St. Augustine (A.D. 354-430) was a Platonist. Both he and Plato were to some extent idealists: Augustine created his righteous City of God and Plato, his Utopian Republic. Both men declared that God or the divine was the measure of all things. For them human nature could only be understood in relation to the ideal. However, Reinhold Niebuhr called Augustine the “first great realist of Western history.” Why is that? Is Augustine really more of a realist than Plato?
Unlike the classic Greek philosophers, Augustine rejected the soul as the source of the ideal. The soul, which Plato believed to be good in its ability to reason and its knowledge of the ideal eternal forms, is subject to corruption in Augustine's view. Augustine distrusts Plato's view of reason because reason can be corrupted through rationalization. It is the reason of the soul that becomes corrupted and in turn, corrupts the actions of the body. Plato argued in The Republic that the best reason could bring happiness, but Augustine argues in The City of God that happiness comes from God.
Plato calls the body evil because its base appetites, or epithumia, drive the person against his reason, logos, and his dignity, thumos. However, Augustine did not believe the body to be evil. The body was created in the image of God, so to call the body evil would be equivalent to calling one of God's works evil. God is good, so what he creates can’t be intrinsically evil. The greatest sins, as Oscar Wilde would later point out in The Picture of Dorian Grey, are enacted in the mind. In the Bible, when Eve plucked the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she wasn't hungry. She was reasoning that the fruit would give her the powers of God. Satan and other demons are spirits and do not have physical bodies, so it is their eternal soul that must be evil. Therefore, Augustine concludes the soul cannot be good enough to always reason rationally, undermining most Platonic assumptions.
Plato believed that the reason of the soul could be perfected through observing the constants of nature and human nature. However, the enlightened republic, built on the constants of human nature can only exist in the mind, not in real life. Nature is a lot more unpredictable than Plato believed. Also both soul and reason can be corrupted through the mutability of justice. Socrates tried to find the intrinsic value of justice, its gold standard so to speak, so that justice and injustice would be immutable. Yet, Socrates could only come up with the karmic retribution of the afterlife in the Myth of Er. Augustine argues that soul, reason and nature all mutable or changeable except under the divine justice of God.
Augustine's final critique of Plato and all other non-Christian philosophers is that pride, the first and worst of all sins, prevents them from agreeing that a belief in God inspires reason, and not reason of itself. In i meant City of God, BK. XIX, Ch.5, Augustine says “They [ancient philosophers] wanted to be happy here and now and through astonishing vanity, they wanted to be made happy by their own actions.” Pride also prevents Plato from seeing that nature is too mysterious and unpredictable to be understood perfectly through corruptible reason. One's reason, Augustine argues, can't be perfect enough to be the final authority on things like truth and justice. Therefore, in Christianity, God replaces the individual's reason as the final authority on truth and justice. Augustine concludes that "I believe in order to understand."
PLATO IS MORE REAL
However, is the view of life through a window of faith truly realistic? Can natural rights only be perceived through God? In this respect, the teachings of Plato are more realistic. Nature, apart from God, should be sufficient to provide the basis for natural rights and natural law. In City of God IV,33 Augustine claims that the complexities within the flux of nature , even the purely accidental, serve a divine purpose. Yet, referring everything back to God does not solve all problems. Socrates would object God being wholly good if he is the source of both good and bad luck. More importantly, Plato, and later Aristotle, argued that human nature by itself should provide satisfactory moral standards for individual and political life. Aristotle called man a “political animal” capable of irrationality and rationality.
At the core of human nature is shared membership in the human species. If we ignore the afterlife and its supernatural implications outside the realm of human existence, we stumble upon a more realistic view of the natural abilities of man. Man’s ability to reason is his chief ability, and perfecting that ability will lead to happiness and the closest thing to human perfection in a human state. Striving for supernatural ideals is unrealistic and inapplicable to human politics, as the works of Machiavelli will later demonstrate.
In Republic I,39, Cicero simply defines a republic as a group of people “associated by a consensus about justice.” Conversely, in City of God II, 21 and XIX, 23, Augustine claims that no politics was ever founded on justice, or his form of justice, divine justice. In XIX, 24, he tries to define a republic without justice as “an assemblage of a multitude of rational beings associated in a common agreement about things they love.” Yet, how can Augustine differentiate between good and bad politics, if he refuses to recognize the only justice that can exist on earth, justice according to human nature? In rejecting the inherent humanism of human politics, Augustine rejects reality and becomes more of an idealist than Plato.
Whether or not the body or the soul is evil becomes irrelevant when it comes to dismissing human reason entirely. Politics and reason must be interpreted according to human nature. The ideal or the divine is something to strive for, but since it does not exist in a tangible form within the realm of human life, it cannot be used as the only standard for justice, republics, rights or law. Plato is much more in touch with humanism and therefore, reality.
- Ryu
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