Augustine vs. Sartre on the Difference God Makes

In this lecture series, Dr. Peter Kreeft examines key ideas in philosophy by comparing and contrasting two representative philosophers in each episode.

In lecture 4, Dr. Kreeft details the differences between Augustine, the lover of truth, and Sartre, whose ultimate enemy is truth. We are faced with a stark choice between Augustine’s road to the source of all love and light and life, and Sartre’s road into the darkness.

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[rdc]

The aging of Dr. Kreeft frightens me more than most things these days because we will be without an incredible voice for Truth, wisdom, and sanity when he is called home ... Perhaps one of the great things of our technological age is that we will still have these remarkable lectures to learn from when he parts our immediate company. God's blessings be continually to him! 🙏

[commercialrealestatephilos]

I pray this video gets to the millions confused and stuck in the mud and muck that is relativism.

[EmmaDeRose-rx]

Thank you so much, Dr. Kreeft, for the rich lectures. I think you may have saved my Catholic faith.

[bman]

These lectures are so rich. What immense wisdom from Dr. Kreeft.

[zita-lein]

The education I never got. Loved this! ❤

[socioster]

Bravo! This is a proof of God's love

[tomasidh]

These videos are an immense treasure. Thank you, Dr. Kreft!

[joolz]

Peter Kreeft will be more ALIVE in Heaven and the HS will keep his wisdom going here.

[bmc]

Thank you Dr Kreeft. These lectures have been wonderful.

[julietn]

Thank you Dr. Kreeft on these immensely profound digital connection to the great philosophers & their work on reason & thought!

[christinac]

These lectures are fabulous. I've been reaping rewards from each one of them.

[RocketKirchner]

Sartre misses Kierkegaard - the concept of anxiety is the possibility of freedom in the sense that one can have that anxiety and still be a Christian .

[sheenapearse]

Philosophy is an ocean, we get lost on, and I never have been able to run a line through “ Existentialist choice “ and Christian truth .
Contrasting Augustine and Sartre / Nietzsche would never have occurred to me, and is definitely beyond me, so I am really grateful for your deeply thoughtful and wise distillation of this topic, and the eternal harm of nihilism. I used to believe our character is our destiny, and our destiny arises from the choices we make in life - but now I understand ‘ the gravity of love ‘ determines our identity _ as Aquinas put it “ The things we love, tell us who we are .” - the heart leads, the mind follows ( justifies ), the will is conformed .
I feel certain most people are unaware of these differing understandings of freedom . Sincere gratitude !

[iqgustavo]

🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation:

00:21 📜 Augustine's "City of God" is a significant work, responding to Rome's decay and fall, influencing Western civilization.
01:19 📚 Augustine's writings, like "Confessions" and "On the Trinity, " shaped Christian civilization and philosophy.
02:30 🏛️ Augustine was a deeply converted Christian philosopher, while Sartre stood as a committed atheist.
03:54 🧠 Augustine's light can be compared to Sartre's, while Augustine's passion and wisdom surpassed Nietzsche's fire.
04:52 ⚖️ Augustine's "Confessions" and "City of God" were influential books throughout the Middle Ages.
05:18 ✝️ Both Augustine and Sartre recognize the profound impact of the concept of God on human life and culture.
06:46 🕊️ Sartre's atheism hinges on the absence of Eternal truth and values, embracing absolute freedom from God's constraints.
07:42 🔄 Sartre argues for the incompatibility of a perfect, unchanging God with personal subjects and free will.
09:19 🕰️ Augustine's God exists timelessly, coexisting with the present, avoiding limitations of past and future.
10:46 🌍 Augustine asserts that without God, there is no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose in human life.
11:58 💔 Sartre finds freedom in God's absence, viewing existence as purely subjective and void of ultimate judgments.
14:11 🛤️ Sartre and Augustine's opposing conclusions emerge from the same principle: "If God does not exist, everything is permissible."
16:45 🗝️ Sartre's atheism is shaped by his desire for radical freedom, affecting his philosophical arguments.
19:20 🔒 Sartre's metaphysical arguments against God stem from preconceived notions, driven by his will and desires.
20:57 🌌 Augustine's philosophy accommodates the timeless existence of a personal God, distinct from Sartre's limited categories.
24:24 ⚖️ Sartre's atheism is based on his desire, contrasting with the more honest atheistic argument from the problem of evil.
25:47 🕊️ Sartre's atheism reflects his personal choice, either leading to misery or satisfaction, mirroring the devil's choice.
26:26 😔 Nietzsche and Sartre reject God's existence due to fear of being known and judged by God.
27:36 🙅‍♂️ Sartre demands absolute freedom, which he sees as incompatible with the existence of God.
28:17 🕊️ Augustine's conversion includes heart, mind, and will, leading him to seek truth, wisdom, and divine love.
30:08 🌟 Augustine's core values are truth, goodness, and beauty, driven by his love for God.
31:31 💔 Augustine longs to be known and loved by God, while Sartre fears dependence on God and seeks total freedom.
34:51 🛑 Sartre's atheism leads to nihilism, denying objective meaning, value, and virtue; values are arbitrary and invented.
36:57 🗽 Augustine's freedom is positive, seeking union with God; Sartre's freedom is negative, avoiding all limits.
39:05 🏙️ Augustine worships God, valuing truth and love; Sartre worships self, rejecting truth and love, leading to isolation and hell.
43:41 ⚖️ Sartre's pessimism and nihilism can push individuals toward deeper questioning and potential religious exploration.
44:06 🌅 Choosing between Augustine's path of love and light or Sartre's path of darkness and isolation has significant societal consequences.

