by Jonathan Ekene Ifeanyi
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| St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo |
Today, Augustinianism is simply the most radically
discarded and forgotten in the New Church. With the present topic, I merely
intend to refresh the minds of few who may be thinking about St. Augustine today even as
his feast day is being celebrated all over the Catholic world.
In his book Cosmos
and History: The Myth of the Eternal
Return, Mircea Eliade, a Romanian historian and philosopher of comparative
religion, explores the Chaldean doctrine of the Great Year popularised in the
third century B.C. by Berossus, a distinguished Babylonian astrologer, which
spread through the entire Hellenic world (whence it later passed to the Romans
and Byzantines).[1]
According to this doctrine, the universe is eternal but it is periodically
destroyed and reconstituted every Great Year. But a brief review of
Pre-Socratic philosophy will show that the doctrine of cyclic time had much
earlier roots in Greek thought (though the Greeks are said to have inherited
the doctrine from ancient Egypt.).
The earliest Greek philosophers are called
‘physicists’ from the fact that the object of their thought was the physis (φύσις), the nature which constitutes the cosmos.
This idea of physis fills the world of Homer and the poets who
equate the natura with the divine. Physis is the entire universe conceived always as
animated, living, and therefore in some sense divine. Aristotle considered this
one of mankind’s most ancient and sacred traditions. Some historians of
philosophy seem to hold that these early Greek thinkers denoted by physis a static and motionless substance. But
that is not so. The primary meaning of physis is ‘growth’, and its first associations are
of life and motion, not of stillness and death. ‘The mere use of this term
already implies the famous doctrine which has earned for the Milesian school
the designation ‘Hylozoist’—the doctrine that the all is alive.’[2]
Originally, Greek philosophy was entirely compatible
with the concept of historical growth, process and change. Aristotle made this
very clear when he pointed out that growth is the etymological sense of physis. ‘Nature means the genesis of growing
things’, he writes, ‘the meaning which could be suggested if one were to
pronounce the Y in physis long...from what has been said, it is plain
that ‘nature’ in the primary and strict sense is the essence of things which
have in themselves, as such, a source of movement; and...processes of becoming
and growing are called nature because they are movements proceeding from this.’[3]
Thus Greek philosophy deals with process here on earth
and in historical mankind. Process leads directly to history. It concerns the
genesis, growth, development and maturation of things. History concerns such
developmental processes when they take place in human groups. The Greek
philosophers, however, were never able to rise to a linear and purposive
concept of time and therefore of history, but rather succumbed more and more to
cyclism, to the myth of the eternal return.
The human experience and observation of time was
variously interpreted both by the physicists and later philosophers. Parmenides
of Elea, an Italiote Greek philosopher of the 6th – 5th century BC, and Zeno, his fellow townsman and
disciple, held that change is logically inconceivable and that logic is a surer
indicator of reality than experience. Thus despite appearances, reality is
unitary and motionless. In this view, time is an illusion. On the contrary,
Empedocles of Acragas, broke up the indivisible, motionless and timeless
reality of Parmenides and Zeno into four elements played upon alternatively by
Love and Strife, thereby giving the Atomists of the fifth century, Leucippus of
Miletus and Democritus of Abdera, a short step to break up reality still
further into an innumerable host of minute atoms moving in time through a
vacuum. Granting that one single atom had once made a single slight ‘swerve’,
the build-up of observed phenomenon could be accounted for on Darwinian lines.
Darwin’s account of evolution survives in the fifth book of De Rerum Natura, written by a first
century Roman poet, Lucretius.[4]
The credibility of Democritus’ and Darwin’s accounts of evolution depends on
the assumption that time is real and that its flow has been extraordinarily
long. But as we shall briefly demonstrate here, Greek thinker hardly conceived
such a concept of time.
Anaximander
The first Pre-Socratics were citizens of Miletus, a
trading port where Oriental and Egyptian influences mingled with Greek thought.
The upshot was a bold, speculative cosmology, and conviction that rational
explanation must start with the identification of the one primary substance,
identified by Thales—as in the Babylonian myths—as water.
Thales held that the universe is alive, that it has a
soul and is full of gods. Anaximenes held that the primary substance was ‘air’
or ‘mist’ while Anaximander called it the indefinite or limitless thing (ἄπειρος). Thus it was
Anaximander who first stated a systematic theory of the nature of the world—not
only of the stuff it is made up of but also of the process of its growth out of
the ‘limitless thing’ into the manifold of definite things. The ‘limitless
thing’ is eternal and it is from it that all things came and into which they
shall return.
