Dr Greg Bahnsen - Ancient & Medieval Philosophy: Augustine (Part 18)

Okay, we're continuing our discussion of the early Christian era. We've already looked at Gnosticism and the early cults as well as Neoplatonism, especially the philosophy of Plotinus. The third thing we should cover in this period is the what are often called Ante Nicene Fathers. A N T E N I C E N E Ante, meaning going before, as in anterior before Nicaea Fathers ante, the Nicaean Fathers. Nicaea, of course, is a reference to the Council of Nicaea that met in 325 AD to consider the Arian controversy. The Arian controversy in many ways has parallels to the problems of the Neoplatonist. How can there be an absolute one that creates the world of matter? The Arians said God created the world through a Logos which is very God like right up there. I mean, just one step below the absolute Deity, but is not fully. God is the first, can we say emanation, the first angel. You get this idea of levels of reality. The Logos, Jesus Christ is not at the level of man, but he's not fully at the level of God. So you see how that in a sense is an analogy to the chain of being some of the Logos speculation that we find elsewhere anyway, Antonocene Fathers, those fathers of the Church that were influential and wrote prior to Nicaea. This area of study is often called patristics, again because of the Latin word for father. Study of the fathers. Well, one more piece of terminology. It turns out the Ante Nicene Fathers were often engaged in polemical debate with the world and trying to vindicate Christianity from charges or trying to show its respectability or trying to answer pagan religions. And so the ante scene fathers are often called the apologists. The apologists. From a philosophical standpoint, if we were to look at the period as a whole, I think we'd have to say the major advance Western thought and ideology that the Ante nessne Fathers bring is a highly personal view of ultimate reality and a highly personal view of knowledge. It's the personalism of their philosophy that is so important. Previously I've talked about with the advent of Christ and the distinctiveness of the Christian position that we don't look at philosophy abstractly and impersonally. The Antecene fathers really drive that home. There is an ultimate reality, the Creator, and it's personal. He is personal. And we have a personal relationship, good or bad, with him. And all that we know is going to be personally qualified by our relationship to this Maker. So you want to get that personal emphasis the metaphysic and epistemology of the Fathers would insist on a personal view of the world. Now let me mention some of the major ante nessne fathers. In the Greek or Alexandrian school we would think of Justin Martyr who flourished about 150 Clement of Alexandria, who flourished about 200 Origen, who flourished about 225. Remember, Origen is o r I g e n and other names. I won't give dates with these. Aristotes, Athenagoras, Tatian, T a t I a n Theophilus, Melito, M e l I t o and Apollinarius are Apollinaris, Justin, Clement, Origen, Aristides, Athenagoras, Tatian, Theophilus, Melito, Apollinaris. In the Latin school, Felix is especially important, flourishing around 200. Lactantius L A c t a n t I s who flourished around 300. Theodoret. In the African school we think especially of Tertullian who flourished around 200. His dates are 165 to 220. Arnobius, a R n o b I u s, Arnobias, Anobius and Cyprian. I've already pointed out that the Antecene Fathers emphasize for us the personal nature of reality, the personal nature of knowing. The key issue that all of them had to address as they are defending the Christian faith against the pagans and false religionists is what should be the Christian attitude towards secular reason? What should be the Christian attitude towards secular reason? We want to take advantage of secular reason. Try to use it or do we want to shun it? Origen is a pretty good example of one of the approaches to that question that says, well, we can trust secular reason and appropriate it for Christian purposes. We can trust it and appropriate it for our own purposes. That attitude was exemplified in the work of Origen. Tertullian, on the other hand, said we should distrust reason or worldly learning. Distrust it rather than trusting and appropriating it. Origen made excuse me. Tertullian made the mistake, however, in pushing his distrust of reason to such a point that it looked like he gloried in offending reason. It's kind of like he took great glory. And it's not just that we distrust it, but it's a great privilege to be standing against it. You sometimes get that kind of cocky attitude in the history of the Christian Church. Remember Luther called reason that whore reason? Well, of course, when you stop and think about it, you have to draw distinctions as to what you mean by the word reason. Before you make those denunciations lest you use the whore to slay the whore. After all, everyone uses reason in one sense, our intellectual gifts and abilities. But it's another thing altogether to make man's unaided reason or autonomous reason your final standard. Tertullian was right to distrust autonomous reason. I don't think he helped the Christian cause by pushing the idea that we're against reason and that we glory in absurdity. We may glory in apparent absurdity, but it's certainly not genuine absurdity. Okay, so key contribution, personalism, key issue. Should we trust secular