St. Augustine on The Natural Distinction Between Man and Beast
Ubi primum occurrit aliquid quod non sit nobis commune et pecori, hoc ad rationem pertinet.
(St. Augustine)
St. Augustine attributes the distinction between man and beast to reason. It is not that reason is defined by men (as if reason were the asset of “evolved” beasts), but that men are defined by reason. Reason, not as man’s prerogative, as if beasts were mere machines, or things devoid of any interiority.
St. Augustine’s classical alternative to modern, Cartesian reason has reason naturally defining man’s place or function. Reason in nature—“pre-historically”. The distinction between man and beast is natural in the respect that the reason why man is not mere cattle is natural. Both man and beast are defined by reason; both belong to reason: ambo ad rationem pertinent. Hence St. Augustine’s ubi...pertinet: “the watershed between man and cattle belongs to reason”. What does this tell us about human reason, about our own language, about our own way—the way of the human being, as distinct from that of sheep? Our own reason belongs to a reason in nature; or: human reason—as the reason that man as man articulates—is the image of a reason hidden in man.
Where art is the articulation of reason, human art will be the image, even mask of a natural art, or of nature as divine or divinely hidden art. Man is said to be the image of God in the respect that the way of man—human art or providence—is a reflection of divine providence, or of the nature that Cicero called our best guide (optima dux), whom we follow and obey (sequimur eique paremus) if we are to be wise. Far from being the fruit of human ingenuity, human wisdom would be the function of an intelligent nature, or of reason hidden in nature.
We would not choose to follow nature as intelligent guide; rather, we would become wise and thus capable of choosing freely by following a reason hidden in nature. We naturally follow nature’s reason and in our living naturally we are wise. But how do you follow and obey nature “just as a god” (tamquam deum)? By recognizing nature as divine art manifest in human art; and natural authority as manifest in human authority, just as natural right would be manifest in civil right, as opposed to its corruption; civil right interpreted in the light of its inherence in nature.
Cattle, to return to St. Augustine’s proposition, would not discern divine action in its own. The beast as such is no image of God. It is not called to mirror nature, but to remain in nature and never to risk being alienated from generation; never to face the challenge of returning its own makings—what it produces, its own offspring—to nature’s reason or mind. Man is the one who is “set apart” to sacrifice himself to God and who, in so doing, imitates God’s own giving of himself fully to Man and derivatively to all life forms.
Human reason, as human art, distances itself from nature only to discover nature’s own providential agency—a divine art—in the distance separating erring man from nature. Felix culpa. The all-too-human erring serves providentially as occasion for the carrying out of a divine mandate. A human hero restitutes all that was given to us, gathering human pretenses back into the original seat of art. As Socrates, he will teach that not we are wise, but the God who hides in nature and who manifests himself as a human hero.
Man defined by a reason or mind or thought (mens) hidden in nature is the place (St. Augustine’s ubi) of return of all appearances, of all illusions—of all purposes, of all acquisitions, of all power—to their source. Cattle does not know this “place” and the art characterizing it. Cattle senses or dreams of its end, but it does not reflect; it does not see in its dreamed-of ends an end presupposed by all dreams; it does not let go of its illusions for the sake of discovering a truth hidden beneath them but that manifests itself in illusions alone. Cattle does not place its trust in invisible things, or in the invisible content of divine thought—of a mind hidden in nature.
Nature does not call cattle to ask questions, to enter into a place of negation for the sake of accessing what is hidden at the heart of all “positive” answers. The being called to question the given as such is man. Man is the being who is called, not merely or primarily to acquire, but to see and present what he acquires—all that he is given to acquire, including his own name or conventional identity—as a reflection of a possession presupposed by all acquisition, a possession that is none other than intelligent being and so mind-in-nature.
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