Capítulo IV: Resultados
4.5 Discusión de resultados
It seems rare to find a theologian who cannot, in some way, improve upon the work of Augustine. Even those who have little or no familiarity with his work will gladly take issue with his person.337 Even those who praise the Bishop of Hippo highly nearly always reserve a breath or two for criticism. Augustine, unlike Aquinas, does not seem to have any ‘pit bulls’ at his side. Besides objections from feminists, pluralists, postmoderns and others who
336 As Augustine is but one propagator of the aesthetic theme of cosmic harmony (though the
most prominent and influential) it is helpful to avoid spending too much time on theological fluctuations within Augustine’s work, let alone digging deeply into biographical or historical details, however interesting, in order to spend time describing and questioning the core components of Augustine’s aesthetic theodicy which he shares with many theodicists from the Middle Ages to the present day.
337 Perhaps the most egregious recent example is Colin Gunton’s essay "Creation and Recreation.
An Exploration of Some Themes in Aesthetics and Theology." Modern Theology 2 (1985): 1-19 which quotes from Augustine’s De musica, extensively, but draws its understanding of De musica exclusively from quotations in Robert O’Connell’s Art and the Christian Intelligence in St. Augustine (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1978) which gives a rather esoteric interpretation of Augustine’s aesthetics (cf. Robert F. Brown, “The First Evil Will Must be Incomprehensible: A Critique of Augustine” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 46: 3: 315-329).
do not share many of the basic tenets of Augustine’s outlook338, even those who seek to defend Augustine on some dogmatic point must often qualify their praise because of the shifts in Augustine’s theology.339
Most notably, Augustine is ambiguously situated in the philosophical debate about libertarian and compatibilist freedom. For instance, recent scholars have argued that Augustine is a compatibilist from start to finish340, or, alternately, that his compatibilist views are later developments.341 For some, Augustine’s compatibilism is seen as an unfortunate failing, in others, a sign of his maturity.342 Augustine himself is vague on whether his later writings are in conflict with his earlier thought. Discussing De libero arbitrio, his central work on the will,in his Retractations, Augustine acknowledges that he said little about grace, except in passing, and that the Pelagians made use of this.343 But Augustine contends that even though this work was written
338 Eugene TeSelle gives a nice overview of a number of the contemporary challenges to the
Bishop of Hippo’s thought in Augustine (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2006), 75-76. See also, Robert Dodaro, ed, et al. Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner (New York, NY:
Routledge, 2000) and Judith Chelius Stark, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Saint Augustine: Re-Reading the Canon (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007).
339 Balthasar acknowledges an ambiguity in Augustine’s writings about when the shift from
“philosophy” to “theology” took place, but he affirms that as early as Augustine’s Cassiacum writings “Augustine is fully conscious of himself as a Christian and a believer” (Glory of the Lord, 2: 96). In coming into contact with the sermons of Ambrose and neo-platonic philosophy, Balthasar argues,
two things come into his field of vision simultaneously, philosophical form and the content it frames and structures, Christian teaching; both are equally strongly attested by the early writings. And if later, especially in his counter attack by the great heresies, the Christian content emerges ever more distinctly and strongly, it is never in the form of material additions, but as developments of parts and elements already clearly contained, albeit in outline, in the original conception (Glory of the Lord, 2: 96).
340 Katherin A. Rogers, "Augustine's Compatibilism," Religious Studies 40:4 (2004): 415-435.
341 Lynne Rudder Baker, "Why Christians Should Not Be Libertarians: An Augustinian Challenge,"
Faith and Philosophy 20: 4 (2003): 460-478.