reason and appropriate it or distrust it? Next thing I want to say about the patristics is just take a minute, since it was in your textbook, to look at the example of origin. Origen lived from 185 to 254 AD, so I've given him a date of flourishing of about 225. He was a student of Clement of Alexandria, But later he came to study, as did Plotinus under Ammonias Sakas in Alexandria. Back in my comments on Plotinus, remember I pointed out Alexandria as the center of this kind of thinking. Well, Plotinus studied under Anus and so did Origen. Origen saw God as unchangeable, eternal and personal being who created the world. This is part of the personalism, the personal metaphysic of the Fathers that is very important. God is the ultimate reality that creates, is personal, eternal and unchangeable. However, because of his Neoplatonic infection we'll call it, Origen was not happy to say that the personal unchanging God created the physical world directly. Rather, God has a subordinate being, a subordinate deity called the Logos create the realm of perishable matter. Under the Logos there are various ranks or levels of reality, and spirits occupy these different ranks. In the created realm, Souls exist outside of body prior to being put in the body. And it's because apparently Origen felt or taught that some kind of rebellion among what we call human souls led to there being embodied, punished for their sin by being placed within the body. And man now uses his free will to gain emancipation from the material body. We want to be emancipated from the body and gained thereby union with God. Salvation amounts to being disembodied and united with God. It of course saddens us to see some of the earliest Christian scholars being so infected by worldly ideas. When I teach you this, you say, well, that sounds like a lot of what we've been looking at already. Sounds a bit like Manicheanism the evil of the material body, sounds a bit like Neoplatonism and so forth. Well, that is discouraging. In fact, in the next thing I want to do here is to read from a long essay that I've written on the history of Christian apologetics to offer some detail of the patristic period and an evaluation of it. It is discouraging, but we have to remember that the Holy Spirit leads the Church to truth. In one sense, I'm personally discouraged that it's taken me so long to reach what minimal level of sanctification I now have today. But I do know that as an early Christian, I had struggles and problems that I don't have today. Of course, I still have other struggles in my Christian life. Sanctification is a progressive thing. In the same way, the church has been sanctified by the truth progressively. And so we see these early Christians, there are certainly improvements in the personal nature of reality. In fact, you have to take sin into account when you do philosophy and things like that. But on the other hand, they are not as far down the line as Calvin was. And of course, Calvin isn't as far down the line as Warfield and Machen were. So we have to recognize the churches sanctified progressively and not let the fact that Origen is such an embarrassing example of mixing worldly ideas with the faith of Scripture debilitate us and think, well, then there really isn't any hope for a Christian philosophy. What was Origen's problem? Why do you think he had these bizarre ideas? Is don't you think it's related to the fact that his understanding of worldly learning was that you can trust it. It's okay as it is. It's just. It has to be appropriated and just kind of turned in a Christian direction. See, if I get on an airplane that's destined for Dallas, Texas, saying, well, that's the general direction of Memphis, Tennessee, from where I am. I'll just get on this plane for Dallas and I'll just go ahead and take the Memphis off ramp. You know. No, it doesn't work that way. But a lot of Christians throughout the history of the church, I think, have made the mistake of thinking they can buy into a secular philosophy and Christianize it as though you could get on the plane which is going to end up in Dallas, that is someplace you don't want to go, and you think you can stop short of that. So that leads me then to. I want to read to you a portion of an article that I wrote for the Foundations of Christian Scholarship, which was edited by Gary North a number of years ago. My article is on the history of apologetics. It's entitled Socrates or Christ? The Reformation of Christian Apologetics. Naturally, it would make me very, very happy if some of you went and got the article and read the whole thing. But I would like to at least take this part of our class and share with you a couple of pages. I go through the whole history of apologetics, obviously in rapid order, but I'd like to take a couple of pages that deal with the patristic period and read this to you and offer some comments. During the second century, all the major motifs in apologetical history came to be foreshadowed. It's a telling commentary upon these apologies that they were modeled after 1 the assaults of the pagan philosophers upon polytheism, and 2 the attempts of Hellenistic Jews to show the superiority of Mosaic revelation to pagan philosophy. What I'm saying here is the early Christian apologists got their apologetical technique. They seem to be aping one the pagan philosophers when they argue against the polytheism of their culture, or two they ape the Hellenistic the the Jews in the