Appeared in Vol. 4 No. 2 Download PDF here
As one of the most influential set of ideas in Christian history, St. Augustine’s thought is always significant. Long before he was a Father of the Church, however, Augustine was a man locked in a desperate search for Truth. Realizing that Truth is simply the face of reality, Augustine sought to apprehend the nature of the universe in creation itself. And in understanding the Christian doctrine of creation, this greatest of all Fathers found the beginning, explanation and end of man. In the article following, Rev. Frederick Miller summarizes Augustine’s quest, describes his method and expounds his conclusions. The resulting study awakens the reader to a fuller appreciation of the gift of life and the purpose of all created goods.
I can think of no book which `shifts gears’ as thoroughly as The Confessions of St. Augustine.
Books I through X tell in beautiful detail and eloquent style of Augustine’s spiritual ruination and rejuvenation. Michelangelo’s Last Judgment with its uncanny descent of the damned and ascent of the blessed captures the inner movement of the work. One experiences a sweeping confusion leading to a fall, or better, to many intellectual and moral `falls’ which equal destruction. But one concomitantly experiences a triumphant, though bloody, ascent to truth and fullness of life. No modern novel can rival in intensity and excitement the story of Augustine’s quest.
And then comes the shifting of gears. In books XI through XIII there is a philosophical and theological treatise on the creation of the universe. No longer does one find autobiography in a strict sense. Many editions of The Confessions omit these trying chapters. Some have asserted that Augustine did not write these books. Others believe that they were never meant to be a part of the whole.
Upon more careful consideration, however, one realizes that Augustine’s exposition of Genesis in The Confessions resolves all the tensions, doubts and agony revealed in the previous chapters. John C. Cooper, for example, in his excellent article entitled “Why Did Augustine Write Books XI – XIII of The Confessions” concluded:
In the exegesis of Genesis 1:1-31 (in books XI-XII of the Confessions) we do not have an abrupt interposition of new material, or a poor ending to a great autobiography, but Augustine’s precise confessio fidei in the God who gives meaning to human existence when He accepts man’s confessio peccati, thus ushering that forgiven sinner into the category of eternity (immortality or eternal life) that frees man from the terror of meaningless and the fear of death.(1)
In other words, Augustine in these chapters affirms that the Christian doctrine of the creation is the end of his quest for truth and the beginning of his new life based on the authority of Divine Revelation. Therein, he discovers the resolution of his philosophical, psychological and theological grapplings with ultimate reality and the true beginning of a life which is directed to a definite end. It is, therefore, not surprising that Augustine concludes his autobiography with an exegetical tract on the creation of the world. In these books one witnesses Augustine savoring the taste of truth and purpose. It should be noted that The Confessions was written c.400 A.D., some thirteen years after Augustine’s formal conversion to the Catholic Faith. These thirteen years afforded Augustine the opportunity to reflect on his metanoia and masterfully develop a Christian philosophy.
Just as Augustine’s conversion reveals the painful process whereby a haunted pagan world turned towards the light of Divine Truth, study of Augustine’s intellectual and spiritual development manifests the vital importance of the doctrine of creation within the body of Catholic theology. John Courtney Murray S.J., in The Problem of God, captured the urgency of Augustine’s search for the truth of revelation when he wrote:
The creation is the central problem of Christian philosophy-the problem of the coexistence and coagency of the infinite and the finite, the necessary and the contingent, the eternal and the temporal, the absolute and the relative. There are two aspects to the problem-one metaphysical, the other moral.(2)
In the first section of this article I shall attempt to sketch a picture of Augustine’s struggle with the notion of creation from a metaphysical and moral point of view. This attempt, hopefully, will reveal the delicate and necessary balance between human reason and supernatural faith. Augustine, wrestling with the doctrine of creation, offers us the opportunity of witnessing theology in authentic process-the human mind and heart expanded through contact with the articles of the Faith.
The doctrine of creation presented St. Augustine with a further difficulty after his conversion which is the subject of the second section below. He felt compelled to reconcile his newly acquired truth with the inspired text of Genesis. This intellectual struggle, reminiscent of the Nicene Fathers’ concerns about departing from strictly biblical terminology, displays the maturation of Christian thought which began with the Fathers, reached a peak in the Neoplatonism of Augustine and found perfect synthesis in the philosophy and theology of the Angelic Doctor. Therefore, I shall briefly examine the exegetical methods utilized by Augustine in his exposition of Genesis.
