From the conclusion

From the conclusion

An Introduction to Ancient Philosphy, by A.H. Armstrong:

"Love moves the will and so the whole man, as its weight irresistibly carries a body to its natural postion. Therefore living rightly is loving rightly, delighting in and being altogether carried away by the desire of our proper object, which is God."

"And only god by his grace can give us that degree of delight in him which moves our will to choose him freely, love him and seek him in preference to all else; why he moves some and not others to this effective delight in him by which alone  we can be saved is an impenetrable mystery of his justice. (The church found it necessare later, as against distorted and exaggerated statements of Augustine's doctrine, to make very clear that god gives all men enough grace to be saved and that man can aleays refuse god's grace.)  Without this grace we live wrongly because we love wrongly. That is, we enjoy and devote our whole energy to grasping as ends those partial, secondary earhly goods which we should only yuse as means to help us on our way to god. This enjoying as ends what we should only use as means, this perversion of the will, is the essence of sin according to St. Augustine. We can only live rightly if we keep a right order in our love. ' I think that a short and true definition of virtue is: it is the order of true love'. We should desire material goods less than spiritual and treat all created goods, which are transitory, partial, and can never content us, as means to attain god, who alone can satisfy the desire of man's soul completely and finally. In the conception of sin as primarily a wrong direction of desire to a lower good in preference to a higher Augustin is very close to the thought of Plotinus.

9. Love for Augustine is not only the driving force of individual, but also of social life. All societies and communities, he says, are constituted by a common desire. Those who seek the same object necessarily form a society to attain it; and it is the nature of the end which determines the character of the society. The great division of mankind as we have seen is between those who desire their proper end, god, above all else, and those whose desire is perverted so that they choose earthly goods as ends instead of means. And these two groups necessarily form two societies or "cities", which divide the human race between them, the city of god and the earthly city, or city of the devil. "Two loves make these two cities; the love of god makes Jerusalem; the love of the world makes Babylon."  The city of god is in heaven, not on earth, and its citizens here are strangers and pilgrims with no permanent abiding-place. Angels as well as men are its citizens and it includes all the redeemed from the beginning to the end of the world. It does not therefore correspond to the church on earth which nevertheless stands in imperfect life is the representative, and the only representative, of the city of god and is endowed as a whole with supernatural holiness; but many of her members are no true citizens of the city, and there are many at any given moment outside who will be saved and become citizens. The city of god is Created Wisdom (Confessions) everlasting and belonging to the supra-temporal  order. The church is the society through which that supernatural order is made present to us in the manner appropriate to this life of passage and change.

The earthly city of city of the devil has no single kind of society which is its necessary embodiment and realization; but all temporal societies and states are parts of it in so far as they pursue purely worldly ends, power of glory or riches, and do not recognize the true god and subordinate themselves to attaining the ends of his city. If a state turns from the service of the devil and the pursuit of worldly ends and recognized the salvation of man, his attainment of union with god and heavenly citizenship through the church, as the supreme end of human life, it is of course no longer part of the earthly city. And even an evil state, devoted to the service of the devil, can claim a certain degree of obedience from the citizens of the heavenly city who live in it, as long as it commands them nothing contrary to the law of god, because it porvides certain temporal goods, a degree of peace and order above all, which they need in their pilgrimage. The war fare between the two cities which St. Augustine sees dominating the whole couse of human history, is something profounder and more universal than a struggle between church and state (though it may often show itself in that form). It is the conflict between right love and perverted love, between true order and the false order which is really disorder, which lies at te root of human life nad in which every man and every group or community must take sides.

With St. Augustine we end our survey of the philosophy of the ancient world. He makes a good stopping-place, for it is he more than any other one man who forms the link between ancient philosophy and the later thought of Western Christendom. In trying to tell so great a story in so small a space there must necessarily have been many errors and omissions, and a certain amount of disproportion. But the book is only intended to act  as an introduction to the subject and to stimulate the interest of any readers it may have. It will have served its purpose excellently if it moves anyone to do some wider reading on his own account, and above all to read, in the original or in translation, some at least of the works of the greatest of those whose thought I have been trying to describe. If I have managed to persuade anybody that Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus and Augustine are something more than musty historical curiosities who can be left to the attention of specialists with nothing better to do, then I shall have done something well worth doing. After all, we may reject the conclusions of the ancients if we like, but their thought is of sufficiently high quality and has affected that of later ages sufficiently deeply to make it very unwise for us to ignore them completely in makeing our own decisions about what we believe to be true."

A.H.A.




From the conclusion: An Introduction to Ancient Philosphy, by A.H. Armstrong