Augustine's Criticism of Philosophers in «De Trinitate» 4, and Its Epistemological Implications

In Book 4, chs 16-17 of De trinitate, Augustine replies to some Neoplatonic philosophers who criticized the Christian faith in the resurrection of the flesh in the name of their own knowledge of eternal reasons. He acknowledges that these philosophers perceived the existence of eternal reasons of all things in God’s wisdom, but he argues that they were unable to know sensible and temporal things without resorting to experience and history. According to Augustine, it is because of pride and lack of purification by faith that the philosophers’ minds were unfit to see future things like resurrection straight in God, in whom all things are eternally present qua known. On the contrary, both prophets and saints were given the possibility of foreknowing the future: by revelation through angels or directly in God, respectively. This shows that, in Augustine’s opinion, the inability to know temporal things by contemplating their eternal causes in God’s wisdom is more due to moral corruption than to natural limits of man’s cognitive powers.