St augustine of hippo biography summary questions
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The result was a quasi-biological theory that associated original sin closely with sexual concupiscence (see 9. Several years later, Augustine succeeded Valerius as head of the diocese.
Augustine was hesitant to move into the bishop’s house, since he did not want to disturb the peace of the monastic community.
This is why Contra Academicos ends with a sketch of Platonic epistemology and ontology and with an idiosyncratic if not wholly unparalleled reconstruction of the history of the Academy according to which the Academics were in fact crypto-Platonists who hid their insight into transcendent reality and restricted themselves to skeptical arguments to combat the materialist and sensualist schools dominant in Hellenistic times until authentic Platonism emerged again with Plotinus (Contra Academicos 3.37–43; the story is still told in Letter 118 of 410, where the renaissance of Platonism is however connected with the rise of Christianity).
Augustine’s “inner-life” ethics of love has some Stoic overtones and may partly have been inspired by Seneca’s version of Stoic intentionalism (Tornau 2023). More precisely, God “first” creates formless matter out of nothing (which is why matter in Augustine, unlike in the Neoplatonists, has a minimal ontological status; cf.
Thomas Aquinas and others had little interest in Augustine’s Platonism, and there was a certain tension between the medieval tendency to look for a teachable philosophical and theological system in his texts and his own way of philosophical inquiry that was shaped by the ancient tradition and left room for tentative argument and was open to revision.
Psalm 86:3 quoted, e.g., in De civitate dei 11.1) and its antagonist, the earthly city, is right or wrong love. From Aristotle to Augustine”, in John M. Dillon and Anthony A. Long (eds.), The Question of ‘Eclecticism’. doi:10.1093/0199281661.001.0001
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). Letter 151.11; Ad Simplicianum 1.2.18).
Augustine's personal life also underwent dramatic changes during his stay in Milan. ib. But neither did he disown it; as late as De trinitate (13.12), he endorses the Platonic axiom that soul is by nature immortal and that its immortality can, in principle, be proven by philosophical means. From the 390s onwards the Bible becomes decisive for his thought, in particular Genesis, the Psalms and the Pauline and Johannine writings (even though his exegesis remains philosophically impregnated), and his mature doctrine of grace seems to have grown from a fresh reading of Paul ca.
Here Augustine says that the human mind has been created by God in such a way as to be “connected” to intelligible reality “from below” (subiuncta) and with a capacity (capacitas) that enables it to “see” the intelligibles in the light of intelligible truth, just as the eye is by nature able to see colors in the light of the sun.
- Dr. Bart D. Ehrman
If I had to pick the two most important conversion stories in the history of Christianity, one would be Paul's and the other Augustine's.
Of all the people who lived during the 4th and early 5th centuries, St. Augustine is the one whom we know the most intimately. Since the Fall, humankind is nothing but a “lump of sin” that God might justly have damned as a whole but from which he has chosen to save some individuals and to transform them into “vessels of mercy” (ib.
The claim of Julian of Aeclanum that with his doctrine of predestination and grace Augustine had fallen back into Manichean dualism has appealed to some modern critics, but Julian must ignore essential features of Augustine’s thought (e.g., the notion of evil as privatio boni) to make his claim plausible (Lamberigts 2001).
5.
Over the course of Augustine’s lifetime, he wrote over 200 books and nearly 1,000 sermons, letters, and
other works.
Death Of St. Augustine
In 430, Augustine fell ill. Timaeus 37c-38b; Plotinus, Enneads III.7.1). 406–420) stand out; a series of sermons on the First Letter of John (In epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus decem, 407) is Augustine’s most sustained discussion of Christian love.
He interpreted this as a divine command, picked up a Bible, and read the first passage he saw - a passage from Romans 13:13-14.
This moment was transformative.