God in St. Augustine’s Soliloquies

Abstract

Augustine was a Christian philosopher and a Priest for the Latin Church. He greatly contributed to form Western Christian thought, representing a real Western Master. Augustine investigated fundamental aspects regarding pedagogy of religious status and gave it significant solutions through cultural thickness, for its theoretical strength, and spiritual significance. Knowledge and faith constitute the goal of the educational process. Faith is a principle, but not a definite term. It is an invitation to undertake new speculations, which will not be reason only, but will be guided and directed by faith: “Intellige ut credas. Crede ut intelligas”. In De Magistro, Augustine supports the idea that ascending to God is a self-learning process, of interior growth that must be carried out under the individual’s own lead, his will and rationality, capable of correcting the mistake so as to purify the eyes of the mind and freeing it from the deceiving attraction from the senses, in order to achieve contemplation of immutable superior realities. Of the self-learning process, following the Augustinian pedagogical method of questions and answers, we will analyze his work Soliloquies at the light of three main purposes: a) Soliloquies is talking to oneself, but it is not an num internal monolog of a self closed in its monadic identity, since Augustine articulates his thoughts coherently towards the search of the truth; b) Soliloquies is a dialog in which reason either plays the role of the instructor or the pupil; c) Soliloquies is not about the Self diving into its own essence of abstract subjectivism, but the search for the Self that co-habits that very same interiority, that is, the one that consists on The Other Self of Oneself.