St. Augustine viewed medieval
philosophy as a period that realized the intermarriage of the divine and the
secular by discovering the former through the latter. This is basically his way
of affirming the necessity of both the divine and the secular to man’s search
of truth. This was despite the disagreement of the Skeptics, Epicureans, and
the rest of other thinkers during his time.
That is why, for him, medieval philosophy is a rational, contemplative
way of knowing God which is similar to the Platonic thrust: the highest achievement
of being is to know Being.
His main point centered on the Divine
Being whose truth can be discovered in various particulars in all that we see
and experience. This is deductive. All the realities and truths about all things
are founded on the Divine Being.
Contrary to some ancient thinkers
like Pythagoras who considered the existence of things out of the “unlimited”, or
Thales of Miletus who considered water as the ultimate principle by which all
things come, or Anaximander who attributed the existence of things from the
principles implicitly knitted from the numbers and worlds in infinite fashion.
The next line of successors starting from Anaxagoras down to Diogenes mentioned
air as the first principle, but emphasized that there is a “divine mind” or “divine
reason” which causes the existence of things. Archelaus’ thoughts also jibed
with Diogenes but emphasized more on the homogeneity of particles and the role
of the divine mind in the process of things.
Moreover, as
every man is gifted with reason, then, he has the capacity to know and to know
the truth. But according to St.
Augustine, the truths that man can discover in all things are fundamentally
rooted in the revelations of the Divine whose truth is beyond question,
relative to certainty. He believes in the basic role of nature, and of all
things in it in the realization of man’s search for wisdom or truth.
This is why, according
to the Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, the different concepts of the medieval thinkers during St.
Augustine’s time, most of those who belonged to the Italic school were too
engrossed with the scientific, mathematical, and mystical perspectives of the world and all of the things in it 1.
The thinkers of the Ionic school
headed by Thales were engrossed in understanding the first principle of
things. However, in the later
development, the next successors still held on the concept of the unity of
things and/or separation of things through the significant intervention of a “divine
mind” or “divine reason”. This “divine mind” or “divine reason” is
responsible for the necessary existence of all things.
Therefore, with the existence of
Italic and Ionic schools in the medieval period, St. Augustine found a more
striking way to make a balance between the thoughts of the two schools through
his principles of the union of the divine and the secular. He had played a significant role in molding
the foundation of medieval philosophy as “philosophical” in terms of the principle
of logical necessity of all things, and “theological” in terms of discovering
the truths of the said necessity in God.
Source:
No comments:
Post a Comment