TO UNDERSTAND CREATION
Romano Guardini in his work The Conversion of St. Augustine pinpointed the difficulty of unravelling the philosophical and theological thought of Augustine. He wrote:
We must posit at once that Augustine’s intellect was extremely acute. He also possessed an almost unparalelled thirst for truth. Throughout his early years these endowments nearly drove him mad. Frequently, Augustine would seize a system of thought (e. g. Manichaeism) as true and do everything possible to live by that truth. In all his searching Augustine instinctively knew that every detail of his life had to be governed by that which he perceived as his end. Throughout his early life Augustine was consistently betrayed and disillusioned by various philosophies. Ultimate truth lay at the crux of his problems. He sought in every movement of his intellect and will a goal which would merit an uncompromising donation of self. It is obvious that the only terminus of his philosophical quest was to be theology or, to be more precise, Divine Revelation. We may assert that Augustine ceaselessly sought wisdom concerning God and his own existence. This truth once acquired, he knew, would lead him to the proper ordering of his personal life. The callow Augustine believed this possible through the disciplined workings of his intellect. The seasoned Augustine knew that this grappling with philosophical questions was only the first step toward the plenitude of truth revealed by God.
As a youth Augustine was catechized by his mother Monica. He writes in the Confessions that three convictions always, even in his worst moments, remained in his consciousness: belief in a provident God; love and reverence for the name of Christ; a certitude of final judgment. Early in his manhood Augustine read Cicero’s Hortensius. This work, extolling the beatitude of wisdom, imprinted an indelible mark on our subject’s intellectual life. He never lost sight of his desire for ultimate truth, an essentially absolute truth to which one might nobly give his life.
Augustine’s agonizing quest for truth and order was the result of his incapacity to relate these two basic sets of ideas-one theological, the other philosophical. In reading the Confessions one vicariously travels Augustine’s difficult path, the end of which was the recognition that Jesus Christ is the revealed Wisdom of God, the exemplar of the created order and the principle of volitional order to man’s final end-eternal beatitude in God.
Augustine was always painfully aware of the transience of all created reality. The heart-rending story of the death of his closest friend in the Confessions presents a striking instance of his sensitivity to human frailty and contingency. He could not, however, find any peace in his conception of God. The reason for this is simple. Augustine states quite clearly that he could never imagine an incorporeal deity. Since he found evil everywhere in the universe, Augustine was compelled to predicate evil and change of the deity. This confusion is mirrored consistently in his private moral life. He found himself locked in his own closed system of materialistic philosophy.
In his early manhood, Augustine aligned himself with the Manichaean sect. This sect concocted a strange mixture of Christian thought and oriental mythology and mysticism. For a time the sect quieted Augustine’s longing for truth with its doctrine of two gods-one spiritual and good, the other material and evil. At this point in his confused life, Augustine saw many benefits in belonging to this esoteric sect. The Manichees offered him a caricature of truth. In his later life, he wrote of their protestations and promises: “They cried out `truth, truth;’ they were forever uttering the word to me, but the thing was nowhere to be found in them”(4) The Manichees also offered him an explanation of God and creation. One can surmise the depth of Augustine’s confusion by contemplating the absurdity of the Manichaean doctrines of the first cause and his effects.
The Manichees, again, posited two equal principles or gods, one good, one evil-god and satan. Each of these deities had his own kingdom, complex and convoluted. The kingdoms were infinite in every direction but had one common border. At one point in time satan invaded the kingdom of light. Consequently, light and darkness mingled-spiritual substance joined with material substance. The material world was thereby `created’ in conflict. A male and female devil in the kingdom of darkness brought forth Adam and Eve. Adam’s body contained a vast number of `seeds of light.’ Eve’s body contained a smaller number. Cain and Abel were the children of Satan and Eve. Seth and the rest of the human race were the children of Adam and Eve. The Manichees saw Adam’s fall in the act of sexual intercourse.
Redemption for the Manichees was not in Jesus of Nazereth. He was considered by them to be the supreme impostor. The Manichees concocted their own Jesus. However, his identity was confused and controverted even among the sect’s most learned teachers. Their Jesus’ act of redemption was, likewise, obscure. His main task seems to have been the liberation of man from the clutch of the material order.
The Manichee escaped his imprisoned existence in matter by abhorring and avoiding everything material. Only a select group of people, the Elect, were capable of this heroic abnegation. The `Hearers’, deficient in perfection, aspired to reach the heights of the Elect. They, victims of the evil principle of matter, were not responsible for any of their actions. Free will was categorically dismissed from the Manichaean system.
