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Chapter 25 - Augustine. Human action: will and virtue

from Part V - MARIUS VICTORINUS AND AUGUSTINE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Edited by
A. H. Armstrong
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Summary

The sources of Augustine's reflection on human conduct, as of much of his thought, are the teaching of the Scriptures and the Church, and of Greek, particularly of Neoplatonic, philosophy. Sometimes, as we have noted, these two are in tension; in the present case, however, they blend completely in his mind. Indeed, it was here that he was above all impressed with the convergence he detected between Platonic and Christian teaching. His readiness to adopt other aspects of Platonic modes of thought, for instance in his discussion of soul and body, can in part be accounted for by this conviction of the similarity of their ethical bearings to those of Christian teaching. Tensions which can sometimes be detected between his Christian belief and his adopted philosophical concepts and language, tensions of the kind we have encountered, for instance, in his account of man as a soul using a body, are here totally absent.

Blessedness, as we have seen, was, for Augustine, the aim of philosophy. The wisdom which philosophy strove to attain would fill and satisfy all the deepest human needs and longings. Augustine was very ready to read back into Plato his own interpretation of what this love of wisdom consists in: Plato, he says, identified the supreme good, in the enjoyment of which man finds blessedness, with God. “And therefore he [Plato] thought that to be a philosopher is to be a lover of God.’ Affirmations of this kind pave the way for an almost wholesale adoption of Platonic notions, especially in the sphere of ethics.

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The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy , pp. 380 - 394
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1967

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