Augustine Faith And Reason Quotes

Is it not lack of faith that leads men to fear the scrutiny of reason? If the destination is doubtful, than the path must be fraught with fear. A robust faith need not fear, for if God exists, then reason cannot help but lead us to Him. Cogito, ergo Deus est,'says St. Augustine, I think, therefore God is.

...Since the mind, which was meant to be reasonable and intelligent, has, by dark and inveterate vices, become too weak to adhere joyously to His unchangeable light (or even to bear it) until, by gradual renewal and healing, it is made fit for such happiness, its first need was to be instructed by faith and purified.

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [quoting 1 Tim 1:7].

The reader of these reflections of mine on the Trinity should bear in mind that my pen is on the watch against the sophistries of those who scorn the starting-point of faith, and allow themselves to be deceived through an unseasonable and misguided love of reason.

Saint Augustine,

The conclusion, therefore, is that of Augustine, who said that the heart of man was created for God and that it cannot find rest until it rests in his Father’s heart. Hence all men are really seeking after God, as Augustine also declared, but they do not all seek Him in the right way, nor at the right place. They seek Him down below, and He is up above. They seek Him on the earth, and He is in heaven. They seek Him afar, and He is nearby. They seek Him in money, in property, in fame, in power, and in passion; and He is to be found in the high and the holy places, and with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit (Isa. 57:15). But they do seek Him, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him (Acts 17:27). They seek Him and at the same time they flee Him. They have no interest in a knowledge of His ways, and yet they cannot do without Him. They feel themselves attracted to God and at the same time repelled by Him. In this, as Pascal so profoundly pointed out, consists the greatness and the miserableness of man. He longs for truth and is false by nature. He yearns for rest and throws himself from one diversion upon another. He pants for a permanent and eternal bliss and seizes on the pleasures of a moment. He seeks for God and loses himself in the creature. He is a born son of the house and he feeds on the husks of the swine in a strange land. He forsakes the fountain of living waters and hews out broken cisterns that can hold no water ( Jer. 2:13). He is as a hungry man who dreams that he is eating, and when he awakes finds that his soul is empty; and he is like a thirsty man who dreams that he is drinking, and when he awakes finds that he is faint and that his soul has appetite (Isa. 29:8). Science cannot explain this contradiction in man. It reckons only with his greatness and not with his misery, or only with his misery and not with his greatness. It exalts him too high, or it depresses him too far, for science does not know of his Divine origin, nor of his profound fall. But the Scriptures know of both, and they shed their light over man and over mankind; and the contradictions are reconciled, the mists are cleared, and the hidden things are revealed. Man is an enigma whose solution can be found only in God.

We can see that if Genesis is silent about anything God made, this does not mean—as we know from firm faith and sound reasoning—that God did not make it. Our basic principles do not allow us to think that the waters were eternally there with God, simply because we find them mentioned in Genesis without explicitly being told that they were made. Thus when Scripture speaks of ‘earth unseen and shapeless’ and ‘a darksome abyss,’ we can follow truth as our teacher and realize that these too were made by God from nothing, and therefore cannot be coeternal with him, though we are not expressly told that.

By far the highest type of religious thought among the Ancients was that of their philosophers. With Saint Augustine, on the contrary, a new age was beginning, in which by far the highest type of philosophical thinking would be that of the theologians. True enough, even the faith of an Augustinian presupposes a certain exercise of natural reason. We cannot believe something, be it the word of God Himself, unless we find some sense in the formulas which we believe. And it can hardly be expected that we will believe in God's Revelation, unless we be given good reasons to think that such a Revelation has indeed taken place.

