Saint Augustine

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.”

Plotinus Augustine was most

influenced philosophically by Plato, by way of Plotinus and Neoplatonism.

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.”

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

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.

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.

“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.”

A Theology of History This idea of a working out of God’s 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.

The Problem of Knowledge Augustine seems to

come at this foundation from a different direction: “I am, therefore I think.”

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.

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.

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