What goodness is: order as imitation of unity in Augustine.

Thompson, Samantha E.

I

AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO famously argues that evil is privatio boni, a privation of good. (1) There is no such thing as independently existing evil, he insists. Rather, evil things are "evil goods," good things which have become corrupted. (2) If a thing were to lose all its goodness it would cease to exist, for only in this state would it have nothing left to lose. Evil is therefore also associated with a lack of existence (or, as it is often translated, being). Evil things are (esse) to a lesser extent than good things, and the worse they get, the less they exist. In Augustine's view, to be good is to be. (3)

Augustine knew that his Manichean opponents had difficulty understanding his claim that evil does not, strictly speaking, exist. He cites one critic who mockingly suggests that people who believe in the nonreality of evil should try picking up a scorpion; they would quickly experience an emphatically palpable evil. (4) Interestingly, some modern commentators seem to have similar difficulties. Some argue that Augustine's privation theory of evil is too abstract or anaemic to deal with the harsh and very real presence of evil as it is actually experienced. (5) Others dismiss it as a uselessly arcane, overly subtle, or even intellectually dishonest conceptual sleight of hand. (6)

The ways in which Augustine's metaphysics of evil can be misconstrued are legion; here I try to deal with only one of them. The real root of the misunderstanding between Augustine and some of his critics is perhaps not so much the idea of evil as privation, as it is the good which is lacking in an object so deprived. Augustine's implication that there are degrees of goodness and, even more mysteriously, of existence, makes it tempting to ascribe to him views he does not hold: that, for instance, goodness is either a conceptual abstraction (contrived mainly for the purpose of asserting that evil is not substantial) with no obvious correspondence to the world of our experience; or, that it is a featureless "stuff" of which things may have greater or lesser amounts and which God, the source of this stuff, injects into things. (7) Although Augustine's metaphorical language helps to encourage especially the latter misconception, it is, as we will shortly see, nevertheless false that he conceives of goodness (or existence) as a kind of mouldable substance poured out by God, still less that he thinks God makes the world out of his own goodness or substance. What, then, is this goodness, this being, that is lacking when a thing becomes evil?

My aim here is to answer this question while clarifying how apparently amorphous abstractions such as goodness and existence translate for Augustine into the concrete world we know. I argue that order (ordo) is the pivotal concept for doing so. (8) As Augustine says (somewhat obscurely in its context in De moribus Manichaeorum), "what is corrupted is actually perverted; and what is perverted is deprived of order, and order is good." (9) Here, as we will see, Augustine is not saying that order happens to be one good among others, but that what good (or at least created good) is, is order.

While it may be difficult for us to conceive of a lack of good, it is far easier to conceive of a lack of order. In many ways, the idea of order is the keystone of Augustine's philosophy. It unifies and renders intelligible (and certainly more accessible for us) not only Augustine's statements about evil, but also his broader claims that everything that is not God depends on God for its existence.

II

Augustine's Dualism. Throughout his works, Augustine uses a variety of metaphors to depict the relationship between particular goods and God, the kind of relationship in which privatio boni can occur. All these analogies describe situations wherein one thing depends for sustenance on an originating source: as the dependent thing becomes separated from that source, it is diminished. A living body will wither if starved of food; (10) a fountain will dry up if separated from its source; (11) things grow cold if moved away from a fire; (12) and (perhaps his favorite) what is illuminated dims when blocked from the source of illumination. (13) Although Augustine's metaphorical identification of God as the source of other goods usefully schematizes a dependent relationship, the analogy quickly breaks down in an important way. As we will now see, for Augustine, God is not a member of the world, existing alongside those things which he nourishes.

The heart of Augustine's thought, the principle as fundamental to it as the dualism of good and evil is to the Manichean system, is the distinction between creature and creator. (14) In his view, there are fundamentally only two kinds of existing (good) things. There is God, the

   one good which is good supremely and in itself, and not by the
   participation [participatione] of any good, but by its own nature
   and essence [propria natura et essentia]; and another good which
   is good by participation, and by having something [bestowed]
   [habendo]. Thus it has its being as good from the supreme good,
   which, however, is abiding and loses nothing. This second kind of
   good is called a creature [creaturam], which is liable to hurt
   through falling away. (15)

This passage captures Augustine's basic metaphysics and also a set of foundational claims which at first appear difficult to reconcile when we try to outline how exactly creation depends on God. Here Augustine reiterates the point of his relational analogies, that creation receives something from God, namely goodness (his specific language here is that of Platonic participation; we will address this in more detail later on). However, he also goes beyond that metaphor and asserts that while creation is dependent, God is not. God is only a source, never a recipient. Even though he is the source of creation's good, he gives it nothing of his own unique goodness or being but remains entirely in himself and loses nothing. As Augustine says more forcefully elsewhere: "all other good things derive their origin from him but are not part of him"; (16) "he [gives] being but not the highest being, as he himself is"; (17) he does not "give birth to [creatures] out of himself." (18) Creation, in other words, is not made out of God. Yet even in his qualifications, Augustine is hinting how creation depends on God, even while it receives nothing of his substance. What creation receives from God is not God-stuff, but a likeness of it: (19) creation, like its creator, both exists and is good, and has these features precisely because it comes from its creator, who is characterized by them (it "has its being as good from the supreme good"). So although creation is not, like God, the highest kind of good, it "approximates" that good as Augustine says elsewhere. (20)

This principle--that all things "imitate [imitamenta sint]" God (21)--will underpin the following discussion, but by extension so will its apparent opposite: that God and his creation are also unlike. In fact, a vast gulf separates God from his creation, as Augustine makes clear throughout his works. (22) "All the good things that God has made are very good, but they are not good in the same way that God is good." (23) "The way in which [God] exists differs totally from that in which these things that are made exist." (24) There is, then, a qualitative difference between God and creation. It is not simply that God is good on an order of magnitude which dwarfs the goodness of creation; rather, he is good in a different kind of way. He exists in a different kind of way. To understand how these unlike goods are yet alike is to appreciate how creation depends on God.

It is very important that Augustine does not arbitrarily define two types of goods. Rather, he thinks he can point to two such objects as have just been described--two things that exist in very different ways, and yet are somehow alike--from within the bounds of ordinary human experience. As we will now see, he does this by identifying two realities with correspondingly very different susceptibilities to change. One of these--the world around us, including ourselves--is changeable (and always changing), and the other, which he identifies as God, is unchangeable (and unchanging). In fact, so different are God and creation in this respect that their changeability (or lack of it) is definitive: "[those natures] which are changeable in some way are called creatures; that which is unchangeable is called creator." (25) The question of how creation depends on God can therefore not only be rephrased as "how does God give creation its existence and goodness if he does not give it some of his being and goodness?" or even "what does it mean to say that creation's goodness and being is like God's, yet vastly different?" but also: "how can a changeable thing be like an unchanging one?" This is where order will become the pivotal idea: Augustine thinks that the orderliness of changeable things is the way that they imitate their unchanging creator. We will begin, then, not with the dependent similarity of creation to its creator but with its dissimilarity with respect to change--a gap which, we will find, will be bridged by order.

