Augustine explored many philosophies and religions in his search for true, unchanging happiness, and ultimately found the answer in Christianity.
Augustine believed that what everyone ultimately wants is happiness. If you ask people, “Do you want it?” the answer may vary from one person to the next, but if you ask, “Do you want happiness?” everyone will say yes. From this perspective, people’s different behaviors all had a common goal: happiness. However, happiness is not something that can be achieved consistently. For example, when we eat food to satisfy our appetite, we feel happy for a moment, only to lose that happiness when hunger returns. Given the “debauched life” that Augustine confessed to in his Confessions, the constant cycle of “wants and gratifications” must have been very painful for him, which is why he sought to find “eternal happiness”? From Cicero, through Manichaeism, astrology, and Neoplatonism, to finally settling on Christianity, Augustine’s search for ‘true happiness’ took him through many ideological shifts. The answer was to be found in Christianity, the religion he finally converted to and settled on. Let’s take a look at his quest for ‘true happiness’.
Augustine’s interest in philosophy began at the age of 19 when he read Cicero’s Hortensius, which was also the first book that got him interested in the Bible. It reminded him that happiness does not lie in ‘doing what we want’ but in ‘wanting what is good’. Up until this point, Augustine had been skeptical of human nature, where ‘the ultimate end is happiness’ but always with a ‘fickle mind’, and this book changed his view of happiness. He decided to find happiness in the ‘pursuit of the good’. However, Augustine was not satisfied with Cicero’s Christian ideas: the problem was the ‘existence of evil’. Augustine questioned how evil could be so prevalent in a world created by a good God. He later became fascinated with Manichaeism because it explained the world in terms of two opposing principles: good and evil. Manichaeism understood the human mind’s constant struggle with desire as a struggle between light and darkness, the gods presiding over good and evil. But even after nine years of study, Manichaeism couldn’t solve Augustine’s problem of eternal happiness. After leaving Manichaeism, Augustine continued his quest through a number of disciplines, until he experienced a decisive conversion at the age of 32 that led him to become a Christian.
Augustine’s good and evil
After his conversion to Christianity, Augustine answered his long-standing questions. His explanation was that true happiness can only be attained by meeting God in the afterlife. In his view, no matter how good life is in this life, death is at the end of it. Augustine believed that a life that ends with death cannot be called happy. Furthermore, since death can strike at any time and from any place, life cannot escape the fear of death. For these reasons, he concluded that true happiness is impossible in this life. He argued that anyone who wants happiness wants immortality. The idea is that true happiness can be found in an immortal world after death.
However, the afterlife itself was not in itself a place where humans could enjoy eternal happiness. If it did, then the answer would be to hurry up and die and go to the afterlife. Happiness in the afterlife required virtue in this life, which was based on Christian beliefs. But Augustine didn’t think it was in our power to know what was virtuous and what was vicious. He thought the fall of Rome was due to moral decay, but “virtue” in Greece and Rome at that time was more about “excellence” (arete) than moral. ‘Excellence’ encompassed not only moral and character excellence, but also purely technical things like agriculture (Demeter), war (Ares), music (the Muses), and thievery (Hermes). For example, in Homer’s The Iliad, the brutal love between Paris and Helen, which is responsible for reducing Troy to ashes, is celebrated as virtue because of its ‘excellence in love’. A society based on this ‘excellence’ was too cruel and barbaric for Augustine, who said that humans know virtue and vice through the grace of God. Without divine grace, vices were inevitable. Now let’s look at what he means by virtue.
Virtue and vice are good and evil, and Augustine’s view of the relationship between the two was influenced by Plotinus, who saw evil not as an ‘active reality’ but as a ‘deficiency’ – that is, evil is the absence of good. Plotinus’s ideas provided Augustine with a clue to the question of “why does evil exist?” Specifically, in Christianity, God is perfect, omniscient, and good, but the fact that evil exists in the world leads to what is known as the Epicurean dilemma. The Epicurean dilemma goes like this
“Does God want to eliminate evil but cannot? If so, he is not omnipotent. Does he have the power to eliminate evil but does not? If so, he is malicious. Does he have the power to abolish evil and will to abolish it, then why does evil exist? If he has the power to abolish evil and wills not to abolish it, then why is he called God?”
Augustine explains this dilemma about the existence of evil in terms of human “free will” and “original sin.
Augustine follows Plotinus’ view of evil as a deficiency of the good. Here, deficiency can be understood as the lack of something. Just as darkness is a ‘lack of light’ and a hole in a garment is a ‘lack of clothing’, so darkness and holes certainly exist, but not as things in themselves, but as a deficiency of something else. So, why does a lack of good happen? Augustine says it’s because the fundamental connection between God and humans has been broken, and humans have become alienated from God. The reason for this estrangement is the “free will” that God has granted humans, and while free will in itself is not a bad thing, humans could have chosen to move away from God or to move closer to God. The problem is that we were disconnected from God in the first place. The fundamental damage to the relationship between God and man can be found in the theory of original sin. Humans were originally created as good as God, capable of living in eternal happiness in an immortal world. But when humans freely rejected goodness, they became alienated from God, and evil arose as a deficiency of goodness. This broken connection could not be repaired by humans on their own. Augustine explains that the reason God sent his Son into the world was to reconnect humans with God. Once reconnected, humans could once again enjoy eternal happiness in an immortal world filled with goodness. In other words, the existence of evil was not created by God, but rather a deficiency created by human imperfection in the relationship between God and humans.
Augustine’s philosophical journey led him to understand the existence of evil and to find ultimate happiness in the grace of God. His ideas would later have a profound impact on medieval Christian theology and remain relevant today. Augustine was more than just a thinker; he was a philosopher and theologian who explored true happiness in the relationship between God and man.
