ABSTRACT
These two quotations announce the leitmotif in Augustine’s thinking-and in contemporary Greek theology. Both had learned from the Platonists-but it is not, as a Platonist would say, god and the world or god in man whom they desire to know. It is God and man. Like the Platonists, they sought to return to God, but to the God who made man as man. Still, there are notable differences between East and West. Augustine grew through crises and arrived at dearly-bought insight into man’s nature and relation with God, which is remote, for example, from Origen’s confidence that in the fullness of time God will ‘restore’ all men and become all in all. His background is in Latin Christianity; to him man is created ‘for God’, yet by himself he is but dust and ashes (cf. Aug. Conf. I 6) bound to nothingness and sin. God has made man but he is created of nothing-a contrast that is inherent in man’s nature and one that lies behind Augustine’s ideas about the relation between faith and thought, intellect and will, grace and predestination, love of God and love of self. Since man in himself is nothing, yet assigned to God, he can only know God’s nature or work in the world through ‘signs’ or ‘traces’. In Augustine this imparts a special character to the general thinking in symbols of the time. This world is a reflection of a higher one; the physical world can only be understood from the spiritual one, but it is understood indirectly through the direction of the will and the reading by the intellect of God’s ‘signs’. Augustine had an enormous talent for absorbing; elements in his thinking come from elsewhere, and-on the basis of the preceding chapters-a detailed demonstration of this should be unnecessary. His originality lies in the whole he constructs, which has been of immeasurable importance for the view of man and the concept of God in the West. The whole is not present from the outset. After the first crises and Augustine’s conversion, the goal is constantly to become perfect in God. First the main emphasis is on knowing God by knowing oneself and by faith. Later the main theme is restlessness of the heart and yearning for repose. Faith and
grace, grace and predestination become the central concepts in this later phase. The standard theological questions of the time-the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation-acquire a special ring in Augustine: the Trinity is a symbolic expression of existence altogether; the Incarnation is God’s direct intervention in human life. Thereby both acquire an importance going beyond Origen’s intellectualism and the formal dogmatics of the Councils.
