CONCLUSION

Chapter 1

THE TEACHINGS WE HAVE DEVELOPED
ARE ILLUSTRATED BY ST. AUGUSTINE'S ANALYSIS
OF THE MATERIALISTS' ERROR

1363. St. Augustine's analysis of the materialists' error shows that error is simply a privation of knowledge. Thus, when the materialist tells himself that his soul is body, he does not know this, he only conjectures it. (242)

We must distinguish the action of the mind when it really knows that a thing is what it is from its action when it conjectures that the thing is what it is. The second action of conjecturing, believing or guessing that a thing is what it is, without knowing, is subject to error. When a thing is not what we fancy it is, we have a false opinion; in other words we err.

1364. It is extremely important that we investigate `how a mind which has no knowledge of a proposition can nevertheless assent to the proposition by telling itself that it knows what it does not know'. Furthermore, not only does the erroneous mind say it knows what it does not know, it affirms and conjectures the opposite of what it knows. Materialists are a case in point. St. Augustine claims that the spiritual nature of the soul is naturally known to every human being through the evidence of consciousness.(243) We must ask therefore: `How does a human being say that he has a corporeal soul when he knows through his own consciousness that his soul is spiritual?'

1365. The materialist is subject to contradiction: 1. on the one hand he has an intimate knowledge of his own soul as living, feeling and understanding; 2. on the other, he guesses that his soul is body. This contradiction can be explained only by distinguishing the two functions of the soul: 1. apprehension of truth, the source of direct knowledge, and 2. reflection, the source of reflective knowledge. We know the intellective, spiritual nature of our soul by means of direct knowledge provided by our intimate feeling and our consciousness. But we disregard this intimate knowledge, and with another act of our understanding investigate what the soul is (as if we did not know), and declare it material, thereby rejecting the true knowledge we have.

1366. St. Augustine then presents the following difficulty: `Why are we commanded to know ourselves when the soul naturally knows itself?' He answers: `The precept requires the soul to think about itself in order to know itself. Not knowing oneself is different from not thinking about oneself'; we can know ourselves without thinking about ourselves, that is, without actually reflecting on what we know.(244)

1367. But how can reflection be so disturbed as to make us guess that the soul is corporeal? According to St. Augustine, we must note that `those who are of the opinion that the soul is corporeal do not err simply because they fail to include the mind in their concept of the soul, but rather because they (arbitrarily) add to the concept the things without which they are incapable of conceiving any nature; they consider that thinking without corporeal images means they are thinking of nothing'.(245)

1368. How is it that they can think only of bodies, and that whenever they think of something, only corporeal images present themselves? Because when we direct our understanding to reflect on anything, we need to know how to direct it carefully to the object of its search. If we do not know how to direct our understanding and reflection to what they seek, our reflection will latch on to something different, take it for the thing itself and so exchange one thing for another. Now, in doing this, the understanding is principally guided by the will and its habits.

What therefore makes the understanding, or better, the materialists' reflection, seek the spirit but find only bodies, that is, find only a corporeal soul while studiously seeking to perceive a spiritual soul? St. Augustine answers that this occurs because materialists have practised directing their reflection only on bodies; their will is occupied and attracted solely by bodies. Hence they have never learnt the way to reach the spirit. The spirit is not discovered in the same way as bodies which are outside of us and discovered with external observation. The spirit is discovered in the opposite way, that is, by turning within and remaining inside ourselves.

`This explains,' says St. Augustine, `why the mind does not seek itself as if it were absent from itself. Nothing is closer to thought than the mind; nothing is more present to the mind than the mind itself, and nothing could be more in the mind than the mind itself. But the mind, once accustomed to feelable (corporeal) things, on which it thinks lovingly, is unable to keep itself to itself without the images of these things. Hence, the shame of its error; the mind is no longer able to separate itself from the images of felt things and see itself alone. In some extraordinary way these things attach themselves to it with the adhesion proper to love. This is the mind's stain. Although it strives to think solely of itself, it conjectures that it is part of that without which it cannot think of itself.' (246)

1369. We see therefore that the confusion of ideas which error presupposes comes from the evil disposition of the will. The will is unable to move the understanding to make the necessary distinctions, and reaches its conclusions while ideas are still confused. The holy Doctor continues, examining acutely all the strands of the materialists' error: `When our mind is commanded to know itself, it does not pursue its investigation as if it were separated from itself, but separates what it has added to itself. The mind is more interior than feelable things, which are clearly outside, and even more interior than their images, which nevertheless are in a part of the soul and also present in animals, even though animals are without intelligence, which belongs to the mind alone. Although the mind is internal, it comes out of itself in some way when it extends its affection of love to these traces of the many things it has understood. — The mind can therefore know itself, and need not seek itself as if it were absent. Let the mind fix the attention of the will, by which it ranges over other things, upon itself, and think itself.(247) The mind will see that there never was a time when it did not know itself;(248) but it loved something else which it CONFUSED with itself and in a certain way added to itself. Thus, it imagined that the many things it gathered together were one, although they were different.'(249)

1370. St. Augustine suggests two ways for bringing the materialists' vague and errant reflection back to the right road where it may find and reconsider itself, that is, its spirit. First, they must be taught to note these things about which all humans agree and disagree, and thus be led to see that certainty is proper to the former, and uncertainty proper to the latter.(250) Second, they must be taught to note those things which cannot possibly be doubted, and those which can be doubted; they must be shown that error has to be sought in doubtful things gratuitously added to the truth; error consists in this addition.(251)
We see therefore how St. Augustine acknowledges common sense and the necessity of intellective perception as two means of correcting wayward, errant reflection.

