Epistemology

Augustine can be said to have an active theory of sense perception. ‘‘Active’’ in this context includes the idea that the eyes emit rays that touch the object of vision. ‘‘For it is not the body that perceives,’’ he writes in Literal Commentary on Genesis 12.24.51, ‘‘but the soul through the body, which messenger, as it were, the soul uses to form in itself the very thing which is announced from the outside.’’ Augustine’s theory of sense perception seems not to be ‘‘representational,’’ if, by that term one means that it is an image or sense-datum that is the direct object of perception. In sensing a body, according to him, we immediately form an image of that body in our sense, yet we cannot distinguish between the form of the body we see and the form of the image we produce in our sense (On the Trinity, 11.2.3).

Augustine’s account of knowledge is not based on the idea of abstraction, as we find in the Aristotelian tradition. Rather, as already noted, Augustine understands knowledge to be something arrived at by an intellectual illumination. He thinks that “intelligible realities,’’ including especially a priori truths, cannot be learned, or even confirmed, in sense experience. All this, including the light metaphor so prominent in Augustine’s idea of illumination, is very Platonic. But Augustine rejects Plato’s idea that the soul might have been introduced to items in the purely intelligible realm before birth. ‘‘We ought rather to believe,’’ he writes, ‘‘that the nature of the intellectual mind is so formed as to see those things which, according to the disposition of the Creator, are subjoined to intelligible things in the natural order, in a sort of incorporeal light of its own kind’’ (On the Trinity, 12.15.24).