Aurelius augustine biography

7.1 Happiness; compare Augustine’s excessive grief about the friend of his youth in Confessiones 4.9–11 and contrast his post-conversion mourning of Monnica, ib. Edizione latino-italiana, 44 vols., Agostino Trapé et al. The belief that a person we have not seen was or is just may trigger our fraternal love for him (De trinitate 8.7; Bouton-Touboulic 2012: 182–187; conversely, Augustine asks those who are united with him in fraternal love to believe what he tells them about his life, Confessiones 10.3).

However, Augustine’s baptism was deferred to a later time in accordance with custom.

In his early years, Augustine possessed an inquisitive mind. Without belief in the former sense, we would have to admit that we are ignorant of our own lineage (Confessiones 6.7) and of the objects of the historical and empirical sciences, of which, as Augustine asserts in a critique of Platonism, first-hand knowledge is rarely possible (De trinitate 4.21).

15.43). Augustine and Philosophy

From ancient thought Augustine inherited the notion that philosophy is “love of wisdom” (Confessiones 3.8; De civitate dei 8.1), i.e., an attempt to pursue happiness—or, as late-antique thinkers, both pagan and Christian, liked to put it, salvation—by seeking insight into the true nature of things and living accordingly.

19.13; Weissenberg 2005). Possidius also described Augustine’s personal traits in detail, drawing a portrait of a man who ate sparingly, worked tirelessly, despised gossip, shunned the temptations of the flesh, and exercised prudence in the financial stewardship of his see.

Death and sainthood

Shortly before Augustine’s death, the Vandals, a Germanic tribe that had converted to Arianism, invaded Roman Africa.

"Tomorrow," he said to himself, "I shall find it: it will appear manifestly, and I shall grasp it " (Confess., vi. Therefore, an evil will has no “efficient” but only a “deficient” cause, which is none other than the will’s spontaneous defection from God. The fact that evil agents are created from nothing and hence are not, unlike God, intrinsically unable to sin is a necessary condition of evil but not a sufficient one (after all the good angels successfully kept their good will).

By the time he was able to marry her, however, he had decided to become a Christian priest and the marriage did not happen.

Augustine was, from the beginning, a brilliant student, with an eager intellectual curiosity, but he never mastered Greek – his first Greek teacher was a brutal man who constantly beat his students, and Augustine rebelled and refused to study.

De civitate dei, (Klassiker Auslegen, 11), Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

The Zentrum für Augustinusforschung, Würzburg, provides a list of (mostly older) translations that are available online.

English

English translations of Augustine’s works down to 1999 are listed in Fitzgerald (ed.) 1999, xxxv–xlii. Horn 1995: 81–87; Matthews 2005: 34–42).

Sintesis de su pensiamento, Madrid: Editorial Augustinus.