Bright 1 Stuart Bright Ms. Gaskins English 2110 9 Sept.

2010 Punishment Paper What is it about human nature that drives such interest towards understanding the absolute truth? Likewise, how does wisdom play into this complete awareness of the unknown? In the texts, Confessions, the first autobiography by Aurelius Augustine, and The Allegory of the Cave, a philosophical conflict demonstrated through the senses by Plato, these answers are expressed in a perplexing manner. They are, however, quite similar as Augustine relies heavily upon the theological and philosophical views that Plato established. Written as a conversation between two men, Plato and Glaucon, The Allegory of the Cave describes a fictional, imaginative scenario in which a group of prisoners have been chained and restricted of mobility in a cave since they were too young to remember any other world. These inhabitants are bound in such a way that they may only see a dark, blank wall in front of them, and they may only hear the echoes of what is going on behind them from reflections off of the wall. A lit fire behind them reveals shadows on the wall that appear to be reality for the prisoners since they have no reason to think otherwise, and this dark and ignorant thought is all that is truth to them. Suddenly, a single prisoner is released and he cautiously wanders around his unknown surroundings, until he is taken out of the cave against his own will. The experience is painful at first, but he comes to a realization that his former world and set of beliefs were ones of ignorance. And his current settings, though questioned and thought to be false in the beginning, were those of actuality. Lastly, if he were to go back to where he was chained up with the others, he would make a fool of himself because his eyes would be adjusted to light and

Bright 2 the others would not believe in him that the shadows are a secondary means of vision produced by the fire. He would inevitably know the truth of both upper and lower worlds, giving him a complete understanding and ultimate sense in what are right or good. Confessions, a series of books written of Augustines life from birth that are compiled with direct prayers to God, give insight to his regrets for his religious practices in earlier years and his eventual conversion through developing a relationship with God. Augustine immediately starts out by thanking God, whom he realized had mercy on him and had given him uncountable blessings. He continues with sorrow as he mentions his sinful past and forced learning of Aeneas teachings that are contradictory to those of divine nature. He goes on in Book II to describe his lustful acts and how his stealing of the pears was like a soul guilty of turning from Gods will. Following this, Augustines time at Carthage reveals a belief that an ascending trip of return to God will bring him the wisdom he sought after so tirelessly. Advancing the story, Augustine would soon be filled with the Lords commands by his friend Ambrose and ill mother to be baptized as a Catholic Christian. He does so and concludes with an allusion to light along with the final request that his mothers dying wish be fulfilled more so with his confessions than by prayer alone. As for the relevancy between the two pieces, Augustine gleams former ideas and Biblical text that correlate to themes within Platos allegory. Augustine introduces the idea of a world that is fundamentally good in nature, and a world where evil merely exists when a crucial part preventing it from being good is missing.

***Augustine Alters the Platonic Understanding of Ultimate Reality

Bright 3 "The status of the transcendent Ideas, so central to the Platonic tradition and widely recognized by the pagan intelligentsia, was now significantly altered. Augustine agreed with Plato that the Ideas constituted the stable and unchangeable forms of all things and provided a solid epistemological basis for human knowledge. But he pointed out that Plato lacked an adequate doctrine of creation to explain the participation of particulars in the Ideas. (Plato's creator, the Demiurge of the Timaeus, was not an omnipotent supreme being, since the chaotic world of becoming upon which he imposed the Ideas already existed, as did the Ideas themselves; nor was he omnipotent vis-a-vis ananke, the errant cause.) Augustine therefore argued that Plato's conception could be fulfilled by the Judaeo-Christian revelation of the supreme Creator, who freely wills the creation into existence ex nihilo, yet who does so in accordance with the seminal ordering patterns established by the primordial Ideas residing in the Divine Mind. Augustine identified the Ideas as the collective expression of Gods Word, the Logos, and viewed all archtypes as contained within and expressive of the being of Christ. - The Passion of the Western Mind, by Richard Tarnas. p106 Anyone who is interested in Augustines role in the history of Philosophy should read the section in the above book titled, The Conversion of the Pagan Mind. I find the author to be exceptionally thorough, clear and concise.

**I quote the following to show the exact parallels between Augustine's concept of the Good and Platonic Good. The only difference is that with Augustine, the absolute good is the Christian God.

From The Passion of the Western Mind, by Richard Tarnas:

Platos mentor, Socrates, had sought to know what was common to all virtuous acts, so that he could evaluate how one should govern ones conduct in life. He reasoned that if one wishes to choose the actions that are good, one must know what good is, apart from any specific circumstances. To evaluate one thing as better than another assumes the evidence of an absolute good with which the two relative goods can be compared. Otherwise, the word good would be only a word whose meaning had to stable basis in reality, and human morality would

Bright 4 lack a serious foundation.

- p7.

"For Plato then, the great task facing the philosopher was to emerge from the cave of ephemeral shadows and bring his darkened mind back into the archtypical light, the true source of being. When speaking of this higher reality, Plato repeatedly linked light, truth, and goodness. In the Republic, he described the Idea of the Good as being to the intellible realm what the sun is to the invisible realm: in the same way that the sun allows objects of the visible world to grow and be visible, so does the Good grant to all objects of reason their existence and their intelligibility. The philosopher's attainment of virtue consists in his discovering that luminous knowledge which brings harmony between the human soul and the cosmic order of archtypes, an order governed and illuminated by the supreme Idea of the Good."

*d soafter two chapters of relative intellectualization, Augustine returns to the description of his marathon of internal torment, with a poetically powerful chapter, again using in multiple places, the metaphor of Platos Cave.

So I was sick and in torture. I reproached myself much more bitterly than ever, and I turned and twisted in my chain till I could break quite free. (pg 1236)