On Augustine’s The Theory Of Illumination

In the face of epoch topic of reason and faith, he advocate faith seeking understanding. What does it mean?Augustine put the faith in the first place, but he does not stopping at the belief in God, expect to be able to understand God. This requires two conditions, one is to have a natural memory of God, second is that God gives illumination to realize the truth. Memory and illumination, the recessive one and the dominant one, Augustine used theory of illumination to solve the challenges of the times. The theory of illumination make human possible to back to God,which opened two roads, one was the process that God created creations, the other one was the return route that creations back to God, which contained abundant dialectical thought. And all of these knowledge that the Christian philosophy inherited and transformed from the ancient Greek philosophy, applied dialectics thoughts to the relationship between God and creations, revealed significance that theory of illumination itself made in the history of philosophy, side highlighted how the early Christian philosophers dealt with the relationship between philosophy and theology from an important perspective. The first chapter of this article comb through history, restore mutual fight or integration between reason and faith, and then give an account of Augustine’s attitude and viewpoint about the relationship, the third chapter delves into theory of illumination, finally make a philosophy historical analysis on Augustine’s theory of illumination.