Free will has nothing to do with the reception of that gift because nobody can will to receive a divine call to faith nor to respond positively to it so as to act accordingly and perform good works out of love Ad Simplicianum 1.
While gratuitous election is, apart from being consoling, comparatively easily squared with the axioms of divine benevolence, justice and omnipotence, its corollary, the equally gratuitous reprobation and damnation of Esau, is a serious philosophical problem ib. Romans The notion of original sin was not invented by Augustine but had a tradition in African Christianity, especially in Tertullian. The view that original sin is a personally imputable guilt that justifies eternal damnation is, however, new with Ad Simplicianum and follows with logical necessity from the exegetical and philosophical claims made there about divine grace and election Flasch ; contrast De libero arbitrio 3.
The theory of Ad Simplicianum is illustrated, with great philosophical acumen and psychological plausibility, in the Confessiones especially bk.
After , pressed by his Pelagian opponents, Augustine paid increasing attention to the mechanics of the transmission of original sin. The result was a quasi-biological theory that associated original sin closely with sexual concupiscence see 9. This knowledge is however hidden to human beings, to whom it will only be revealed at the end of times De correptione et gratia Until then, nobody, not even a baptized Christian, can be sure whether grace has given her true faith and a good will and, if so, whether she will persevere in it till the end of her life so as to be actually saved De correptione et gratia 10—25; cf.
While in Hellenism this had largely been a theoretical issue, it acquired practical relevance under the circumstances of monastic life: some North African monks objected to being rebuked for their misbehavior with the argument that they were not responsible for not yet enjoying the gift of divine grace De correptione et gratia 6.
Taking up ideas from De magistro and from Ad Simplicianum , Augustine replies that rebuke may work as an external admonition, even as a divine calling, that helps people turn to God inwardly and hence must not be withheld De correptione et gratia 7—9. To the query that predestination undermines free will, Augustine gives his usual answer that our freedom of choice has been damaged by original sin and must be liberated by grace if we are to develop the good will necessary for virtue and happiness.
Wetzel — ; some, especially later, texts do however present prevenient grace as converting the will with coercive force Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum 1. A problem related to predestination but not equivalent to it is divine foreknowledge Matthews 96—; Wetzel ; for general discussion, Zagzebski His solution is that while external actions may be determined, inner volitions are not.
These are certainly foreknown by God but exactly as what they are, i. De libero arbitrio 3. This argument is independent of the doctrine of grace and original sin; it applies not just to fallen humankind but also to Adam and Eve and even to the devil, whose transgression God had, of course, foreseen De civitate dei The criterion of membership in the city of God a metaphor Augustine takes from the Psalms, cf.
Psalm quoted, e. A person belongs to the city of God if and only if he directs his love towards God even at the expense of self-love, and he belongs to the earthly city or city of the devil if and only if he postpones love of God for self-love, proudly making himself his greatest good De civitate dei The main argument of the work is that true happiness, which is sought by every human being ib.
The first ten books deconstruct, in a manner reminiscent of traditional Christian apologetics, the alternative conceptions of happiness in the Roman political tradition which equates happiness with the prosperity of the Empire, thus falling prey to evil demons who posed as the defenders of Rome but in fact ruined it morally and politically and in Greek, especially Platonic, philosophy which, despite its insight into the true nature of God, failed to accept the mediation of Christ incarnate out of pride and turned to false mediators, i.
The history of the two cities begins with the creation of the world and the defection of the devil and the sin of Adam and Eve bks.
Obviously, however, the heavenly and earthly cities must not be confounded with the worldly institutions of the church and the state. In history, each of these, and the Church in particular, is a mixed body in which members of the city of God and the earthly city coexist, their distinction being clear only to God, who will separate the two cities at the end of times ib.
While the city of God is a stranger or, at best, a resident alien peregrinus: ib. This dualistic account is however qualified when, in the part of the work that moves closest to social philosophy, Augustine analyzes the attitude a Christian ought to adopt to the earthly society she inevitably lives in during her existence in this world.
