Summary of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Chapter 19: Augustine and Aquinas
This lecture discusses the contributions of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and how reason and faith, once seamlessly integrated in the Christian/Neoplatonic/Gnostic tradition, became diametrically opposed in the modern worldview.
Augustine was an early Christian theologian who is known for writing the first spiritual autobiography Confessions. Early in life, he was influenced by Manichaeism, which emphasized the struggle between good and evil which he experienced in his own life. His loss of agency came from a sense of being dragged down by lust, and an apparent proclivity to do precisely that which was wrong.
Seeking what he envisioned as a remedy to counteract the darkening world around him, he had a series of transformative insights upon reading Plotinus and Paul. He conjectured that reason is driven by a love of what’s real and good, and what was damaged in him was the capacity to love. The process of ascending the levels of reality then, began with healing one’s ability to love. Therefore, both Neoplatonism and Gnosticism both inevitably depended on the agape afforded by Christianity, thus integrating them together.
According to modern cognitive science, the three components of meaning are: coherence (sense of structure, how intelligible the world seems), significance (a sense of what’s good and valuable in the world), and purpose (a sense that your life is moving towards a destination). These three components can be mapped as follows:
Nomological Order — coherence — brought by Aristotle
Normative Order — significance — brought by Plotinus
Narrative Order — purpose — brought by Christianity
Thus Augustine’s worldview was structured upon these three mutually supporting pillars, combining the best science, spirituality, and personal growth of the time. When the Roman Empire eventually collapsed (in 476 AD), this worldview helped preserve the legacy of the Axial Revolution and its grammar of meaning.
How then, did we eventually lose it?
In 1054, there was the Great Schism between Eastern Orthodox and Catholicism, which resulted much of the Western World losing connection with Neoplatonism and becoming more Aristotelian.
The way in which we read also changed. Before, reading was usually done aloud in a community, and the aim was to open oneself up to being transformed by the text (lectio divina). Afterwards, influenced by Aristotle’s scientific views, reading became increasingly about propositions and internal cohesion within the language. Instead of conforming to the external world, knowing became more about coherence of dialogue.
As Aristotle’s thinking was rediscovered in the West, people struggled to integrate it into the Christian worldview, as it dealt with questions of the natural world rather than the divine. Aquinas stepped in to try to save the axial worldview by reformulating the two worlds mythology. According to Aquinas, reason and science are about finding real truths of the natural world, but there is a world above that (the supernatural) which is only accessible by faith. What bridges the gap is love, which moves the will to assert what it can’t know through reason alone.
If we compare this worldview with what preceded it, we may notice that science and spirituality are becoming increasingly separated, and faith is becoming more opposed to reason, rather than something that drives it. As the power of reason increases through science, the supernatural world inevitably starts to seem less real to us, and ultimately less viable.