augustine test

• Head and heart are united in St. Augustine
• We are made in the image of God who is infinite Truth and infinite Love
• "amor meus, pondus" – "my love is my gravity"
• Synthesis of faith and reason
• The most important feature of modern civilization is "unquestionably the decline of religion"
• Crisis of reason and the decline of faith
• Interprets all of human history as the drama of divine providence and human free choice
• Centered on the choice between the two most fundamental options of human life
• Membership in one or the other of the two "cities"
• City of God (Civitas Dei) – the invisible community of all who love God as God
• City of Man (Civitas Mundi) – all those who love the world and themselves as their god
• Central plot of human history is the conflict and interplay between these two cities
• The same drama as City of God/City of Man in St. Augustine's own life
• "Thou has made us for Thyself, and (therefore) our hearts are restless until they rest in you"
• The story of man's search for God and God's search for man
• Primary, central doctrine in Christianity
• Discover your unique individual talents, desires, personality, happiness
• Discover the universal human situation, the "meaning of life," the laws of human nature
• Without God man is a living tragedy
• Man is essentially a seeker, a lover, a desirer
• Man needs to discover and attain his own end, and home and happiness
• Man is a creature of nature
• But he does not feel completely at home
• Nature limits man, thwarts him, gives man only a taste of what he wants without limit
• Nature gives man pain
• We live in this pain, we die in this pain
• Nature may oppose us but we have transcended it with:

  • Family and friendship
  • Culture and civilization
  • Art and science
  • Language and literature
  • Law and order
• The limitations of nature – especially its morality – infect all of our human constructions
• Nature is necessary but it is not home
• We have high ideals, aspirations for truth, goodness, beauty
• There is a chasm between these high ideals and our ability to attain them
• When we look at ourselves we find wisdom and unselfish love BUT we also find that we are stupid, selfish, lustful, violent
• We betray our own ideals
• If there is any hope, it must come from God

  • God's perfection makes God incapable of being found in us
  • Our only hope is that a perfect God who does not need us nevertheless loves us and saves us from ourselves
  • All human ways up fail; our only hope is a divine way down
• Faith is our affirmative response to objective divine revelation

  • Divine revelation centers on and culminates in Christ
  • The key to perfecting reason (wisdom, understanding) is faith
  • Faith seeking understanding
  • The ultimate goal is to know God, to see God
• Augustine believed that man is body AND soul, with the body being part of human nature
• The body is not evil nor is it the source of evil
• Matter (and thus the body) is good and created by God
• God created all that is, "all that is is good"
• The soul is the true center, the self itself, the I, the personality