III

Change versus the Unchangeable: What it Means to Exist. Everything in the world is always changing, Augustine claims. To see this, we need to appreciate what he means by change (mutatio). Change is more than the mutation of form over time or the shifting of position through space. Rather, things change merely by occupying space and time. An object with spatial dimension, for example, is spread out over space and is therefore different at one spatial point than it is at another--that is, it changes from one point to another. (26) This extension remains however much changeable things are broken apart. Such things are infinitely divisible: no matter how finely physical things, for example, are divided up, those very divisions will have "a right and a left, a top and a bottom, a near side and farther side, ends and middle ... these parts are present in any material object, however tiny." (27) Likewise, anything which moves through time is similarly spread out, but moment by moment, at no time present all at once. (28)

For Augustine, this extension through time or space means that a changeable thing is always radically incomplete. At any point within its boundaries, it lacks most of what it has and will have in its totality: it will always be smaller in the part than in the whole since it is inherently a multiplicity. A physical object "must have one of its countless parts here and another there, and however large a body might be or however small a particle might be, it occupies an area of place and fills that same place so that it is whole in no part of it." (29) The same point can be made about temporal extension; temporal things are like phrases of poetry: the whole of what they are--their "meaning"--is not found in a single syllable (that is, moment) but only in the whole of the time they take up. (30) Any changeable thing, then, is never fully present all at once. It is never "truly and simply one." (31)

The lack of true unity or oneness displayed by changing things leads Augustine to what may seem an unwarranted conclusion: changing things do not fully exist. They both are and are not. (32) Change is a kind of constant dying away into nothingness, since mutation over time and space causes one state of affairs to dissolve, to be replaced by another which gives way to yet another. "Anything at all, no matter how distinguished or excellent, if it is changeable, truly is not. After all, no real, true being is found where nonbeing is also found. Whatever can change, in fact, once changed, is not what is was; if it is not what is was, a kind of death has taken place; something that was there has been destroyed and is not"; (33) "every change causes that which was, to cease to be." (34) Augustine regards this constant dying away into nothingness as evidence that changeable things must be creatures, things that are made. By changing, things demonstrate that they come from nihil, the nothingness out of which God creates the world, (35) not in the sense that he fashions it from a formless substance called "nothing," (36) but in the sense that before (so to speak) this act of creation nothing (neither space nor time itself) existed except God. (37)

Augustine's claim here--that everything within the realm of our everyday experience, including ourselves, does not fully exist--needs to be understood in the context of what he thinks does exist fully: "that truly exists which endures unchangeably. "(38) Augustine associates existence with a tendency not to change. He also thinks that there is a reality like this, and that he can, to a certain extent, introduce his readers to it: "When the soul understands something which exists ever the same, it without doubt understands God, and he is Truth [veritas]"; (39) "Wherever I found truth, there I found my God, truth itself." (40) To find out what "truth" is like is to find out what God is like.

Why should truth be identified with God? And in what sense does truth, or God, exist differently and uniquely from the ordinary but changeable things we are accustomed to describe as existing? In fact, in what sense does truth exist at all in the sense in which we usually use the word "exist"? Answering these questions will summarize for us Augustine's conception of God in such a way that we can readily compare and contrast God's existence to creation's existence.

IV

God as the Truth. Augustine's claim that "God is truth" is neither equivalent to the claim that it is merely true that God exists, nor to the claim that God is a truth. Rather, as the Platonists showed Augustine (and as he consequently tries to show as well, most notably in De libero arbitrio and De vera religione, but also in sections of De diversis quaestionibus oetaginta tribus), Truth itself (as I shall now render it to distinguish it from particular truths) is not a proposition, but something which exists just as surely as physical objects in the world of ordinary experience exist--in fact even more so, for it exists in a different and yet superior way than the world. Thus, to identify God with Truth is not to identify him with either a human construct or an artificial abstraction. For Augustine there is nothing more solid (so to speak) than Truth.

In the Confessiones, Augustine gives an outline of a sort of program or "inquiry by stages" by which the Platonists advised him he might discover truth, or God, for himself. (41) Encouraged by the Platonic books, he writes,

   I had been trying to understand how it was possible for me to
   appreciate the beauty of material things ... and why the power to
   make sound judgments [integre ... iudicanti] about changeable
   matters was readily available to me, so that I could say, "This
   thing ought to be like this, but that other different"; and in
   seeking the reason why I was able to judge as I did, I realized
   that above my changeable mind [supra mentem meam conmutabilem]
   soared the real, unchangeable Truth, which is eternal. (42)

The key to this passage, and to Augustine's identification of God with Truth, is his claim that in Truth he finds something "above" his mind. (43) In other works which follow along the lines summarized here, he stipulates that if we first identify the most superior thing in the world, and then find something superior to that, then that thing is what we ought to acknowledge as "God." (44) Roughly speaking, then, Augustine's argument about the superiority of truth advances in two parts. First, he establishes reason (ratio; in other works, the mind, mens) as the highest aspect of creation. Second, he establishes that there is indeed something superior to reason, and it is Truth. Given the previous stipulation, we must then admit that Truth is God.

To establish reason (or the reasoning mind) as the highest element in creation, Augustine places it in an overall hierarchy of superiority. Intuitively we know that those creatures who can reason (like human beings) are superior to those that are merely able to use their physical senses (like animals), to those that merely live (like plants), and certainly to those that simply exist without living, sensing or reasoning. (45) This is why animals may be tamed and trained by human beings, and not the other way around. (46) Reason is also, therefore, the most superior aspect of the human being himself, surmounting his capacity to sense the visible world.

To demonstrate this more precisely, Augustine points out that the senses cannot evaluate themselves. They gather data, but reason sorts it out and "judges" the sensations gathered through the senses. (47) It is reason, for instance, that realizes that an oar dipped in water is not actually broken but only appears so. (48) In De vera religione, Augustine accords judgment a decisive role in defining reason's relationship to the rest of reality, including truth. He first defines judging by distinguishing it from knowing. To know (cognoscere) something is to recognize that something is a certain way; to judge (iudicare) something involves the recognition that a thing can be different than it is: it is only this capacity for comparison and appraisal that leads to the ability to say "ought," "should," "was," or "will be." (49) Augustine then asserts that whatever judges stands above that which it judges, so that "what judges is superior to [praestantiorem esse] what is judged." (50) The implication for reason is that "if rational life judges by itself alone, then there is nothing more excellent" (51)--which is crucial because Augustine's arguments about reason begin with the supposition that the most excellent thing of all deserves to be called "God." But as Augustine next demonstrates, reason cannot judge "by itself alone"; in fact, it is far from self-sufficient. If nothing else, this is shown by the fact that reason functions better at some times than at others and in some people better than in others. (52) The question is, with respect to what does reason succeed or fail?

