Saint Augustine
Putnam, Samuel
May 7, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL SAINT AUGUSTINE By SAMUEL PUTNAM AT THE moment this essay is written, I have not yet seen ¦**• Giovanni Papini's Saint Augustine, but it seems safe to predict that...
...In other words, it is comparatively easy to impose an order...
...In bringing order out of the Saint's apparent philosophic disorder, the historian shows us how Augustine brings all questions, no matter what, back to that Godhead which is in the Christ...
...it is a good deal more difficult to discover the order that is inherent in the body of doctrine under examination...
...Saint Augustine himself, it is apparent, sensed the difficulty of organizing his thought and suffered from it, and the difficulty becomes almost anguish with the faithful and devoted Augustinian: "The difficulty against which every follower of Augustine desperately struggles is the fact that, in order to explain his author, he must begin with what might as well be the end, and to define a single point of his author's doctrine, he must, absolutely, give an exposition of the doctrine as a whole...
...and the historian, in his turn, who undertakes to examine his philosophy link by link suffers constantly from the knowledge that he is doing it violence, and that, at any point where he attempts to assign a provisional limit, he runs the risk of breaking the chain...
...A distinction is drawn between the Augustinian and Thomistic theories of knowledge...
...M. Gilson's aim, then, is to give us not alone the authentic, but the integral doctrine with which he is dealing...
...His Archives d'Histoire Doctrinale et Litteraire du Moyen Age are an indispensable classic of scholarship, and his work on Saint Augustine has been preceded by an Introduction au Systeme de Saint Thomas d'Aquin and by a Philosophic de Saint Bonaventure...
...the next edition of the present work will show, no doubt, the results of further masonry...
...In this treatise, which well might serve as a preface to the works of Saint Augustine, the author, hopefully, begins by appreciating the difficulty of his task...
...Indeed, M. Gilson is quite possibly the greatest in his field...
...The first effect, as it were, of beatitude being wisdom, the third portion of the work deals with the state of the Christian soul in the enjoyment of that wisdom and that beatitude...
...This, and not any moral, political or psychological system, provides a centre for his chaotic-seeming cosmos...
...Further, in cooperation with the faculty of the College SaintMichel, M. Gilson has founded an Institute of Mediaeval Studies at Toronto University...
...Augustine is in quest of a good which will overcome all desire, and wisdom is inseparable always from the possession of this sovereign good...
...In a paper of this scope, it is, unfortunately, impossible to go into details, and it is the details which illumine M. Gilson's method...
...and what have the Confessions always been, if not just such an itinerary...
...There is here no finished and rounded structure as with Saint Thomas Aquinas, within whose system, it will be recalled, both Pascal and Malebranche declined to permit themselves to be immured...
...The point is, for the many thousands who will read Papini's work, where they are sure to encounter the poet rather than the philosopher, a good complement would be, if they are at all interested in philosophy, Etienne Gilson's newly published Introduction a l'Etude de Sainte Augustin, an octavo volume in the Etudes de Philosophic Medievale Series (J...
...The absence of order from which Augustinianism suffers," says M. Gilson, "is but the presence of an order different from the one that we expect...
...It was first sketched in at the Sorbonne six or seven years ago, and in the interim, its expounder has been chiseling away at it in his lectures at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes...
...The structural metaphor is not without point in M. Gilson's case...
...In this process, the seeming obscurities are shown to be a part of the original edifice, and are built up into an integral part of that recreative edifice which is being erected under our eyes...
...none presents a more slippery set of surfaces and facets...
...His philosophy has, therefore, a practical, a pragmatic end, with the quest of truth and the quest of happiness springing from the same felt need...
...Besides teaching the history of mediaeval philosophy at the Faculte de Paris and L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes, for the past three years he has lectured, during the last trimester of each year, at Harvard...
...This, despite Papini's native taste for philosophy and his quite extraordinary philosophic background, despite the fact that his own conversion has been, in a manner, a flight from a disparate universe, from a world of conflicting "minds" and objective particulars...
...M. Gilson's name is far from being new to anyone whose interests take him into the field of mediaeval philosophy or the mediaeval sciences...
...Such are the essential themes of Augustinianism, a translation of personal experience, as outlined by M. Gilson...
...for there is a theory of knowledge in Augustine, though it may suprise some to hear it...
...That is why it is, one never knows whether Saint Augustine is speaking as a theologian or as a philosopher, whether he is proving the existence of God or developing a theory of knowledge, whether the eternal verities of which he speaks are those of science or of morality, whether it is a doctrine of sensation that he is engaged in expounding or the consequences of original sin...
...it is an effort and a sustained effort, to express, in accordance with a unified order, everything to be found in the vital body of thought that is being chronicled...
...He then proceeds to apply his method, a method which one of his countrymen, M. Henri Gouhier, has excellently defined: "For M. Etienne Gilson, synthesis in the history of philosophy is neither a resume nor a foreshortening, nor an elementary exposition...
...May English readers soon be given the benefit of his labors...
...No body of philosophy in the world, it may be, is harder to come to grips with...
...Simple good-will, as he tells us, is not enough...
...all this is so interwoven and so holds together that Augustine is unable to pick up a single link of the chain without drawing to him the chain as a whole...
...What the expositor is giving us, in his own words, is a "guide-book" (itineraire) of the soul to God...
...For the Confessions are not an introduction to the philosophy, but the philosophy is, rather, a commentary on the Confessions...
...Vrin, Paris...
...It is a difficulty that is inherent in the body and heart of the Augustinian doctrine...
...for there are in Pauini, we are to remember, at once an untamed poet and a philosopher—but that is another story...
...This guide happens to be especially well compiled, since the author is a writer as well as a historian and never forgets the fact...
...The means are those which the philosopher, the author of the Confessions, personally has tested...
...The Augustinian theory which the latter proceeds to give us is one which has been built up over a period of years, and on which the author, who works with the patience of a mediaeval craftsman, probably will continue to labor for some years to come...
...In the course of this exegesis, the problem of the will is taken up in connection with the problems of grace, of morality and of knowledge...
...The difficulty is not one of style alone, nor due solely to topicality, historic circumstance...
...May 7, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL SAINT AUGUSTINE By SAMUEL PUTNAM AT THE moment this essay is written, I have not yet seen ¦**• Giovanni Papini's Saint Augustine, but it seems safe to predict that the Augustine we shall find there will be very much the one that Pascal saw: the warm, vital, pulsating, human individual, sinning and repenting and hewing a path to sainthood with something of Dionysiac fury...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 1