342 See the above examples of Katherin Rogers and Lynn Baker, respectively.
343 Retr. 1.9
ABBREVIATIONS: CD: De civitate Dei; Conf: Confessiones; De Doct. Christ.: De Doctrina Christiana; De
Mus.: De Musica Ench.: Enchiridion; LA: De libero arbitrio; NB: De natura boni; Retr.: Retractations; Trin.: De Trinitate; VR: De vera religione.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations of De civitate Dei, Retractations and Confessiones are taken from the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press); De libero arbitrio, De vera religione and De natura boni are from the Library of Christian Classics: Ichthus Edition (Westminster Press); Enchiridion is taken from The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love, trans. Henry Paolucci (Chicago: Gateway, 1961); De Doctrina Christiana is taken from On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); De musica is taken from Philosophies of Art and Beauty, trans. Robert Russell, ed. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 194.
against the Manichees, it applies just as much to the Pelagians, and thus makes no move to ‘retract’ or distance himself from the work. Yet, while Augustine seems comfortable with the way in which his earlier theodicy fits with his later theodicy, current scholars disagree on whether Augustine’s later compatibilism fits naturally with his earlier thoughts on evil, which seem, on the surface to be quite libertarian.344 Katherin Rogers contends that Augustine’s views on the will hold together, while G. R. Evans and Eleonore Stump find a shift in Augustine’s thought which is at odds with his earlier writings.345 Moving from De libero arbitrio to De civitate Dei and on to
Enchiridion it is possible to chart the bishop’s change in tone, as he worries less and less about the role of the will, and emphasizes ever more strongly the divine prerogative of God to save whomever he wishes.346
Yet, despite the fact that there is no clear consensus on many of Augustine’s views surrounding the nature of the will, and despite the noticeable changes in Augustine’s thinking, even within his writings surrounding the problem of
344 G. R. Evans, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), 118.
345 Of the central questions Augustine addresses in De libero arbitrio, perhaps most troubling to him
was the question of divine foreknowledge and human responsibility. How could we be free, he ponders, if God knows in advance what we will do? Yet, Augustine is insistent, that God’s knowledge in no way determines or undermines human agency. Yet, as G. R. Evans writes in Augustine on Evil, “Augustine was to shift his ground on the question of compulsion in his last years, as he became more and more firmly convinced that divine grace chose those it would rescue from the consequences of Adam’s sin, and made their wills capable of choosing the good whether they consented or not. God thus has not only foreknowledge but an active role in bringing about that which he foreknows, and because he is omniscient he is irresistible” (117-8).
I am inclined to agree with T. D. Chappell, who argues in Aristotle and Augustine on Freedom: Two Theories of Freedom, Voluntary Action, and Akrasia (London: St. Martin's Press, 1995) that the seeds of Augustine’s later compatibilism were present, if not fully explored, in his earlier writings. Thus, Augustine’s more determined commitment to determinism in De civitate Dei and Enchiridion marks an outgrowth of Augustine’s thinking. Whether one takes that ‘growth’ to be a flower or a cancer depends greatly on one’s Christian tradition.
346 There is a distinct shift in tone, between Augustine’s De libero arbitrio, wherein he stresses the
importance of active agency in humanity, else misery would not be justified, and Enchiridion, where Augustine’s concern to stress the goodness of God’s grace overshadows his concern to relate the justice of God to the specific end of each human life (see Ench. 98-99). This shift toward the big picture, without worry of the small, suggests that Augustine has ceased to worry overmuch about the nature of free will and has given over to a focus on the will of God as the arbitrator of our destiny. This turn can be seen earlier, as in De civitate Dei, where we note that Augustine has taken a more compatibilist-sounding approach to the question of human willing , focusing on the necessity of grace as both the material and efficient cause of right choosing (12.6-7). In Enchiridion we find this kind of argument repeated (Ench. 32), as Augustine finds the source of all humanity’s choosing in God’s divine prerogative.
