There is perhaps no better known theologian in the Church than St Augustine. St Thomas Aquinas is a close second, but Augustine’s imprint on the Church is unrivalled. Moreover, St Augustine has been used to justify all sorts of varying strands of Christianity, such as Lutheranism and Jansenism. Augustine can also, unlike many other Christian thinkers, lay claim to having influenced the wider intellectual world. Hannah Arendt wrote a book about him, while Martin Heidegger delivered a series of lectures on him. Augustine is a misunderstood thinker who has been blamed for many a problem in the Church’s history, and still, he has also been hailed as the answer to these, and other, challenges. The tension inherent in Christianity is revealed in Augustine himself, and his life discloses how they are reconciled.
In St Augustine, we find two lines of thought embodied. The first might be called an ancient, Platonic metaphysics, inspired by writers such as Plotinus. The other is a more existential questioning (with precedence in St Paul) which went on to inspire Luther (to some degree), Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger. The first asks questions such as “what is evil?” and “why do things exist?”. They are complicated questions which cut to the core of being itself. But Augustine’s speculation is not devoid of personal experience and anguish. This led him to develop a more personal philosophy, asking questions about the meaning of his own life. This is remote from mere speculative thought and asks what meaning I as an individual can find in the world.
Problems arise when the two are separated. Mere metaphysical speculation detaches humans from questions of their place in the world, while pure existentialist thinking risks alienating the individual from existence itself. Metaphysics can tell us that beings – such as animals, humans, and plants – desire to preserve themselves. Life, in other words, has meaning and value. But it may seem fraught with difficulty and anxiety. To merely reply to such a universal complaint with “metaphysics tells us it isn’t so” is no consolation. After all, Christianity is the religion of a personal God, where Christ comes to meet us and to suffer, rather than provide us with conclusive intellectual proofs of His own existence. The strain between the personal and universal is embedded in existence itself, beautifully articulated by Roger Scruton in his suggestion that “the metaphysical loneliness of the subject is not a historically transient condition. It is a human universal.” The feeling of loneliness may have struck you, but the irony is that we are united in something greater precisely in this feeling of loneliness.
What might seem like a difficulty is actually a challenge to engage with existence itself. The two questions: “why does anything exist in the first place?”, and “what is my purpose in life?” are not detached. The seeming gap between the immensity of life and the insignificance of our lives is an invitation to welcome God to overcome that gap. It also provides a breeding ground for speculation about where the individual is situated in the ecosystem of life, just as St Augustine could write in his Confessions about the creation of the world, of the meaning of “time”, and about his faults and struggles. After all, it was his sense of guilt at stealing an apple as a young boy which sparked the philosophical enterprise for which he is primarily remembered.