I knew from the time that I got up on Thursday that it was going to be a warm day. All of my windows needed to be opened for me to be comfortable during yoga so I made sure that I wore shorts and a tank shirt to ride to Philosophy class.
Later that morning I got a call from
a private number that I almost didn’t answer because I’d thought it might be
one of the usual bill collectors. It turned out to be Cheryl from the Toronto
Housing Allowance Program. She told me that they’d reviewed my appeal for the
allowance and that I was now being considered. She warned me that she wasn’t
making any promises but that it looked like I would be approved, in which case
I would receive a retroactive deposit for three months starting on September 18th.
I guess she was calling me to let me know that my case was over her head now
and so she couldn’t officially guarantee that I’d get the allowance, but it
looks like I will. That’s good news.
I was a few pages behind on my
reading so I brought my laptop and sat at the study bar outside the classroom.
By the time the lecture theatre cleared I only had five pages left. It turned
out though that I wasn’t as behind as Professor Black. Her lecture was still
covering our first reading.
Augustine had become increasingly
disenchanted with Manichean dualism with its equal good and bad deities that
were material in some sense, whether solid or not. By book seven of his
autobiographical confessions he has discovered Platonism through the Neo
Platonists, Plotinus and his student, Porphyry. They helped him see the true
nature of evil and that god and god’s abode were not material. Augustine saw
that the metaphysical expression of Platonism mapped onto the Trinitarian
theory of Christianity. The trinity was not three distinct substances. From
Plotinus, Augustine established the hierarchy of:
Highest – One –
Good
/ Intellect \
- Being |
\ Soul – Holy Spirit /
There is a disanalogy here though as
Augustine corrects the Neoplatonic view. He develops a theory of illumination,
with god as the inner light and Christ as the inner teacher.
But the NeoPlatonists were not
always friendly with Christianity. Augustine refuted their belief in spiritual
beings. But Augustine liked NeoPlatonism because it was monotheistic and it put
the One and the Good above Being. Augustine identifies the One and Good with
god but concludes that it is Being in itself.
When Moses encountered the burning
bush he asked for god’s name. Some see god’s response as a refusal to answer,
but Augustine believed that, “I am who am” was telling Moses that god is pure
being. There is a crucial connection between Being and Goodness, which rules
out Manicheanism because it believed that evil has being.
If god is Being then it must be the
source and cause of all other beings. Effects resemble causes, so creatures resemble
god with being and goodness. In the world, everything is subject to corruption,
as in decay.
To illustrate the experience of
decay she told us that her cat killed a couple of chipmunks.
Everything with being also has a
principal of non-being. If it had existence from itself it would have the
maximum of being and would not decay. If something exists then it must be good.
If an evil being exists it cannot be purely evil and so Manichean dualism is
impossible.
She says that the slugs in her garden
do no good. A nice person is better than a slug but Augustine says there is
beauty in the whole but only god can see all of existence at once because god
exists outside of the picture. One tile in a mosaic may have an ugly colour but
contributes to the overall beauty.
Evil is a kind of non-being but not
Nothing and not an illusion. Evil is privation of good – relative non-being.
Everything that is not god has a certain privation. Evil still can’t be a
separate principal.
Augustine became a Manichean motivated
by worry that by making god the ultimate cause it would also be the cause of
evil. If evil is just privation then god is not responsible. Something is only
evil relative to you but good as part of the whole. God couldn’t make
everything perfect because then it would be co-equal.
Book 11 of the Confessions deals
with Time and Eternity. Augustine analyzes the opening lines from the Bible in
an inner dialogue with himself. His approach here is phenomenological.
“In the beginning …” deals with creation
in time in temporal language. God the creator is eternal and unchangeable. What
is the relation between time and eternity? Time and eternity are both always in
the present. Eternity as the eternal present, an unending present outside of
time is central for Augustine.
I rode home along Queen. It was nice
to finally be free of the busses. On the way I stopped to buy bananas and
yogourt at Freshco.
That night I watched an episode of
Maverick that guest starred Kathleen Crowley. She’s been in several episodes
either as different characters in recurring roles. She was a beautiful actress
with an interesting style and voice.
I tracked down and downloaded the
few literary works in the syllabus that weren’t in the edition of the Norton
Anthology that I’d downloaded earlier.
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