evil, there is a widespread unity in the general pattern of his argumentation and reflection on evil, and especially within his reflections on theodicy and aesthetics. The thread that runs through much of his writing is a continual desire, wherever possible, to discern the beautiful logic whereby God has providentially ordered the cosmos. “No-one has praised God so assiduously as the supreme beauty or attempted so consistently to capture the true and the good with the
categories of aesthetics as Augustine”, Balthasar writes.347
Furthermore, the continual desire to capture the true and the good within the categories of aesthetics plays a part in Augustine’s desire to defend God, and to illuminate the just governance of creation by God despite the
presence of sin, corruption, and misery in the world. For Augustine, creation is filled with signposts which point to God’s goodness. We find them in nature, the principles that govern the arts, and in the natural intuitions of humanity. Yet we must look carefully to see this (sometimes hidden) beauty. “Anyone who thinks the oar is broken in the water and is restored when it is taken out has nothing wrong with his senses,” Augustine writes in De vera religione, “but he is a bad judge of what they convey to him... [in such a person] the mind operates perversely, for it and not the eye was made to contemplate supreme beauty.”348 Likewise in De musica, Augustine describes the way that our thinking must rise to a higher level, in order to discern the beauty in the whole: “In this array there are many things which to us appear out of order and confused, because we have been attached… to their order, their station in existence, according to our own limited merits, not knowing the glories which Divine Providence has in operation (gerat), concerning us. It is as if some one were put to stand like a statue in a corner of a fine, large house, and found that, being a part of it himself, he
347 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, 2: 95. 348 VR 62.
could not perceive the beauty of the structure, (fabrica).”349 Augustine, wherever possible seeks to see past the ‘broken oar’ of evil in order to discern the bigger and more beautiful picture.
I therefore support John Hick’s effort in Evil and the God of Love to see in Augustine a central set of concerns which form the foundation of an ‘Augustinian’ theodicy which can be gathered under an ‘aesthetic theme’.350 As discussed in Part I, Hick draws out three crucial facets of Augustine’s theodicy: essential goodness of creation, the value of plenitude, and the just visitation of misery on the sinful. Though somewhat simplistic, this outline marks out the key elements in Augustine’s theodicy which are not only important to his own work, but are also widely shared (if altered in some ways) by later theologians, (Boethius, Hugh of St Victor, Aquinas, and down the line to thinkers such as C. S. Lewis). These three focal points form the basis of this foundational aesthetic theodicy.
2.1. EXCURSUS: Answering Tilley’s Objections to an Amalgamated Theodicy
Despite the influence of John Hick’s work, and the praise which is often attached to his “near-classic survey” of Western theodicy, there are several objections to Hick’s amalgamation which must be addressed, and are helpful in the long run to discern the patterns of Augustine’s thought more fully. In
The Evils of Theodicy, Terrence Tilley has questioned the very existence of an ‘Augustinian theodicy’, charging Hick with “attribut[ing] to Augustine a system of ‘theodicy’ which goes far beyond what he actually claimed and said.”351 This accusation of Hick takes two forms. First, Tilley charges Hick and other theodicists with an attempt to shoehorn Augustine into the mold of theodicy, into which Augustine, according to Tilley, never properly
349 DM 6.30
350 As described in Part I.
fits. Second, Tilley charges that the attempt to “amalgamate Augustinian ‘themes,’ ‘doctrines,’ ‘teaching,’ etc., into a single theodicy”, as Hick does, is a “diatessaron” which obliterates the unique character of the individual works from which these ideas sprang.352 Since I aim to spend a fair amount of space discussing Hick’s argument against Augustine, while accepting Hick’s general reading of Augustine, I think that Tilley’s objection is worth
disputing.353 In an effort to counteract Tilley’s work, I will oppose the ideas that Augustine’s writings ought not to be considered to contain a ‘theodicy’, properly speaking,and that Augustine’s writings are not unified enough to allow for harmonization. I believe that both positions are mistaken, and
intend to briefly rebut them. This refutation, however, is doubly helpful as a way to look at some of the elements of Augustine’s theodicy which might escape our attention otherwise. It is my purpose for this first section then, to defend a priori Hick’s amalgamation, and also to provide a helpful context for Augustine’s own thoughts on beauty and evil, by showing them to be driven by a central concern - to ‘make credible’ the Christian faith.
