The Insufficiency of Reason - A Pre/Postmodern Reading of Confessions VII.

My project is to examine Saint Augustine’s account of his ascent to God by introspection and reason as told in the Confessions, Book VII, and to determine 1) whether or not Augustine actually reaches a saving knowledge of God in this ascent, and 2) if not, why his attempt to reach God with reason would fail. I believe that Augustine did not in fact reach a saving knowledge of God in this reasoned ascent, and the reason his attempt failed is that reason alone is an insufficient means of attaining salvation—one must be led by the Holy Spirit if one is to reach God, and similarly, salvation. First, I will closely examine several passages in Book VII of the Confessions to more closely determine from the text what Augustine himself believed about this experience. Then, from his observations, I will attempt to explain to the best of my ability why Augustine does not reach salvation in God in this experience, both Scripturally and in looking at postmodern literature, particularly James Smith’s commentaries on Derrida. Finally, I will conclude this paper with a very brief and more generalized argument about the pros and cons of reason and—more specifically—natural theology, using my conclusions from Saint Augustine’s experience as related in Book VII.

Book VII begins with Augustine relating his struggles with Catholic doctrine. Once he is informed that the Catholic faith did not actually believe that God the Father has the form of a human body—a thought which he abhorred—he began to struggle with the ideas of God’s incorruptible and immutable nature, and relatedly, the problem of evil. Looking back on this struggle, Augustine considered himself much like a blind man, though he also thought that he was becoming “a grown man.” He says of himself, “So my heart had become gross, and I had no clear vision even of my own self,” and, “But you had not yet ‘lightened my darkness.’” Since Augustine firmly believed, even in his dark state, that God was incorruptible in character and power , he was presented with the task of finding an alternative nature of evil, since, if evil was created by God, then he was not in fact incorruptible in character, and if evil was presented by a force of darkness other than God—as the Manichees described, then God was not in fact incorruptible in power. He says about this problem,

"But a problem remained to trouble me. Although I affirmed and firmly held divine immunity from pollution and change and the complete immutability of our God, the true God who made not only our souls but also our bodies, and not only our souls and bodies, but all rational beings and everything, yet I had no clear and explicit grasp of the cause of evil. Whatever it might be, I saw it had to be investigated, if I were to avoid being forced by this problem to believe the immutable God to be mutable. Otherwise I might myself become the evil I was investigating. Accordingly, I made my investigation without anxiety, certain that what the Manichees said was untrue. With all my mind I fled from them, because in my inquiry into the origin of evil I saw them to be full of malice, in that they thought it more acceptable to say your substance suffers evil than that their own substance actively does evil."

It was in this tension—a tension in which he recognized his fate would be decided—that Augustine began his inquiry into the origin of evil, and likewise his inquiry into the nature of God.

After searching for an answer to the origin of evil in created things and having no success, and rejecting astrology as a means of divination, Augustine tells us that he comes to read the books of the key Neoplatonic writers Plotinus and Porphyry, and it is in reading these texts that Augustine is encouraged to look within his own soul as a means of coming to the knowledge of the divine. Thus begins Augustine’s “ascent by introspection.” He tells us this of the experience:

"By the Platonic books I was admonished to return into myself. With you as my guide I entered into my innermost citadel, and was given power to do so because you had become my helper. I entered and with my soul’s eye, such as it was, saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than my mind…. It was not that light, but a different thing, utterly different from all our kinds of light. It transcended my mind…. When I first came to know you, you raised me up to make me see that what I saw is Being, and that I who saw am not yet Being. And you gave a shock to the weakness of my sight by the strong radiance of your rays, and I trembled with love and awe."