Sometimes, the answer seems simple: reason compares sensory states of affairs (the oar optically bent in water versus the reality of the straight oar). But reason does not merely compare one sensible state of affairs to another. Certain kinds of judgments we make about the world are not actually based on anything that can be received through the senses. When making these judgments correctly, we seem to be able to evaluate our sensory data by referring to invisible standards "seen" only by the mind, that is, by reason. Augustine calls these standards "truths." Throughout his works his favourite examples of such truths are drawn from three areas, which we might somewhat anachronistically label as mathematics, aesthetics, and morality. Whether the judgments in question concern the answers to arithmetical sums, (53) the relative perfection of a geometrical shapes in the world, (54) the beauty of a physical object, (55) or the goodness of a good law (56) or a good man, (57) Augustine thinks that judgments made about number, beauty, goodness, or virtue can be "sound" (made integre, that is, correctly). They are not, in other words, a matter of opinion. If someone cannot see the true right answer to a sum, there is something objectively wrong with his judgment. Again, in making such judgments we are comparing sensible things to standards of number, beauty, and goodness which are themselves not present to the senses but only to the mind. (58)

Here we approach the crux of the above passage from the Confessiones, in which Augustine refers to the decisive Platonic argument which showed him who or what God is. In apprehending these standards (or truths), reason has encountered a ceiling past which it has no right (or, for that matter, ability) to exercise its power of judgment. Reason can no longer give explanations or arguments for what it asserts. It has reached the irreducible limits of explanation which form the basic and unquestionable elements of thought: it cannot judge these elements because they are that by which it judges. We saw earlier that judging something assumes the possibility that the thing can fail to live up to some standard; it involves the ability to say that something ought to be a certain way. In contrast, when reason encounters truth, it "simply recognizes that it is so." "No one can say why these intelligible things should be as they are; and no one in his sober senses should say that they ought to be as they are, as if they could be otherwise." (59) If the truth were inferior to us,

   we would make judgments about it, not in accordance with it
   [secundum illam], just as we make judgments about material objects
   because they are below us. We often say, not just that they are a
   certain way, but that they ought to be [esse debere] a certain way.
   The same is true of our souls: we often know, not merely that they
   are a certain way, but that they ought to be that way ... We make
   these judgments in accordance with the inner rules of truth,
   which we perceive in common, but no one makes judgments about those
   rules. When someone says that eternal things are better than
   temporal things, or that seven plus three equals ten, no one says
   that it ought to be so. We simply recognize that it is so; we are
   like explorers who rejoice in what they have discovered, not like
   inspectors who have to put things to right. (60)

The important thing about all truths, then, is that "reasoning does not create truth but discovers it." (61) Reason not only refers to the truth, but defers to it. Since reason cannot judge the truth, but only make judgments in the light of it, truth is therefore superior to reason; and, since we must concede that whatever we are "certain not only exists, but is more excellent than our reason" is God, we must acknowledge that Truth is God. (62)

V

How Truth (and God) Exists. Insofar as Truth exists differently from any changeable thing, so does God. As the standard against which changeable things are judged by human reason, Truth is inherently unchangeable, and it is so because it is one single thing, a real--the only real--unity. Augustine tends to conflate his arguments for these points with those in favour of the fact that Truth may be said to "exist" at all, and it is worth teasing them apart.

To establish that Truth exists, Augustine focuses on what we might call its objectivity (although this is not his language). Augustine claims that the standards we can see in our minds--and only in our minds--are not thereby a product of our minds. They are independent of our minds even while our minds have access to them. As a kind of preparation for this idea, Augustine points out that we experience this kind of relationship to external realities all the time when we physically sense anything. (63) His favorite example of this kind is the act of physical seeing. We know that when we see something we are experiencing a reality beyond our own minds because other people can see it too. If we direct someone with healthy and open eyes and with an unobstructed view towards an object we ourselves can see, they see what we see (indeed we cannot prevent them from doing so). This implies a third object, transcending the visual apparatus and minds of both observers, with its own independent existence. In Augustine's terminology it is a "publicly" and not "privately" accessible state of affairs. (64)

Augustine wants to claim that the seeing of the truth is like this in a number of important ways. (It is therefore no accident that even ordinary ways of speaking tend to borrow the language of visual apprehension when referring to the act of understanding which is the intellectual apprehension of the truth.) When we make such judgments--such as about the correct answer to a sum--we are at once seeing the state of affairs that leads us to make such a judgment, and also the standard against which we compare and judge it. The "eye of the soul," Augustine asserts, is reason. (65) And just as the physical eye perceives objects which are independent of the observer, so reason perceives objects which are likewise independent of the reasoner. This is why pointing out such truths to someone who cannot apprehend them is more like trying to get them to look in the right direction than it is like trying to get them to, say, memorize a fact. Truths too are public, rather than private, (66) "common to all who think." (67) And this means, Augustine argues, that the things we see with reason exist, just as do the things we see with our eyes.

On the other hand, there is a unique quality to the existence of truths, and it is implied by the very superiority that leads us to acknowledge Truth as God. "If truth were equal to our minds, it too would be changeable. For our minds see the truth better at some times than at others, which shows that they are indeed changeable. But the truth makes no progress when we see it better and suffers no setback when we see it less." (68) Truth does not change. The standards inherent in it must remain constant insofar as they represent a way to measure other things. The unchangeableness of Truth, however, is more profound than, say, those human standards which do not change by convention. As we have seen, the unchanging standard of Truth cannot "be otherwise." Reason does not produce it, but bows to it, recognizing that it simply is the way it is. (69) Thus, when Augustine says that Truth simply "is," he is saying more than that Truth is the irrefutable axiomatic basis of reasoning. He is making a claim about the way Truth exists that contrasts it to the way changeable things exist. We saw that change includes the occupation of space or time. Augustine contends that Truth occupies neither and transcends both. We have already seen that Truth is incorporeal, for it is available only to the mind, not the senses. As for time, "in the abiding truth I do not find past and future, but only the present ... Dissect changes in things; you will find 'it was' and 'it will be.' Think about God; you will find he is, and that 'he was' and 'he will be' cannot be." (70)

Truth--or God--is not divisible into parts, either spatially or temporally, but is fully present all at once. Besides unchangeableness, Augustine has another way of expressing this manner in which God exists: God is "simple" (simplex). (71) By this description, Augustine means to capture not only God's timelessness and immateriality but also the relationship (or rather lack of one) between God and his attributes: God does not have any attributes. This is not a statement of God's blandness but of just the opposite, of God's pure being. God is what he has. (72) Although we rightly think of God as beautiful and good (remembering that he is the standard against which changeable instances of goodness and beauty are judged) these kinds of statements are, strictly speaking, inaccurate. God is not one beautiful or good thing among others, or even one existing thing among others. He does not "have" beauty or goodness. (73) Because he is the very standard by which good and beautiful things are judged, he is beauty and goodness itself. "We talk about a good man, good land, a good beast, a good body, a good soul; but as often as you say 'good,' you add what it is that is good and say, 'a good something.' But there is a simple good, just good itself, pure goodness, through which all good things are good." (74)

