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| From "Theist Thug Life" FB Page. |
With the arrival of a new year (I know, I'm late) I thought to share something from Augustine of Hippo that has often encouraged me to meditate about time and eternity. The main reason why I love the following Augustinian text is that I remember reading this section from his Confessions years ago when I was still a teenager and my heart was not exactly at peace and my future uncertain. Antithetically to my own existence, the eternal and immutable nature of the triune God as described by this powerful statement provided me with some helpful and good for thought and, sure, some comfort.
"Apud te rerum omnium instabilium stant causae et rerum omnium mutabilium immutabiles manent origines et omnium irrationalium et temporalium sempiternae vivunt rationes." ~ Confessiones, I.VI.IX.
"In Thy presence do stand the causes of all things that are unstable and even of all things that are changeable the unchangeable roots remain with Thee, and the eternal reasons of things which are temporal and irrational do live." ~ Confessions, 1.6.9 (translation by Erich Przywara).
This beautiful statement by Augustine of Hippo, although brief, is so rich that it took me some time to decide where to start expounding its meaning. I will start by showing something of Augustine's beautiful theological rhetoric.
In Thy presence do stand the causes of all things that are unstable
and even of all things that are changeable the unchangeable roots remain with Thee,
and the eternal reasons of things which are temporal and irrational do live.
If we associate the words which I have highlighted according to their colours, we will see that Augustine has composed a beautiful poem of theological juxtaposition of opposites, contraries, or antonyms (I thank David C. Noe for the hint). Thus, we arguably have something similar to what follows.
In Thy presence do:
a) stand the causes of all things that are unstable;
b) of all things that are changeable the unchangeable roots remain with Thee;
c₁) the eternal reasons of things which are temporal and irrational live;
c₂) the eternal reasons of things which are temporal and irrational live.
Here I am more interested in the theological and philosophical import of Augustine's words. The three couples of words are basically saying the same things, although each from a slightly different perspective. I will try to expound them separately. But first, we need to place Augustine's beautiful sentence in its context.
Some context
We are at the beginning of Augustine's Confessions. He began with a prayerful meditation on the nature of prayer, man and God (1.1.1 to 1.5.6). Then, he continues by meditating coram Deo (in the presence of God) about his birth and childhood, asking whence he "came hither into this—shall I call it dying life or living death?" (1.6.7). Augustine then reveals to be troubled by the very fact of the passing of the time, temporality itself raises in himself philosophical issues and existential questions.
"And, behold, my infancy died long ago, and I live ... Tell me, Your suppliant, O God; tell, O merciful One, Your miserable servant—tell me whether my infancy succeeded another age of mine which had at that time perished. Was it that which I passed in my mother's womb? For of that something has been made known to me, and I have myself seen women with child. And what, O God, my joy, preceded that life? Was I, indeed, anywhere, or anybody? For no one can tell me these things, neither father nor mother, nor the experience of others, nor my own memory. Do you laugh at me for asking such things, and command me to praise and confess You for what I know?" ~ Confessions, 1.6.9.
Augustine realises that in order to understand and interpret both his present and past life, he has not so much to focus on his own memory of his youthfulness but rather he has to focus on the eternal and immutable God, creator of all.
"I give thanks to You, Lord of heaven and earth, giving praise to You for that my first being and infancy, of which I have no memory; for You have granted to man that from others he should come to conclusions as to himself, and that he should believe many things concerning himself on the authority of feeble women. Even then I had life and being; and as my infancy closed I was already seeking for signs by which my feelings might be made known to others. Whence could such a creature come but from You, O Lord? Or shall any man be skilful enough to fashion himself? Or is there any other vein by which being and life runs into us save this, that "You, O Lord, hast made us," with whom being and life are one, because You Yourself art being and life in the highest? You are the highest, "You change not" (Mal. 3:6), neither in You does this present day come to an end, though it does end in You, since in You all such things are; for they would have no way of passing away unless You sustained them. And since "Your years shall have no end," Your years are an ever present day. And how many of ours and our fathers' days have passed through this Your day, and received from it their measure and fashion of being, and others yet to come shall so receive and pass away! "But You are the same;" and all the things of tomorrow and the days yet to come, and all of yesterday and the days that are past, You will do today, You have done today. What is it to me if any understand not? Let him still rejoice and say, "What is this?" Let him rejoice even so, and rather love to discover in failing to discover, than in discovering not to discover You" ~ Confessions, 1.6.10.