Augustine’s language in this section clearly demonstrates that he experienced God in a very real way within himself. He recognized his own state as a thing who is still becoming, in contrast to the Being he saw, and by the help of God—possibly the Holy Spirit, since the person who guides Augustine is indeed referred to as a guide and helper—Augustine comes to a love and awe of this God, two things that at least seem to be characteristic of a follower of God. If this is indeed true, why does Augustine tell us he does not actually become a Christian until later in Book VIII, when he speaks of his conversion under the figtree? It seems as if, when the Spirit guides Augustine in this passage, He is guiding him to a knowledge of God’s ultimate transcendence and Augustine’s own inability to attain Him, not to a knowledge that saves. To confirm this, Augustine says, “But I did not possess the strength to keep my vision fixed. My weakness reasserted itself, and I returned to my customary condition. I carried with me only a loving memory and a desire for that of which I had the aroma but which I had not yet the strength to eat.” Notice Augustine’s clear—albeit poetic—language when he states that the only things he received from this vision were a memory and a longing for something that he could not yet have. Augustine was not saved in this vision.

But why? Augustine clearly believed he experienced God in this vision, and who are we to suggest otherwise, since we cannot see into his soul? What was Augustine yet lacking, that had he obtained it, it would save him? The answer to this question, when thought about for even a short amount of time, seems obvious. Augustine did not have Jesus Christ, and sure enough, he tells us as much immediately following his fall from the vision. In retrospect, he states, “I sought a way to obtain strength enough to enjoy you; but I did not find it until I embraced ‘the mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus’….” Even though Augustine clearly experienced God and the guidance of the Holy Spirit in his vision, he lacked the correct perspective on which he could come to a knowledge leading to salvation. Without this perspective, which is found through faith in Christ Jesus, this vision of Augustine’s acted analogously to the Law of the Israelites; it could not save, it could only condemn and show Augustine where he did not match up to God’s supreme excellence. In order to have the ability to be guided by the Spirit to the knowledge of the Father and His salvation, one must have the correct interpretation of the world, and this cannot be reached by universal reason alone, since as finite beings, we are not omniscient, and therefore cannot have a completely objective perspective on the world. We must have the correct perspective or interpretation supplied to us by the Holy Spirit through faith in Jesus Christ. Scripture clearly says,

“But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.”

This view stating that the narrative of faith in Christ leading to our saving knowledge of God, while supported Scripturally, was also preemptively put forward by Augustine himself when he stated that he could not maintain his rational image of the glory of God without first coming to faith in Jesus Christ. Thus his mantra: faith leads to knowledge.

This idea of subjective interpretation of the world as a kind of text, while obviously not a new idea—as we can see in Augustine’s “faith leads to knowledge”—is an idea that is presently most commonly associated with postmodern philosophy, most noticeably in the writings of Jacques Derrida and others. One author in particular, James Smith, in his book Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?, attempts to show how Derrida’s doctrines of deconstructionism and interpretation of the “world as text”—which he also believes were much like Augustine’s views—mesh perfectly with the narrative of Scripture. He says this:

"Christians who become skittish about the claim that everything is interpretation are usually hanging on to a very modern notion of knowledge, one that claims something is true only insofar as it is objective—insofar as it can be universally known by all people, at all times, in all places. On this account, the truth of the gospel—that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself—is taken to be objectively true and thus capable of rational demonstration…. Thus the very fact that both the centurion and chief priests are confronted by the same phenomena and yet see something very different seems to demonstrate Derrida’s point: the very experience of the things themselves is a matter of interpretation. Even if we are confronted with the physical and historical evidence of the resurrection—even if we witnessed the resurrection firsthand—what exactly this meant would require interpretation. Only by interpreting the resurrection of Jesus does one see that it confirms that he is the Son of God."

and later, Smith states,

"What is required to interpret the world well is the necessary conditions of interpretation—the right horizons of expectation and the right presuppositions. But as Paul repeatedly emphasizes, these conditions are themselves a gift; in other words, the presuppositions and horizons that make it possible to properly ‘read’ creation are grace gifts that attend redemption and regeneration. This is precisely why we shouldn’t be surprised that not everyone we encounter immediately grasps the rationality of the gospel. In fact, we should expect that someone will not be able to properly ‘see’ creation or the crucifixion without the grace of redemption."