As we search and explore, we must be careful not to read the Bible as if it’s guilty until proven innocent. This is one sure way to turn our faith into a cold, pure science. And our relationship with God will die as the romance fades. Martin Luther, the well-known reformer, referred to this as the difference between a magisterial use of reason and a ministerial use of reason. Someone who practices the former places himself above the Scriptures and judges whether it is true or false. That person becomes the final arbiter of truth and error. However, the person who practices the latter submits himself under the Scriptures, trusting the Word of God as the final arbiter of truth. This is what Augustine referred to as “faith seeking understanding.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche described Christianity as ‘Platonism for the masses’ – an accusation that applies with equal or greater force to secular humanism. The faith that history has a built-in logic impelling humanity to a higher level is Platonism framed in historical terms. Marxists have thought of human development as being driven by new technologies and class conflict, whereas liberals have seen the growth of knowledge as the principal driver. No doubt these forces help shape the flow of events. But unless you posit a divinely ordained end-state there is no reason to think history has any overarching logic or goal. For Plato and Plotinus, history was a nightmare from which the individual mind struggled to awake. Following Paul and Augustine, the Christian Erigena made history the emerging embodiment of Logos. With their unending chatter about progress, secular humanists project this mystical dream into the chaos of the human world.

We saw that the period of the Middle Ages was dominated by Scholasticism, that is, the reason which becomes autonomous, reason which is placed above faith. And this reason, as Kireyevsky very well saw, in the nineteenth century when he was criticizing the West from the Orthodox point of view, very quickly turned against Christianity. First it was supposed to be the handmaiden of faith and serve Christianity and prove all the dogmas of faith and prove a great many other things also based upon authority, the authority both of Scripture, of some early Fathers, mostly Augustine, and Aristotle, since it was believed that Aristotle had the true view of nature. But in the age of the Renaissance, this reason turned against religion. Because if it’s [reason is] autonomous, it’s able to develop its own principles; there’s no reason why it should be bound to the religious content. And also we saw in the Middle Ages that the great movements — Francis and Joachim — were very monastically, ascetically oriented. But in the Renaissance, there was a complete reaction against that. And again, this simple matter of the context in which the new ideas arose changed; and therefore no longer were people interested in either monasticism or having reason serve theology. And so we find in this period that the idea of monasticism and asceticism is treated extremely negatively, because the interest in the world has now been awakened.

It is precisely because He is omnipotent that for Him some things are impossible.

Why does religion work as a coping mechanism? Dr. Koenig offers five reasons: it provides a sense of meaning and purpose during times of trial; it offers a positive worldview that is optimistic and hopeful; it provides role models and teachings that facilitate the acceptance of suffering; it gives people a sense of self-control; and it reduces loneliness.9 One does not have to have a Ph.D. in psychiatry to understand that atheists are at a decided disadvantage in times of stress. They simply do not have access to the resources that Dr. Koenig details. “Our Hearts Are Restless Until They Rest in You.” This famous line from St. Augustine captures the essence of Catholicism: our real home is with God.

Charity is patient.” I Cor. 13:4 Patience, says St. Thomas,1360 is a virtue attached to the virtue of fortitude, which hinders a man from departing from right reason illumined by faith by yielding to difficulties and to sadness. It makes him bear the evils of life with equanimity of soul, says St. Augustine,1361 without allowing himself to be troubled by vexations.

If we are perplexed by an apparent contradiction in Scripture, it is not allowable to say, The author of this book is mistaken; but either the manuscript is faulty, or the translation is wrong, or you have not understood.

Like the boy from the expensive prep school who becomes a drug dealer, or the evangelist preacher who steals from his congregation, Augustine had discovered that simply knowing right from wrong was not enough. What’s needed is a deeper emotional commitment to rightness and truth. Augustine saw it coming not from our reason or from our conscious will, which bears the stain of Adam, but from our faith.

From the point of view of Plato—not to mention Socrates—this was a shocking downgrading of reason. But Bernard was only following Plato’s hierarchy of knowledge as adopted and adapted by Saint Augustine. Just as reason is superior to opinion (doxa), so Saint Augustine taught that faith is superior to reason because it rests on the highest wisdom of all, the truth of God’s revelation.9 Faith of this potent kind is more than belief.

