Ratio in Relatione

The Function of Structural Paradigms and Their Influence on Rational Choice and the Search for Truth

Anthony Hollowell

• Editorial: Pickwick Publications
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725261952
• Categoría: Théologie et religion
• Categoría: Théologie chrétienne

For nearly every important decision, we often receive the same advice: think for yourself. Such a statement assumes that rational thought is a type of "do-it-yourself project," that what a person thinks is derived from one's independent human existence. But there are some critical thinkers who challenge this assumption, showing the ways in which rational thought is molded and determined in forceful ways by various elements that lie outside the free choices of an individual. According to both Alexis de Tocqueville and Romano Guardini, structural elements within various cultures exhibit a distinct power over rational thought and dispose human persons to specific patterns of logic, and according to their evidence, what a person thinks is inextricably bound to their relationships. In this book, the social dimensions of rational thought can be more clearly seen, even by those conditioned to think that they can think for themselves.

Chapter 1

Ratio et Relatio

On the development of ratio in the life of Saint Augustine

This thesis begins by introducing, not an idea, but a person.

Saint Augustine was born in the African city of Hippo to a Christian mother and a pagan father, and such religious differentiation between the parents was not without consequence. From the religious discipline of his mother, Augustine inherited the experience of attending Catholic masses, learning to recite basic prayers, and encountering the essential stories of Scripture. From the pagan discipline of his father, Augustine inherited a knowledge of the great pagan speeches of the classical world, an education dedicated to the pursuit of rhetoric and the crafting of words in order to convince, and a zealous desire to achieve status and recognition among his fellow men. These two contrasting yet complimentary foundations would be structural supports that would intertwine and interact in unexpected but fruitful ways throughout the entirety of his life.

His parents were mutually (if not equally) determined to provide their son with an excellent education which would allow him to rise above his inherited social status and obtain a reputation both for himself and for his family. Their son was not as interested in this education as his parents, for Augustine often despised and frequently ignored his studies, which subjected him to various beatings from his father.1 These beatings actually became a source of his earliest religious devotion, for the fear of such beatings was a strong motivation to pray:

I used to prattle away to you, and though I was small, my devotion was great when I begged you not to let me be beaten at school. Sometimes, for my own good, you did not grant my prayer, and then my elders and even my parents, who certainly wished me no harm, would laugh at the beating I got—and in those days beatings were my one great (burden).2

Both Monica and Patricius (the parents of Augustine) considered these beatings humorous, and so their son turned to a heavenly father whom he hoped would answer his prayers to be spared from this suffering and humiliation. This prayer was not always answered.

As Augustine progressed in his education, his father’s ambition for his son progressed as well, and though his father’s “determination was greater than his means,” he nonetheless chose to do everything in his power to find these means and saved up the money to send him to Carthage.3 Carthage was a superior educational environment, and thus Patricius was greatly respected by his contemporaries because of his willingness to sacrifice so much of his own wealth and comfort for the progress and social advancement of his son. The one person who was not impressed with such sacrificial parenting was Augustine, lamenting to God that “this same father of mine took no trouble at all to see how I was growing in your sight or whether I was chaste or not. He cared only that I should have a fertile tongue.”4 Once he arrived in Carthage, it did not take long for Augustine to seek after his father’s desires, as “it was my ambition to be a good speaker, for the unhallowed and inane purpose of gratifying human vanity.”5 Augustine excelled at this discipline, winning various awards for superior speeches and attaining the respect of his classmates and teachers, but in the middle of such vain pursuits of human glory, the prescribed course of studies brought him to a book and a person whose writings would reorient the entirety of his life: Cicero’s Hortentius.

This book by Cicero recommends the reader to engage in a study of philosophy, and it is difficult to overestimate the impact of such a book and such a person in the life of Augustine. He says that “it altered my outlook on life” and that “the only thing that pleased me in Cicero’s book was his advice not simply to admire one or another of the schools of philosophy, but to love Wisdom itself, whatever it might be, and to search for it, pursue it, hold it, and embrace it firmly.”6 Instead of being captivated by the pursuit of a job or a career laid out by his parents and his society, Augustine was now captivated by the idea of pursuing Wisdom, and from this point onwards, it was not the mastery of a school of philosophy which was important but rather the attainment of Wisdom itself. Thus he says that “all my empty dreams suddenly lost their charm and my heart began to throb with a bewildering passion for the Wisdom of eternal truth.”7 This was a true conversion for Augustine, as his entire life was reoriented towards a “bewildering passion” for arriving at “eternal truth.” After reading this book, his intellectual life would never be the same, and what happened with this book would become a recurring theme throughout his life, for it would not be the last time a book or a person reoriented his entire way of thinking.

Despite a swollen heart which had begun to throb for the ideas which he encountered in Hortentius, this text was deficient in one respect: it did not mention the name of Christ. Augustine explains:

The only check to this blaze of enthusiasm (for Cicero’s book) was that (it) made no mention of the name of Christ . . . for from the time when my mother fed me at the breast my infant heart had been suckled dutifully on his name . . . Deep inside my heart his name remained, and nothing could entirely captivate me, however learned, however neatly expressed, however true it might be, unless his name were in it.8

Once again, we see the religious prejudice which dominated much of his early thought, and so in his feverish resolve to pursue Wisdom, we should not be surprised to see that the first place he went to in order to attain Wisdom was the Bible. Yet he was greatly disappointed by what he found there because, in the words of Peter Brown,

He had been brought up to expect a book to be “cultivated and polished”: he had been carefully groomed to communicate with educated men in the only admissible way, in a Latin scrupulously modelled on the ancient authors. Slang and jargon were equally abhorrent to such a man; and the Latin Bible of Africa, translated some centuries before by humble, nameless writers, was full of both. What is more, what Augustine read in the Bible seemed to have little to do with the highly spiritual Wisdom that Cicero had told him to love. It was cluttered up with earthy and immoral stories from the Old Testament; and even in the New Testament, Christ, Wisdom Himself, was introduced by long, and contradictory, genealogies.9

Such contradictory and unpolished writing surely was not the source of Wisdom which Augustine’s educated and polished mind had grown to admire, but even though he would later write that this first serious reading...