‘The vision of reality given us by the first
philosophical speculation of the Greeks is a historical view’, writes Prof.
Diano. ‘That nature (φύσις) which Anaximander and Anaximenes sought to
explain ...is actually the birth of things considered in the principle which
generates them. But time closes itself into a circle...And thus this
historicity becomes cyclical. Because worlds are generated, grow and die away
while the principle abides, it is the divine’.[5]
There are three grades of existence in the philosophy
of Anaximander. First, there are things (οντα),
that is, the multiplicity of individual things we see around us. These are
declared to perish into those things out of which they came into being. And those
secondary things out of which natural objects came into being are the earth,
air, water and fire—the primitive elements of which all bodies are composed,
which were recognised long before philosophy began. The visible world groups
itself into masses of comparatively homogenous stuffs, each occupying a region
of its own. First, there is the great lump of earth, above it the water, then
the space of wind and mist and cloud; beyond that we have the blazing fire of
heaven, the aether. These are the secondary elements out of which individual
things were born and into which they shall return.
However, the elements themselves are not eternal nor
is their separation into distinct regions more than a transient arrangement. On
the contrary, they themselves are destined to return into that from which they
came—the third and ultimate stage of existence, which Anaximander identified
simply as ‘‘incorruptible and undying, the limitless thing’’. Thus in the
process of growth, first of all the formless, limitless, indefinite thing
separates first into the elemental forms, distributed in their appointed
regions, the elemental forms again give birth to the multiplicity of individual
things and, when they die, receive them back again. And the process will
continue in this way unto infinity.
In a sole surviving fragment of Anaximander we
read:
‘Things perish into those things out of which they
have their birth, according to that which is ordained; for they give reparation
to one another and pay the penalty of injustice, according to the disposition
of time’.[6]
Thus Anaximander, in his cyclic view, holds that
things perish into those things from which they were born, according to the
decree of fate (moira). Those things from which they were born are
the elements—water, earth, fire and air—and these themselves are not eternal,
nor is their separation into distinct regions more than a transient arrangement.
On the contrary, the elements themselves are destined to return into that from
which they came—the limitless thing, the third and ultimate stage of existence.
After that, the limitless thing again separates—first into the elemental forms,
distributed in their appointed regions; these again give birth to things, and,
when they die, receive them back again, and then return to the limitless thing.
And reality will continue to rotate in this way unto infinity. This is Anaximander’s concept of eternal
return.
Pythagoras
‘All mortal things under constraints of nature revolve
in a wheel of changes. When they are born they grow, and when grown they reach
their height, and after that they grow old, and at last perish. At one time
nature causes them to come to their goal in her region of darkness, and then
back again out of the darkness they come round into mortal form, by alternation
of birth and repayment of death, in the cycle wherein nature returns upon
herself.’[7]
Thus the whole nature of things, all the essential
properties of physis are contained in
the tetractys of the decad, which is
the ‘fountain of ever-flowing nature’ and contains the periodic movement of
life, evolving out of unity and reverting to unity again, in the recurrent
revolution of a wheel of birth. This is
the Pythagorean concept of eternal return. Eudemus of Rhodes, a pupil of
Aristotle who has a strong claim to have succeeded him as head of the Lyceum, wrote at that time:
‘The Pythagoreans teach that things return in a cycle
individually identical. I therefore shall find myself staff in hand narrating
the same myths to you in the future and you will be seated then just as you are
now. Everything will be the same. It follows that time itself will be the
same...for change itself recurs one and the same.’[8]
Heraclitus of Ephesus
Heraclitus of Ephesus, a philosopher of the Logos who flourished about 500BC, seems
likewise to teach the cyclic concept. The frame of his cosmological scheme is
temporal—the cycle of existence, that cycle whose beginning and end are the
same; indeed, he appears to have identified time with his one primary
substance, the unifying element in all things, the Logos or everlasting fire which is always being partly kindled and
partly quenched. The movement round this cycle is not the mechanical motion of
body, but the movement of life itself—the movement of the one, living and
divine, soul substance, embodied in fire, which perpetually dies into all other
transformations and is reborn again.