Here two aspects of Augustine’s personality were immediately satisfied. He found a system of purported truth which for a time satisfied his intellectual aspirations. He also realized that he might continue to sin as he pleased in the rank of the Hearers. After all, it was merely the evil principle which caused his transgressions. The Manichees, furthermore, offered Augustine an elite, pseudophilosophical clique in which he felt at home. They also solved his many problems concerning the Christian scriptures by simply tearing them asunder.
For the moment Augustine’s mind was satisfied. He found easy answers to his questions concerning God, the transient nature of all things created, the problem of evil and his own disheveled moral life. His thirst for truth, however, did not leave him in peace for very long.
Augustine perceived many difficulties in the Manichaean system of thought. Primarily he could not reconcile the two principles of being. What at first seemed a satisying answer became again a gnawing problem. This fact bears testimony to the human intellect’s dissatisfaction with any theory which falls short of truth. Augustine commented, as he decided to abandon the sect: “All the same because I despaired of finding any profit in that false doctrine, I began to hold slackly and carelessly even the ideas with which I had decided to rest content while I could find nothing better.”(5) Augustine mistrusted the Manichees all the more because of the emptiness of their philosophy. Augustine felt thoroughly betrayed. None of his questions regarding human existence or science had been answered by even the most learned of the sect, Faustus.
Moreover, the immorality of the sect drove Augustine from its environs. He observed that beneath the pious, rigorous life of the Elect there existed rank hypocrisy and scandal. The moral license of the Manichees, at first so appealing to Augustine, now appeared as so much madness and pretense. Here one finds testimony to the human will’s dissatisfaction with any object which is not wholly the good.
In Book XII of the Confessions one discovers what is certainly the dynamism of Augustine’s journey. As a mature Christian, the Bishop of Hippo keenly realized that his possession of truth in Christ was in beginning, in via and in term a gift of God’s Grace:
You kept stirring me with Your secret goad so that I should remain unquiet until You should become clear to the gaze of my soul. And from the secret hand of Your healing my swollenness abated, and the troubled and darkened sight of my mind was daily made better by the stinging ointment of sorrow.(6)
It was to be some time, however, before he attained this vision.
After his rather long flirtation with the Manichees, Augustine, disillusioned and bitter, turned to the universal skepticism of the Academics. In the process of categorical doubt Augustine cleared all the rubbish of the Manichean system from his mind. Unknowingly, through his questioning of even the possibility of coming to the truth, he was preparing for the last stage of his journey towards Revelation.
The day on which Augustine began to read the works of the Neo-Platonists, Porphyry and Plotinus, was a momentous day in the history of Western Philosophy and, perhaps, the birthday of Christian philosophy. The philosophy of Plotinus was an original synthesis of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoic philosophers. Augustine read Plotinus rather than Plato because the former philosopher’s works had been translated into Latin. In these books Augustine found a natural theology, severely flawed yet capable of resolving many of his intellectual difficulties concerning the nature of God.
Plotinus posited as his first principle, the One. The One is simple, perfect unity. In the system of Plotinus the One is unnamable because it transcends human categories in an absolute sense. In fact, the One is pure transcendence. It should be observed that the One is not a personal being-the One is bluntly an `it.’ However, the One is the first principle of all reality.
From the One emanated the second principle-the Intellect. The Intellect is the essence of all that is knowable to man. It is the self-thinking thought of Aristotle and the locus of the Platonic ideas.
The Intellect is inferior to the One because in him there exists the multiplicity of the knowing subject and the known object. Yet the Intellect, since he is the source of everything knowable, is a god and the father of all the other emanating gods of Plotinus. From him flow all essences, themselves gods, including the soul of each individual man.
Augustine believed that he recognized in these writings the truths found in Sacred Scripture. In fact, he boldly asserted that through the philosophical skeleton of the Neo-Platonists he ascended for the first time to an understanding and experience of God as incorporeal Being.