Like I have previously argued, and as both Augustine and Scripture suggest, Smith argues that the only way that one can come to a correct—and saving—interpretation of the events told in Scripture is through a gift of grace by God Himself, through the Holy Spirit. Reason, though being a useful tool to those who already believe for giving an account of our beliefs, cannot bring us to God, or to His salvation. This is why natural theology, or the branch of the philosophy of religion devoted to giving rational arguments for the existence of God, will never really work as an evangelistic apologetic without the Spirit. Quite simply, if the Holy Spirit is not moving in a person, no amount of rational argument will bring them to accept Christ, since only the Holy Spirit can supply the correct, divine means of interpretation needed for salvation. Only by first coming to faith in Christ can we be guided by the Holy Spirit to the knowledge—or the vision, as Augustine puts it—of salvation.

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In the meeting to discuss the first draft of my first paper for Medieval Philosophy, there was some debate as to whether the argument in the draft under discussion committed the fallacy of false alternative, creating a false dichotomy between the use only of reason as a means of knowing God, and the use only of personal experience of God as a means of knowing God, leaving no room for any “middle-ground” positions. These middle-ground positions would use some combination of both reason and our personal experience of God as a means of knowing God. In light of this discussion, I was asked to show how my paper did not actually commit this fallacy of false alternative instead of writing an actual final draft.

My paper was a thought experiment into the insufficiency of reason as a tool of obtaining the salvation taught by Christianity, using Saint Augustine’s accounts of his “Ascent by Introspection” and his conversion experience within the narrative of his Confessions, in Books VII and VIII, respectively. I was attempting to show that Augustine’s attempt to reach God and His salvation through reason alone failed because the Holy Spirit did not bring him to a saving knowledge to Jesus Christ, and I pointed out that Augustine himself says this in retrospect. In this sense, a certain perspective—that of the divine revelation of Christ—was first required before Augustine could use reason in the pursuit of God, since our reason—our philosophy—will only lead us to where we are already inclined to go. As Augustine said it, “Faith leads to knowledge.” I then continued to explore the implications of this insufficiency of reason in postmodern philosophical terms, using some of James Smith’s comments on Derrida and deconstructionism as a foundation. Building off of this, I argued that the Holy Spirit supplies us with our saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, which is the correct perspective (or interpretation of the world) that is needed before reason can be used in pursuit of the knowledge of God. I ended the paper with a brief section on the limits of natural theology in light of this insufficiency of reason, arguing that natural theology would never really work as an evangelistic tool, unless it is accompanied by the Spirit.

The section in my paper that was called into question was the section that moved into the postmodern implications of the insufficiency of reason. It was stated that in stating that reason/natural theology could not be used in evangelism, it seemed as if I had created a false dichotomy between faith and reason, making it seem like one could only choose one or the other, and leaving no alternative point of view. This would be to commit the fallacy of false alternative, since there are clearly plausible alternate points of view. After reviewing my paper, I have decided that my argument, as I intended it to be, still stands, but is in need of some clarity of wording at several points in order to steer clear of the fallacy of false alternative.

To clarify, I had meant to say that natural theology could only be successful in evangelism if the Holy Spirit was already working in the heart of the person being evangelized to. The Spirit could quite possibly use reason to bring a person to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, but only if the Spirit was already at work within that person, bringing him to the place where he could epistemically see that God’s revelation in Christ is truth, granting the person the divine perspective. This just seems necessary due to the finite nature of man. Because we are not omniscient, we are not in a position to objectively know truth, since there are just so many facts about God and the universe that we cannot know. Simply, man is finite, and being such, he can only know things from his finite perspective on the universe. Therefore, man’s reason can only get him as far as his perspective is limited, and seeing as how all men have slightly differing limited perspectives (since they are not all the same man), all men will come to different conclusions using the same ability of reason. In context of my paper, since finite man is not the infinite God, he cannot see all of what God sees. In particular, he cannot see God’s plan for the salvation of man through His Son Jesus Christ, and therefore cannot come to the knowledge of its truth. This condition of man would require God to supply the correct perspective to him, in order that he might see the universe through the eyes of God. This perspective change is done by the work of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, as I should have made more clear in my paper, to an atheist whose heart in which the Holy Spirit is not working, arguments for the existence of God—the work of natural theology—will simply never be convincing.

Therefore, my paper, being unclear, seemed to commit the fallacy of false alternative. This observation, however, was due to the lack of clarity in the final sections of the paper. Now, since I have supplied the correct perspective (or at least a better one) in which to see the argument, I believe that the observation no longer applies.