Greek/Hellenistic Tradition Augustine View in Book XIX Essay

Greek/Hellenistic Tradition Augustine View

In Book XIX of Augustine's City of God, his focus is on the end of two cities -- "the earthly and the heavenly" (843), which he explains while simultaneously illustrating the nature of the Supreme Good. He tells the reader that peace and happiness, which exists in the heavenly city, can also be experienced on earth. The cities are, in fact, entangled in this, the earthly, world. Augustine explains to us the many different ways humans try to combine virtues and pleasure in order to find peace and happiness in life, but he claims that none of these ways are answers, none of these ways will bring a person peace nor happiness; on the contrary, combining virtues and pleasures can bring insecurity and thus unhappiness. Man does not know, according to Augustine, how to combine both virtue and pleasure, so the goal of life becomes about how to live according to a certain wisdom, which can eventually take us down the path to eternal happiness. The goal is to incorporate justice into one's own life.

When comparing Augustine's City of God to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, it becomes apparent that Augustine, though critical of Aristotle's work, echoed some of Aristotle's theories related to virtue and justice. Both philosophers were in pursuit of a just society and they both believed that goodness was key; however, it was in their ideas about what made up goodness that made them different. Even though Aristotle believed that God was needed in society for the chief reason of people having a responsibility to something else (other than themselves, making them selfish), which would encourage them to be good citizens, and Augustine believed that God was not to be used as a part of the government, both wanted the same thing in the end: justice and goodness.

Aristotle believed that moral virtues set out to help us behave rightly. He notes that it is also important that one have the required intellectual virtues in order to reason about how one should behave. In the following passage, Augustine similarly tells us how we can coordinate God's love and reason:

to make clear the great difference between their hollow realities and our hope, the hope given us by God, together with the realization -- that is, the true bliss -- which he will give us; and to do this not merely by appealing to divine authority but also by employing such powers of reason (Augustine 843).

In trying to find peace and happiness, Augustine agreed with some of Plato's theories. One of the most obvious ways that Augustine agreed with Plato was in his belief that finding happiness must be sought through society. However, Augustine believed rather strongly that faith in God must be individually practiced (i.e., not through society) because that is the only way to the Supreme Good.

…when it is asked whether a wise man should be so concerned with social life that he wants the Supreme Good, which brings man happiness, for his friend as much for himself, and is concerned to ensure it for his friend, or whether a wise man acts as he does solely for his own happiness, then the question is not about the Ultimate Good, but about taking or not taking a partner to share in this good, and that not for the philosopher's own sake but for the sake of that partner, so that the wise man may rejoice in his companion's good as in his own (Augustine 846-847).

Augustine concludes that even though there is the philosophy that a social life will bring people happiness (such as Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, "a human is a social being and his nature is to live in the company of others" 177), it will only bring man further unhappiness in the end. He claims in the passage that social activity is…