The only solution to this problem is, for Augustine, to look outside of himself to what, or better, to the One who does not change.
"You, O Lord, who ever livest, and in whom nothing dies, since before the world was, and indeed before all that can be called before, You exist, and are the God and Lord of all Your creatures; and with You fixedly abide the causes of all unstable things, the unchanging sources of all things changeable, and the eternal reasons of all things unreasoning and temporal." Confessions, 1.6.9.
"In Thy presence do stand the causes of all things that are unstable." - Metaphysics.
God is the supreme cause of everything. Augustine rejects all kinds of naturalism, deism, and, anyway, any doctrine that leaves anything outside of the sovereign and causative power and will of God. He does not deny the existence of secondary and created causes, but he points at the error of considering these causes as sufficient and independent of the power and will of God.
"There is one kind of natural order in the conversion and changeableness of bodies, which, although itself also serves the bidding of God, yet by reason of its unbroken continuity has ceased to cause wonder; as is the case, for instance, with those things which are changed either in very short, or at any rate not long, intervals of time, in heaven, or earth, or sea; whether it be in rising, or in setting, or in change of appearance from time to time; while there are other things, which, although arising from that same order, yet are less familiar on account of longer intervals of time. And these things, although the many stupidly wonder at them, yet are understood by those who inquire into this present world, and in the progress of generations become so much the less wonderful, as they are the more often repeated and known by more people. Such are the eclipses of the sun and moon, and some kinds of stars, appearing seldom, and earthquakes, and unnatural births of living creatures, and other similar things; of which not one takes place without the will of God; yet, that it is so, is to most people not apparent. And so the vanity of philosophers has found license to assign these things also to other causes, true causes perhaps, but proximate ones, while they are not able to see at all the cause that is higher than all others, that is, the will of God; or again to false causes, and to such as are not even put forward out of any diligent investigation of corporeal things and motions, but from their own guess and error." ~ On the Trinity, 3.2.7.
God's causative operation is comprehensive and includes not only the natural world but also the moral and spiritual world of his created rational and moral creatures. Augustine offers a fascinating mental experiment. I emphasised in italics the most relevant sections.
"Let us take, then, the case of a wise man, such that his rational soul is already partaker of the unchangeable and eternal truth, so that he consults it about all his actions, nor does anything at all, which he does not by it know ought to be done, in order that by being subject to it and obeying it he may do rightly. Suppose now that this man, upon counsel with the highest reason of the divine righteousness, which he hears with the ear of his heart in secret, and by its bidding, should weary his body by toil in some office of mercy, and should contract an illness; and upon consulting the physicians, were to be told by one that the cause of the disease was overmuch dryness of the body, but by another that it was overmuch moisture; one of the two no doubt would allege the true cause and the other would err, but both would pronounce concerning proximate causes only, that is, corporeal ones. But if the cause of that dryness were to be inquired into, and found to be the self-imposed toil, then we should have come to a yet higher cause, which proceeds from the soul so as to affect the body which the soul governs. Yet neither would this be the first cause, for that doubtless was a higher cause still, and lay in the unchangeable wisdom itself, by serving which in love, and by obeying its ineffable commands, the soul of the wise man had undertaken that self-imposed toil; and so nothing else but the will of God would be found most truly to be the first cause of that illness. But suppose now in that office of pious toil this wise man had employed the help of others to co-operate in the good work, who did not serve God with the same will as himself, but either desired to attain the reward of their own carnal desires, or shunned merely carnal unpleasantnesses;—suppose, too, he had employed beasts of burden, if the completion of the work required such a provision, which beasts of burden would be certainly irrational animals, and would not therefore move their limbs under their burdens because they at all thought of that good work, but from the natural appetite of their own liking, and for the avoiding of annoyance—suppose, lastly, he had employed bodily things themselves that lack all sense, but were necessary for that work, as e.g. grain, and wine, and oils, clothes, or money, or a book, or anything of the kind—certainly, in all these bodily things thus employed in this work, whether animate or inanimate, whatever took place of movement, of wear and tear, of reparation, of destruction, of renewal or of change in one way or another, as places and times affected them; pray, could there be, I say, any other cause of all these visible and changeable facts, except the invisible and unchangeable will of God, using all these, both bad and irrational souls, and lastly bodies, whether such as were inspired and animated by those souls, or such as lacked all sense, by means of that upright soul as the seat of His wisdom, since primarily that good and holy soul itself employed them, which His wisdom had subjected to itself in a pious and religious obedience?" ~ On the Trinity, 3.3. Emphasis added.