1371. From all this we can also infer that persuasion in the case of error is never as firm as persuasion in truth, and never goes long unaccompanied by hesitation and doubt. Hence a person who has often tried to confirm his persuasion in error, and by experience sees that he wastes his time in fruitless effort, finally opts to believe that firm persuasion is impossible, and comes to rest in abject scepticism.

I cannot not find a better example to demonstrate the inconstancy of persuasion of error than St. Augustine's observation on the divergence or mutability of opinions about those matters in which precisely materialists err.

`The command that the soul should know itself means simply that it must be certain that it is only those things of which it is certain, and none of those things about which it is uncertain. It thinks uncertainly that it is fire or air or any other body whatsoever. And it cannot think what it is in the same way that it thinks what it is not. (252)

By means of the images of its phantasy, the soul thinks all these things: fire, air, this or that body, a part or composition and temperament, and says it is only one or other, but not all of them. But if it were one of them, it would certainly think this thing in a way different from all the others, that is, not through some imaginary fabrication (as we imagine absent things which are touched with our bodily sense or anything similar) but with an interior, true, unsimulated presence(253) — nothing could be more present to itself than itself — like thinking it lives, remembers, understands and wills. It knows all these things within itself without imagining them outside itself and touched by the sense as all corporeal things are touched. If the soul takes nothing at all from these thoughts in order to add it deceptively to itself and believe it is itself, then all that is left to the soul in these thoughts (stripped of their external objects) is the soul itself.'(254)

Notes

(242) `When, for example, the mind thinks itself to be air, it thinks that air understands; it knows however that it understands. It does not KNOW, but THINKS that it is air' (De Trinit., 10).

(243) In Book 10 of De Trinitate St. Augustine shows at length that every human being, through the evidence of his own consciousness, knows that he lives, feels and understands, and knowing this, knows his own soul, the subject, which lives, feels and understands. Error arises when something heterogeneous is added to this knowledge. The heterogeneous element is not supplied by the internal evidence of consciousness but by the external senses, which perceive only bodies, not the soul. Thus St.Augustine accepts internal observation as a legitimate source of knowledge of the soul.

(244) `I believe we are commanded to know ourselves in order that we may think about ourselves. KNOWING ourselves is different from THINKING about ourselves' (De Trinit., 10, 5).

(245) De Trinit., 10, 7.

(246) De Trinit., 10, 7, 8. — We are born with this kind of stain, which increases with wrong use. It is a fact that the rational part of human beings is uncertain in its movement, while the senses are extremely active from infancy and, I would say, engage the whole person before reason has been able to control them.

(247) The mind `determines within itself the THE WILL'S ATTENTION by which it ranges through other things, and thinks of itself'.

(248) With direct knowledge void of reflection.

(249) De Trinit., 10, 8.

(250) `Let (the mind) separate what it IMAGINES itself to be from what it KNOWS itself to be. It will be left with what cannot be doubted, even by those who have thought the mind to be some kind of body. Not every mind thinks itself to be air; some minds consider themselves fire, others the brain, others another body, and others something else, as I noted above. But THEY ALL know that they understand, and that they exist and live. They refer their understanding to that which they understand, but their being and living to themselves, etc.' (De Trin., 10, 10).

(251) `Because we are dealing with the nature of the mind, we must omit from our consideration every notion received externally through our bodily senses, and diligently consider the things which, as we have seen, every mind knows about itself as certain. People have doubted whether air is the force of life or the power of remembering, understanding, willing, thinking, knowing, judging; or whether fire, brain, blood, atoms, or a fifth element of some kind of body (besides the usual four) has this power, or whether the composition and temperament of our flesh is able to effect all these things — different people affirm different things. But who doubts that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks and knows? — The mind therefore is none of these material things. The sum total of what the mind is commanded to know is that it is certain that it is none of those things of which it is uncertain; and that it is certain that it is only that which it is certain that it is' (De Trin., 10, 10).

(252) The distinction between what is subjective and what is objective and extrasubjective is clearly visible in this discourse. As we have seen, confusing these elements is the origin of all materialism, (cf. OT, 988 ss.).

(253) Once again we see how according to St. Augustine only interior observation can give us accurate ideas of the soul.

(254) De Trin., 10, 10.