Page:King Alfred's Old English version of St. Augustine's Soliloquies - Hargrove - 1902.djvu/32

XXVI RELATION OF ALFRED TO ST. AUGUSTINE full. It was his need and his delight to wrestle again and again with the hardest problems of thought, and to comprehend to the utmost the divinely revealed matter of the faith. He always asserted, indeed, the primacy of faith, according to his maxim: Fides praecedit intellectum.... But to him faith itself was an acting of reason, and from faith to knowledge, therefore, there was a necessary transition. He constantly looked below the surface to the hidden motives of actions and to the universal laws of diverse events. The metaphysician and the Christian believer coalesced in him. This may be seen in the ease with which he blends philosophy and theology in his writings: his oratio and his meditatio unconsciously melt into each other. It is Augustine who first clearly -and completely expresses the principle of the immediate certainty of inner experience. His love for introspection even constitutes his peculiar literary quality. He 'is a virtuoso in self-observation and self-analysis; he has a mastery in the portrayal of psychical states which is as admirable as is his ability to analyze these in reflection, and lay bare the deepest elements of feeling and impulse. Just for this reason, it is from this source almost exclusively that he draws the views with which his metaphysics seeks to comprehend the universe'. And so he finds the way to certainty through doubt, and makes this one truth the starting-point of his philosophy, strikingly reminding us of Descartes' use of cogito, ergo sum. 'In that I doubt, or since I doubt' says Augustine, 'I know that I, the doubter, am: and thus just this doubt contains within itself the valuable truth of the reality of the conscious being. Even if I should err in all else, I cannot err in this; for in order to err I must exist'. This is a dominant argument, not only in the Soliloquies, but in his other writings.

1 Schaff : History of Christian Church, HI. 997, f.

2 Windelband: History of Philosophy (tr. Tufts), 277.

3 Cf. Sol II. 7ff. ; De BeataVita 7; De Ver. Mel. 72 if.: De Trin. X. 14, etc.