Abstract

Augustine outlines the nature of God in a lucid, yet scientific way--in a manner which would be appealing and convincing to minds which, like his own, had sought the true God in the systems of philosophy and religious thought of his time. He presents his thought on God with the aid of that philosophy which could lend its authority and achievements to confirm, corroborate and establish what the revelation of both Testaments and the Fathers have to say on the nature of the true God. Augustine uses the philosophy of the Enneads to give a more solid, a more philosophical basis for what is contained in the Biblical writings and Christian tradition on the nature of the Divine. ;Augustine writes in great detail about the approach to God through the mind and its ideas. But he also writes in the form of hints and allusions about the approach from nature to nature's God. While Augustine makes use of contingent and mutable beings in ascending to a necessary and immutable Being, he prefers to reach God through the existence of those immutable truths which the intellect is capable of attaining in this life. Perceiving the existence of eternal and immutable truths which cannot be based upon the order of contingent beings, the mind naturally ascends to God, who alone can be the unchangeable, eternal source and foundation for these truths. ;Augustine is so sure of God's existence that he felt it is not a debatable question. He holds that no rational creature so long as it makes use of its reason can be entirely ignorant of God. Augustine is not a systematic writer and does not state proofs for God's existence in any orderly or systematic form. But his writings involve many of the steps necessary to establish His existence and thus make it inevitable that he should express numerous indirect and occasional direct proofs. They may be divided into seven main categories: from the idea of truth; from the degrees of perfection; from universal consent; from the very idea of God; from the witness of the inner reason or soul; from contingency and from the order and beauty in the world. These are not to be considered as entirely independent of one another or as of equal cogency and significance. ;My intent is to show that Augustine provides much evidence in his voluminous writings of an approach to a knowledge of God's existence and to a certain limited extent of his nature through the light of unaided natural reason. ;When I use the term, God, I am referring to the God of monotheism . This conception of the Divine may be characterized as follows: God is the unique, transcendent, infinite Spirit who has freely created out of nothing everything other than Himself. This is the Reality or Being to whom I refer when I discuss Augustine's approach to the existence and nature of God. ;There is a real question as to what was the authentic mind of Augustine on the very relevant issue of the capacity of the human reason of itself to ascend to a knowledge of the existence and nature of God. This is the problem I attempt to deal with and hopefully shed some small light on a possible resolution. This problem has two primary aspects: first, does Augustine attempt to demonstrate God's existence from reason alone and second, does he attempt to demonstrate God's nature from the light of human reason and, if so, to what extent?