Greek world. They ape the Hellenistic Jews where they tried to show the superiority of Moses to pagan philosophy. The recurring themes are illustrated by the following examples. First, the letter to Diogenes exposed the folly and immorality which are fostered by pagan idolatry. And then it went on to emphasize the moral effects of the gospel on the mind and the heart of believers. This is what Aristides does in his brief apology to the emperor Hadrian. You show the foolishness and immorality of pagan idolatry and show the moral effects of the gospel in believers. In customary style, Tatian attempted to prove that the Mosaic revelation was more ancient than the Greek writers. What's the point here, like? Well, the Greeks were good philosophers. It's just we had it first. In his apologies, Justin Martyr said that the philosophers were enlightened by the divine Logos and thus were Christians without realizing it. That hurts the whole idea here again is that Greek philosophy which you all respect and look up to. Either we had it first or they really were Christians, but they didn't know it. Aristides confronted the problem of a plurality of religious options, arguing from comparative standards studies that Christianity is the least superstitious of all the options available. Athenagoras argued on philosophical grounds that there cannot be a plurality of gods. In the same vein as Quadratus stress on the gospel miracles, Athenagoras wrote a work on the resurrection of the dead. Justin's dialogue with Trypho the Jew argued for the deity of Christ from the Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament. And finally, Theophilus appealed in his work Ad Autoclicum to the subjective testimony of the heart that is the proof of Christianity from the internal feeling of peace and security. What we find then is an epistemological continuity with the intellectual perspective and the interpretation of experience found in unbelieving thought. The early Church fathers, to put it very simply, tried to make common cause with the theory of knowledge and the approach to philosophy that they found in the unbelieving world, and then turn it toward Christian application. So as early as the second century, what we see in Clement, Athenagoras and especially Justin is this making common cause with the theory of knowledge of the world. The kinds of arguments which Socrates utilized in his apology before the Athenians were all reflected in the Christian apologetic strategies of the second century. Appeals to fact, logic, beneficial effects, and finally to the heart. That's not surprising, seeing that both Socrates and the apologists took a naturalistic, autonomous approach to knowledge. God was in the dock before the bar of human reason and experience. As a result, the apologetic strength of Paul at Athens was lacking. Now, why do I say that? Obviously these guys are on our side, you know, given the pagan world. Why am I being critical of the patristic apologists? Well, I am because though their hearts were in the right place and they share the same basic theology and convictions that I do as a Christian, I believe their approach to philosophy and thus the defense of the faith, really weakened the case that could have been made. Instead of approaching things as Paul did at Athens, with an antithetical challenge, instead of trying to undermine pagan philosophy, they too often tried to make common cause with pagan philosophy and just show that if you really did it right, you would be led to Christian conclusions. And in all of this, they had to assume then the atomic autonomy of the human mind to evaluate the world and then on its own terms and by its own standards, vindicate God's claims. But none of the apologists showed Christianity to be to the definitive truth of God. No argument was forthcoming that the truth of the gospel was the necessary condition for the changed lives of Christians. You take the argument, look, Christians live good lives well, but that doesn't mean that the gospel is true. Indeed, the Christians could have been morally motivated and transformed simply by believing that the gospel is true. You see, believing that a certain fairy tale is true may lead you to do things, if you believe in Santa Claus. And you act like a good little boy, so you get presents on Christmas warning. But that doesn't prove that there's a Santa Claus. By arguing that the Greek philosophers had plagiarized Moses and had been inspired by the Logos, the apologist assumed what the veracity of the philosopher's perspective. That is to argue that way assumes that the philosophers basically had it right. And yet maintaining that that the Jews had this truth first that had certain deleterious effects on the argument for Christianity. If you agree with the philosophers in their presuppositions, it appears to be arbitrary selectivity to refrain from agreeing with their conclusions. You can't run to Plato and Aristotle and all these others and say these are great, great philosophers, we had it first and so forth. And then you're going to have to explain why then don't you go all the way and agree with their conclusions. The educated pagan would say if you appeal to the philosophers to validate certain truths of the faith, but not others. This simply shows that the better or the validated teachings of Christianity are also taught by the philosophers. Since the better teachings of Christianity are also taught by the philosophers, then