God and Humanity Remembering God

God and Humanity

Remembering God

Our heart is restless until it rests in you," (Augustine 3), many nations throughout history have believed that man had an innate connection with the divine. This belief is that we are born with the knowledge of God, but forget these essentially lessons in our experiences as men. Plato, the philosophers known as the Stoics, and later the Christian theologies of St. Augustine all portray a natural relationship between man and God, that must be remembered through religious devotion and knowledge of the natural world. Plato began a tradition of recording man's desire to learn about the immaterial and formless divine, therefore becoming one with it. Plato, however, believed that this knowledge was new to the human mind, which was born without knowledge of "the one" or the Forms. Despite the belief that God was material, Stoicism later used this same concept in their theologies of a natural goodness within the souls of all men. Finally Christianity, through the philosophies of St. Augustine, adopts the idea that we are born with a natural knowledge of God, which must be restored through conversion to and remembrance of His will.

Plato expressed the Socratic idea that it is our life's work to improve the soul and gain wisdom. Through this pursuit we gain true knowledge, untainted by opinion known as doxa. Plato explains in his work the Republic, that it is therefore our life's work to learn as much as we can about "the one," for our knowledge brings us closer to it. The Forms are manifestations of "the one," or the source of all intelligibility and goodness. Through truly knowing the Forms, we gain real knowledge and forever leave the cave which traps us in opinion. True knowledge brings the man out of the cave and into the light of the real world. The divine, in Plato's beliefs, was immaterial and formless but also much more unimaginable than the God imagined by the Stoics and St. Augustine's Catholicism. Although we were supposed to spend our time uncovering the secrets of the divine, Plato believed that we were initially born ignorant of God.

The Stoic tradition followed the Platonic and Socratic idea that it was man's goal in life to gain as much knowledge of the world as possible. They placed extra emphasis on knowing the material world, however, for they believed that God was actually a material being. This divine being was involved in with the events of the material world, for it was a member of that world. Stoicism portrayed an active God who molded fate through his internal relationship to all other material beings (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Stoics, like Plato, also believed that God was associated with an external "one," or universal knowledge. However, man could gain knowledge of this universal truth through knowledge of the material world, which therefore leads him to God. The Stoic God was material, and therefore knowable to man, who is also a material being. They believed that all things which were knowable to us were of a material nature.

St. Augustine took this idea of becoming close to the divine through knowledge of it, but expressed that this knowledge had always been within us. Through our memory, which is one of the only things we can trust as real, we remember God "You are always the same, and you always know unchangeably the things which are not always the same," (Augustine 137). St. Augustine believed that the were was an immaterial and formless God "You are certainly not our physical shape...Yet you mad humanity in your image and man from head to foot is contained in space," (94).which we had known before our mortal "morbid condition of the mind," (186). He believed that through religious conversion and religious devotion, man could rid himself of his mortal limitations and remember the divine splendor of God. Through ones memory, one attained closeness with the glory of God, "Memory pleasures in distinct particulars and general categories all the perceptions which have penetrated, each by its own rate of entry," (195). St. Augustine gives an example of how simple this idea is, and would be if people just opened themselves up to a relationship with God. His conversion in his garden, as seen in his Confessions, shows how we only need one small spark to open up our memory and understanding of Him.