Fire is actually the Logos and is the principle of justice. Its chief embodiment is the
sun, and through all the cycle of its transformations it preserves its measures
and will not overstep these measures, otherwise ‘the spirit of vengeance, the
ministers of justice would find him out’. Later writers identified this
‘justice’ with ‘Fate’ (moira)
Theophrastus in particular tells us that ‘‘He lays down a certain order and a
determined time for the changing of the world, according to a certain fated
necessity’’. Again, in Diogenes Laertius we read:
‘The all is finite, and the world is one. It arises
from fire and is consumed again by fire, alternatively, through all eternity,
in certain cycles. This happens according to fate’.[9]
Thus, for Heraclitus reality passes from the living
state to the dead, and round again. He maintains that this is no sorrowful
weary wheel, from which any escape could be possible, for it is a movement of
life, and life can take no other course, no upward flight into a mansion in the
stars. This becomes more vivid in an important fragment which testifies to his
denial of the creation of matter:
‘This ordered universe (cosmos) was not created by any
one of the gods or mankind, but it was ever, and shall be ever living fire,
kindled in measure and quenched in measure’.[10]
This implies that all things that have perished in the
past—inanimate objects, all dead animals and human beings, including
Heraclitus—will come back to this world to repeat all the things they did in
the precious world. This, we shall see, is more pronounced in the philosophy of
Zeno the Stoic.
Socrates
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| Socrates |
Born in 469BC, Socrates represented the turning point in
Greek philosophy, at which the self-critical reflection on the nature of our
concepts and our reasoning emerged as a major concern, alongside cosmological
speculation and enquiry.
Despite his ingenuity, in Socrates we see the cyclic doctrine
lay implicit in the old doctrine of reincarnation which he drew out when, on
the day of his death, he discusses with his Pythagorean friends the mystic view
of life on earth and in the other world of the unseen.[11]
Here Socrates relates ‘an ancient tradition’ that souls go to the under-world
and come back to this world again and are born from the dead.[12]
He argues that if the living are born again from the dead, then human souls
certainly exist in the spiritual world, for they could not be born again if
they do not exist there. The fact that they are born from the dead is a
sufficient proof that they exist there. [13]
Apart from human beings, Socrates also considers all animals
and plants and all things which are born or generated. Using the argument that
contraries are produced from contraries, he argues that all things in the
physical world are generated from the spiritual world; likewise, all things in
the spiritual world are generated from the physical world, and vice-versa. For
instance, the living are the opposite of the dead and the dead the opposite of
the living. Thus the living are generated from the dead and the dead from the
living. Sleeping is the opposite of being awake and being awake the opposite of
sleeping. Thus sleeping is generated from being awake and being awake from
sleeping. Similarly, the noble is the opposite of the disgraceful and the
disgraceful the opposite of the noble. Thus the noble is generated from the
disgraceful and the disgraceful from the noble. All things in the universe have
opposites. Thus all things move in a circle. Between these pairs of opposites
there are two kinds of generations, from one to the other and back again from
the other to the first. And reality will continue to rotate in this way unto
infinity. Socrates argues that if generation did not proceed from opposite to
opposite and back again, but always went forward in a straight line, without
turning back or curving, then in the end all things would have the same form
and be acted upon in the same way and stop being generated at all. For
instance, he says,
‘If the process of falling asleep existed, but not the
opposite process of waking from sleep, then in the end that would make the
sleeping Endymion mere nonsense; he would be nowhere, for everything else would
be in the same state as him, sound sleep.’[14]
Or, he goes on:
‘…if all things were mixed together and never separated, the
saying of Anaxagoras that all things are chaos would soon come true.’[15]
In the same way, he maintains, if all things that have life
should die, and when they have died, the dead should remain in that condition,
then it is inevitable that in the end all things would be dead and nothing
would be alive; for if the living were generated from any other thing than from
the dead, and the living were to die, then there cannot be any escape from the
final result that all things would be swallowed up in death.
Thus the return to life is an actual fact, and it is a fact
that the living are generated from the dead and the dead from the living. All
things move in a circle.
Plato
The above view was of course explored by Plato in his
work Phaedo. Born about 427BC, at
Athens, Plato, ‘the king of thought’, stands with Socrates and Aristotle as one
of the shapers of the whole western intellectual tradition.
