St. Augustine and St. Thomas understanding of God, Faith and Reason

St. Augustine and St. Thomas understanding of God, Faith and Reason

Introduction

St. Augustine and St. Thomas were two recognized Christian philosophers. St. Augustine lived between centuries IV and V, studied in Africa and initially was an intellectual who had pagan religious orientation, adhered to Manichaeism and later under great influence of his mother and several authors who read converted to Catholicism and considered as belonging to the patristic.

Discussion

The patristic, in short, is the effort to create a Christian philosophy which attaches to traditional Catholic practices a theoretical framework for posing as “a set of ideas produced and systematized by reason in a logical whole” But the first attempts to consolidate this Christian philosophy that tried to reconcile faith and divine revelation with reason and logical reasoning not been very successful. Only to St. Augustine, who could develop a true synthesis of Christian philosophy, systematically organized knowledge-based nature of Neo-Platonism thought that suited Plato's conceptions Catholic (Wormald, 2010).

St. Augustine was a priest and was inspired by Plato. He was 32 in age when he reaches the Christian conception of life and moral conversion and, founded a monastery. Among his works, the highlight is the concept of City of God, where St. Augustine divides the cities into 'earthly' and 'God's '. That was a chaos until the coming of Abraham. The union of both was with the Church after the coming of Jesus.

Regarding epistemology, Augustine was based on the certainty of spiritual existence, in which the senses and the intellect are sources of knowledge. So light can be both physical and spiritual. With regard to metaphysics, the human spirit is God's presence. This is rational power, infinite, eternal, immutable, simple; love (Teske, 2010).

While the Greek thinking preached in a metaphysical dualism, Christians preached moral dualism in which evil is seen as the absence of good. The body is not bad by nature, the matter cannot be essentially evil, and it is considered the temple of the soul.

For St. Augustine, intelligence is divine and attributed to the primacy of the will. The will is free and can lead to evil, sin being nothing more than a synonym for disorder. Since the spirit lives in the bodies of man, we harm God when we hurt ourselves. We must bear in mind that it is better to take the good from evil than not permit evil. Moral evil entered the world with original sin and continues today, which is why there is suffering and the loss of God's gifts. Finally, Augustine has the doctrine of specific germs and the beings that God created (Teske, 2010).

For St. Augustine's philosophy was the pursuit of happiness and that, for him, was a “question of the human condition in search of bliss”. Yet St. Augustine did not find in this beatitude Hellenic philosophy but in the Scriptures of Paul of Tarsus (Teske, 2010). This is where his efforts to unite reason to faith appear. The primacy of faith and reason ...