What is Truth? Augustine and Verbum

            This is not too much for high school students! If elementary school kids a hundred years studied this in classical schools, our kids can handle this, as well. You just have to be patient. Transitioning into Augustine is easy for me; several of my professors in graduate school were Augustine scholars and I was born on his feast day, so I have a particular affinity for him.

St. Augustine of Hippo at Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church in Atlanta, GA. "Love is the Beauty of the Soul". If we are made to Love and to be Loved and that is our Authentic Self, then, indeed, as Augustine says, that Love is the Truest Beauty of our Authentic Self. (photo P. Smith)

St. Augustine of Hippo, six hundred years after Aristotle, explored the Authentic Self through the lens of Judaism and Christianity. As a rhetorician and a master of human language Augustine, before he even professed a belief in Christianity, wrote extensively on the concept of how one could know one’s Authentic Self and thereby achieve happiness. Above all, Augustine admits, the capacity for one to know one’s Authentic Self is profoundly limited, for, as one discovers who they are at a given moment in time and space, they are already different and what they have discovered is no longer True. The Truth of who one is, therefore, can only be observed from a transcendent or objective perspective. Combined with the classical understandings of telos and phronesis and in recognizing a Judeo-Christian parallel with Aristotelean Virtue and Ethics, Augustine began to dive deeper into Christian understanding of Truth, first in terms of philosophy and material epistemology, and later in terms of relationship and his own personal encounter with the divine. It was his own development of a relationship with the divine that would add to and expand what Augustine refers to as one’s Verbum.