In Plato, we find the cyclic doctrine lies at the very
root of his theory of knowledge based on pre-existence. In his work Phaedrus we read:
‘For the revolution of the spheres carries the
immortal souls around, and they behold the world beyond, and the intelligent
soul...feeding upon the sight of truth, is replenished, until the revolution of
the world brings her round again to the same place’.[16]
Again, this is the concept of eternal return. But, as
Eugene Kevane points out, Plato at times speaks of Fate in terms of an iron
necessity, then again recovers his native humanism sufficiently to deplore
astral fatalism and to deny eternal recurrence in the strict sense of Stoicism.
Aristotle
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| Aristotle |
Aristotle assembled the instruments of thoughts for
breaking the spell of the cyclic view with his penetrating metaphysical
analysis of the causes and his powerful passages on the mode of existence and
the operation of the eternal Prime Mover. In his work, Prote Philosophia (First
Philosophy), Aristotle explores the nature of the real, the essential substance
of the universe. At the base of his doctrine is the distinction between matter
and form. He finds in the universe a hierarchy of existences, each of which is
the ‘matter’ of that next above it, and imparts form and change to that next
below. At the lower end of the scale is the primary formless matter, which has
no real but only logical existence. At the upper end is the primary Unmoved
Mover, an eternal activity of thought, free from matter, giving motion to the
universe through an attraction akin to love. This primary Unmoved Mover he
identifies with God (though Aristotle does not mention the name ‘God’).
Aristotle argues that, whatever is moved is moved by
something else. A being that is moved is moved by another being and that other
being is also in turn moved by yet another being which is itself also moved by
another, and so on. Thus there are series of movers in the universe, and if we
keep on tracing the series, we are bound to come to the very beginning of
motion, the first in the series of movers who is Himself not being moved by any
other being. This is the First Mover, the Unmoved Mover. Thus Aristotle held
that God is the original cause of motion in the universe, while He Himself is not
being moved by any other being, since He is not subject to motion. He then
argues that since God is a spiritual being, He cannot have physical contact
with the material world. Hence He causes motion in the universe by the
attraction of His infinite perfection. God is purely perfect, and His perfection
attracts the world and pulls it into motion. Thus He moves all things in the
universe by the attraction of His infinite perfection, while He Himself is
unmoved by anything.
The above doctrine—though with its brief
errors—certainly reveals the ingenuity of the philosopher. However, Aristotle
was unable to use his tools to full effect and cannot really be exempted from
the error of cyclism. On the contrary, he too, like all the others, professes
the doctrine openly. We see the cyclic doctrine lies implicit in his work ΜΕΤΕΩΡΟΛΟΓΙΚΩΝ (Meterologica):
‘For we maintain’, he writes, ‘that the same opinions
recur in rotation among men, not once or twice or occasionally, but infinitely
often.’[17]
Stoicism
Stoicism is a unified, logical, physical and moral philosophy. Founded in Athens about 315BC, as a school of philosophy it includes some of the most distinguished intellectuals of antiquity. Founded by Zeno, who was born about 335 BC, at Citium on the Island of Cyprus, this philosophical movement attracted Cleanthes and Aristo in Athens and later found such advocates in Rome as Cicero, Epictetus, Seneca and the emperor Marcus Aurelius.
As a youth, Zeno was inspired by the ethical teachings
and particularly by the courageous death of Socrates. This influence helped to
fix the overwhelming emphasis of Stoic philosophy upon ethics, though the
members addressed themselves to all three divisions of philosophy formulated by
Aristotle’s Lyceum, namely logic,
physics and ethics.
In their physical theory the Stoics conceived the
universe as a great living organism, composed of soul and body, both of a
material nature, which represent the active and the passive elements. The body
(earth and water) represents the passive element, and the soul (fire and air)
represents the active element. The active element supervises the passive
element and in fact, exists in every object in the universe. It is the presence
of the pneuma that holds both animate
and inanimate objects together. Thus both humans and plants have the pneuma in them. For humans, the pneuma operates in the form of psyche,
which is why humans have the ability to think. The soul of the universe, though
of a material nature, has all the divine attributes. They held the pantheistic
doctrine that ‘god’ is immanent in the world, and this ‘god’ is conceived as
the Heraclitean Fire which contains the germs of all things and actuates their
becoming. Reason and providence are the coordinators of all things unto good.
Hence everything that happens is the best that can happen. Everything that happens
happens for the good of the universe and happens to keep the world soul going.
Thus there is nothing bad in the universe. On the contrary, everything in the
universe is good. What we call evil is ordained for the attainment of the
universal good of nature and consequently is not a real evil at all. Every
activity is reduced to movement and finds its root in mechanical necessity.