In his work entitled Our Hearts are Restless; The Prayer of Saint Augustine, Frank J. Sheed described the invaluable assistance of the philosophy of Plotinus in St. Augustine’s journey to God:
Augustine thinks neither `philosophically’ nor ‘theologically.’ His thought does contain a philosophy as well as a theology, but both are hidden. Anyone wishing to examine them must first dig them out and this is no easy evacuation. Many unfortunate misunderstandings would have been avoided had this fact been faced more squarely, and had fewer attempts been made to employ Augustinian thought like Thomistic, or even like that of a nineteenth century theologian. Augustine’s thought is of the period before the split into philosophy and theology. It is Christian reflection, it is thereflection of a Christian man on existence-not on abstract existence, but on very real existence as determined by God.(3)
Aided by Plotinus Augustine at last saw the meaning of spirit. Augustine was an artist with the imagination of an artist. Now he realized that the difficulties about God were all in the imagination, which makes mental pictures, not in the intellect. Without space and time imagination cannot function. Plotinus showed Augustine that neither is essential to existence, that God is wholly beyond them. Space, putting it crudely, is emptiness, and why should emptiness be essential to existence? If a being has parts, of course, it needs space to spread its parts in. But parts are dividedness, and why should dividedness be essential to existence? Why should there not be spiritual beings wholly contained in their being and their actions, in the one single act of being?(7)
In the Confessions Augustine identifies the “I Am Who Am” of Exodus with the One of Plotinus. He, likewise, identifies the Word of the Father with the Plotinian Nous. Precisely at this point one finds Augustine’s intellectual breakthrough. There are indeed many serious inadequacies in this tenuous union of philosophy and Divine Truth. However, in the relationship Augustine perceived between the truth of philosophy and the truth of Scripture, he identified the philosophical first principle with the religious first principle. Etienne Gilson discussed this fusion in his work, God and Philosophy:
Any Christian convert who was at all familiar with Greek philosophy was bound to realize the metaphysical impact of his new religious first principle; since the name of God was “I Am,” any Christian philosopher had to posit “I AM” as his first principle and supreme cause of all things, even in philosophy.(8)
Augustine’s conversion to the Catholic Faith came shortly after his conversion to Neo-Platonic philosophy. What took years of searching and intellectual turmoil was resolved in one moment of intellectual light. He seems to have known the exact moment of his “justification”; the moment when his natural knowledge of God became supernaturally informed and expanded by Faith. He uses a very perceptive and satisfying analogy to demonstrate the difference between the two states of knowledge. His knowledge of God attained through the use of reason was likened to the vision of a beautiful city seen from the peak of an enormous mountain. Although he saw the city from afar, he knew no way of arriving within its gates. His knowledge of God attained through the supernatural gift of Faith, on the other hand, was likened to the vision of the same city. There is a most important difference, however. Besides the vision, there is a sure knowledge of the way to the city. That way is the Mediator between the finite and the infinite, The Word of God, Jesus Christ Himself.
GENESIS
Chapters XI through XIII of the Confessions now fit into place. Augustine, certain of God as “I AM” and finally understanding the source of evil as the privation of goodness in being and in human acts, immediately turned his gaze to Genesis and began ecstatically to praise God for the truth grasped in its pages. Augustine’s discovery of Genesis after his conversion may be likened to a blind man’s discovery of sight. Not only did he acknowledge God as Pure Act for the first time in his life, but he also acknowledged the goodness of the creation. He furthermore accepted himself as the master of his own destiny. In the revealed doctrine of the creation of a good world, Augustine discovered his own free will. He realized that he had the capacity, aided by Grace, to direct every action to God as His true Beatitude and end.
To this point we have examined Augustine’s natural knowledge of God transformed into supernatural knowledge through the gift of Faith. He was aided on his way by the philosophy of Plotinus as well as by St. Ambrose’s lenten sermons on the book of Genesis. What remains is an appraisal of Augustine’s teachings on creation in the light of his newly discovered theodicy and Faith. These teachings are found in their original formulation in Chapters XI through XIII of the Confessions.
Augustine, following Ambrose his Teacher, may be considered eclectic in his interpretation of Scripture. Both Fathers jumped back and forth from the literal sense of the school of Antioch to the allegorical sense of the school of Alexandria. Both Augustine and Ambrose favored the literal sense of Scripture when studying and teaching the exact doctrine of the Catholic Church. Both appreciated the allegorical or mystical interpretation of scripture in preaching and catechizing the uninstructed. This fact is further testimony of Augustine’s genius. Availing himself of a limited exegetical background, Augustine was fully aware of the necessity of preserving the literal meaning of the inspired text. He was, also, aware of the pedagogical assets of the allegorical sense of Scripture. Both methods have bearing on his exposition of the creation in the Confessions.
