Review: Confessions of Augustine

   I enjoyed reading "Confessions" by St., Augustine (Augustine of Hippo).  In reading this work again I was struck first by how his writing established that there is an absolute truth and a person of genuine faith does not fear that truth.  The work also clarifies that a growing faith and relationship with God is an intensely personal one in which you struggle with the truth about yourself.  More than ever I see the birth of scientific reasoning in the work as never before.

   I was particularly struck by Book IV in this reading. Augustine depicts his embrace of the Christain faith because it allows him the freedom to pursue truth.  The emergence of scientific reasoning was made possible by the amazing ability of humankind to imagine and generate explanations (such as "Categories" by Aristotle).  Augustine went a step further and suggested that the truth of an explanation is indicated by the ability of that explanation to predict events.  Critical to science was generating explanations that could then be modified, improved or discarded.  Augustine provided the intellectual humility and the emotional detachment needed to establish an explanation that was open to modification or even rejection, 
    Augustine recognized that sometimes our reasoning can be wrong or in error.  This intellectual humility was an important first step to recognizing the need for improvements, refinements or replacement of previous explanations.  Such changes, he recognized, had nothing to do with the "Christian God" but rather with our misunderstanding of natural events.  Sometimes explanations might be wrong or influenced by irrational ideas that we cling to for emotional reasons,  Augustine said:

   “the mind's motive force, which gives impetus for action, is corrupt and asserts itself in an insolent and disturbed way, and as viscous acts occur if obsession has captured the minds affective part which is at the root of the impulse to carnal pleasure, so also errors and false opinions contaminate life if the reasoning mind is itself also flawed. That was my condition at that time.  For I did not know that the soul needs to be enlightened by by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth.” 
                                                       (Confessions Book IV, 25)

     In the passage (above) Augustine recognized the need for detachment from emotion and bias in order to know the truth.  This meant an openness “to error” and recognizing the possibility of “misunderstanding” that would require an “external light”.  Augustine also wrote:

    “Already I had learnt from you that nothing is true because it is eloquently said, nor false because the signs coming from the lips make sounds deficient in sense of style.  Again, a statement is not true because it is enunciated in an unpolished idiom, nor false because the words are splendid. “
                                                      (Confessions Book V, 10)

     In the quote above Augustine recognizes that truth is the product of some external reality and not dependent on the authority or eloquence of the speaker.  It is very similar to the reason, even today, that people choose to become Physicists (like Sava Demopolous a famous particle physicist depicted in the movie “Particle Fever”). 

Comparing Explanations to Observations
   Augustine of Hippo had been a follower of the “Manichees” which was a faith popular in the Roman Empire at the time.  Augustine was able to question a leading teacher of the Manichees directly about errors and false statements concerning astronomy.  Augustine recalls in his writings:

   “When he was caught out making false statements about the heaven and the stars and the movements of the Sun an Moon, even though these things are not integral part of religious doctrine, yet it was clear enough the his bold speculations were sacrilegious.  He not only wrote on matters of which he was ignorant, but also uttered his falsehoods with so mad a vanity and pride that he attempted to attribute them to himself as though he were a divine person.”
                                                (Confessions Book V, 8)

     The knowledge and mathematical skills Augustine had acquired through his practice as an astrologer allowed him to precisely predict celestial events including eclipses and planetary alignments.  Knowing that celestial events could be predicted Augustine questioned the assertion that the Sun and Moon were objects animated by divine beings as claimed in the Manichean interpretation of the physical world.  The accurate and predictable behaviors of the Sun and the Moon led Augustine to think that these heavenly bodies were themselves subservient to some natural principles that allowed the calculations to make accurate precise predictions of celestial events (such as eclipses).  Augustine suspected that that celestial events were not manipulated by beings but he thought were actually inanimate objects controlled by unknown mechanisms.  Augustine of Hippo was over a thousand years ahead of his time! 
     The inability of his Manichean teacher to recognize the lack of truth in his predictions about the astronomical events was evidence to Augustine that the reasoning thought to guide religious and moral questions would also be errant.  More alarming was how the Manichean teacher boldly made wrong astronomical predictions based on divine claims of knowledge without physical evidence.  Augustine realized that the Manichean faith required he abandon his understanding of the mathematical patterns he recognized as truthful and accurate.  Augustine could not bring himself to reject the accurate models predicting astronomical events in order to fully embrace the Manichean faith.
     Augustine recognized that the Christian faith gave him the freedom to accept mathematical reasoning and apply it to natural events without constraint by his Christian faith.  Natural events and the comprehension of our physical universe could change but these were unrelated to the faith that guided the hearts of men and women.  The Christian faith was about man's “view of his heart” and not about man's “view of physical events”. 

     “For the controlled modesty of a mind that admits limitations is more beautiful that the things I was anxious to know about.”
                                                (Confessions Book V, 12)

     The recognition that nature could be analyzed and predicted, un-tethered to a supernatural explanation, with numerical models and quantitative reasoning was laid out by Augustine of Hippo sixteen centuries ago.  His intellectual humility meant that the mathematical models and prediction of astronomical events could be refined as he came to learn more of the world without challenge to his Christian faith.  Recognition of our limited understanding, or inadequate models, would drive a desire to refine and improve the models.  Changing a physical understanding could now be done without anxiety or hesitation.  His Christianity allowed him to investigate with wonder and awe! Physicists still seek knowledge for the sake of knowing how our universe works.
    
      The fact that truth was not "personally defined" but rather "externally verifiable" was in clear contradiction to a popular culture that saw truth as defined by personal experience and power.  This idea about truth was most clearly expressed by a civil judge who knowingly condemned an innocent man, washed his hands and then stated "What is truth?"
       Augustine was therefore converted to Christianity because Christianity allowed for a search of  "absolute truth" that was external and verifiable.  This truth did not depend on personal interpretation or civil authority.  Your struggle with God was personal but truth existed if you were able to recognize it, or not.  I now recognize that this was the birth of science in the western culture.