We might wonder how a simple being could underpin such widely divergent kinds of truths as those which are mathematical, moral, or aesthetic in nature. If God is the ground of all these kinds of truths, surely this makes him anything but simple. Augustine's answer is essential to the basis of his metaphysics. He points out that all truths converge in a single unity. For example, a unity ultimately underlies truths concerning judgments of mathematics and beauty. In De libero arbitrio, Augustine argues that all mathematics is based on a single invisible standard of reference: the basic unit of one. (Each number, says Augustine, is named on the basis of how many times it contains "one.") But such a thing as "one" cannot be perceived by the senses since every material objects is made up of parts. As we have seen, even apparently homogenous objects can be subdivided into smaller sections. So, he asks, "where" do we come to know this "one"? Wherever we have seen it, it cannot have been in material objects, which are never "truly and simply one." We therefore see it in Truth itself. (75) Along similar lines, in De vera religione, Augustine holds an imagined conversation with a house builder whom he asks why a house with a certain arrangement of doors and windows or arches should be regarded as superior to one without such an arrangement. The craftsman replies that symmetrical arrangements give more pleasure to the viewer. (76) Questioned appropriately, the craftsman could be shown that such arrangements give pleasure because they are beautiful, not that they are beautiful because they give pleasure; and that symmetry is beautiful because it approximates unity. "It is because its parts correspond and are so joined together as to form one harmonious whole." (77) Still, however, precisely because it has parts, such a thing does not "completely achieve the unity [it aims] at," but rather "fall[s] short of it, and in a measure misrepresent[s] it." (78) So, again, where does he see unity itself, against which this judgment is made? Not in material things since "no material thing however beautiful can possibly achieve the unity it aims at, since it must necessarily have its parts separated by intervals of space." (79) The answer, of course, is that again we are applying to our sensory experience a standard only accessible through the mind, a standard which is ultimately God himself. (80) Indeed, the nearer we get to God, Augustine believes, the more attributes which are derived from him converge. (81)

Beyond reasoning and argument, however, scripture itself, Augustine believes, testifies to God's unique singular kind of existence. It does this with its appellations for God: in the name of God revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai, "I am who am [Ego sum qui sum]," (82) and in the cryptic term for the divine found in the Latin translation of the Psalms, idipsum (sometimes ipse idem)--the "Selfsame" (83)--Augustine finds the Bible identifying the creator revealed in the Book of Genesis, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, with a being who simply is and is thus unchangeable:

   What is the Selfsame? That which always exists in the same way;
   that which is not now one way, and then another way. What is the
   Selfsame, unless it is that which is? But what is that which is?
   That which is eternal. For, something that is always in one way and
   then in another is not, for it does not endure; it is not
   altogether nonexistent, but it does not exist in the highest sense.
   And what is that which is, except he who when he sent Moses forth,
   said to him, "I am who am"? (84)

To exist is not to change.

VI

Order: Creation's Imitation of Unity. So far we have established the reasoning which leads Augustine to identify two types of things, the changeable and the unchangeable. We have, in other words, identified the vast difference between God and the world. Recall that our overall aim is to determine whether Augustine has a more concrete way of schematizing the goodness or being with which he claims God supplies creation, especially given that he rejects the idea that creation is produced from God's own substance. Now that we have determined the equivalence of Truth and God, and so the unique way in which God exists, the problem appears more pronounced. God exists in such a way that he is "always the same," and not "spread out" over space and time." (85) How can a world which "is flowing, dissolving, melting ... and always perishing," (86) which is "incapable of abiding unchanged for a single moment" (87) be said to exist and to be good in a way that somehow connects it to the highest goodness and existence, God? How can it "participate"--to use the Platonic language Augustine occasionally favours (88)--in a God whose substance it does not share? How is it that a changeable thing exists at all, if to exist is not to change?

The answers are found, Augustine thinks, in the very method by which we approached an apprehension of Truth as God. The ascent from the senses, through reason, to the Truth shows that God is "discovered" through that which is not God; so there must be some relation between the two. As Augustine finds St. Paul putting it in Romans 1:20: "For the invisible things of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made." (89) But what are we seeing in creation that allows us to judge it against the eternal and unchanging standard of truth?

In fact, we have already encountered the beginnings of Augustine's answer to this question. In spite of their changeableness, created things manage to imitate unity "because [their] parts correspond and are so joined together as to form one harmonious whole" (90); that is, because they exhibit order. Augustine makes this point more explicitly in the following passage from De moribus (Manichaeorum). Here Augustine draws correspondences between unity and order, with existence functioning as a kind of common denominator:

   Now things which tend towards existence tend towards order, and,
   attaining order they attain existence ... For order [ordo] reduces
   to a certain uniformity that which it arranges; and existence is
   nothing else than being one [Nihil est autem esse, quam unum esse].
   Thus, so far as anything acquires unity, so far it exists. For
   unity [unitas] is how, through accord and harmony [convenientia et
   concordia], compound things [ea quae composita sunt] exist as far
   as they do. For simple things exist by themselves, for they are
   one. But things not simple imitate unity by the agreement of their
   parts [concordia partium]; and so far as they attain this, so far
   they exist. This arrangement [ordinatio] brings about existence
   [cogit esse], and disorder, non-existence; and perversion or
   corruption are other names for disorder. (91)

There are a number of important points packed into this somewhat labyrinthine passage. Taken together, they give us a comprehensive summary of how Augustine thinks creation imitates, and therefore depends on, God. Augustine here makes three syllogistically related points. The first is that to exist is to be "one," a unity. The second is that order is the way nonsimple things (things which have "parts") imitate the oneness of a truly simple thing. The third is that things therefore exist to the extent that they exhibit order (and exist less to the extent that they become disordered). In this passage, Augustine also hints at how the order of creation constitutes a kind of imitation of unity: it has something to do with an "arrangement of parts" which imposes some kind of "uniformity" or "harmony" on things that are "not simple."

A definition of order that Augustine offers in De civitate Dei resonates with this idea of a complex of relationships: "order is the arrangement of things like and unlike that assigns to each its proper position." (92) To see what he means here, it is worth exploring a little further the idea of order itself, via the closely related ideas of form and, most importantly, nature. To do so is ultimately to pin down what constitutes the goodness of created things (and, generally speaking, of human beings)--the goodness that is received from God and that is somehow missing (to some degree) in something corrupted, or evil.

VII

Nature as a Pattern (Order) of Change. Throughout his works Augustine observes that, despite the fact that things in the world constantly change, this change is not random or arbitrary. Rather, the motions and fluctuations of changeable things are "ordered motions" (93); they "repeat with a certain regularity their journeys through time." (94) Change is governed by patterns discernible in things, which Augustine generally calls "forms." If it were not for these forms, the universe would be unintelligible: "Whatever changeable thing you look at, you could not grasp it at all, either by the sense of the body of by the contemplation of the mind, unless it had some form composed of numbers, without which it would sink into nothing.... changeable things ... complete and carry out the numbers of times and places in the way appropriate to their class [pro suo genere]." (95) Here Augustine indicates that form has something to do with measured relationships: shapes or patterns that can be captured in terms of proportion or number. More importantly, the specific types of patterns or numbered relationships a thing displays are governed by what is "appropriate to [its] class."

With this phrase Augustine is alluding to his conception of nature (natura). The idea of nature is central to understanding the connection between order and unity, and ultimately between order and goodness. For Augustine, I will now argue, a changeable thing's nature essentially represents a prescription for the way it may, and therefore will, change. If my metaphor of a prescription (while not directly Augustine's) suggests that there is someone doing the prescribing, this is all to the point, for a thing's nature is, in Augustine's view, the way in which God intends a particular creature to reflect his simplicity or unity. A thing's nature does this because it is what stays the same about a changeable thing. Although a creature is always changing, the kinds of change it may undergo do not, and these kinds of orderly change are dictated by its nature. (96)

Augustine attempts to use an intuitive idea of nature against the Manicheans, who assert that evil has its own unique nature. They cannot really mean this, he insists, because they condemn evil, and to condemn something is to imply that the condemned thing ought to be otherwise, that it is falling short of a good pattern in some way. (97) Augustine calls this pattern a thing's nature, and tries to pin down its significance for his Manichean opponents by suggesting that a nature is what allows us to "conceive of a thing as being a member of its own kind." (98) A condemned thing ought to be a good thing, and its way of being good is defined by the kind of thing it is. In De vera religione, Augustine gives a more elaborate definition of nature. If something has a nature, it "is a particular thing; it is distinguished from other things by its own proper form; and it does not transgress the order of nature." (99) Unfortunately, Augustine does not take up these points one by one, possibly because they are so interrelated in his mind that he thinks it unnecessary to do so. We can, however, clarify them by referring to other things he says about nature and patterns of order in the world. In each case we see that having a nature is linked precisely to existing.

