EXISTENCE OF GOD
St. Augustine’ understanding of the existence of God is based on his understanding of the
divine attributes and divine simplicity.1
Like the most Christian Theologians, Augustine perceives God as Being. For St.
Augustine, “Being is equated with eternity and immutability.”2 Eternity and mutability will always
remain the two main attributes of God in the doctrine of St. Augustine. Reflecting in the divine
attributes, we can comprehend God existence. The starting point of this proof is the mind’s
apprehension of necessary and changeless truths, of a truth “which thou canst not call thine, or
mine, or any man’s, but which is present to all and gives itself to all alike.”3 This truth is superior
to the mind, inasmuch as the mind has to bow before it and accept it: the mind did not constitute
it, nor can it amend it: the mind recognizes that this truth transcends it and rules it’s thought rather
than the way around. If it is were inferior to the mind, the mind could change it or amend it, while
if it were equal to the mind, of the same character, it would itself be changeable, as the mind is
changeable. The mind varies in its apprehension of truth, apprehending it now more clearly now
less clearly, whereas truth remains ever the same “Hence if truth is neither inferior nor equal to
minds, nothing remains but that it should be superior and excellent.4
Augustine clearly holds that God is ‘simple’ in various parts of De Trinitate V-VII (VI. 6,
VII. 2 and VII. 10). However, it is in VI. 8 where he discusses the notion of simplicity in detail.
Two underlying aspects for simplicity can be abstracted from Augustine’s discussion.5 First,
1
Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
2
Confessions, VII, II, 177.
3
De lib. Arbit. 2,12,33.
4
Ibid
5
Immutability is a third aspect of simplicity but an adequate discussion is beyond the scope of this essay. See
Roland J. Teske, ‘Divine Immutability in Augustine’ in To Know God and the Soul: Essays on the Thought of Saint
Augustine (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), pp. 131-154.
something is simple if and only if the multiple attributes predicated to it cannot be considered as
parts in a whole. The body is not simple because it consists of parts “in such a way that one of its
parts will be greater, another smaller”. The underlying logic is that we can call one part of the body
greater and another smaller only because the body has separate parts with different measures of
size. For Augustine, the very possibility of comparing different parts of the body demonstrates that
the body is not simple. Thus for something to be simple, all its multiple attributes cannot be
considered as parts in a whole. Second, something is simple if and only if it cannot be treated such
that the whole can be regarded as an aggregate sum. For example, the cosmos is greater than the
heaven alone or the earth alone. This is the case because the cosmos is an aggregate sum of heaven
and earth, where the sum is greater than the individual terms alone. It follows that the cosmos is
not simple because it consists of two distinct parts, heaven and earth. The second aspect of
simplicity follows naturally from the first since if something contains separate parts, then these
parts can be considered as individual terms in a sum and so this thing can also be treated as an
aggregate sum.