Therefore, it is only with God that "fixedly abide the causes of all unstable things" because he is the only unchangeable cause of both changeable causes and their effects. Now if this is the case, it is not surprising that Augustine adds that "the power of the will of God reaches through the spiritual creature [angels] even to visible and sensible effects of the corporeal creature. For where does not the wisdom of the omnipotent God work that which He wills, which reaches from one end to another mightily, and sweetly does order all things?" (3.2.6). God's sovereign causative activity, therefore, includes all existence, both in its material and its spiritual form, both the physical and material realm and the spiritual and moral realm.
"The will of God, 'who makes His angels spirits, and His ministers a flaming fire' [Heb 1:7; Sal. 103:4], presiding among spirits which are joined in perfect peace and friendship, and combined in one will by a kind of spiritual fire of charity, as it were in an elevated and holy and secret seat, as in its own house and in its own temple, thence diffuses itself through all things by certain most perfectly ordered movements of the creature; first spiritual, then corporeal; and uses all according to the unchangeable pleasure of its own purpose, whether incorporeal things or things corporeal, whether rational or irrational spirits, whether good by His grace or evil through their own will. But as the more gross and inferior bodies are governed in due order by the more subtle and powerful ones, so all bodies are governed by the living spirit; and the living spirit devoid of reason, by the reasonable living spirit; and the reasonable living spirit that makes default and sins, by the living and reasonable spirit that is pious and just; and that by God Himself, and so the universal creature by its Creator, from whom and through whom and in whom it is also created and established. And so it comes to pass that the will of God is the first and the highest cause of all corporeal appearances and motions. For nothing is done visibly or sensibly, unless either by command or permission from the interior palace, invisible and intelligible, of the supreme Governor, according to the unspeakable justice of rewards and punishments, of favor and retribution, in that far-reaching and boundless commonwealth of the whole creature." ~ On the Trinity, 3.4.9.
"Of all things that are changeable the unchangeable roots remain with Thee" – Ontology of Creation.
According to Augustine, there are in God all the ideas, examples, patterns of every single created thing (how exactly that happens I will not discuss here; this touches the philosophical and theological issue of the relationship between God and the so-called abstract objects).
"God supreme and true, with His Word and Holy Spirit (which three are one), one God omnipotent, creator and maker of every soul and of every body; by whose gift all are happy who are happy through verity and not through vanity; who made man a rational animal consisting of soul and body, who, when he sinned, neither permitted him to go unpunished, nor left him without mercy; who has given to the good and to the evil, being in common with stones, vegetable life in common with trees, sensuous life in common with brutes, intellectual life in common with angels alone; from whom is every mode, every species, every order; from whom are measure, number, weight; from whom is everything which has an existence in nature, of whatever kind it be, and of whatever value; from whom are the seeds of forms and the forms of seeds, and the motion of seeds and of forms; who gave also to flesh its origin, beauty, health, reproductive fecundity, disposition of members, and the salutary concord of its parts; who also to the irrational soul has given memory, sense, appetite, but to the rational soul, in addition to these, has given intelligence and will; who has not left, not to speak of heaven and earth, angels and men, but not even the entrails of the smallest and most contemptible animal, or the feather of a bird, or the little flower of a plant, or the leaf of a tree, without an harmony, and, as it were, a mutual peace among all its parts—that God can never be believed to have left the kingdoms of men, their dominations and servitudes, outside of the laws of His providence." ~ The City of God, 5.11. Emphasis added.
In Augustine's view, the presence in God of the ideal forms and reasons of all things has important ontological implications. Through the creative act, these eternal and ideal reasons manifest themselves in the created order through the so-called seminal reasons or principles.