By the first point Augustine seems to mean that having a nature--that is, being a type of thing--is what allows something to be a thing at all. It is the order or pattern of parts that renders the parts related to one another, and thus makes them precisely parts of a whole, that is, of a single thing. This is what he means when he says that the "parts" of a beautiful object "correspond and are so joined together as to form one harmonious whole"; while having parts means that it will never "completely achieve the unity [it aims] at," by such harmony of components it nevertheless thereby "approximates unity." (100) And, since (as we have seen) to be one thing is to exist, structure is what allows something to be identified as a single thing. In several places Augustine uses the word integritas (101) to express this interrelationship of parts to one another and to the whole, a word whose meaning (even in modern English) connotes holding together and unification. Other words Augustine uses to express the same idea include "harmony" (harmonia) and also "peace" (pax): God has not abandoned even "the inner parts of the smallest and lowliest creature, or the bird's feather ... he has not left them without a harmony of their constituent parts, a kind of peace." (102) And, for example, in the case of a living body, (103) harmony includes what the Greeks call "those proportions ... by which the mutual adaptation of each organ and the whole body, inside and out, are held together [constat]." (104) The peace of the body is, likewise, a "tempering of the component parts in duly ordered proportion" which it has due to its form, and without which it would be nothing. (105)

To hold together according to a pattern (or nature) therefore allows a thing to be a thing: something we can point to as a particular kind of being. But what determines this arrangement of parts into a whole? Here we approach the second and third features of nature as given above: something with a nature is "distinguished from other things by its own proper form; and it does not transgress the order of nature." These points suggest that a nature is a kind of limit or boundary, a set of characteristics to which things adhere so as to be what they are. Augustine does not tend to think of "the laws of nature" in a modern generalizing way, as disembodied invisible tracks from which the behaviour of nature as a whole does not deviate. Rather, he sees the repeating patterns in nature, including the relationships of parts to wholes or of causes to effects as evidence of the unfolding natures of discrete types of creatures, the potential for which is latent from the beginning in their "rational seeds." (106) These are hidden principles of organization which reside in natural things from their very beginnings (in the way, for example, the tree is potentially hidden within its seed), (107) and which determine the shape that the development of these things will take as they change. These causes help explain, for example, why beans are not produced from grains of wheat, or human beings from cattle. (108) Augustine sees even the tendency of objects to fall downwards not as evidence of a universally applicable law of gravity but as the result of the tendency of objects to seek their natural positions in the universe. (109)

Augustine sums up this notion of nature as both a defining and a limiting factor of things using a set of descriptors which he gleans from Wisdom 11:21: "You have arranged all things by measure [mensura], number [numero] and weight [pondere]." (110) Augustine's interprets this passage as a description of the defining features of any created thing. His most extended reflection on these features is found in De Genesi ad litteram, (111) and although his explicit definitions of each term in that work are somewhat imprecise, he supplements them in other works by means of other virtually synonymous triads (for example that of measure, form [forma], and order [ordo] in De natura boni 3). Measure applies to the boundaries or limits to which a thing adheres and which makes it the kind of thing it is; this descriptor relates to nonphysical things like the soul as well as to corporeal objects. Form (or number), which we have already encountered in a passage from De libero arbitrio above, refers to that feature of a thing with which modern scientists would be most familiar in its material sense: the structuredness of things which makes them susceptible to mathematical description: their proportions, shape, and size. (112) Finally, weight or order (the latter term as used here means something more specific than the broader idea of order we are now in the process of investigating) identifies the place that the particular thing occupies in the overall schema of creation. It is that place into which the thing naturally "settles" and which therefore determines its movement in the universe: "weight draws everything to rest and stability." (113) Of the three, a thing's weight is more concerned with the relationship a thing bears to other things than to its own internal parts. (114)

Notice, again, that these descriptors essentially both describe and prescribe change--or rather patterns of change--which natures exhibit. They, and the idea of nature under which they are subsumed, are variations on Augustine's overarching theme of order. Recalling Augustine's definition of order as "the arrangement of things like and unlike that assigns to each its proper position," we can identify nature as that which does the assigning of proper positions according to measure, number, and weight. But what is crucial is that a thing's nature, the particular unique way it is ordered (including the relationship between its parts and so forth), does not itself change. "Nature," then, captures for Augustine the truth that order is the way changeable things manage to, in some sense, stay the same.

But as we have seen, changelessness constitutes existence. This means that for Augustine, to have a nature--that is, to be ordered--is to exist. "Things are fixed in their own order by a certain particular nature so as to exist." (115) For a created thing, to be is inseparably linked to being a particular kind of thing. Furthermore, since to be, purely and simply with no change whatever--to be a true unity--is to be God, the approximation of this oneness via orderliness is to imitate God. To have a nature, then, is in itself to imitate God. (116) And there is yet another correlation Augustine draws between the relative unity of created things and their existence and order. Created good, too, is equivalent to its order. We earlier saw Augustine argue that goodness is equivalent to existence: one of his anti-Manichean arguments involved pointing out that when we say that something has a nature (as the Manicheans do about evil) what we mean is that there is a specific way it is supposed to be. Augustine insists that this is not the case with evil; but his broader point is that a thing's nature dictates what a good example of that thing is, (117) so much so that this good correlates to the existence of that thing. Against the Manicheans, Augustine underscores this point by arguing that only something that exists can become less good, so that to lose all goodness is to cease to exist. But we have just seen that for Augustine something exists in so far as it is ordered. It follows, then, that good, too, correlates to order: for created things, "order is good." (118) The ordering principles imitative of unity--measure, number (or form) and weight (or order)--are, says Augustine, in a way "generic goodness [generalia bona]." (119)

There is a final consideration that has been all along implied but is worth making explicit. So far we have determined that creation is dependent on God in the sense that God is that reality of which creation is an imitation; he is the "principle from which all unity derives, and to resemble which all things strive." (120) But Augustine wants to say more than this. Creation does not take it upon itself to imitate God in the specific ways its nature dictates; in fact, Augustine thinks it more or less self-evident that nothing can choose its own nature, or form. Things simply find themselves with the nature they have. Form, Augustine insists, is always imposed from above by that which is beyond form--simple, self-existent, and the source of all form. (121) "All order is from God." (122) Measure, number, and weight find their ultimate reference point in God, for God is "the measure without measure" that "places a limit on everything"; he is the "number without number" by which "all things are formed"; the "weight without weight," "which guides all things." (123) If nothing else, the very changeability of things proves that they have received everything they have (their form) which is all that prevents them from lapsing completely into the nothingness into which their constituents or parts are constantly disappearing. (124) Nature, then, is not only a pattern but an intended pattern: it is the design, (125) even the will, (126) of God for particular things. The very order according to which they change is "fixed and governed by the laws of the highest God" and "he did not look to anything placed outside himself as a model for the making of what he created." (127)

When we understand that for Augustine goodness is identified with order, a variety of his claims begin to open themselves to further and more useful interpretation. For instance, we can now see that the goodness received from God is indeed translatable into terms with concrete implications. Order is a measured way things and parts of things are related to one another. We can also see in what sense Augustine conceives of the dependence of creation on God. Something is indeed transmitted from God to creation, but it is not God's substance. Although Augustine may use mysteriously Platonic language when he says that creation participates in God, he means that creation imitates God's unity by means of its orderly change.