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[gridlock]

You were very polite in not exposing more facts about Sartre's private life.

[matiasdsalerno]

Wow! This video is full of wisdom! God bless Professor Kreeft

[greyforge]

This is one of the best things I've ever listened to, out of untold hours of podcasts and videos. Incredibly well-prepared material and clear delivery. I suppose the content boils down to the opposing ideas of freedom, which Bishop Barron has specifically drawn attention to, namely arbitrary freedom of choice between options and "the disciplining of desire such that attainment of the good becomes first possible and then effortless." If there are real values that exist outside of yourself, then you have to accept the second idea of freedom.

I'm still sorting through a lot of difficulties about what religious belief involves, but I think anyone should be able to see that there are objective values in the world which exist outside of themselves. You can't be a great artist or athlete or be loved by people just by deciding you want it to be so. You have to conform yourself to something outside yourself. It's the worldview of a relatively immature and spoiled high school student (or younger) to expect your life to instantly become what you will it to be. Even more juvenile to think that all values are subjective - to believe that goodness isn't good and beauty isn't beautiful unless you say so. Only someone with no experience of the world, who has never encountered anything greater than himself, could be so deluded.


Instead of that worldview, you might imagine that objective values are not only greater than your own individual person, but that they are transcendent relative to all the rest of reality. You might have faith that beauty and goodness and truth point to a metaphysical state of being. You might reason that mercy is more real than evil because it envelops and contains it, and that beauty is more real than ugliness which is only its absence, and that all this might say something about the ultimate point of life. This all seems like it would be pretty straightforward and obvious, if people like Sartre hadn't wormed their way into the culture in relatively recent history. And if we weren't all mini-existentialists in our immature and confused natures, particularly when we're young.

[michaelderenzi]

This is great. Reminds me of a quote from Tocqueville: "If man has no faith, he must obey, and if he is free, he must believe."

[alex.vgeorge]

I am a pastor gone through all most all philosophy. His understanding in philosophy incredible same time he evaluate all in light of theology, there is gold and Dimond in it those who hear

[PaoloGasparini-uxkp]