"We worship that God who has appointed to the natures created by Him both the beginnings and the end of their existing and moving; who holds, knows, and disposes the causes of things; who has created the virtue of seeds; who has given to what creatures He would a rational soul, which is called mind; who has bestowed the faculty and use of speech; who has imparted the gift of foretelling future things to whatever spirits it seemed to Him good; who also Himself predicts future things, through whom He pleases, and through whom He will, removes diseases who, when the human race is to be corrected and chastised by wars, regulates also the beginnings, progress, and ends of these wars who has created and governs the most vehement and most violent fire of this world, in due relation and proportion to the other elements of immense nature; who is the governor of all the waters; who has made the sun brightest of all material lights, and has given him suitable power and motion; who has not withdrawn, even from the inhabitants of the nether world, His dominion and power; who has appointed to mortal natures their suitable seed and nourishment, dry or liquid; who establishes and makes fruitful the earth; who bountifully bestows its fruits on animals and on men; who knows and ordains, not only principal causes, but also subsequent causes; who has determined for the moon her motion; who affords ways in heaven and on earth for passage from one place to another; who has granted also to human minds, which He has created, the knowledge of the various arts for the help of life and nature; who has appointed the union of male and female for the propagation of offspring; who has favored the societies of men with the gift of terrestrial fire for the simplest and most familiar purposes, to burn on the hearth and to give light." ~ The City of God, 7.30.
Augustine's belief according to which there are "some hidden seeds of all things that are born corporeally and visibly ... concealed in the corporeal elements of this world" (On the Trinity, 3.8.13) leads him to offer the description of "pregnant" creation which is both fascinating and philosophically relevant for the history of Christian thought.
"All these things in the way of original and beginning have already been created in a kind of texture of the elements, but they come forth when they get the opportunity. For as mothers are pregnant with young, so the world itself is pregnant with the causes of things that are born; which are not created in it, except from that highest essence, where nothing either springs up or dies, either begins to be or ceases. But the applying from without of adventitious causes, which, although they are not natural, yet are to be applied according to nature, in order that those things which are contained and hidden in the secret bosom of nature may break forth and be outwardly created in some way by the unfolding of the proper measures and numbers and weights which they have received in secret from Him who has ordered all things in measure and number and weight: this is not only in the power of bad angels, but also of bad men." ~ On the Trinity, 3.9.16.
As it is relatively well known, Augustine's metaphysics and ontology of creation have important epistemological implications.
"The eternal reasons of things which are temporal and irrational do live" – Epistemology.
"The eternal reasons of things which are temporal and irrational do live" – Epistemology.
God alone "is the creator who is the chief former of these things. Neither can any one be this, unless He with whom primarily rests the measure, number, and weight of all things existing; and He is God the one Creator, by whose unspeakable power it comes to pass" (On the Trinity, 3.9.18). The Augustinian principles mentioned so far are, unsurprisingly, also epistemological in character. According to Augustine, in God there are also the archetypal and perfect eternal reasons and truths that we, humans, use in order to perceive, interpret, know, jusge, and understand both the physical and the spiritual worlds. Regarding the former, Augustine says what follows.
"Whence also, even in the case of the images of things corporeal which are drawn in through the bodily sense, and in some way infused into the memory, from which also those things which have not been seen are thought under a fancied image, whether otherwise than they really are, or even perchance as they are—even here too, we are proved either to accept or reject, within ourselves, by other rules which remain altogether unchangeable above our mind, when we approve or reject anything rightly. For both when I recall the walls of Carthage which I have seen, and imagine to myself the walls of Alexandria which I have not seen, and, in preferring this to that among forms which in both cases are imaginary, make that preference upon grounds of reason; the judgment of truth from above is still strong and clear, and rests firmly upon the utterly indestructible rules of its own right; and if it is covered as it were by cloudiness of corporeal images, yet is not wrapt up and confounded in them." ~ Augustine, On the Trinity, 9.6.10.
Without necessarily degrading sensorial knowledge, yet Augustine is clearly more interested in the intellectual knowledge of spiritual truths and principle.
