Augustine on: How the Christian faith deals with reason

Saint Augustine of Hippo,

The authority of Scripture he held in even higher esteem than that of the Church. Because the Scriptures are inspired by God, they are completely free from error and are therefore to be believed absolutely.2 Such a view of authority would seem to imply that reason has no role to play in the justification of belief, and sometimes Augustine gives that impression. He asserts that one must first believe before he can know.3 He was fond of quoting Isaiah 7: 9 in the Septuagint version: “Unless you believe you shall not understand.” The fundamental principle of the Augustinian tradition throughout the Middle Ages was fides quaerens intellectum: faith seeking understanding.

But certain statements of Augustine make it clear that he was not an unqualified authoritarian. He maintained that authority and reason cooperate in bringing a person to faith. Authority demands belief and prepares man for reason, and reason in turn leads to understanding and knowledge. But at the same time, reason is not entirely absent from authority, for one has to consider whom to believe, and the highest authority belongs to clearly known truth; that is to say, the truth, when it is clearly known, has the highest claim to authority because it demands our assent.

According to Augustine, it is our duty to consider what men or what books we ought to believe in order to worship God rightly. Gerhard Strauss in his book on Augustine’s doctrine of Scripture explains that although for Augustine Scripture is absolutely authoritative and inerrant in itself, it does not carry credibility in itself—that is, people will not automatically accept its authority upon hearing it. Therefore, there must be certain signs (indicia) of credibility that make its authority evident. On the basis of these signs, we can believe that the Scripture is the authoritative Word of God, and submit to its authority. The principal signs adduced by Augustine on behalf of the authority of Scripture are miracle and prophecy. Though many religions boast of revelations showing the way of salvation, only the Scriptures have the support of miracle and prophecy, which prove it to be the true authority.

Thus, Augustine’s authoritarianism would seem to be drastically qualified. Perhaps Augustine’s apparent inconsistency is best explained by the medieval understanding of authority. In the early church, authority (auctoritas) included not just theological truths, but the whole tradition of past knowledge. The relationship between authority and reason was not the same as that between faith and reason. Rather it was the relationship between all past knowledge and present-day understanding. Knowledge of the past was simply accepted on the basis of authority. This seems to have been Augustine’s attitude. He distinguishes between what is seen to be true and what is believed to be true. We see that something is true by either physical perception or rational demonstration.

We believe that something is true on the basis of the testimony of others. Hence, with regard to miracle and prophecy, Augustine says that the trustworthiness of reports of either past or future events must be believed, not known by the intelligence. Elsewhere he declares that one should believe in God because belief in him is taught in the books of men who have left their testimony in writing that they lived with the Son of God and saw things that could not have happened if there were no God. Then he concludes that one must believe before he can know. Since for Augustine the historical evidence for miracle and prophecy lay in the past, it was in the realm of authority, not reason. Today, on the other hand, we would say that such a procedure would be an attempt to provide a rational foundation for authority via historical apologetics.

Now the obvious question at this point is, Why accept the authority of the writers of the past, whether they be the classical writers or the authors of Scripture? Clearly, if Augustine is to avoid circular reasoning, he cannot say that we should accept the authority of the evangelists because of the authority of Scripture, for it is the evangelists’ testimony to miracle and prophecy that is supposed to make evident the authority of Scripture.

So Augustine must either come up with some reason to accept the evangelists’ testimony as reliable, or abandon this historically oriented approach. Since he lacked the historical method, the first alternative was not open to him. Therefore, he chose the second. He frankly admits that the books containing the story of Christ belong to an ancient history that anyone may refuse to believe. Therefore, he turns to the present miracle of the Church as the basis for accepting the authority of Scripture. He saw the very existence of the mighty and universal Church as an overwhelming sign that the Scriptures are true and divine.

Now notice that Augustine is not basing the authority of Scripture on the authority of the Church, for he held the Scripture’s authority to exceed even that of the Church. Rather, his appeal is still to the sign of miracle, not indeed the gospel miracles, which are irretrievably removed in the past, but the present and evident miracle of the Church.

In The City of God he states that even if the unbeliever rejects all biblical miracles, he is still left with one stupendous miracle, which is all one needs, namely, the fact of the whole world believing in Christianity without the benefit of the gospel miracles.4 It’s interesting that, by appealing to a present miracle as the sign of the authority of Scripture, Augustine seems to have implicitly denied authoritarianism, since this sign was not in the past, in the realm of authority where it could only be believed, but in the present, where it could be seen and known. Be that as it may, Augustine’s emphases on biblical authority and signs of credibility were to set the tone for subsequent medieval theology.

Craig, W. L. (1994). Reasonable faith : Christian truth and apologetics (Rev. ed., pp. 17–20). Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books.