divine revelation is superfluous. You see how that's a two edged sword. The Christians try to run to Plato and Aristotle to get help, but the world can respond well. If Plato and Aristotle understood these truths, then we don't need the Bible, do we? Where Christianity is questionable, the unbeliever doesn't want to follow it. Where Christianity agrees with the philosophers, the unbeliever need not follow it. Moreover, when the Christian message is placed upon the foundation of pagan thought, the message proves to be naturalized and distorted. For instance, if you take the Greek view of fate, where anything is said to be possible in history, the resurrection of Christ is a mere oddity of irrational historical eventuation. Appeals to fact are ultimately futile unless the apologist recognizes and avoids the unbelievers presupposed philosophy of fact. For various reasons, the argumentative appeal to fulfilled prophecy and the evaluation of pagan religions as leading to immorality and superstition are examples of question begging. If you don't take a biblical perspective, that is from a non biblical perspective, Christianity is seen as immoral and superstitious. And from an unbelieving perspective, the arguments from prophecy all appear to rely on a tendentious reading of the Old Testament in the first place. After all, the orthodox Jewish authorities didn't interpret the text in this fanciful, axe grinding way that the Christians do. Why then should an educated pagan feel compelled to Believe the Christian apologist. And finally, the fact that a believer has an inward indication of the truth of his faith may tell you something about the believer, that he's having this experience of calm and divine acceptance and so forth, but it says nothing about the objective truth of the believer's faith. You see, testimony tells you about the person giving the testimony. It doesn't tell you anything about what he is testifying. And so the second century's Socratic apologies for the faith were just so much mill grist for the mills of unbelieving thought. The intellectual challenge of the Gospel, I believe, was not sounded, not fully sounded. Third circumstance century apologists, especially those of Alexandria, continued to assimilate arguments from Platonic and Stoic philosophers as well as from Jewish controversialists. Clement of Alexandria argued that the best aspirations and insights at work throughout pagan history, for instance those in the mystery cults or Hellenic philosophy, had been fulfilled in their apex Christianity. He looked at some of these things we have studied this morning, saw the best aspiration of the mystery cults and of the Greek philosophers as coming to fulfillment then in Christianity, Having studied philosophy under the father of Neoplatonism, Origen argued against the criticisms of some Celsus by saying that the Bible agrees with sound philosophy and that the Christians inability to prove historical assertions of the Scripture is no defect, since the Greeks cannot prove their history either. What a great defense, huh? The necessity then and the uniqueness of the Christian message were to a great extent hidden in the apologies of the Alexandrians. The Latin apologists were not much better in the work. Octavius Marcus Minucius Felix proclaimed that the philosophers of old were unconsciously Christians and that the Christians of his day were genuine philosophers. It's only in Tertullian that we begin to see some return from this event. Epistemological Babylonian captivity of Christian apologetics Is that too fancy an expression? The epistemological Babylonian captivity of the apologists and their theory of knowledge. They were really taken captive to the pagans, to the Babylonians. However, along with Tertullian's refusal to integrate Jerusalem with Athens, his famous remark was what does Jerusalem have to do with Athens? We don't trust secular reasoning. We also find the counterproductive recommendation of Christian teaching. Because it is absurd, I believe. Because it is absurd, he said. He should have said I believe in spite of its apparent absurdity. I think he could have gone on to say, since this teaching appears to be absurd, it obviously doesn't arise from natural human reasoning. This is not the sort of thing we'd come up with if we were left to ourselves. And so the apparent absurdity of Christianity actually speaks in favor of it Now. I think that would have been a better way of putting it. I think the teaching of Athens must be unmasked for its presuppositional absurdity and not simply allowed to stand as an erroneous option over against the faith, as did the other 3rd century apologists. Cyprian merely repeated 2nd century arguments for the faith, adding to the evidences the spectacle of Catholic unity, that is, he said, because of the unity of the Church that proves the truth of Christianity. An argument with assumptions which might seem to disprove the truth of Christianity. With the arrival of the Protestant Reformation, right. When you see disagreements in the Church, then that argument tends to disprove Christianity. The 4th and 5th centuries witnessed the attempt by apologies to construct a new religious synthesis, a global vision constructed from materials of Stoic and Platonic philosophy, yet reshaped by the Gospel. The overriding problem of the previous age had been the relationship between Christianity and classical culture. But now, with Christianity seeing amazing success, you