Week 5: Augustine is Full of it.

As I found with the Republic, On Christian Teaching contains what I see as logical flaws throughout which make it difficult to accept anything which is built upon previously established concepts. Since his writing is more advice than a proof or argument for how one ought to examine Christianity, the holes in his reasoning don't detract much from the value of his arguments, but they do affect the extent to which I can respect what he says in general. A few instances stuck out to me as I was reading, and for this blog post I shall examine them further.

On page 45, Augustine examines the significance of the fourty-day fast. He claims that the number originates  from the days of creation (7) plus the number of the holy trinity (3), adding up to ten, conveyed to us temporally- as there are four seasons, four sections of the day, etc. the number 10 is multiplied by 4. First of all, the implications of this are entirely unclear (what do the days of creation plus the trinity add up to, why are they conveyed temporally, and how should this affect the way we think of the 40-day fast?). Secondly, the mathematical logic he uses here (and even more so in the examples following) shows that he could likely have made spiritual "sense" out of any random number given. When he continues on to apply these mathematical principles to various stringed instruments- conjecturing that the number of strings should have some spiritual significance- he comes across as being desperate to link everything together even if it was not intended to be. This desperation colors the way I view the rest of his arguments.

He also uses somewhat faulty logic in his condemnation of other schools of thought. Referring to the practice of augury (53), he says "both before and fter making their observations, (they) deliberately avoid seeing birds in flight or hearing their cries, because these signs are null and void unless accompanied by the observers agreement." Is this not reminiscent of the way he supports searching for meaning in text with a meaning already in mind? Also, he has not considered the possibility (not being a participant in augury) that this is a principle of the practice- augury is based on the idea that the predictions are to be made in a specific time frame and from a certain perspective, otherwise every movement of every bird would contain omens of the future.