Augustinianism
Augustinianism is the long philosophical-theological tradition descended from Augustine of Hippo (354-430), whose 'Confessions' (c. 397-400), 'De Trinitate' (399-419), and 'De Civitate Dei' ('City of God', 413-426) defined a distinctive Latin Christian vision of God, soul, time, will and history. Its core themes are the primacy of the will and love over the intellect, the radical fallenness of human nature in original sin and the consequent necessity of grace, the doctrine of divine illumination as the condition of human knowing, the inwardness of the self ('in interiore homine habitat veritas'), and the historical drama of the two cities — the city of God built by the love of God to contempt of self and the earthly city built by the love of self to contempt of God. In the medieval period the tradition flowed through Anselm ('Proslogion', 1077-1078), Bonaventure ('Itinerarium Mentis in Deum', 1259) and the Augustinian Hermits, against whom the Aristotelian-Thomist synthesis was deliberately positioned. At the Reformation Augustine's anti-Pelagian writings became the charter of Reformed soteriology in John Calvin's 'Institutes of the Christian Religion' (1559); in seventeenth-century France, Cornelius Jansen's 'Augustinus' (posthumous, 1640) and the Port-Royal circle (Pascal, Arnauld) recovered an austere Augustinianism within Catholicism. Modern Catholic Augustinianism includes Josef Pieper, the 'ressourcement' theologians, and Joseph Ratzinger; in the Reformed world the school is continuous with the entire Augustinian strand of Protestant thought.
Worldview
To be an Augustinian is to experience oneself as a restless heart — 'our heart is restless until it rests in thee' — caught in the dramatic interval between the City of God and the earthly city, between the loves that order the soul rightly and the loves that disorder it. The world is created, good, intelligible, and shot through with signs of the Trinity ('vestigia trinitatis'), but it is also fallen, and the fallen will cannot heal itself. History is read as a single great drama from creation through the Incarnation to the Last Judgment, and political life is permanently relativised: no earthly city is the city of God. The framework classifies this as Personal: God is the personal Trinity who is more interior to me than I am to myself, who speaks, calls, judges and graciously redeems, and whose love is the proper end of the human heart. The framework classifies this as Revelation in moral authority: although natural reason can know much, the actual conduct of fallen life requires the revealed law and above all the gift of grace, because 'da quod iubes et iube quod vis' — grant what you command and command what you will. The Augustinian therefore lives with a permanent sense of dependence on grace and a strong suspicion of every philosophical or political programme that promises self-salvation.
Moral Implications
Augustinian ethics is an ethics of ordered love ('ordo amoris'): virtue is rightly ordered love and vice is disordered love. Because the will is wounded by original sin, moral life is impossible without grace, and the cardinal virtues themselves, severed from charity, become 'splendid vices'. The tradition is therefore wary of confidence in merely natural ethics and insists on the centrality of humility, repentance and self-knowledge. Politically it generates a sober realism: the earthly city can at best secure a relative peace, and no political programme — Roman, revolutionary, or liberal — should be invested with eschatological hope. Pascal's 'Pensees' and Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realism stand in this line.
Practical Implications
Augustinianism shaped Latin Christian spirituality, the Western theology of grace, much of monastic and Reformed devotional practice, and a long political tradition of anti-utopian realism. Calvin's church order, the Jansenist schools at Port-Royal, the Lutheran emphasis on simul iustus et peccator, the modern Catholic ressourcement, and Niebuhr's mid-twentieth-century critique of liberal progressivism all draw directly on this tradition. In education and pastoral care it produces a distinctive attention to the interior life, to confession and self-examination, and to the formation of love rather than the mere training of intellect.
I. Time
Time is the great Augustinian theme: in 'Confessions' XI Augustine famously argues that time is not a Substantival container that pre-exists creation but emerges with the creature — 'the world was not made in time but with time'. Time is therefore Emergent, Finite, One-dimensional, Linear and Uni-directional, with a single beginning at creation and a single end at the Last Judgment. The present is paradoxical: past and future have being only in the soul's distentio, which holds them as memory and expectation, while only the present moment strictly is. Freedom is Non-Deterministic because human choices are genuine, even though the whole of history is foreknown and providentially ordered by an eternal God who is the ground of time rather than a being within it.
Attributes
II. Space
Space is Substantival, Finite, Three-dimensional, Flat and Local — a feature of the created order rather than an aspect of God, who is omnipresent without being spatially extended. Augustine resists every imagination of God as a vast bodily presence diffused through space, insisting in 'Confessions' VII that God is wholly everywhere without being divided. The created cosmos is finite and good. The decisive spatial fact in this tradition is not cosmology but the inwardness of the soul: the true 'place' of the encounter with God is not above the heavens but within.
Attributes
III. Matter
Matter is Substantival, Finite, three-dimensional, Local and Conserved. Augustine's anti-Manichaean writings are emphatic that matter is the good creature of a good God: it is not the principle of evil, and evil is privation of good rather than a substance. The body, against all dualist temptations, is to be raised and glorified, not escaped. This commitment differentiates Augustinianism sharply from Gnostic and Manichaean dualisms, even though Augustine's own theology of original sin gives the body and its concupiscent drives a more strenuous moral role than they have in some other Christian traditions.
Attributes
IV. Observer
The Augustinian observer is an interior self — a deep, restless heart whose self-knowledge is at the same time the discovery of God dwelling within ('tu autem eras interior intimo meo'). The observer is Embodied and Plural, but the access route to truth runs through introspection rather than detached objectivity. Knowledge extent is Mediated because we know finite things only in the light of the eternal forms by divine illumination — the intellect does not generate its own light but is illuminated by the divine Word. Agency is Both: the will is genuine but radically wounded by sin, and only grace restores the freedom to love rightly ('liberum arbitrium' versus 'libertas'). Retainment is Total because the soul is immortal and bears its loves into eternity. Above all the observer is a creature of 'memoria', and memory in 'Confessions' X is the vast interior space where the self meets God.
Attributes
V. Energy
Augustine treats the natural order as the good creation of God, and Augustinianism retains a classical view of physical reality: energy is Substantival, Finite and Conserved within the limits God has established. Dispersibility is Irreversible because time has a single direction running from creation to consummation. There is no esoteric doctrine of cosmic energies here; physical processes are simply the orderly behaviour of creatures sustained in being by divine providence. The school is comfortable with the results of natural science precisely because nature is genuinely natural, even as it is always more than itself.
Attributes
VI. Information
Information is Substantival and Continuous, borne by the divine ideas ('rationes aeternae') in the Word, by which all things are known and through which the human intellect knows whatever it knows. Cosmic information is Conserved because nothing falls out of God's eternal knowing. Personal-identity information is Conserved because the individual soul is immortal and its memoria — the whole of its temporal life, including its loves and sins — is gathered up before God. Granularity is Continuous because what is known is intelligible form, which is grasped as a unity in the act of understanding (Augustine's analyses of light, judgment and the inner word).
Attributes
Works that name Augustinianism in their embodiments
Foundational texts that draw on this school, with each work's declared weight.
Personas with Augustinianism as a declared influence
How Augustinianism resolves each dilemma
57 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 5 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
6 mainstream positions
Matter · 7 dilemmas, all mainstream
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 2 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.