Finally, we can now anticipate a more concrete way of describing the loss of good. Goodness (and therefore existence itself) is capable of gradation and therefore of diminution because order is so capable: what is orderly can become disorderly. And if order is equivalent to a thing's good, then when it becomes disorderly it falls away from this good into a state of privatio boni. Augustine makes this connection explicit in the passage above from De moribus we looked at earlier: "[order] brings about existence, disorder, non-existence; and perversion or corruption are other names for disorder." (128) Just as good is order, evil is not only a lack of good, but disorder. Most importantly, we can also therefore anticipate that if Augustine is consistent--and I think he is--specifically human evils in all their variety will have this in common: they will all be humanity's experiences of its own disorderliness. (129)

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

* This article is the winner of the Philosophy Education Society's 2011 Dissertation Essay Contest.

(1) De civitate Dei 11.22 [hereafter civ. Dei]; Confessiones 3.7.12 [hereafter conf.]; Enchiridion ad Laurentium de fide spe et caritate 11 [hereafter ench.]. Augustine's works in Latin may be found in Patrologia Cursus Completus, Series Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1844-64). Translations will be noted when consulted and cited closely (with possible modifications). To enable readers to consult a variety of editions, references to Augustine are provided using the standard numbered textual divisions and subdivisions common to the Latin editions and to most unabridged translations of Augustine (including those referenced in this article). Various translations may refer to these divisions as "books" and "chapters."

(2) ench. 13.

(3) conf. 7.12.18; Contra epistulam Manichaei quam vocant fundamenti 40.46 [hereafter c. ep. Man.]; ench. 12; De natura boni 15, 17, 19 [hereafter nat. b.].

(4) Among other counterarguments, Augustine responds that many things have an evil effect--that is, disagree with or are inconvenient to--human well-being, but only when used inappropriately. Both salt and fire are extraordinarily useful and extraordinarily dangerous to human beings, depending on how they are administered. It is, therefore, anthropocentric nonsense to call something evil just because it can be harmful. De moribus ecclesiae Catholicae et de moribus Manichaeorum 2.8.11 [hereafter mor.]; cir. Dei 11.22. But Augustine seems to know he is often arguing in vain. "But what am I to do? I know that many of you can understand nothing of all this." mor. 2.2.4, The Writings Against the Manichaeans and Against the Donatists, trans. Richard Stothert, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1889).

(5) See H. J. McCloskey, "God and Evil," in God and Evil: Readings on the Theological Problem of Evil, ed. Nelson Pike (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 36; Paul Schilling, God and Human Anguish (Nashville: Abingdon, 1977), 93; and Christopher Kirwan, Augustine (London: Routledge, 1989), 62. Polkinghorne expresses a typical version of this concern: "For all its intellectual attractiveness, this is a very difficult theory to square with experience. How could one tell a victim of cancer or the Holocaust that he was simply suffering from the privation of the good? There seems to be a much more positive quality to evil than Augustine's theory allows." John Polkinghorne, Science and Providence (Boston: Shambala, 1989), 61.

(6) See H.J. McCloskey, "God and Evil," 65: privation theory is "an attempt to explain [evil] away as not needing a solution"; Wallace I. Matson, The Existence of God (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965), 142-3: "Really the 'evil as non-being' ploy is a play on words, an unfunny joke"; and Stanley G. Kane, "Evil and Privation," International Journal of the Philosophy of Religion 11 (1980): 55: "Evil as privation looks very much like a tour de force of definition. Things are so defined that it is logically impossible for God to create evil." I am indebted to D. A. Cress's "Augustine's Privation Account of Evil: A Defence," Augustinian Studies 20 (1989): 109-28, which reviews some of the discussion on this topic.

(7) Cress, "Augustine's Privation Account," 110-11; Rowan D. Williams, "Insubstantial Evil," in Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honor of Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (New York: Routledge, 2000), 106; John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London: Macmillan Press, 1966), 57; and John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 259, note the difficulty in importing Augustine's idea of gradations of being into ordinary terms. Rist comments that the equivalent degrees of goodness are easier to understand. In one sense, he is clearly correct. In ordinary terms we commonly think of things as capable of being more or less good, whereas things either exist or not. Still, what exactly we mean by "good" is still difficult to say without further analysis and translation.

(8) Many commentators have in passing noted the equivalency Augustine draws between created goodness and order (and therefore between evil and disorder); see, for example, Cress, "Augustine's Privation Account," 113, 118; Williams, "Insubstantial Evil," 113; Rowan D. Williams, "Good for Nothing? Augustine on Creation," Augustinian Studies 25 (1994): 14; and C. Harrison, Rethinking Augustine's Early Theology: An Argument for Continuity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 86. However, none takes up the implications of these identifications. On the other hand, Torchia does offer an extended outline of the connection between the order of reality and moral order, although with a different emphasis than is offered here. Joseph N. Torchia, "The significance of ordo in St. Augustine's moral theory," in Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum, ed. Joseph T. Lienard, Earl C. Muller, and Roland J. Teske (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 263-276.

(9) mor. 2.5.7: "Item quod corrumpitur, profecto pervertitur; quod autem pervertitur, privatur ordine; ordo autem bonum est." My emphasis.

(10) De natura et gratia 20.22; see also conf. 4.1.1; De Genesi adversos Manicheos 2.9.12 [hereafter Gn. adv. Man.].

(11) Gn. adv. Man. 2.5.6; conf. 1.6.10

(12) Enarrationes in Psalmos 65.13 [hereafter en. Ps. ].

(13) De Genesi ad litteram 8.12.25-6 [herafter Gn. litt.]; mor. 1.7.11; conf. 12.15.20-21; civ. Dei 11.9; In epistulam Joannis ad Parthos tractatus 1.4.

(14) Williams goes so far as to call this a kind of "hierarchical dualism." "Good for Nothing," 10; see also Vernon J. Bourke, Augustine's View of Reality (Villanova: Villanova Press, 1964), 5.

(15) mor. 2.4.6, trans. Stothert.

(16) nat. b. 1, trans. John H. S. Burleigh in Augustine: Earlier Writings (Philadelpia: The Westminster Press, 1953).

(17) civ. Dei 12.2.

(18) Gn. adv. Man. 1.2.4; see also Gn. adv. Man. 2.29.43.