In Neoplatonist terms, our reason picks out the trail of divine emanation like a phosphorescent glow in the dark, which eventually leads our soul out of the cave, toward the ultimate source of the light of reason and everything else, God Himself. This is what Saint Augustine means (or seems to mean) when he speaks of “the divine illumination of the intellect.”39 Man’s reason is not superfluous to Augustine’s relationship with God. Fused together with faith, it is essential to it. It is just that reason alone gets us nowhere; it remains stuck at the cave’s exit. Faith provides that needed extra boost, by affirming the supreme immutable truth imbedded in the Word of God, which no human being could hope to discover in this mortal life by himself. We see the luminous trail for what it really is, the path to salvation.

Why didn’t God make the world sooner? In the early fifth century AD, Augustine of Hippo answered that God did not make the universe at a point in time, but “simultaneously with time.” That is, he believed God had created space and time together. Modern cosmologists have come to agree that he was right about space and time, and therefore it is meaningless to ask why the big bang didn’t happen earlier than it did.

Augustine found that Christian faith actually broadened his reason, it did not destroy it. For the first half of his life, Augustine had fallen in love with creation and hoped that honor, knowledge, sexual intimacy, and even friendship would satisfy his desires, but as he tells us, his heart remained restless. He found that rest only when his life was first ordered to the Creator.

He [Saint Anselm] said theology is faith seeking understanding. In fact he was riffing on Saint Augustine who said "Credo ut intelligam" — I believe in order to understand — not that my puny understanding and such attempts as I have to use rational powers are ever, by themselves, going to get me to some conclusion in which my mind, small as it is, can comprehend the wholeness of God's mystery, and arrive at a fully orthodox conclusion by a chain of reasoning. That will never happen, because God is always greater [...]

Christ chose us “You did not choose Me,” Christ says, “but I chose you” (John 15:16). Such grace is beyond description. What were we, apart from Christ’s choice of us, when we were empty of love? What were we but sinful and lost? We did not lead Him to choose us by believing in Him; for if Christ chose people who already believed, then we chose Him before He chose us. How then could He say, “You did not choose Me,” unless His mercy came before our faith? Here is the faulty reasoning of those who say that God chose us before the creation of the world, not in order to make us good, but because He foreknew we would be good. This was not the view of Him Who said, “You did not choose Me.” We were not chosen because of our goodness, for we could not be good without being chosen. Grace is no longer grace, if human goodness comes first. Listen, you ungrateful person, listen! “You did not choose Me, but I chose you.” Do not say, “I am chosen because I first believed.” If you first believed, you had already chosen Him. But listen: “You did not choose Me.” And do not say, “Before I believed, I was already chosen on account of my good works.” What good work can come before faith, when the apostle Paul says, “Whatever is not from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23)? What then shall we say when we hear these words, “You did not choose Me”? We shall say this: We were evil, and we were chosen that we might become good by the grace of Him who chose us. For salvation is not by grace if our goodness came first; but it is by grace – and therefore God’s grace did not find us good but makes us good. Augustine of Hippo Commentary on John 15:16

If we interpret St. Augustine in material terms, by the pure light of a reason which is not truly theological but geometric, his teaching seems to annihilate the creature. As a result of original sin man is taken to be essentially corrupt; that is the doctrine of Luther, of Calvin, of Jansenius. Is not this the purest pessimism? Nature is corrupted in its essence by original sin; and under grace it remains corrupt, grace being here not life, but a covering cloak. Yes, it is the purest pessimism: but there is a singular result. Human nature before sin possessed as its due all the privileges of Adam. Now this corrupt man, who can merit nothing for Heaven, and whom faith covers with Christs grace as with a cloak, has nevertheless a value here on earth, even as he is and according to what he is, in the very corruption of his nature. Make way there for this sullied creature, since man must live in the hell which is this world! Such is the dialectic, the tragedy of the protestant conscience, with its admirably vivid and aching sense, but too purely human, too darkly human sense of mortal misery and sin. The creature declares its nothingness. But this declaration is its own. Man is a walking corruption; but this irremediably corrupt nature cries out to God, and the initiative, do what one will, is thus man’s battle cry.