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Essay on Pagan Virtue in Augustine and Aristotle
The study of the virtues has largely dropped out of modern philosophy, yet it was the predominant tradition in ethics from the ancient Greeks until Kant. Traditionally the study of the virtues included the study of what constituted a successful and happy life. Drawing on such diverse sources as Aristotle, Augustine, the classical virtues of courage, temperance, practical wisdom, and justice centrally define the good for humans, and that they are insufficiently acknowledged in modern moral philosophy.
Saint Augustine, who is often credited with saving Christianity from the threat of corruption from pagan and heathen influences, and it cannot go unremarked that Christianity which claims to have given woman its one true savior also found itself in need of being saved, expresses more eloquently than most a blend of ideas about the nature of the soul, part Greek from Aristotle and Plato and part Hebraic, that came to be regarded as the standard definition of that sacred, if somewhat elusive, concept. In On Christian Doctrine, for instance, he says that and so faith clings to the assurance, and we must believe that it is so in fact, that neither the human soul nor the human body suffers complete extinction, but that the wicked rise again to endure inconceivable punishment, and the good to receive eternal life.
There are two kinds of distinctions that can be drawn here between Aristotle and Augustine about the nature of the soul. Aristotle never suggests that the individual human soul is somehow immortal, or that it does not suffer "extinction." His concept, that soul is a universal substance which imparts "essential whatness" to the body and that the two are inescapably intertwined, does not accord well with the idea Augustine expresses here that the body and the soul, which stamps body as to kind.....................