Making much of the opening words of Genesis, “In the beginning,” Augustine successfully “despoils the Egyptians,” i.e., uses Plotinus’ system to his own advantage. For Augustine, “the beginning” is the Nous-the coeternal, consubstantial Word of the Father. All intelligible reality exists in Him for all eternity. Often Augustine compares the teachings of Plotinus concerning the Nous with the Christology found in the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel. According to Augustine, the creation in time, or to be more precise, the creation with time was eternally in the Word of God. He neatly posits the infinite gap between the finite and the Infinite by examining the fragile nature of time in reference to the nature of eternity. He carefully differentiates creation eternally in the Word and creation “with time” in the finite order of the creation. Both realms are distinct; both are intimately and organically related. This notion of the participation of created being in Divine Being was philosophically epoch-making and had many significant consequences in St. Thomas’ synthesis of the Aristotelian philosophy of being. (9)
Next, Augustine delves into the nature of this participated being of the universe and teaches that the participation is in the realm of essences. Again, he utilizes Plotinian idealism and states that every essence exists because of its relation to the Divine Ideas in the Word. The problem, however, is how the Divine Word created these participated essences ex nihilo. In other words, how does the participated essence resemble the Eternal Idea?
The text of Genesis itself seemingly offered him a solution to this philosophical problem. Augustine records an apparent discrepancy. Genesis 1 tells of a successive creation. Genesis 2 tells of an instantaneous creation. How is this contradiction to be resolved? Augustine posits that God’s utter simplicity as I AM necessitates an instantaneous creation. Chapter 2 of Genesis records the fact of creation with time. Chapter 1 relates the unfolding of creation in time.
When God created, he “concreted” prime matter and substantial form. For Augustine, working from a Neo-Platonic metaphysics, prime matter is the reality closest to nothingness. In the Confessions, in fact, he refers to this unformed matter as est, non est and nihil aliquid. Prime matter, he asserts, never really existed without form. To affirm the contrary would be to bestow on matter an independence of God, the Creator. It would, likewise, deny the revealed truth that God created everything ex nihilo. For Augustine, form effected the concretion and established essence. The form caused the finite being to resemble in a finite way the Divine Ideas in the Word. The essence is, of course, the manner of partipation in Being. Gilson notes: “Augustine explains creation by saying that both matter and form are created together ex nihilo, matter representing that from which creation is made, their synthesis constituting that which was made.”(10)
In his article, St. Augustine’s Theory of Seminal Reasons, Jules M. Brody analyses and explains Augustine’s understanding of the creative act:
When He thus created, God called to Himself the imperfection of the creature (prime matter); and turning to God the unformed creature received a form. The result was that the non-perfect creature imitated the form of the Word. The imperfection of the creature did not precede form in time because God concreted both simultaneously. For example, a speaker simultaneously produces the sound (matter) and words (form).(11)
According to St. Augustine, although God created everything in one act, he immediately gave some beings definite form. Other beings were created in a potent state, enveloped in their own causes. To account for the gradual emergence in time of forms of being not actually manifest in the beginning, Augustine made use of the philosophical concept of seminal reasons (rationes causales or rationes seminales). These were defined by Augustine as causes or principles of latent species created by God and hidden in matter in the one, instantaneous act of creation. As time progressed and atmospheric conditions became favorable these seminal reasons caused and, in fact, fixed various species which were temporally new yet latently present in the cosmos from the first moment of God’s creation. Augustine situated the seminal reasons in the sphere of God’s providence. It was He who created all things, tended them and caused them to emerge according to His pre-ordained plan. In this way Augustine explained the seemingly contradictory creation accounts in Genesis. Chapter 2 of that book records the one act of creation. Chapter 1 describes the unfolding of creation beneath the watchful eye of a Provident God.
Some have attempted to see in Augustine’s explanation of creation traces of evolutionary transformism. To the contrary, however, it must be noted that these seminal reasons are by no means the principles of transformation of species. Rather, as principles they fix species. The seminal reasons, however, offer a means whereby Augustine could explain a duration in the unfolding of God’s act of creation in time.