What happens must happen and it is not possible for it to happen otherwise.
The cosmology of the Stoics was firmly deterministic
and orderly, as the eternal course of things passes through returning creative
cycles, in accordance with the creative principle or Logos Spermatikos. Here
lies the doctrine of eternal return. All things in the universe originated from
the pneuma (the original Fire),
through Fire, and will eventually return to this original Fire through a
universal conflagration. After the universal conflagration, the process will
start again, and everything will be reconstructed to be exactly as they were
before. The same people in the previous world will re-appear in the
reconstructed world doing exactly the same things they did before. Then comes
another universal conflagration that will return all things to their
sources—that is, to the pneuma or
Fire or Logos. Then the process of
reconstruction will begin again, to be followed later by another conflagration
and another reconstruction.[18]
Thus the universe, at the end of each of the
never-ending series of cycles, is absorbed into the divine fire, and then
starts on a fresh course exactly reproducing its predecessor. This concept has
been expressed by Shelley at the end of his Hellas:
‘Worlds on worlds are rolling over
From creation to decay
Like the bubbles on a river
Sparkling, bursting, borne away’.[19]
Chrysippus, Zeno’s disciple who is sometimes simply
regarded as the second founder of Stoicism, summarises his philosophy this way:
‘The substance (i.e. the world) is transformed by fire
to its original state and from it returns again in the identical order as
before...At periodical intervals of time there is a conflagration in which all
things perish, then return again to form this same world. For just as the stars
turn around in the same orbits, so the events of the cycle just past recur
identically the same. Socrates and Plato will exist anew, and so too all men,
identically, with the same friends and neighbours. And the same things will be
believed and discussed, and every city, every landscape will rise again
identical. This return of all things happens not just once but many times—in
fact, things will recur in this way forever without any end unto infinity’.[20]
With the above doctrine, history cannot be composed of
unique, contingent events. Neither time nor history has any real significance.
 |
| Chrysippus |
‘In this fashion the philosophical thought of
classical antiquity was corrupting the very words used to express the ancient religious
belief in a personal, flexible divine providence’, writes Eugene Kevane, ‘compatible
with the contingency of human life and history, utterly different from this
mechanical fatalism which has hardened reality and even human history into
these inexorable cycles. Man is called “free” by the Stoics, but in the manner
of the modern Marxists: free to obey necessity willingly, recognising this
“nature of history”, lest he has to submit unwillingly’.[22]
Monsignor Eugene Kevane notes that the spread of this
doctrine of eternal return represents the corruption of traditional religious
thought:
‘Instead of teaching divine interventions freely
entering and ordering human affairs, thinking had declined into myths which
destroy the meaningfulness of time and history and hence of personal living. In
the cyclic and fatalistic view of time there can be no hope and no real
happiness for man. He has left only to turn to the transitory things of the
earthly life and to live in them as though there were no God’.[23]
The doctrine of eternal return was simply common to
all Greek thinkers, both the great and the minor—we lack time and space to
demonstrate more of this here. As Prof. Padovani puts it:
‘The doctrine of eternal return, aside from a few
insignificant exceptions, dominates all Greek thought. The endless turning of
all becoming before the Immutable One, the everlasting repetition of all things
and all events—this is the mind of antiquity. From this there follows the
failure to achieve a rational concept of human history, because the human
actors therein depend on the irrationality of matter, not created by God: they
are born, they live, they die, without reason and without purpose. This is the
fundamental basis of that concept of fate, the irrational necessity which
presses darkly on all events and binds them like iron. This is that fearful and
obscure destiny upon which in the end even the gods, suffering like men,
depend. For even the Greek gods have ended bound up within the cosmic cycles of
the eternal return.’[24]
As quite absurd as this doctrine may sound, it should
be noted that it is in no way dead in our own time. Eternal return was
“resurrected” and taught by the philosopher and classical philologist Friedrich
Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, and was believed and applauded by many.
Nietzsche embraced the doctrine in 1882, which he explored in the notebooks
making up The Will to Power, and in Thus
Spoke Zarathustra—his aim being, unlike the Greek philosophers, to rubbish
Christianity.