have the heroic martyrs, advances in doctrinal formulation, the conversion of Constantine, the emperor. With those sorts of things happening. The leading apology era was the work the Case against the Pagans by Arnobius, who evidently was more familiar with Stoic thought than with Christian theology. Arnobius subscribed to the tabula rasa theory of the Hebrew human mind. The mind is a blank slate at birth, and argued that even though all intellectual opinions are uncertain, no one can know for sure we should believe the one which offers more hope than the others. That is, you should go with that philosophical outlook that is more hopeful for man. And so in this approach, Christianity becomes an eschatological insurance policy. Arnobius admitted that he had no solution to the problem of evil, did not clearly deny the existence of pagan gods, and left us with an apologetic more suited to deism than to Christianity. Lactantius made extensive use of Plato and Cicero and Lucretius, and interestingly and is apologetic, establishing with the competence of reason the existence and the providence of God. You look to Plato and Cicero and others. You can prove from reason that God exists and prove his providence. From there he pleaded the limitations of philosophy and went on to accept the deity of Christ on grounds of inspired prophecy. So you see, philosophy is competent to prove certain things about God, but then it's limited and you have to have divine revelation to prove other things. An instructive contrast can be seen between the attitudes of Ambrose And Eusebius, Ambrose said that it is good that faith should go before reason lest we seem to exact a reason from our Lord God as from a man, end of quote. Ambrose of course is influential in the life of Augustine. Please remember the name of Ambrose. We'll come to Augustine in a few minutes. It is good that faith should go before reason, lest we seem to exact a reason from our Lord God as from a man. He understood that you can't put God in the dock to be judged by autonomous human reason. For Eusebius, faith undergirded knowledge and yet knowledge prepared the way for faith. You see this in his two part work, the Preparation of the Gospel and then the Proof of the Gospel. Eusebius was a forerunner to Augustine in two major One, Eusebius pioneered the apologetic of world history, that is arguing for the truth of Christianity from its amazing success in the world. And secondly, he Platonized the Bible almost as much as he baptized Greek philosophy. The domination of the Socratic or autonomous outlook in Christian apologetics is further witnessed in Theodoret's work, the Truth of the Gospels Proved from Greek Philosophy. I mean the title tells you all right, the Truth of the Gospels Proved from Greek Philosophy. Theodoret felt able to incorporate the the highest insights of Neoplatonic speculation into his Christian philosophy. Yet he argued simultaneously that Christians alone live up to the best insights of the pagans. Okay, I realize there's a lot of detail there and compact argumentation, but what I've tried to do as a precept expositionalist in apologetical methodology is to go back and look at the history of apologetics and see the shortcomings, the pitfalls, the weakness of the type of apologetic or defense of the faith that has so often been offered when that apologetic does not set up the antithesis between Christian thinking and philosophy in the world, but rather tries to find common notions to work on the basis of Greek thinking, Neoplatonism or the philosophers of old. What happens is the faith gets distorted and in the end the world says we don't really need what you're offering us at all. And so that's not much of a defense of the faith when it shows Christianity to be either superfluous or distorts the message of Christianity. And that would be my basic evaluation of the ante nessine fathers. I've made some positive remarks about their contribution to the history of thought and overall, in terms of worldly thinking, they're a great improvement. But if we take a more insider evaluation kind of now we close the Door to the world and inside the family starts talking about its own problems within the Christian family. I think we really have to be critical of much of what we find in the Antonocene Fathers. Do you have any Questions about Section 13, the early Christian era, Gnosticism, mystery cults, Neoplatonism, and the patristic apologist, the Antonocene Fathers. In the Church itself at that time? Well, I think we'd have to say they played a significant role. The leading teachers of the Church are the men we're talking about. So these were the leading teachers of the Church, not people in the Church during Philosophy of Carnage? No. See, the question that you're posing presupposes a modern situation. You're thinking from our own day and age. We have people who sit in the Church, in the congregation as philosophers. Well, they did too. I don't want to completely deny that. But it isn't as though you had people who were the theologians, and then you had these guys over here who taught in the Christian college and they were in the philosophy department. I mean, that would be a real anachronistic way to see it. These were the great teachers of the Church and they tended to do philosophy and theology. It is true that there are other theologians of the Church who wrote more specifically on exegetical and theological points that I haven't mentioned. You