Augustine, like Paul, shared the Neoplatonic vision of the temporal life of the flesh as opposed to the eternal life of the Spirit. With the Fall, the will of man had become corrupted. As a result, man was no more in the intact state of nature. In this sense the human life was no more the natural one. It became a life of the pursuit of self-love, cut-off from the eternal heavenly life as a pursuit of love to God. Only by God’s grace man could reacquire the true free will to move beyond a self-love.
Augustine’s lasting contribution was to provide the conceptual foundation for the Pauline voluntarism through his doctrine of corruption of human will after the Fall. By the developing the notion of the will Augustine planted the germs of the future Scholastic clash of ideas of voluntarism and intellectualism. However, to Augustine, the notion of the will had its significance only in respect to man. It was left to the later medieval voluntarists to take a further step and to ask a question about the role of God’ will in respect to His reason.
Augustine’s voluntarism was more intellectualized (neoplatonized) than Paul’s one. Augustine already asserted the image of God in reason. But it was not Irenaeus’ solution of separation of earthly natural life (by reason in the image of God) from eternal life of salvation (by the likeness in the spirit). To Augustine, after the Fall the
Moreover, a true wisdom as a knowledge of the eternal and invisible things was beyond the depraved man unassisted by grace. The true image of God was then in the Neoplatonic contemplation (in the mind of man) of the eternal ideas (in the mind of God). To Augustine, moreover, God’s image was more than a power of reason, it was also a power of will (to love). Augustine’s meaning of the image in human reason, thus, overlapped with the meaning of the likeness in the spirit as connoting the good will. As a result, Augustine’s notion of the will became entangled with a notion of reason even in respect to man.
Augustine, however, responded in his intellectualistic leaning not only to Neoplatonism. He also saw the image of God in human reason, as applied to the natural life. He was influenced by the Stoic concept of the sense-knowledge as self-awareness. But, to him, such self-awareness was foundation for the external temporal things knowledge (not lost after the Fall). It underlined his assessment of the rational self- sufficiency of the earthly life. Augustine saw the earthly life as corrupt, but not irrational. It was rational from the view of self-love (self-advantage). It had a rational goal to obtain the earthly peace, promoting self-love. It was self-sufficient, since a purpose of the earthly peace was achieved by the earthly means. Still, Augustine failed to reconcile himself to the earthly life, which rationality of self-love had nothing to do with the eternal wisdom of love of God.
Augustine’s contradiction was, thus, in his assertion of a radical duality of the natural life after the Fall and the coming salvation in the spirit. Still, he could not deny completely natural life as far as it was flown from God’s creation. So, on one
merely by love for God. But, on another hand, God Himself created man and nature, striving to self-preservation, beginning in self-awareness, which manifested self- love. Augustine, as a result, was torn between the Neoplatonic contempt for life of flesh and the Stoic assertion of its naturalness, and, in a sense, its inevitability.
Augustine’s vision of the earthly life as inherently corrupted was in a marked contrast with that of his teacher Ambrose. Ambrose attempted to build a new Christian foundation for law of nature as a law of the eternal self-preservation. Ambrose though dealt with natural law for the sages only. Ambrose’s sage had perceived by reason that the promotion of the justice in the earthly life served to achievement of salvation and the eternal life. To Augustine, the earthly life and eternal salvation were set far apart. To Augustine, a true just life was impossible in the earthly city self-love. If we may adopt a twentieth century (and Russian) comparison, while Ambrose believed in military Communism, at least for a few (the Christian sages), Augustine believed that the New Economic Policy was here to stay until God’s grace.54
In summary, the roots of Augustine ambiguity towards natural law lay in his Neoplatonized voluntarism. To Ambrose, natural law was the eternal life of Spirit, which was the goal of the human existence, with the natural life of flesh being the merely the works of preparation. The place, given by Augustine to grace, had further diminished the significance of the observance of natural law on man’s own account. His position became even more complicated, due to some confusion of
54 The disastrous experience of so ‘Militant Communism’ (1918-20) with its compulsory expropriation of ‘the food excesses’ from the peasants, and prohibition of private trade, resulted in spreading starvation,
voluntarism with the Neoplatonic intellectualism. The image of God was in man’s reason, which, however, was disfigured. But it was not only in man’s reason, but also in his will, which lost its innate love to God. So salvation, the whole purpose of man’s life, became unattainable to man in his natural life (by his reason) aside of God’s grace which would return righteousness to his will through man unhindered ability to contemplate the eternal ideas in God’s mind.
The whole pathos of Augustine’s position was in contrasting of the eternal life of the city of God with the earthly city life.55 It showed how far the Christian thought moved from the Stoic vision of ‘city of God’, where men shared in God’s reason. Augustine’s Platonic antithesis between the eternal and temporal laws undermined the whole idea of natural law.
Still, to Augustine, the earthly life was to be natural as far as the law of nature was revealed in the Ten Commandments, and the Gospel commanded it. He himself asserted natural law as a law of conscience, innate in man and existed before the Fall, preceding the written Law of Moses and Gospel (given to command the law of nature more explicitly) (Dean, 86). Were then Ten Commandments not a law for the earthly life? Or were they not a part of the original natural law for the state of nature (where everybody was equal and there was no private property and, hence, theft)? Moreover, Augustine restated the naturalness of family and society to man from the creation. This acceptance of social nature of man led him to state that men were
55 In the aftermath of the siege of Rome in 410 , as Markus noted, society had been increasingly seen by Augustine from the historically -eschatological prospective of salvation, in contrast to the Classical cosmological prospective (Marcus, 1970, 97-98; 101). The contrast of the eternal and temporal life was sharpened in the times of the expectation of the decline of the Roman world which the early Christian , as
held together by the bond of kinship; man was driven to enter into society and to make peace with men by nature (Carlyle, 1928, 1,125).56
Augustune had attempted to reconcile the vision natural law as the Commandments with Pauline anti-legalism. It was not enough to know God’s Commandment. While by his own will man could refuse to obey God, only by grace (!) could he truly fulfil the Commandments (from the love of God, not self-love). However, it was not enough for a rehabilitation of the Commandments to state that they were to be fulfilled internally in the will, not externally. The true question was about the use of the Commandments for salvation. Were the Commandments (by themselves) as the Law of earthly life of any use for (heavenly) salvation? And (as Paul’s) Augustine’s answer would be negative.
The only true law of nature was in the Gospel precept to love God and others, which was unattainable in the unnaturally deprived earthly life. In a sense, the whole notion of natural law as a law of the earthly life became meaningless. Augustine was self-contradictory in his vision of the Commandments as God’s law and in his ‘anti-vision’ of absence any true justice in earthly life, which the Commandments supposed to be regulating. He was too much of the Pauline anti-legalistic voluntarist. To Augustine, like Paul, there could not be salvation outside the state of grace. Only by God’s grace man could be transformed from love of self to love of God.
56 Augustine practical teachings on Natural Law, in respect the natural equality of men and, then, slavery and government as remedies for Original Sin, were in the line with the other Christian Fathers (Carlyle