Saint Augustine

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Saint Augustine
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The City of God

• This experience, this vision, if you would call
  it that, qualified him to write a book that was
  to be, in fact, the autobiography of the Catholic
  Church. That is what The City of God is.

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Plotinus

• Augustine was most influenced philosophically by
  Plato, by way of Plotinus and Neoplatonism.

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Manichaeism

• Manichaeism is distinguished by its elaborate
  cosmology describing the struggle between a good,
  spiritual world of light, and an evil, material
  world of darkness. Through an ongoing process
  which takes place in human history, light is
  gradually removed from the world of matter and
  returned to the world of light from which it
  came.

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• When you Christianize this philosophy,
  contemplation becomes a life lived with an
  abiding awareness of the presence of God within
  the human soul.

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• In other words, humans were made for happiness,
  and our misery is that we do not experience this
  happiness on any sort of continuous or even
  regular basis.

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• Immediately upon our birth we are limited by our
  gender, race, socio-economic condition and many
  other factors. All of these limits condition our
  freedom and self-understanding.

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• Hence the city that is united in charity will be
  the only one to possess true peace, because it is
  the only one that conforms to the true order of
  things, the order established by God. The city
  that is united merely by an alliance of temporal
  interests cannot promise itself more than a
  temporary cessation from hostilities and its
  order will never be anything but a makeshift.

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A Theology of History

• This idea of a working out of Gods will for
  humanity over time is a huge idea in Western
  culture. It sees things moving forward, rather
  than in circles or cycles, as is sometimes the
  view of Eastern philosophies.

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The Problem of Knowledge

• Augustine seems to come at this foundation from a
  different direction I am, therefore I think.

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The Just War Theory

• Christianity had been pacifist for its first few
  centuries, but Augustine was the first person we
  know of who was able to give a reasonable
  justification for why a Christian could take up
  arms.

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The Problem of Language

• It was unfortunate that throughout history flesh
  became confused with body, and thus the body
  became a source of temptation and sin, when this
  is never what the scriptures intended in the
  first place. Such is the problem of language.

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• Can we learn to celebrate great ideas without
  making dogmas out of them?