(19) Augustine reserves the special status of image (imago) of God for rational beings like humans and angels (see div. qu. 51; vera rel. 44.82), and tends to locate the source of this image specifically in the divine Trinity. De Trinitate 9.2, 12.6-8, 12.12 [hereafter Trin.]; De Genesi ad litteram impefectus liber 16.55--62. But a recurrent theme of his writings is that all creation is made in the likeness (similitudo) of God in that its goodness is a kind of imitation of his goodness (beauty) and existence. See div. qu. 51; conf. 3.6.10, 7.11.17. See Mary Clark, "Image Doctrine," in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allen D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmanns, 1999), 441; Lewis Ayres, "Measure, Number, and Weight," in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, 551. The precise difference between image and likeness cannot be addressed here, nor can, with any specificity, humanity's likeness to the Trinity, but see Clark, "Image Doctrine," 440-442, and G. Bonner, "Augustine's Doctrine of Man: Image of God and Sinner," Augustinianum 24 (1984): 495-514.

(20) "propinqua summo bono" in De natura boni 1.

(21) vera rel. 49.95.

(22) As Williams puts it, there is a "radical distance and difference between God and creation." Williams, "Good for Nothing," 10; Williams identifies what he calls the simultaneous "continuity and ... discontinuity between God and the universe" as essential to understanding Augustine on creation (ibid., 11); see also Rist, Augustine, 256.

(23) Gn. adv. Man. 1.2.4.

(24) Gn. litt. 5.16.34.

(25) Epistulae 18.2 [hereafter ep.]; see also civ. Dei 8.6; nat. b. 1; conf. 7.11.7.

(26) De libero arbitrio voluntatis 2.14 [hereafter lib. arb.]; vera rel. 30.55, 21.41.

(27) lib. arb. 2.8, trans. Thomas Williams in On Free Choice of the Will, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993).

(28) lib. arb. 2.14; conf. 11.11.13. In the Confessiones Augustine presciently reflects on the fact that space is inextricably linked to time. What occupies space must occupy time as well; time is one of the measurements of the movement of objects. See conf. 11.21.27-24.31.

(29) ep. 137.4, trans. Roland J. Teske in Letters 100-154 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2003); see also Trin. 6.8.

(30) vera rel. 21.41-22.42. For a good discussion of the nuances of Augustine's views on physicality, see Ludger Hoscher, The Reality of the Mind: Augustine's Philosophical Arguments for the Human Soul as a Spiritual Substance (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 13-21.

(31) lib. arb. 2.8, trans. Williams.

(32) conf. 7.11.17; ep. 2.

(33) In Johannis evangelium tractatus 38.10 [hereafter Jo. ev. tr.], in Homilies on the Gospel of John 1-40, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2009); Hill's emphases.

(34) nat. b. 19, trans. Burleigh.

(35) conf. 10.4.6; civ. Dei 12.2; nat. b. 1.

(36) nat. b. 25-26.

(37) conf. 11.13.15.

(38) conf. 7.11.17, in The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. John K. Ryan in (New York: Doubleday, 1960).

(39) De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus 54 [hereafter div. qu.].

(40) conf. 10.24.35, trans. Ryan.

(41) In De libero arbitrio 2.6-11 and De vera religione 29.52-35.65, Augustine actually walks his readers through the Platonic program of ascent summarized in the following passage from the Confessiones. Thus Augustine probably means this brief description of his Platonic discoveries in the Confessiones to function more as a biographical note than as itself a philosophical argument. Since he admits that the actual experience of treading the path he describes is difficult, lengthy, and far from obvious (c. ep. Man. 2.2-3.3), it is improbable he would expect to convince a reader with such a summary as the Confessiones passage provides.

(42) conf. 7.17.23, trans. Ryan.

(43) The argument is therefore not a proof for the existence of God in the modern sense. Augustine, along with most ancient thinkers, never doubts that there must be a highest being which ought properly to be called God; the important question is what thing deserves that name (see Rist, Augustine, 69). Hence his question as he puts it in De liberio arbitrio 2.3 is not whether God exists, but rather how it may be made clear--manifestum--that God exists, and by extension what God is like. In contrast to the Manicheans, who, he insisted, did construct a god who appealed to them, the Platonists discovered rather than invented something to which, given its exalted status, they (and Augustine) only then applied the name God. See Roland J. Teske, To Know God and the Soul: Essays on the Thought of Saint Augustine (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 26-48 and Rist, Augustine, 67-71 for further argument against the notion that De libero arbitrio presents a case for the existence of God.

(44) lib. arb. 2.6, Trin. 14.16; vera rel. 30.56-31.57; div. qu. 54.

(45) lib. arb. 1.7-8; 2.3; see also Trin. 15.6; civ. Dei 8.6.

(46) lib. arb. 1.7-8.

(47) lib. arb. 2.6; see also conf. 7.17.23, 10.6.8-10.

(48) vera rel. 28.53, 33.62.

(49) vera rel. 31.58. Another way Augustine expresses the same idea is to say that reason "questions" the material world of nature: only reason (and therefore only human beings, as opposed to animals) wonders about nature and tries to correlate, explain and systematize its observations of physical phenomena. See conf. 10.8.8-10.

(50) vera rel. 29.53, in Augustine: Earlier Writings, trans. J. H. S. Burleigh (Philadelpia: The Westminster Press, 1953).

(51) vera rel. 30.54, trans. Burleigh.

(52) vera rel. 30.54; lib. arb. 2.5, 2.12.

(53) lib. arb. 2.8; vera rel. 34.73.

(54) conf. 10.12.19; vera rel. 30.56.

(55) vera rel. 32.59; conf. 7.17.23.

(56) lib. arb. 1.6.

(57) Trin. 8.4; en. Ps. 26.8.

(58) vera rel. 30.55; lib. arb. 2.8; conf. 6.16.26; civ. Dei 8.6.

(59) vera rel. 31.57, trans. Burleigh.

(60) lib. arb. 2.12, trans. Williams, his emphases.

(61) vera tel. 39.73, trans. Burleigh. The relationship of truths to Truth is not made clear by Augustine, a problem acknowledged by commentators on his epistemology (for example, see Teske, To Know God, 42 note 33). The problem is perhaps somewhat ameliorated by the following considerations. First, clearly Augustine is not suggesting that individual truths such as 7+3=10, or "This man is good" are God. As he points out, almost everyone is capable of seeing the truth in statements like these, and they are not thereby seeing God. There are immoral mathematicians who seem completely ignorant of other types of truth; likewise, even relatively godless people are able to rightly assign praise and blame and so are apparently able to make correct judgments about right and wrong (Trin. 14.21; see also lib. arb. 2.11). What he is suggesting, however, is that the objectivity and quality of these truths is rooted in the existence of Truth, or God. Second, this relationship is suggested by his distinction between veritas (or the truth, often rendered by translators and commentators with a capital "T") and verum (something true, a true thing): "Truth is one thing and that which is said to be true is another" (Soliloquia 1.15.27 [hereafter sol.]); in fact, Augustine even suggests that truths are the "art of the omnipotent artificer" (vera rel. 31.57), suggesting some kind of productive relationship, though this certainly does not imply that truths are created by God in the sense that they could have been any different than they are. In fact, this is the very point about truths: they, unlike the things by which they are judged, cannot conceivably be other than they are (a quality about which we will shortly say more). This quality is due to the fact that God "makes all things to be true which are true" (vera rel. 36.66), but they are true because they are somehow like him, because they in some sense follow from him: "Truth is that by which anything that is true is true" (sol. 2.15.29); a truth gets or "derives its quality" from Truth (sol. 2.10.18). So in general we can say with certainty that Augustine thinks that while truths are not God, all have truth in common because they are grounded in his existence. See Simon Harrison, "Truth, Truths," in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allen D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmanns, 1999), 853.

