This week the lecture was about Augustine. Augustine was born in 354 in Algeria . He converted to the Manichean tradition, became an auditor and focussed his works on religious philosophy. Later, Augistine mastered himself in rhetoric. Augustine was an important philosopher and up until the 19th century he was seen as the greatest antique philosopher. Up until today his sayings about free will and other big subjects are very important. One of Augustines masterpieces was ‘Confessions’, where he writes about how man can change and he does an attempt to do philosophy as an everyday practice. Augustines main audience were Greek pagans such as Aristotelians, Platonists, Manechieists and Donatists.
Augustine was known for his love for wisdom. He liked discussing ‘important life topics’, like more philosophers in his time did. But one of the questions he spent most of his time on was the problem of evil. How could God allow evil, would he exist. This question can be magnified to the question of how the perks of religion can be declared by philosophy. Just like last week, we see here that religion is at the top of other studies, ‘she’ stands above all and other studies ‘serve’ her. But back to Augustine. His thought of evil is most comparable to the neoplatonistic thought about it. Shortly explained, there is ‘nous’ in neoplatonism, which is the rational intellect that is prior to the corporal world. Since the nous existed before the material world, it must be immaterial. Since nous is the highest good, everything that is in the material world makes us humans feel ‘incomplete’. We are always looking for ‘completeness’ and this makes that there is some kind of paradox in the story of life. evil is always in the corporal realm and has a human affair. Herein lies the problem: people try to appoint evil as in within Gods control, but since it is actually in the physical realm, and not in the realm of ‘nous’ where God also exist, the problem of evil lies within humans. Therefore, evil is being described as a lack of goodness.
In this weeks lecture we saw again that religion is what the medieval philosophy is all about. Bit by bit we also see that not religion nor God is the source of evil, like discussed last week, but that religion might even be ‘the good’, while things such as evil lie within our physical realm, which is the realm of human beings, but not of God. Next week, we will hopefully see that this line is continued.
Medieval Philosophy Blog 