Augustine’s Refutation
of the Cyclic Theory
In his book Christianity
and Classical Culture (A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to
Augustine), Prof. C. Cochrane, an Oxford classicist, traces the movement of
thought from Augustus to Augustine, from the time when classical thought was at
the height of its glory to the time when it had disintegrated into nihilism and
scepticism and—in the work of Augustine—a new chapter was opened in the story
of civilization. Classical thought, for all its splendid achievements, had been
unable to overcome dichotomies between being and becoming, between reason and
will, between the intelligible or spiritual world and the material world known
by the senses. Human history was an unending struggle of virtue against
fortune, of the skill and courage and cunning of the human will against the blind
power of fate which would—in the end—always prevail. This inward and spiritual
decay was matched by all too visible disasters until in Augustine’s own time
the eternal city of Rome, the very citadel of classical civilization was
captured and sacked by the barbarians.[25]
Among the intellectual battles fought by Augustine by this
time, which are simply beyond the scope of the present work, was his discovery
of the meaning of time. Indeed, the intellectual revolution he pioneered in
this field is of more than mere historical interest. Before his time, it was
commonly believed in the ancient world, and in almost all cultures, that time
moves in a circle and therefore that history is also cyclical. Against this
myth of the eternal return, which fascinated philosophers for centuries,
Augustine launched a vigorous attack, an attack on the circuitus temporum, as he
calls it, ‘those arguments with which the ungodly try to turn our simple piety
from the straight road, and to make us join them in walking in circles,
arguments which, if reason would not refute, faith could afford to laugh at.’
According to Augustine, the real basis of this theory may be
traced to the inability of the scientific intelligence to grasp the notion of
‘infinity’ and to its consequent insistence upon ‘closing the circle’. But
this, he points out, is a demand of the human reason which, not unlike the
human stomach, is disposed to reject what it cannot assimilate. It should
therefore be deprecated as an attempt to measure ‘by the narrow standards of a
mutable human mentality the divine mind, wholly immutable, capable of
apprehending whatever degree of infinity and numbering the innumerable without
the alteration of thought’.
‘To the Christian’, writes Prof. Cochrane, ‘nothing could be
more abhorrent than the theory of cycles. For it flatly contradicts the
scriptural view of the saeculum as,
from beginning to end, a continuous and progressive disclosure of the creative
and moving principle. By implication, it also denies the Christian message of
salvation for mankind. In the form which it assumes with classical materialism,
it represents motion as dependent on forces beyond control, and, for classical
idealism, it takes shape as a belief in the endless reintegration of ‘typical’
situations, a belief which does the grossest injustice to the unique character
and significance of the individual historical events’.[26]
By implication, observes Augustine, the theory of cycles
denies any real happiness for the soul of man, as it must proceed on an unremitting
alternation between false bliss and genuine misery and back again from the
other to the first, and so on. He writes:
‘For how can there be true bliss, without any certainty of
its eternal continuance, when the soul in its ignorance does not know the
misery to come, or else unhappily fears its coming in the midst of its
blessedness? But if the soul goes from misery to happiness, never more to
return, then there is some new state of affairs in time, which will never have
an end in time. If so, why cannot the same be true of the world? And of man,
created in the world? And so we may escape from these false circuitous courses,
whatever they may be, which have been devised by these misled and misleading
sages, by keeping to the straight path in the right direction, under the
guidance of sound teaching.’[27]
There were those who quoted the passage in the book of the
Ecclesiastics, “the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that
which is done is that which shall be done: there is nothing new under the sun”,
and took this to be referring to those circular movements, returning to the
same state as before and bringing all things back to the same condition.
