Abstract

Ciril Rütsche:
»Verus philosophus est amator Dei«
Augustine and the Inversive Method of Religious Knowledge
(FKTh 2018-1, p. 52–62)

Augustine often wrote that people know the eternal truths only if they love them. But how to hold it in the face of the Statement in De spiritu et littera (412) that it is impossible to love something without knowing it? How can love precede the knowing, if nobody can love something without knowing it? Does it depend on the fact that for Augustine only the god-lover is a real philosophier, because only he holds the desire that opens him in principle the possibility to know everything whatever a human being can know?