Natural minds and divine truth: Rethinking the Augustinian1 idea of necessary truth

Abstract

St Augustine of Hippo and the other fellow Augustinians, such as St Bonaventure, argued that the human mind lacks the cognitive capacity to attain the necessary, certain, and the immutable truth. This necessary, certain, and the immutable truth, they argued, can only come through divine illumination whose source is God. For this reason, many people have recourse to religious places in search of this immutable and
necessary truth about nature and human beings. This paper argued that discourse about truths reduces to discourse about language truth. If it is true that language and meaning are natural and originate form human cognitive faculty, then statements about the idea of divine truth, divine illumination, necessity, and even every statement that purports to express
or implies the existence of God, are all, as a matter of necessity, natural issues and are going to be product of man’s cognitive powers. No truth of these statements can therefore be beyond the natural. The paper then concluded that, seriously speaking, presumptuously what the Augustinians are looking for might be termed human idols which are invariably inherent in human cognitive faculty.