Among philosophers, Augustine was not only the most famous convert but also the most totally converted one, while Sartre is probably the most complete and consistently unconverted. God's reality changes everything for Augustine and God's unreality changes everything for Sartre. Both are totally and uncompromisingly clearly and comprehensively committed to their completely opposite philosophies. Augustin's conversion was the archetypal example of the conversion of Western Civilization to Christ and Sartre’s conversion away from that faith is equally the archetype of our civilization's ongoing and increasing anti-conversion. It was Nietzsche rather than Sartre who actually called himself the Antichrist and wrote a whole book by that title, but Sartre has at least an equal right to that name and his concepts are much clearer and more consistent than Nietzsche's sparkling but chaotic fireworks. Augustine gives us both fire and light, both passion and reason, both heart and head, but it's clearer to compare his light to Sartre's light than his fire to Nietzsche's fire. However, Augustine is unrivaled in these two powers, heart and head, love and understanding, passion and wisdom, and medieval statues of him always show him holding an open book in one hand and a burning heart in the other, no mere man who ever lived exceeded him in both powers at the same time. If you doubt that tell me one book that can rival his Confessions in both. Comparing Augustine and Sartre, comparing two prophets and prophecies of the two new directions, the two radical turnings that our culture has taken - the first one 16 hundred years ago, when it was converted to Christianity -, and the second one being the opposite new direction, it is increasingly taking today. These two men exemplify these two options everywhere, both in their individual lives, in personalities, and also in their social and political philosophies. If Sartre had been asked to pick the two great books that he thought were most disastrously wrong, he might well have picked Augustine's Confessions and The City of God, the two books that were after the Bible the two most popular and influential books in Christendom for well over a thousand years after Augustine, throughout the Middle Ages and which defined the culture that used to be called Christendom and which is now called simply Western Civilization. For both, Augustine and Sartre, no idea makes more of a difference than the idea of God. Both to the mind and to the heart. Augustine and Sartre take up their opposite positions regarding God, both with their heads and with their hearts, with reason and the will. So, let's look at their reasons first. Augustine's signature argument for God's existence is the argument from the premise that we can know eternal truths - like two plus three equals five - with certainty. He uses this to prove the conclusion that there must be some eternal and infallible divine Mind in which we see these truths. For we see these truths not just in changing human minds and in changing material things. When the teacher teaches the student that two plus three equals five the student does not see this truth in the changing world or in the changing and fallible mind of the teacher or in his own changing fallible mind but in the mind of God! If there is eternal truth there is an eternal mind, and this is especially true of truth about values. Sartre replies with exactly the opposite argument. He argues from the premise that there is no eternal and infallible divine mind, and that there can be no eternal truth and no eternal values. Dostoyevsky, like Augustine, famously argued that if God does not exist everything is permissible and not everything is permissible therefore God must exist. Sartre replies explicitly to Dostoevsky's argument - which is essentially the same as Augustine's argument - that the premise is true. That if God does not exist everything is permissible. But Sartre then takes the opposite path from the principle that God does not exist and therefore everything is indeed permissible. Sartre also has a signature argument for God's non-existence and this is a very difficult and abstract metaphysical argument but it is so central to his philosophy that we cannot ignore it.
I shall try to make it as clear as I can. I begin with the premise that there are only two kinds of reality, two kinds of being, which he calls “being for itself” and “being in itself.” “Being for itself” is his term for “persons, ” subjects, and “I’s.” They think and choose, therefore they act and change in time. He also calls this existence meaning “personal existence”, or “human existence.” And since his philosophy centers on this, he calls it “existentialism.” It is the philosophy of subjectivity, of the priority of subjects over objects, of existence over essence. “Being in itself”, on the other hand, is his term for “objects, ” objects of thought or choice - whether those objects are physical or mental. The essence of an idea or a physical thing does not change or act in time. Trees grow and dogs bark with them, but the essence of a tree and the essence of a dog does not change. So, “being in itself” is static and timeless, and complete and perfect, while “being for itself” is dynamic and changing, and incomplete. It's on the way to its identity, rather than secure in it. That's why dogs can't be un-doggy but humans can be inhuman. We experience identity crises, we can struggle with ourselves, and we can construct different personalities for ourselves as nothing else can. Sartre then argues that nothing can be both “being in itself” and “being for itself.” Both perfect and personal, both static and dynamic, both unchanging and changing, both object and subject. But the concept of God is the concept of a perfect eternal person: a mind and a will that acts but not in time. Thus, Sartre argues the concept of God is self-contradictory. For Sartre, the gods of pagan religions were projections of ourselves as personal subjects and Plato's eternal truths or forms or essences or projections of our own subjective ideas. And the God of the Bible is a projection of the double perfection that we most desire but cannot possibly be: the synthesis of both eternity and time, inaction and action, changelessness and change, essence and existence, objectivity and subjectivity, being in itself and being for itself. We can't ignore those two arguments, but I think we can find a deeper source of Sartre's atheism and of Augustine's theism than either of those rational arguments. It is the total difference God makes to both of them. For Augustine, if God does not exist there is ultimately nothing: no meaning, no purpose, no value, no good, no hope, nothing lovable in human life. In the words of a great title of Cardinal Sarah's book, it's “God or nothing.” For Sartre God does not exist, and he goes in his right: ultimately, there is nothing! Nothing greater than us, nothing to judge us as good or evil, true or false, and that's great for Sartre! That's what freedom means for Sartre: freedom from everything, even God. So, Sartre’s god is his own freedom! If there is a God above us, we are not totally free, and we are totally free! Therefore, there is no God above us.
That's the foundation of Sartre’s atheism. Sartre sees freedom as essentially negative: freedom from being reduced to an object, an object of God. Augustine sees freedom as essentially positive. Freedom to attain our happiness, our perfection, our destiny, our true identity in God. The difference is so total that these two brilliant philosophers are perhaps the most totally and radically theistic and the most totally and radically atheistic thinkers who ever lived. Mankind has come up with millions of ideas throughout its long multicultural life and one of them is the idea of God, the idea of something like God, some superhuman absolute that is common to the religions of all the world. Now, if we weigh this single idea against all other ideas. If we put the idea of God on one side of our mental scales and if we put on the other side of the scale all the millions of ideas that all the millions of human beings throughout all of history have ever come up with, every other idea that any human mind has ever conceived, what will happen? God’s idea will be so heavy that it will lift all the other millions of ideas into thin air, like clouds! That's why religion has always been the single most passionately important dimension of human life to every culture that came before our own Brave New World. If this idea is true, it is the greatest of truths. If it is false, it is the greatest of falsehoods! Religion is either mankind's greatest wisdom or mankind's greatest illusion.