Augustine in his formulation of the doctrine of creation achieved a brilliant synthesis of Christian Faith and Greek philosophy. While remaining faithful to Revelation, he attempted to explain creation in strictly philosophical terminology. He developed the notion of time as a creature with great precision. He boldly interpreted Genesis in a scientific manner. He, furthermore, groped in the dark to formulate a philosophy of being. Etienne Gilson, in God and Philosophy, contends that Augustine never fully achieved his goal:
His ontology, or science of being, is an `essential’ rather than an `existential’ one. In other words, it exhibits a marked tendency to reduce the existence of a thing to its essence, and to answer the question: `What is it for a thing to be?’ by saying: `It is to be that which it is.”‘(12)
STILL SIGNIFICANT
These various accomplishments, truly startling and monumental, and these shortcomings, easily attributable to Augustine’s meagre resources in the spheres of philosophy and scriptural exegesis, should not distract from the full, existential significance of the inclusion of a formal tract on the dogma of creation in one of the world’s most popular autobiographies, The Confessions.
Augustine in the ample company of the ancient world in general and his own pagan contemporaries in particular was terribly confused by his world. He lived in a culture which either deified the cosmos in toto or placed every aspect of that cosmos in the hands of sometimes playful and often hostile deities. His personal involvement with the sect of the Manichees led Augustine to see the world as the battleground of two deities-one benevolent, the other malevolent. He believed that there was no principle of escape. The radical dualism of the sect contained an implicit affirmation of `fate’, the irrational will of Zeus. At the very core of the pagan world was irrationality. Augustine’s intellect was unable to grasp the True. Likewise, his will could not grasp the Good. Consequently, Augustine before his conversion pathetically deified hiw own will and seized finite goods as the purpose and end of his existence. Each betrayed him and thrust him forward on his quest. The mature Augustine would later attribute this restlessness to the Grace of God.
In discovering the philosophy of Plato in the writings of Plotinus, Augustine discovered the `preambles of faith.’ He was led to use his reason in the service of the quest for God. Through philosophy he came to recognize the true nature of evil as the privation of goodness in being and in acts of the human will. He also ascended to a clear notion of God as immaterial and as the only efficient cause of all created being. In the process, Augustine realized that he moved himself through the free movements of his will.
Through his contact with St. Ambrose, Augustine realized that God had revealed through the Word what his reason detected through its own orderly movements. When reason failed, faith supplied for yet never contradicted reason. Augustine realized that one might pass easily from one land to the other and that faith and reason were intimately related. Through the Grace of Justification, Augustine grasped in love the God whom his reason sought and Revelation made manifest. In the discovery of the Church’s dogma of Creation, Augustine discovered truth which his reason naturally recognized as true. He also discovered the principle which would give order to his formerly disordered life. He found his origin, his end and the means to the attainment of that end. In adhering to God as his Beatitude and End, Augustine realized that all created reality, rather than enslaving and betraying him, could lead him, used properly, to a deeper knowledge and love of God. In his latter life as Bishop, theologian and defender of the authentic Faith, Augustine was able to extol his and our summertime enemy, the mosquito, as revelatory of something of God’s excellence: “Who planted that dart, that weapon whereby it sucks up blood? What a tiny duct it has for absorbing it! Who indeed arranged these things? Who made them? Are you stupefied at these tiny things? They praise their Great Maker!”(13)
This brief journey into the intellectual and volitional life of the Church’s great `Doctor of Grace’ should convince us anew that every aspect of Divine Revelation is intimately related to man’s temporal and eternal happiness. Furthermore, the authentic teaching of the Church is the only body of knowledge which can totally satisfy man’s quest for goodness and truth. It alone bears witness to and reveals the proper object of man’s intellect and will, God Himself. To withhold or compromise Catholic Doctrine is to fling modern man into the pitiful darkness which ensnared and nearly destroyed the young Augustine.
-NOTES-
1 John C. Cooper, “Why Did St. Augustine Write Books XI – XIII of the Confessions?” Aagnstinian Studies 2 (Fall, 1971): p. 41.
2 John Courtney Murray, The Problem of God, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 92.
3 Romano Guardini, The Conversion of Saint Aognstine, (New York:Sheed & Ward, 1960), p. 69.
4 Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans., Frank J. Sliced, (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1942), p. 39.
5 Ibid., p. 79
6 Ibid., p. 115-116.
7 Frank J. Sheed, our Hearts are Restless: The Prayer of St. Augustine, (New York: The Seabury Press, 1976), p. 26.
8 Etienne Gilson, God and philosophy, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), p. 41.
9 Michael Schmaus, Dogma-God and Creation, (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1969), p. 67.
10 Gilson, p. 204.
11 Jules M. Brody, “Saint Augustine’s Theory of Seminal Reasons,” New Scholasticism 38 (April 1964): p. 150.
12 Gilson, p. 61.
13 Saint Augustine, Enarr. I, X.