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Chapter 23 - Augustine. Reason and illumination

from Part V - MARIUS VICTORINUS AND AUGUSTINE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Edited by
A. H. Armstrong
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Summary

Augustine likes to distinguish different grades in the range of knowledge of which the human mind is capable. We have already noted one distinction, that between belief and understanding. Understanding, Augustine seems to suggest, is the distinctive work of human reason: it is the result of its application and pursuit. When he is concerned to contrast understanding with belief, Augustine normally speaks of intellectus, intelligere, intelligentia; when he discusses the result in the mind of the work of reasoning, he speaks of scientia. Thus one of his definitions of scientia in effect almost identifies it with intellectus: in the course of a lengthy discussion of the distinctive character of human knowledge (scientia) he likens the relationship between reason and knowledge to that between looking and seeing: knowledge is the success of the enterprise of reason. Its chief characteristic is rational cogency; something is known when it is fully clear and transparent to the mind, and is, so to speak, seen by it.

Before we examine the various mental processes involved in different kinds of knowledge, we must note a distinction which Augustine introduces within scientia: he defines wisdom (sapientia) as knowledge of a special kind. He calls it a ‘contemplative knowledge’, and describes it as being concerned with eternal objects, whereas the remainder of scientia, to which he now confines the term in a narrower sense, is concerned with temporal things. Knowledge and wisdom differ only in virtue of the difference in the objects concerned, and Augustine allows that their distinction is not radical: the words may indeed be used interchangeably.

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The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy , pp. 362 - 373
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1967

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