In the above I have fixed that sleight of hand trick of yours hoping others would ignore the full content of my post to which you very sparsely responded.
AMR:
For the sake of a coherent/unified response, I opted to answer what I took to be what was the main "thrust" of your posting, i.e., what you took the most time to write about. If you wish to revisit various topics, by all means, you should revisit them in a later posting.
In a word? Yes. I, of course, don't deny that St. Augustine meant what he said. That said, for both St. Augustine and for all linguistic discourse, "what did he say" is only one minor part of the whole picture. We have to take several things into account:
1. To whom did he say it?
2. What was the context in which he said it?
3. Why did he say it?
4. How does what he said fit historically both into what he said before and after, and also what was commonly held in the tradition within which he worked? How, furthermore, does it fit into the overall scheme of his general thought?
5. How have these statements been historically understood within the relevant traditions?
Not to mention, of course, that St. Augustine was the kind of man who was not unwilling to change his mind and revise his thought over time. Consider the Retractions.
I was considering making a thread about this very point, but I figure here and now is as good as anywhere or any-when.
To my mind, the "cherry-picking" tendency of the protestants, both with regard to scripture and anything else, is...I don't even know what adjective I should use to describe it. Unhelpful? Deplorable? Unhistorical? Anti-scholarly?
I could go on, but I'm sure you get the idea.
The more I engage in the study of the history of philosophy (my dissertation is going to be on a topic in Neoplatonism), the more I think that Alasdair MacIntyre (see, e.g., Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry) is basically just right on the impact of tradition on correctly understanding anything. The idea of a "great books" series, i.e., that you can take all of these different works, read them in historical isolation, and understand them perfectly (as though we were simply disembodied, a-perspectival rational agents), is just wrong. A text cannot be read in any meaningful sense without being interpreted. The practical question, then, that arises is: how do I interpret it correctly? The answer, for scripture, for philosophical texts, or anything else is always "tradition." What's a good way of understanding Aristotle? Read the ancient commentators of his school.
This is, of course, a major "gripe" of mine against modern analytical philosophy, in particular, modern analytical "historians of philosophy." I can't help but cringe every time I see, in some secondary text, an attempt to drive a wedge the Plato of the dialogues from the Neoplatonic commentators...as though the Neoplatonic commentators hadn't read them (in the original Greek, no less)?
At any rate, that's essentially the problem with your evaluation of St. Augustine, AMR. You are taking isolated quotes by St. Augustine and taking them in utter isolation from their appropriate contexts (whether be historical, argumentative, polemical, etc.).
I fully grant that St. Augustine, at some point after the Soliloquies (in which he expressed belief in the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence (anamnesis), adopted a doctrine of divine illumination, i.e., that the rules and principles of right reasoning, of the sciences (in the ancient philosophical sense of the term), etc. are "beamed down to us," so to speak, by God, and that we "see these things," so to speak, "in the Divine Art." He expresses some doubts about this with regard to geometry in De Trinitate, but even there, he indeed advances the doctrine as a "replacement," so to speak, to the Platonic theory of knowledge (at least, insofar as he understood it) expressed in the Meno.
I insist, however, at least so far as I have read and have understood the man, St. Augustine simply doesn't appeal to Divine Illumination when discussing Church authority, scriptural interpretation or religious faith. When St. Augustine speaks of divine illumination, he must be understood, first and foremost, not as a Catholic, but as a philosopher, as a man who fell early in his life to the Manichean errors, was "saved" from those errors by Academic skepticism, was subsequently converted to Platonic dogmatism, and passed through Platonism, as though by stepping stones, to the Catholic faith.
I repeat: Divine illumination is not, for St. Augustine, a religious doctrine, but a philosophical one. It is an (albeit misguided, of course) answer to Plato. He himself insists, e.g., in the Retractions, that Divine Illumination is not restricted simply to Christian believers. That's how anyone knows anything with certainty.
Again, if you want to understand his views on scriptural interpretation, then you must view what he says in the proper contexts in which he talks about these things, as, e.g., in polemical disputation against manichean doctrines. "Hey, Catholic, see these books of the scriptures that you received from the Catholic Church? Here's all kinds of problems with the Old Testament. You should throw that out. The New Testament is OK, except for a few passages that were interpolated later. Don't worry. We have all kinds of writings and fables that will help you understand the New Testament."
Since you've linked to this posting a few times now, I'll address it in detail in a later post in this thread. Cruciform replied to it later in the thread that you linked, but I don't think that you were particularly satisfied by his reply. Stay tuned.
He doesn't say "succession of truths." He says "succession of bishops." Granted, it may be anachronistic for me to say "infallible," since I don't recall him speaking in this way, and I see no reason to argue over the use of the term. What is important is this: the degree to which the truths in question can be found credible is precisely the degree to which those authorities, who propose them to us for our religious assent, are credible. The gospels and the faith are credible if and only if the authority of the bishops is credible. They are credible if and only if there is an unbroken succession from the apostles to them.
See De Utilitate Credendi, paragraph 35: "When, therefore, we see such fruit progressively realized by God's aid, shall we hesitate to place ourselves in the bosom of his Church? For it has reached the highest pinnacle of authority, having brought about the conversion of the human race by the instrumentality of the Apostolic See and the succession of bishops."
By St. Augustine's standards, the religious assent of the protestants to whatever form of Christian belief they have is poorly grounded, if not epistemologically abysmal. In terms of whether or not you have good reason for your beliefs even in the Scriptures, you're likely no better off, or, at least, not much better off, than a manichean or a Muslim.
Mohammad is not credible. Mani is not credible. Muslim Imams are not credible. Protestant teachers are not credible.
Again, I see no reason to debate about the use of the word "infallible," since St. Augustine simply doesn't speak in those terms one way or the other, so far as I am aware. Let it suffice to be noted that our belief in Jesus and the gospels presupposes our assent to the teaching authority of the bishops of the Catholic Church.
At any rate, I believe that you make an error when you insist that, for St. Augustine, the authority of the Church is derived from the scriptures. For Augustine, at least in the order of knowledge, it's the other way around. We should believe in the scriptures 1. only because the bishops command us to believe in them and 2. only insofar as is consistent with right reason and the teaching of the bishops. [You can see precisely this at work, e.g., in his commentary on Genesis at the end of the Confessions.]
I do fully grant, however, that the authority of the Church is derivative from the authority of Jesus...not, however, the Jesus "as presented in the Gospels," but the real, historical Jesus who taught his apostles, who, in turn passed on a living tradition of religious faith to their successors.
Practical vs. theoretical. Again, the authority of the bishops grounds our "theoretical" assent to the truths of the gospels and of the Catholic faith.
With respect to the various things that you quoted later:
1. I fully grant that God alone is infallible, and I grant this in precisely the same sense that God alone can forgive sins. The infallibility of the magisterium of the Church is derivative from God's infallibility (insofar as it is the Holy Ghost who teaches us through the instrumentality of the bishops), and the "power" of the priest to forgive sins in the confessional is derivative from God's power to forgive (insofar as it is Jesus who forgives and acts in the sacrament through the instrumentality of the priest).
2. With respect to the other points, again, context? Apart from their polemical/argumentative/historical contexts, we simply can't understand what St. Augustine is trying to say.