Augustine’s repugnance finds expression in an impassioned outburst:
‘...heaven forbid that correct faith should believe that
these words of Solomon refer to those periodic revolutions of the physicists,
by which, on their theory, the same ages of the same temporal events recur in
rotation, so that, as one might say, just as Plato, for example, taught his
disciples at Athens in the fourth century, in the school called the Academy, so
in innumerable centuries of the past, separated by immensely wide and yet
finite intervals, the same Plato, the same city, the same school, the same
disciples have appeared time after time, and are to reappear time after time in
innumerable centuries in the future. God forbid, I say, that we should swallow
such nonsense! Christ died, once and for all, for our sins: ‘semel mortuus est Christus pro nostris
pecatis; and in rising from the dead He is never to die again: He is no
longer under the sway of death.’[28]
Referring to the misinterpreted book of the Ecclesiastes, he
writes:
‘But in fact the writer is speaking of what he has just been
mentioning: the succession of generations, departing and arriving, the paths of
the sun, the streams that flow past. Or else he is speaking generally of all
things which come to be and pass away: for there were men before us, and there
will be men after us; and the same holds good for all living creatures, and for
trees and plants. Even the very monsters, the strange creatures which are born,
although different one from another, and even though we are told that some of
them are unique, still, regarded as a class of wonders and monsters, it is true
of them that they have been before and they will be again, and there is nothing
novel or fresh in the fact of the monster being born under the sun.’[29]
Augustine thus bears witness to the faith of Christians that,
not withstanding all appearances, human history does not consist of a series of
repetitive patterns, but marks a sure advance to an ultimate goal; and, as
such, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is in no way cyclical but
linear. As Prof. Cochrane puts it:
‘For Augustine, therefore, the order of human life is not the
order of ‘matter’, blindly and aimlessly working out the ‘logic’ of its own
process, nor yet is it any mere reproduction of a pattern or idea which may be
apprehended a priori by the human
mind. To think of it as either is to commit the scientific sin of fornicating
with one’s own fancies; in other words, of disembodying the Logos in such a way as to rub the saeculum of all possible significance.
For the Christian, time, space, matter, and form are all alike, in the words of
Ambrose, ‘not gods but gifts’. They thus present themselves, not as causes but
as opportunity. As such, they may be said both to ‘unite’ and to ‘divide’. This
they do by giving us our status as individuals in the saeculum. But this status involves its specific limitations, not
the least of which is the difficulty of communicating with our fellows. This
difficulty is intensified by the confusion of tongues (diversitas linguarum) which results from the effort of men to
surround themselves with economic and cultural barriers of their own creation;
and from it not even a saint can claim to be exempt.’[30]
For Augustine, human history presents itself as a tissue of
births and deaths, in which the generations succeed one another in regular
order, and in this context of generations each and every individual has his own
times and spaces, so that the notion of a man ‘out of his age’ is a vicious and
irrelevant abstraction. The clue to human history is not in any fine-spun
philosophic abstraction—such as particles of matter ceaselessly grouping and
regrouping themselves, the type monotonously repeating itself in countless
individuals—but purely and simply in the congenital impulse of human beings to
attain happiness, and this happiness they find in order, that is to say, in a
disposition of arrangement of equal and unequal things in such a way as to
allocate each to its own place, apart from which the consequence is disturbance
and distress, perturbatio et miseria.[31]
Augustine thus conceives life as inherently and intrinsically
order. Mankind, says Prof. Cochrane, like all creatures organic and inorganic,
is subject to the fundamental appetites
or urge of things, a dynamic urge which finds expression in the human soul;
however, this urge is in no way blind; on the contrary, it is illumined by
intelligence and attains satisfaction only as it discovers its ‘place’—that is
to say, as it learns to conform to the true order of its being:
‘With unintelligent creatures the ‘arrangement’ by which this
order becomes possible is merely organic; it is a pax corporis, that is to say, ‘an ordered disposition of the parts
of the body resulting in a cessation of desire’. But, with rational spirits,
the demands of the order go further; they are to be fulfilled only in a pax rationalis, that is, ‘agreement
between knowledge and activity (cognitionis
actionisque consensio). And, since man is an embodied soul, a truly human
order must be at once organic and spiritual, i.e. ‘an ordered life and
salvation of the living being’ (pax corporis et animae ordinate vita et salus
animantis’).’[32]
In the effort to achieve such an order, says Prof. Cochrane,
success or failure will depend upon a combination of intellectual insight and
moral power:
‘In this sense it becomes true to say that ‘to think
correctly is the condition of behaving well’. But however salutary the
admonition to correct thinking, it is by no means easy to observe. For, in the
first place, it presupposes a grasp of first principles, in default of which
thought must inevitably run wild. And, in the second, it involves processes
which are no less moral than mental, the greatest danger confronting the
thinker being that of permitting his own shadow to fall between himself and the
truth. ‘It is obvious’, observes Augustine, ‘that error could never have arisen
in religion, had the mind not chosen to worship either itself or body or its
own vain imaginings’. That it should have succumbed to this temptation is, of
course, to be attributed to pride (superbia)
which thus for him, as for Tertullian, is the devil’s own sin and, peculiarly,
the sin of philosophers.’[33]
In summary, Augustine says it is intolerable for devout ears
to hear the opinion expressed that after passing through this life—with all its
calamities—we are to return to it again, ‘to be involved in hellish mortality,
in shameful stupidity, in detestable miseries, where God is lost, truth is
hated, and happiness is sought in unclean wickedness’. If the theory of cycles
were true, he says, then it would be more prudent to suppress the truth and
wiser to be ignorant:
For if our happiness in the other life will depend upon our
forgetfulness of these facts, he writes, why should we aggravate our
wretchedness in this life by knowing them? If, on the other hand, we shall of
necessity know them there, let us at least be ignorant here.