know, Athanasius, for instance. But I wouldn't want you to dismiss these as not being Christian teachers and recognizing the Church as such. Other questions? No. What happens is you can see that people have a tendency to look at the New Testament, want to pick up names, especially of favored people. And so Theophilus was obviously named after the Theophilus of the New Testament, but it's not the same person. Other questions about the early Christian era. If not, we're going to move on to one of my favorite philosophers, maybe my favorite philosopher. This will be Roman numeral 14. Roman numeral 14. Augustine. Let me put Augustine in historical perspective for you. Remember, earlier I spoke of the Edict of Toleration. Constantine had been converted, or apparently so. People will argue, I guess, for many years whether it was genuine or just a socially expedient thing to do. Anyway, Constantine was converted and he issued the Edict of Toleration in the year 313 A.D. 12 years later, the Council of Nicaea was called 325 to deal with the Arian controversy. The heresy of Arius having to do with Christ being like God rather than God Himself. Homoosias vs. Homoiusios. Arius said Christ is homoiousios. He's like the substance of God. The orthodox position established at Nicaea is that Christ is homoosios not homoi but homo. He is the very same substance. Homoousios means same substance. Homoi means like the substance of God. Okay. Edict of Toleration 3:13 Council of Nicaea 325. Then in the year 354 Augustine is born. Year 354. He was born to a christian mother and a pagan father and lived in tagaste t a g a s t e t a g a s t e in northern africa. His parents sent him to Carthage, Africa to study. He was apparently a good student. In the year 383 he visited Rome and there came under the influence of Ambrose. What did Ambrose teach? It's appropriate that faith goes before understanding. During his lifetime Augustine had sampled many of the religious alternatives of his day. He was very promiscuous ideologically speaking, religiously speaking. But in the year 386 he had gone to Milan and there he was converted by a Christian friend visiting from Africa. Year 386two years later he returned to Africa this is 388 and exercised an exemplary Christian life. Eventually he was made Bishop of Hippo in Northern Africa in the year 391. As the Bishop of Hippo one of the biggest administrative controversies he had to deal with was known as the Donatists controversy. The Donatist held that the legitimacy of a sacrament depends upon the state of mind and purity of the person administering the sacrament. So they were rigorous in their understanding of the sacraments and the disposal of the Church. If you had a priest who had fallen, who had compromised under persecution then when he gave the sacraments they were not true sacraments. And Augustine wrote much against that to overcome the Donatist point of view. The rigorous of the Donatists that didn't recognize the legitimacy of the Church as the source and dispenser of the sacraments rather than the individual minister. Augustine died at a time when the barbarians were overthrowing the Roman Empire. As an example, in the year 410 Rome was sacked by Alaric. Augustine died in the year 430-ad-430. Struggles with the problem of evil early in his life led Augustine away from his mother's Christian faith into Manicheanism. I'm talking about struggles with the problem of evil. That is an intellectual problem, the philosophical problem of evil. Augustine also struggled with evil itself with a lifestyle that was displeasing to God, that was self centered and he writes about this later in his confessions. I'll talk about that in a couple of minutes. But the problem of evil is an insolence. Intellectual problem is how can there be evil in this world if God is all good and God is all powerful? Manicheanism, as I taught you, already offers an answer to that. Well, there's a ultimate metaphysical power or principle of evil in this world. So there can't be a good God that is ultimate and absolute. The good is always hemmed in by or limited by the power of evil, which is also ultimate. So Manicheanism, light and darkness, good and evil being ultimate principles of reality, seem to be an answer to Augustine later, after he was converted and came out of Manichaeanism. This is very interesting. I think there's an insight here that will be helpful to you. Augustine later viewed the promise of knowledge offered by the Manichaeans as audacious. He said the kind of knowledge they promised to give their followers is audacious. No one can rise to such a level that they can understand and know even and the purposes of the universe in the way that they think they can on their own autonomous grounds. And secondly, and this is crucial, Augustine saw the search for a rational account of evil. That is, God needs to give some explanation to me and give a rational account of the evil that's in this world. The search for a rational account of evil is itself an evil that is, challenging God about the problem of evil is itself an example of an evil thing to do. When I lecture around the country on the problem of evil, this is one of the conclusions, by the way, after I lay out the philosophical options and show why there's no philosophical problem from the Christian viewpoint, no logical problem with evil, but rather there's a psychological problem. So we don't know why God allows things to happen and we're called