Augustine's Questions: Why the Augustinian Theology of God Matters Today

Finally, it all comes down to a correct description of God. Everything else—culture, politics, nature, human relationships—is properly understood only in the measure that ultimate reality is grasped with at least a relative adequacy. Like all of the other great theologians of the tradition, St. Augustine struggled his whole life with this central question. Though his restless mind ranged over innumerable issues, from human psychology to Roman history to Christology and eschatology, his primary preoccupation was determining the meaning of the word "God." And he found answers. Though he was one of the greatest searchers in the Western tradition, Augustine did not have a romantic attitude and therefore did not regard the search as an end in itself. Here I think John Caputo, reading Augustine through the lens of Derridean undecidability, has misconstrued his subject.¹ At the end of his questioning, Augustine found a truth in which he could rest, a truth that, he was convinced, had set him free. And this was none other than the conviction that ultimate reality is the trinitarian God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that Augustine's questions and answers are remarkably relevant to our time, and that finding for ourselves the truth that he found is of great moment not only for our personal spiritual fulfillment but also for the health of our Church and culture.

What I should like to do, in the course of this article, is to follow, in a necessarily sketchy way, the Augustinian path toward the understanding of God, thinking with him and after him. And I would like to demonstrate throughout the analysis how Augustine's questions and solutions matter for us, especially for those committed to carrying on and making effective the intellectual heritage of Catholicism. I will undertake this task by looking at three key arguments that Augustine had at different points in his intellectual journey: the first with the Manichees and the Platonists when he was a comparatively young man, the second with the Arians when he was in midcareer, and the third with the Romans as he approached the end of his life. What emerges, as Augustine wrestles with these various opponents, is that very distinctive understanding of ultimate reality that we Christians call belief in the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Augustine's Argument with the Manichees and the Platonists

The work of St. Augustine that has exercised most fascination and given rise to most commentary over the ages is, of course, his great autobiography, Confessions. Relying implicitly on the double sense of the Latin term confessio, Augustine uses this text as a means both to confess his sins and to profess his praise of God. In fact, those two moves are, in his mind, inextricably linked: the more he becomes aware of his sins, both intellectual and moral, the more he is able to acknowledge and thank the true God—and vice versa. Nowhere is this link between contrition and praise more clearly on display than in the seventh book of Confessions. In this densely textured section of his autobiography, Augustine recounts the tortuous process by which he wriggled free from the influence of Manichaeism, the dualist, quasi-Gnostic system of which he had been, for nine years, a faithful adept. The principle allure of Manichaeism—both in Augustine's day and in ours—is the simple and elegant way that it handles the problem of evil. If the world is, at the most basic level, a struggle between a force of good and a force of evil, then we are not obliged to blame God for suffering. Instead, we should simply side with him in his just and worthwhile enterprise, even as we hate the principle responsible for evil. Manichaeism solves the problem of theodicy by dissolving it.

Now what is the conception of God associated with this Manichaean philosophy? It would not be quite right to say, as most popular accounts have it, that God is, on the Manichaean reading, purely spiritual, set radically apart from...