Augustine and Plato

I'm missing the cover sheet for this, but it was written for Dr. Gerald Boersma's class, The Theology of St. Augustine, in the Spring, 2021 semester.

Plato’s influence is seen in much of Augustine’s early works. I will illustrate this by first discussing Plato’s “doctrine of the forms” and then applying those doctrines to Augustine’s two of Augustine’s early works. Plato’s “doctrine of the forms” illumines Augustine discussion of “signs” in The Teacher, and in his discussion of the seven stages of the soul in On the Greatness of the Soul.

Like all the ancients, Plato considered that to practice philosophy was to “to initiate a process of inner purgation, ascent and, ultimately, union with the One.”[1] Plato lived about 400 years before Christ, and scholars cannot definitively state whether, or how much, he knew of the one, true God; his understanding of the One, in any event, would not be equal to Augustine’s understanding. Yet even the early Christians sought rationally: “ultimately the very structures of the cosmos comport with reason, more, the cosmos is held in being by Reason.”[2] We, as Christians, worship God the Creator; “proximate to the One was the Logos, the intelligibility who created all things.”[3] As Boersma further states,

The Christian was one who loved the Logos, lived according to the Logos, and aspired for union with the Logos. In this he shared a fundamental disposition of ancient philosophy.[4]

Although Plato and Augustine may well have defined the One differently, they both sought the creator. Plato’s forms seek to reflect perfection, perfection that can only be found in God.

Plato uses comparison to explain the soul. In the Phaedrus, for example, the winged chariot’s horses can only ascend if they are properly guided by their passengers. Those who reach the world of the gods are the ones whose desire and vision gains that. Those who fail are the ones who are tethered to the earth by material wants and desires. “Philosophers ascend with alacrity to the highest realm.”[5] In Augustine, we will see that to reach Plato’s world of the gods is to reach heaven, and it is the seventh and highest level of the soul, but “a certain mansion” where we have reached knowledge of God.

We shall come by the Virtue and Wisdom of God to that Supreme Cause, or Supreme Author, or Supreme Principle of all things, or otherwise more aptly call that great reality.[6]

In reaching that seventh levels, Augustine brings the soul through six other degrees. He uses here, as in other of his works, Plato’s doctrine of forms. Boersma tells us

it is impossible to understand Augustine without the metaphysical framing this doctrine provides.[7]

Plato’s forms have a three part definition. First, they are that which makes things what they are. They are casual, for they are the “eternal, stable, immaterial, and unchanging sources of all things.”[8] Yet they are not simply ideas of things. They do not come into existence in our minds; they come into our minds because they first exist outside our minds. The forms make the things we experience in this world to be what they are. As such, the first essential element of Plato’s doctrine of the forms is that they are causal. Forms are not the thing, but the concept of the thing. I have a glass bowl on my dresser. It is one-of-a-kind; it was hand blown. Even if I tried to recreate it using exactly the same colors and technique, the bowl would never be exactly the same: I would not, could not, blow in exactly the same way I did the first time, or turn the glass in the over at exactly the same rate of speed and continuity. The fire would never be exactly the same in heat and height of the flames. Yet both would be bowls, and would be recognizable as bowls. In a room of bowls made at that same glass-blowing center, each would be unique in color, shape, style, yet each would be recognizable as a bowl, because of its shape. While each would be a bowl, suitable for use as a bowl, none of them would reach perfection of form; each would be an interpretation of form.

Someday, that bowl will cease to be as it is today. It will get chipped; the color will change. It may get dropped and break into pieces. While it is in the shape of a bowl, it is not a form. Form is never-changing: the idea of the bowl is eternal and static:

But the idea ... is eternal ..., it will never rot or discolor. For Plato, all of material existence (which is changing and decaying) is an imitation of the primordial forms (which are unchanging and stable). The forms cause material things to be what they are.[9]

The second aspect of forms is that the forms give “unity to finite reality”[10] as well as to “disparate reality.”[11] (p 5) We recognize the glass bowl I made, and the other glass bowls, and the soup bowl, cereal bowl, and pasta bowl, in my cabinet all as “bowl” because they all have the quality of “bowlness”; they all participate in the form, the concept, of bowl. We cannot know all

Perhaps hardest to explain is the third aspect of the doctrine of the forms: the forms are what we seek as the highest stage of our existence:

“The third element to the doctrine of the forms is perhaps most important. The forms are not only causal and unitive, but they are the goal or aim (telos) of human existence – the forms are that to which we aspire.[12]

Dr. Thomas Williams, who is currently a professor of philosophy at University of South Florida, has phrased all this in simple terms. At a lecture on Augustine and the Platonists to students of the Freshman Program of Christ College, the Honors College of Valparaiso University, he stated:

Plato himself liked to talk about how sensible things are shadowy copies of the true realities, which he called “the Forms.” The Forms are the eternal and unchanging ideal blueprints of things, the perfect intelligible paradigms. For example, the Form of Beauty is Beauty Itself: an intelligible reality that is perfectly, unchangingly, unendingly, unstintingly, unambiguously beautiful. Sensible things can be beautiful too, but only to the extent that they “participate in” or “share in” or “try to be like” the Form of Beauty. And of course Plato emphasizes that sensible things never completely live up to the Forms.[13]

Now, of course, Dr. Williams was speaking to Freshman who may not have had a background in philosophy or theology, and his description is simple. But here we can use it to help us understand just what Plato means by forms, and how Augustine uses them in ON THE GREATNESS OF THE SOUL.

[1] Boersma, p. 1

[2] Boersma, p 1

[3] Boersma, p 1

[4] Boersma, p 1

[5] Boersma p 4

[6] Augustine, Soul. 33.76

[7] Boersma p 5

[8] Boersma p 5

[9] Boersma, p 5

[10] Boersma, p 5

[11] Boersma, p. 6

[12] Boersma p 6