A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

was no Trinity, so little does the doctrine engage their minds. 22 Its imposition as
dogma, by an imperial decree, did nothing to root it in the everyday life of the
Church.
Despite his impressive attempts to find a rational basis for belief in the Nicene
Trinity, Augustine always maintained that the concept remained a mystery,
essentially a revelation of God that one had to accept in faith. This is echoed in
the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church (1994), which refers to the Trinity
as ‘a mystery of faith, one of those mysteries that are hidden in God, which can
never be known unless they are revealed by God... God’s inmost Being as Holy
Trinity is a mystery that is inaccessible to reason alone’. 23 This might be
acceptable theologically, even if it raises conceptual problems, relating, for
instance, to the nature of revelation and the authority of the Church, which have
to be addressed. The problem was that Augustine then went on to cast doubt on
the process of reason itself, especially as it related to the study of the natural
world. It is one thing to accept, as all the great Greek thinkers did, that there are
limits to reason; it is another to fail to recognise what a major contribution
reason can make to human knowledge and understanding in, say, mathematics
and science. Augustine had already used the concept of ‘faith’ to displace
Platonic reasoning; he was now to confront the tradition of Aristotle, the use of
reason to define cause and effect from empirical evidence collected by the
senses.
Augustine was not sympathetic towards the study of the natural - world. In his
Soliloquia, an early work, he asks himself the rhetorical question of what he
wishes to know. ‘I desire to know God and the soul. Nothing besides? Nothing
whatsoever.’ 24 As so often with Augustine, his attitude darkens with time, not
least in his approach to the natural world. One can see the development of his
thought through a study of the way he uses the term curiositas, what Aristotle
would have seen as the healthy ‘desire to know’, above all to explore and
understand the world available to the senses. To Augustine, curiositas is always
unhealthy in so far as it diverts attention away from God. In the Confessions, he
provides a critique of the term as essentially sinful. ‘There is another form of
temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease [sic] of curiosity...
It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, these secrets
which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing, and which man
should not wish to learn.’ 25 He later talks pejoratively of curiosity as the ‘lust of
the eyes’ and then, in his final works, as a sin associated with the fall of the soul