It is really terrible to think of the implication of eternal
return. It is very fearful. ‘God forbid that what the philosophers threaten
should be true’, he says, ‘that our genuine misery is never to have an end, but
is only to be interrupted time and time again, throughout eternity, by
intervals of false happiness’.
There is nothing to compel us to suppose that the human race
had no beginning, he maintains, because there is no reason to believe in those
strange cycles which prevent the appearance of anything new. Ironically, the
Platonists whom Augustine has in mind here taught that the soul which follows
after God and upon death obtains a view of any of the truths in the world of
forms is set free from harm until the next period of the cyclic revolution.
Augustine uses this against them. If a soul is ‘set free’, he says,
‘and will never return again to misery, just as it has never
before been set free, then something has come into being which has never been
before, and something of great importance, namely the eternal felicity of a
soul’.
Now, he says,
‘If this happens in an immortal nature, something new,
something not repeated and not to be repeated by any cyclic revolution—why is
it argued that it cannot happen in mortal things?’
If the Platonists assert that bliss is no novelty to a soul,
since the soul is returning to the bliss which before it always enjoyed,
‘still the freedom is certainly a novelty, since the soul is
set free from the misery which it never suffered before, and that misery itself
is also a novelty, the production in the soul of something which had not
existed before’.[34]
Augustine leaves the question whether the number of the
liberated souls who are never to return to their misery can be continually
increased to those who engaged in subtle argument about the limit which is to
be set to the infinity of things! If that number can be increased, he argues,
then certainly something can be created which has never been created before,
since the number of the freed souls, which never existed before, was not just
created once for all but will be continually created. On the other hand, he
goes on,
‘...if there must be a fixed number of freed souls, which
never return to misery, a number which is never increased, then that number
itself, whatever it may be, certainly did not exist before; and it cannot
increase and reach its final sum without starting from a beginning; and that
beginning did not exist before. To provide this beginning, therefore, a man was
created, before whom no man ever existed.’[35]
Notes
[1]
Mircea Eliade Cosmos and History: The
Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Nork Harper Torchbooks, 1959), p.87
[5]
Carlo Diano, “II concetto
della storia nella filosofia dei Greci”, Grande
Antologia Filosofica, II, 248 in Augustine
the Educator, p.p. 11-12.
[7] Ibid. p. 167.
[10]
K. Freeman Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers:
A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels’ Fragmente der Vorsokratiker
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948), p. 26 (Heraclitus, Frag. 30) in Augustine the Educator, p. 12.
[11]F.
M. Cornford From Religion to Philosophy, op. cit. p. 163
[12]
Phaedo, 70d.
[13]
Ibid.
[14]
Ibid.
[15]
Ibid.
[16]B.
Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato (New
York: Bigelow and Brown, n. d), Vol. III, pp. 405-6 in Augustine
the Educator, loc. cit.
[17]
Lee, H.. D. P. (transl.), Aristotle
Meterologica (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 13.
[19]
Paul Harvey The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (London: Oxford University Press,
1962) p. 407.
[21]
Ibid.
[22]
Ibid. p. 15.
[23]
Loc. cit.
[24]
Umberto A. Padovani, Grande Antologia
Filosofica, Vol. I, XVI-XVII in Augustine
the Educator, p. 15.
[25]
Truth to Tell (London: SPCK, 1991),
p. 16.
[26]
Charles Norris Cochrane Christianity and
Classical Culture (New York: Galaxy Book, 1957), p. 483.
[27]
De Civ Dei Bk. Xii, 14.
[28]
Ibid., xii, 15
[29]
Loc. cit.
[30]
Charles Norris Cochrane Christianity and
Classical Culture, op. cit. p. 484.
[31]
Ibid. p. 486.
[32]
Ibid.
[33]
Ibid. p. 487
[34]
De Civ. Dei op. cit. Xii, 21.
[35]
Loc. cit.
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