“I don’t quite understand how Plato’s ideas could go together with
Christianity,” Sophie objected. “What about the eternal ideas?”
“Well, St. Augustine certainly maintains that God created the world out of the
void, and that was a Biblical idea. The Greeks preferred the idea that the world had
always existed. But St. Augustine believed that before God created the world, the
‘ideas’ were in the Divine mind. So he located the Platonic ideas in God and in that
way preserved the Platonic view of eternal ideas.”
“That was smart.”
“But it indicates how not only St. Augustine but many of the other Church
Fathers bent over backward to bring Greek and Jewish thought together. In a sense
they were of two cultures. Augustine also inclined to Neoplatonism in his view of
evil. He believed, like Plotinus, that evil is the ‘absence of God.’ Evil has no in-
dependent existence, it is something that is not, for God’s creation is in fact only
good. Evil comes from mankind’s disobedience, Augustine believed. Or, in his own
words, ‘The good will is God’s work; the evil will is the falling away from God’s
work.’ “
“Did he also believe that man has a divine soul?”
“Yes and no. St. Augustine maintained that there is an insurmountable barrier
between God and the world. In this he stands firmly on Biblical ground, rejecting the
doctrine of Plotinus that everything is one. But he nevertheless emphasizes that man is
a spiritual being. He has a material body—which belongs to the physical world which
‘moth and rust doth corrupt’—but he also has a soul which can know God.”
“What happens to the soul when we die?”
“According to St. Augustine, the entire human race was lost after the Fall of
Man. But God nevertheless decided that certain people should be saved from per-
dition.”
“In that case, God could just as well have decided that everybody should be
saved.”
“As far as that goes, St. Augustine denied that man has any right to criticize
God, referring to Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: ‘O Man, who art thou that replies!
against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it; why hast thou made me
thus? or Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel
unto honor and another unto dishonor?’ “
“So God sits up in his Heaven playing with people? And as soon as he is
dissatisfied with one of his creations, he just throws it away.”
“St. Augustine’s point was that no man deserves God’s redemption. And yet
God has chosen some to be saved from damnation, so for him there was nothing
secret about who will be saved and who damned. It is preordained. We are entirely at
his mercy.”
“So in a way, he returned to the old belief in fate.”
“Perhaps. But St. Augustine did not renounce man’s responsibility for his own
life. He taught that we must live in awareness of being among the chosen. He did not
deny that we have free will. But God has ‘foreseen’ how we will live.”
“Isn’t that rather unfair?” asked Sophie. “Socrates said that we all had the same
chances because we all had the same common sense. But St. Augustine divides people
into two groups. One group gets saved and the other gets damned.”
“You are right in that St. Augustine’s theology is considerably removed from
the humanism of Athens. But St. Augustine wasn’t dividing humanity into two
groups. He was merely expounding the Biblical doctrine of salvation and damnation.
He explained this in a learned work called the City of God.”