"It makes a difference, whether, under that or in that darkness, I am shut off as it were from the clear heaven; or whether (as usually happens on lofty mountains), enjoying the free air between both, I at once look up above to the calmest light, and down below upon the densest clouds. For whence is the ardor of brotherly love kindled in me, when I hear that some man has borne bitter torments for the excellence and steadfastness of faith? And if that man is shown to me with the finger, I am eager to join myself to him, to become acquainted with him, to bind him to myself in friendship. And accordingly, if opportunity offers, I draw near, I address him, I converse with him, I express my goodwill towards him in what words I can, and wish that in him too in turn should be brought to pass and expressed goodwill towards me; and I endeavor after a spiritual embrace in the way of belief, since I cannot search out so quickly and discern altogether his innermost heart. I love therefore the faithful and courageous man with a pure and genuine love. But if he were to confess to me in the course of conversation, or were through unguardedness to show in any way, that either he believes something unseemly of God, and desires also something carnal in Him, and that he bore these torments on behalf of such an error, or from the desire of money for which he hoped, or from empty greediness of human praise: immediately it follows that the love with which I was borne towards him, displeased, and as it were repelled, and taken away from an unworthy man, remains in that form, after which, believing him such as I did, I had loved him; unless perhaps I have come to love him to this end, that he may become such, while I have found him not to be such in fact. And in that man, too, nothing is changed: although it can be changed, so that he may become that which I had believed him to be already. But in my mind there certainly is something changed, viz., the estimate I had formed of him, which was before of one sort, and now is of another: and the same love, at the bidding from above of unchangeable righteousness, is turned aside from the purpose of enjoying, to the purpose of taking counsel. But the form itself of unshaken and stable truth, wherein I should have enjoyed the fruition of the man, believing him to be good, and wherein likewise I take counsel that he may be good, sheds in an immoveable eternity the same light of incorruptible and most sound reason, both upon the sight of my mind, and upon that cloud of images, which I discern from above, when I think of the same man whom I had seen. Again, when I call back to my mind some arch, turned beautifully and symmetrically, which, let us say, I saw at Carthage; a certain reality that had been made known to the mind through the eyes, and transferred to the memory, causes the imaginary view. But I behold in my mind yet another thing, according to which that work of art pleases me; and whence also, if it displeased me, I should correct it. We judge therefore of those particular things according to that [form of eternal truth], and discern that form by the intuition of the rational mind. But those things themselves we either touch if present by the bodily sense, or if absent remember their images as fixed in our memory, or picture, in the way of likeness to them, such things as we ourselves also, if we wished and were able, would laboriously build up: figuring in the mind after one fashion the images of bodies, or seeing bodies through the body; but after another, grasping by simple intelligence what is above the eye of the mind, viz., the reasons and the unspeakably beautiful skill of such forms." ~ Augustine, On the Trinity, 9.6.11.
Augustine explains how, for instance, this happens in the context of the inner generation and consequent exercise of human verbal language. He offers a sort of phenomenology of the human word.
Conclusion"We behold, then, by the sight of the mind, in that eternal truth from which all things temporal are made, the form according to which we are, and according to which we do anything by true and right reason, either in ourselves, or in things corporeal; and we have the true knowledge of things, thence conceived, as it were as a word within us, and by speaking we beget it from within; nor by being born does it depart from us. And when we speak to others, we apply to the word, remaining within us, the ministry of the voice or of some bodily sign, that by some kind of sensible remembrance some similar thing may be wrought also in the mind of him that hears—similar, I say, to that which does not depart from the mind of him that speaks. We do nothing, therefore, through the members of the body in our words and actions, by which the behavior of men is either approved or blamed, which we do not anticipate by a word uttered within ourselves. For no one willingly does anything, which he has not first said in his heart." ~ Augustine, On the Trinity, 9.7.10.
As I mostly commented Augustine through his own words, my own comments were not particularly in-depth. Here I simply wanted to show one example of the very deep and numerous theological and philosophical references that are virtually everywhere in Augustine's Confessions. As the sentence by Augustine I have here discussed is (like countless other Augustinian passages,) pregnant with meaning, so, according to Augustine, creation is full of God's activity (in the way Augustine qualifies that).
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Addendum (May 24, 2023): Dr. David Noe from Latin Per Diem has produced a very helpful video where he parses the passage from Augustine which I discussed here.