upon to trust him that he has a morally sufficient reason for the evil he allows. Then it becomes a question, do we trust him or do we say no? Unless you tell me what the reason is, I won't believe you. You see, the search for the reason, reason why God permits evil, is itself an evidence of a wicked mindset that will not trust him on his own. Say so. Well, having struggled with the problem of evil, but finding the Manichaean approach inappropriate, later Augustine turned toward a Neoplatonic solution to the problem of evil. Neoplatonic solution. Now you know what the Neoplatonist taught, right? Reality, the ultimate good is one and transcends this world. But there's A chain of being. As things are less valuable, they have less reality, less being to them. And eventually it gets so thin that you find fall off the chain of being and then you have what is the opposite of the ultimate good. You have evil, which is the realm of matter. And that has no reality or being. It's off the chain of being. So on that viewpoint, evil is nothing positive, it has no being. And evil is not positive, it doesn't have reality. Then it's merely negative. It's the absence of the good, right? You fall off the chain of being. Evil then is the absence of being the absence of the good, or as Augustine would call it, privation. Evil is a deficiency in reality, a deficiency of good. So he would use an example like health and sickness. Sickness is not something positive, it's the absence of health. Likewise, evil is nothing positive. It doesn't have reality. It's the absence of the good. It's privation or deficiency. Now the Bible tells us that the world was created out of nothing. The world is not an extension of God. The world is not part of the chain of being, of God's own being. The world was created out of nothing. But we've already said that evil is a nothingness, is a privation. And since the world was created out of nothingness rather than out of God, then the world shows a mutable moral character, mutable or changeable character. It was created out of God. It would always have to be good. But since it was created out of nothing, then it's possible for it to go bad. And so later in his life, Augustine tended toward this more, if you will, Neoplatonic type of answer to the problem of evil, rather than a Manichean answer to the problem of evil. Let's turn then to the other kind of evil Augustine was concerned with. And that's the evil in the hearts of men and particularly in his own heart. Augustine is probably the best. The work for which he's best known is his Confessions. In the Confessions we find an acute sense of sin, of depravity. Repeatedly, non Christian writers have evaluated Augustine, have read the Confessions and have concluded that there was something terribly paranoid and wrong with this guy because he seemed so exercised by what just human foibles. I remember when I was in college, I made my living my senior year working for a woman that had eight acres and so forth. She was a wealthy woman, in fact, the niece of Bertrand Russell, very well read and so forth. She knew that I was a Christian. And so when we'd be gardening, she would often talk about these things. And she never tired of ridiculing Augustine for his Christian confessions. You know, this man is just so oppressed and burdened by such small little things. Yes, he engages in sex, but not like the pagans of his day. In fact, relatively speaking, Augustine lived a disciplined life. But yeah, he did engage in sex outside of marriage and so forth. Or take the example, famous example of Guston stealing the pears. Or is it peaches? Pears. That's what I thought. He just agonizes over the fact that he stole these pears from this man. And she would say, I mean, that's just. I mean, it's a minor thing. What's he making such a big point out of a minor thing? Well, here's the heart of it. You see, Augustine was exploring the nature of sin. And what he saw was the willfulness and the unreasonable nature of sin. Because, you see, he didn't like pears. And this is what concerned him. He says, what does this tell me about myself? That I would sneak into this man's orchard and steal pears which I don't even enjoy. I didn't do this out of sensual pleasure. Why did I do it? I did it because it was wrong. I was attracted to doing something which was evil. You see that it's not the pairs that's the big point. It's that Augustine realized he wasn't satisfying a natural desire. He was just doing wickedness for its wickedness. So the willfulness and the unreasonableness of sin is something that is acutely aware of in the Confessions, and I find it a fascinating work. I think it's valuable. Moreover, he confesses his. His intellectual arrogance, and that's something we as students of philosophy need to be mindful of. Augustine realized that the willfulness of his sin had intellectual consequences. He was arrogant before the Almighty, arrogant in terms of the sufficiency of his mind. And moving on to another point in Augustine's metaphysic, his view of reality, he saw Plato's dualism as a distortion and exaggeration of the truth. A distortion and an exaggeration of the truth. Augustine is also a dualist when it comes to metaphysics. He believes that there are two realms, but he does not believe that Plato is understanding, understood the two realms properly. For Augustine, it's the Creator and the creature that we're talking about. Remember, for Plato, it was the realm of the