(62) lib. arb. 2.5, trans. Williams; see also lib. arb. 2.15 vera rel. 30.56-31.57

(63) This, in my view, is one of the chief reasons Augustine tends to dwell on the features and mechanics of the way the senses work in the midst of his Platonic ascents to God in lib. arb., conf., and vera rel. as cited above.

(64) 1ib. arb. 2.7.

(65) lib. arb. 2.6; div. qu. 46.

(66) lib. arb. 2.12.

(67) lib. arb. 2.8; see also vera rel. 34.73.

(68) lib. arb. 2.12, trans. Williams.

(69) lib. arb. 2.12; vera rel. 31.57-58.

(70) Jo. ev. tr. 38.10.

(71) civ. Dei 11.10; Trin. 6.6, 15.7; conf. 4.16.29.

(72) civ. Dei 11.10; conf. 4.16.29.

(73) On the identification of beauty and goodness, see Carol Harrison, Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

(74) en. Ps. 26.8, numbered Psalm 27 in Nine Sermons of Saint Augustine on the Psalms, trans. Edmund Hill (London: Longmans Green, 1957).

(75) lib. arb. 2.8.

(76) Before his conversion, Augustine wrote a treatise (now lost) in which he in part argued that we find things beautiful because they are symmetrical, and that beauty is therefore reducible to symmetry (conf. 4.13.20). After his conversion first to a Platonic view of beauty and then to Christianity he moved beyond this argument to ask why symmetry itself should be beautiful.

(77) vera rel. 32.59, trans. Burleigh.

(78) vera rel. 32.60, trans. Burleigh.

(79) vera rel. 32.60, trans. Burleigh.

(80) vera rel. 31.57 ; see also Trin. 14.20.

(81) De ordine 2.44-49.

(82) conf. 7.10.16; nat. b. 19.

(83) conf. 9.4.11; 7.17.23; 12.7.7, trans. Ryan.

(84) en. Ps. 121.5, my emphasis.

(85) conf. 7.10.16.

(86) De beata vita 2.8.

(87) ep. 2.1.

(88) vera rel. 11.21; div. qu. 46; mor. 2.4.6. For further reflection on Augustine's use of the idea of participation, see Bourke, Augustine's View of Reality, 117-123.

(89) For example, vera rel. 52.101; Gn. litt. 2.8.17, 4.32.49; Trin. 13.24, 15.3; conf. 7.11.17.

(90) vera rel. 33.61, trans. Burleigh.

(91) mor. 2.6.8, trans. Stothert, my emphasis.

(92) civ. Dei 19. (13: "Ordo est parium dipariumque return sua cuique loca tribuens dispositio."

(93) civ. Dei 8.6, my emphasis.

(94) div. qu. 46, in Eighty-three Different Questions, trans. David L. Mosher (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1971); see also Trin. 3.11.

(95) lib. arb. 2. (16, trans. Williams.

(96) In his Villanova lecture outlining the basic principles of Augustine's metaphysics, Bourke states that because corporeal things change both in time and space, they are "in no way immutable. There is no permanence in this lowest order of beings." (Bourke, Augustine's View of Reality, 4). While on one level he is clearly correct, the point perhaps needs some qualification. I will be arguing that such things do have a kind of permanence, in that the pattern according to which they change is exactly what does not change about them.

(97) mor. 2.35.40; lib. arb. 3. (13-14; civ. Dei 12.1.

(98) mor. 2.2.2, trans. Stothert.

(99) vera rel. 7. (13, trans. Burleigh.

(100) vera rel. 32.59-60, trans. Burleigh.

(101) lib. arb. 3. (14; vera rel. 12.23, 18.36.

(102) civ. Dei 5. (11, in St Augustine: Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).

(103) Despite his use of the example of a beautiful house to illustrate unity, Augustine is not much interested in artifacts. Most of his examples of unity or integrity are taken from the natural world. (Perhaps it is because of his much greater interest in natural things that he is never very careful to make a distinction between artifacts--like houses--and natural things.) He chastises the Manicheans for failing to acknowledge the order according to which the bodies of the humblest creatures are arranged. Even in worms, insects, and apes, limbs or appendages are matched, like to like, within a single body, and organs work together to allow the animal to function as a whole--as a single unity--and therefore survive, vera rel. 41.77; nat. b. 14; ord. 1.1.2.

(104) civ. Dei 22.24, trans. Bettenson.

(105) civ. Dei 19. (13, trans. Bettenson; see also vera rel. 11.21.

(106) See rationes seminales or rationes causales in Gn. litt. 6.10.17, which Hill translates as the less misleading "primordial causes." See On Genesis, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, New York: New City Press), 310.

(107) Gn. litt. 5.23.44.

(108) Gn. litt. 9.17.32.

(109) conf 13.9.10; en. Ps. 29.2.10.

(110) Augustine's translation of scripture reads: "omnia in mensura, et numero et pondere dispouisti." Ayres, "Measure, Number, and Weight," 551. For a more detailed analysis of Augustine's meaning and use of these terms, and for some justification for my synthetic interpretation of them here, see Ayres, "Measure, Number, and Weight," 550-52; J. O'Donnell, Augustine: The Confessions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 2:46; C. Harrison, Beauty and Revelation, 101-110; and Bourke, Augustine's View of Reality, 18-22.

(111) Gn. litt. 4.3.7-4.5.11.

(112) Gn. litt. 4.3.7-4.5.11. Augustine is clear that nonmaterial things too have form or number, exhibiting, for example, measurable structure through time; see Gn. litt. 4.3.8.

(113) Gn. litt. 4.3.7, trans. Hill.

(114) Augustine's idea of weight is so clearly other-oriented that Hill goes so far as to translate ordines (its correlate) as "destinies": "All things ... as long as they continue to be, have their own proper measures, numbers, and destinies [ordines]." Gn. litt. 3.16.25; see On Genesis, trans. Hill, page 231, note 24.

(115) div. qu. 46, trans. Mosher.

(116) lib. arb. 3.15.

(117) De duabus animabus 4.5.

(118) mor. 2.5.7.

(119) nat. b. 3, trans. Burleigh.

(120) vera rel. 36.66, trans. Burleigh.

(121) lib. arb. 2.17; vera rel. 18.36.

(122) vera rel. 41.77. Here Augustine is citing Romans 13:2.

(123) Gn. litt. 4.3.7-4.4.8, trans. Hill, 246.

(124) conf. 11.4.6 ; lib. arb. 2.17; nat. b. 1, 10; civ. Dei 12.1.

(125) lib. arb. 3.15.

(126) civ. Dei 21.8.

(127) div. qu. 46.

(128) mor. 2.6.8, trans. Stothert.

(129) Williams suggests that Augustine thinks that "what we experience and call evil is, indeed, not simply a void, a lack, but it is the effect of a lack" (my emphasis). "Insubstantial Evil," 113. Williams does not develop this idea, but I try to make a systematic case for it in the course of my dissertation, "Augustine on Suffering and Order: Punishment in Context," (University of Toronto, 2010).

Correspondence to: Samantha Thompson, samanthae.thompson@utoronto.ca