2.1.1. Is Augustine’s Theodicy not a Theodicy?. To make his case against Augustine’s theodicy, Tilley first lays out a strict definition of the practice:
A successful theodicy demonstrates either that a person can justly move from the data of the actual world, including its evils, to the claim that an omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent deity created it; or that the actual world is as good as or better than any other
352 One is left to assume, by Tilley’s use of the word, that a “diatessaron” in theodicy would be as
unwelcome in Western Christianity as has been the Diatessaron of Tatian.
353 Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy, 5. Underlying Tilley’s critique of Hick, I believe, is not primarily a
desire to defend Augustine against false reading (Tilley finds much of Augustine’s work objectionable) so much as a desire to undercut theodicy, which he believes harmful:
[T]heodicy can be unmasked as a discourse practice which obscures evils and marginalizes the agents of reconciliation. My conclusion is that theodicy as a discourse practice must be abandoned because the practice of theodicy does not resolve the problems of evil and does create evils.(5)
Essentially, Tilley’s argument seems to be that by holding up Augustine as a propagator of theodicy, contemporary thinkers wrongly invoke precedent for their position, both obscuring Augustine’s meaning and perpetuating the harmful practice of theodicy at the same time.
possible world ; or that its picture of the world is at least as plausible as any other available alternatives.354
In his attempt to argue that Augustine offers no theodicy, Tilley turns to a number of key Augustinian sourceswhere he points out that Augustine’s treatment of evil therein attempts none of these tasks.355 Discussing, at length, the Enchiridion, Tilley reads Augustine’s handbook for Christians as offering a ‘defense’. Using Plantingan terminology, then, Enchiridion is only defending “the compatibility of belief that God exists and that there is evil in the world”.356 According to Tilley, the discussion of evil in Enchiridion should only be taken to be a possible explanation, not one that purports to say what God’s reasons “really are”, and thus, is not theodicy. Likewise, according to Tilley, passages from De civitate Dei, ought not be used to apply to theodicy, because Augustine here is writing a apologetic account of
history, not a justification of God, strictly defined. Other works are likewise placed beyond the pale for theodicists: Confessiones is too autobiographical, and De libero arbitrio and De natura boni are too stridently polemical to be mined for content of Augustine’s genuine thinking.
As discussed in Chapter 1, I believe ‘theodicy’ should be viewed as a rather wide field whose general aim is to alleviate (not necessarily to dispel or destroy) tension between the idea of God and the fact of evil. Included in this definition would be the idea of a merely logical defense, a la Plantinga,
354 Ibid., 131. 355 Ibid., 131.
356 Ibid., 133. Contra Tilley, the distinction between theodicy and defense does not, I believe, have
to do so much with ‘warrant’ as ‘commitment’. The defender of God undertakes an entirely oppositional stance. He or she simply aims to defeat objections to God’s existence, as in the case of the free will defender who proposes a merely possible reason why God might allow evil - even if he or she is not committed to that reason. As such, this is what Plantinga undertakes when he proposes his free will defense, and it is correct to say that a free will defender need not be committed to believing that there really is free will. But Plantinga is too bold in stating that a theodicist “tries to tell us what God’s reason for permitting evil really is.” (28). Theodicists must not, however, put forward only reasons for evil which they think “really are” God’s reasons, but rather put forward reasons which they think are likely to be God’s reasons. This is a subtle, but important distinction, touching on the nature of theological inquiry itself Tilley inherits Plantinga’s mistake here when he suggests that Augustine’s Enchiridion is a defense, and not a theodicy, because, as Tilley describes it, the Enchiridion is a “statement of faith and a defense of its coherence”. It seems to me that a statement of faith entails more commitment than a mere defense can provide.
but also even more modest attempts. Under my rather latitudinarian criteria, Augustine does offer a theodicy. But even under Tilley’s criteria, a pattern of thought in Augustine’s work may well be described as ‘theodicean.’
Specifically, when Tilley defines a successful theodicy as one which demonstrates that “its picture of the world is at least as plausible as any other available alternatives” it is hard not to think of Augustine’s struggles against Manichaenism in Confessiones or De libero arbitrio, or of his grand work, De civitate Dei contra Paganos, which pits Christian truth against Pagan