forms and then the sense world. There's no personal God, but rather impersonal ideas which form the transcendent realm. For Plato, Augustine saw Plato's dualism as a distortion and an exaggeration. In the first place, the sense world is not illusory. Mere appearance, Plato, remember, dismissed the world of sensation as misleading us from the ideas and forms. Augustine did not like the deprecation of the realm of creation as being somehow mere appearance tending toward unreality. Nor did Augustine appreciate Plato's view that matter is eternal. The material world is created out of nothing. It is not eternal as it is in Plato. Thirdly, Plato's dualism was a distortion because the transcendent world in Plato is impersonal. It's not the realm of Jehovah God, the creator of heaven and earth, but it's an impersonal realm of abstract ideas. Augustine also rejected the pantheistic emanation view of the world set forth by the Neoplatonist. The world is not an extension of God, the emanation out of the overflowing plenitude of being. I hope that these contrasts help you to see the significance of Augustine's doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Hope you see the significance of the Creator creature distinction in Augustine's metaphysic. Okay, another point in Augustine's philosophy. We have set before us the goodness of God's mysterious providence and plan. The goodness of God's mysterious providence and plan. Augustine saw the world as sustained and provided for by God's providence. God takes care of the world and keeps it running in an orderly way. And he sustains men, provides for their needs. God's providence is just part of the fact that God plans everything that happens. And God's plan is mysteriously good, or it's mysterious and good. It's mysterious because it sometimes happens that bad things take place and yet God turns them to the good. All things work together for good. That's what Paul taught. Augustine realized then that the course of his life and the events that take place in history can be good, even if it's mysterious to us as to how they are good right now. So he taught the goodness of God's mysterious providence and plan. Augustine's view of Providence that God upholds the world, renders it orderly apart from his supernatural intervention. Augustine's view of Providence provided a rationale for science. Though Augustine was not scientific in his writing, intended to depreciate what we would call natural science, the fact is that his day and age was not scientifically minded. But you could not do science as we do it today if it weren't for the metaphysic that Augustine provided. The view of the created Realm as basically orderly. Augustine provided a rationale for science in the basic orderliness of the created realm. Now, I've tried to avoid using the term nature, but you see that this is the Christian alternative to the concept of nature. In English, it's all been blended together, and we speak of nature and Christian framework. But where the ancient Greeks were trying to arrive at a concept of nature as orderly and open to investigation by the human mind, Augustine, or Christian philosophy, has that in its doctrine of creation and providence, because God governs the cosmos in an orderly way, now it can be examined. Let's stop and think about that for a minute. We find out from our experience that eating corn is good for the human body. And so we, from time to time, maybe some people who are obsessed with this have corn every day, but from time to time, we serve corn to our children. Now, what would we do if, however, when we serve, serve corn on a particular day, and let's just say it's only corn that my child has eaten, he gets deathly sick and I have to run him to the hospital and his stomach has to be pumped and so forth, we save his life and we go home and we say, well, weird things happen in this universe. Sometimes corn is good for you, sometimes it's not. No, as a matter of fact, because we believe in the order orderliness of the universe, and we know that in an orderly, regular way corn is good for people to eat. When it proves not to be good for us to eat, what does that force us to do? We go back and we look for a further factor. To be scientific is to explain why our expectation or the normal course didn't pan out. Why isn't that regularity there? Well, there must be what we think is another factor, another cause that enters in this. Corn is contaminated or had some kind of poison in it or something like that. The reason why you do a scientific investigation, you, you know, you send the, the stuff that's in the boy's stomach to the lab to be analyzed scientifically is because you believe in the orderliness of the universe. If you believe the universe was random and disorderly, you have no reason. I mean, studying what you pumped out of the boy's stomach wouldn't tell you anything. But because the universe is orderly, we know that we want to serve corn that hasn't been sitting out for three weeks and gotten stale or had some kind of bacteria in it or something like that. The course of scientific discovery depends upon the assurance that the world in which we live is orderly, basically. Orderly. And that's why I say, though Augustine and the people of his day were not scientifically minded, his metaphysic, his view of Providence is what lays the foundation for science. Okay, a further point. Augustine taught that God exercises his sovereignty through man's free will.