There are higher and lesser degrees of both individual and collective peace, e. The lower forms of peace are relative goods and, as such, legitimately pursued as long as they are not mistaken for the absolute good. Political peace is thus morally neutral insofar as it is a goal common to Christians and non-Christians.
Augustine criticizes Cicero because he included justice in his definition of the state Cicero, De re publica 1. The early Roman Empire, which strove for glory, was more tolerable than the Oriental empires that were driven by naked lust for power; the best imaginable goal pursued by an earthly society would be perfect earthly peace ib. But the doctrine of the two cities deliberately precludes any promotion of the emperor or the empire to a providential and quasi-sacred rank.
Not even Christians in power will be able to overcome the inherent wretchedness of fallen humanity De civitate dei Like the vast majority of ancient Christian theologians, Augustine has little or no interest in social reform. Slavery, meaning unnatural domination of humans over humans, is a characteristic stain of postlapsarian human life and, at the same time, an evil that is put to good effects when it secures social order ib.
War results from sin and is the privileged means of satisfying lust for power ib. Nevertheless, Augustine wrote a letter to refute the claim that Christianity advocated a politically impracticable pacifism Letter His Christian reinterpretation of the traditional Roman Just War Theory should be read in the framework of his general theory of virtue and peace Holmes To be truly just according to Augustinian standards, a war would have to be waged for the benefit of the adversary and without any vindictiveness, in short, out of love of neighbor, which, in a fallen world, seems utopian Letter Wars may however be relatively just if they are defensive and properly declared cf.
Cicero, De officiis 1. Outright misogyny is rare in Augustine, but he lived in a society and worked from a tradition—both Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian—that took the natural and social subordination of women to men largely for granted cf. Augustine interprets the Genesis tale of the creation of woman Genesis —22 to mean that, Eve having been created as a helper to Adam and for the sake of reproduction, she was subordinate to him already in paradise De Genesi ad litteram 6.
This situation is exacerbated by the Fall; under the conditions of fallen humankind, marriage is, for the wives, a kind of slavery that they should accept with obedience and humility as Monnica did; cf. Confessiones 9. Clark In his early anti-Manichean exegesis of Genesis, he allegorizes man as the rational and woman as the non-rational, appetitive parts of the soul De Genesi contra Manichaeos 2.
De vera religione 78; De Genesi ad litteram 8. By implication, woman is an image of God qua human being, but not qua woman. The practice enjoined by Paul is meant to signify this difference De trinitate This exegesis safeguards the godlikeness of woman against a widespread patristic consensus and, it appears, against Paul himself, but at the same time defends social inequality and even endows it with metaphysical and religious significance Stark a.
Clark : his mother, Monnica her name appears only in Confessiones 9. In the dialogues of Cassiciacum, Monnica represents a philosophical way of life based on the natural intuitions of reason and on an unshakable Christian faith together with a life according to the precepts of Christian morality De beata vita 10; De ordine 1. Augustine represents her influence on his religious life as pervasive from his earliest years onwards and even compares her to the Mother Church Confessiones 1.
She embodies ideal Christian love of the neighbor see 7. With this she however combines, especially in the earlier books, more mundane motives, e. Like the other human influences on Augustine reported in the Confessiones , she is used by God as an instrument of his grace in a way she neither foresees nor wills.
True to the deliberately counter-intuitive and often provocative procedure of the Confessiones , he singles out an emotion that, then as now, most people would have easily understood but which he nevertheless interprets as a mark of his sinful state because it resulted from the loss of a female body he had, in a kind of mutual sexual exploitation, enjoyed for the sake of pleasure Confessiones 4.
For this disobedience they, and all humankind with them, were punished with the disobedience of their own selves, i. The inability of human beings to control their sexual desires and even their sexual organs witness the shameful experiences of involuntary male erection or of impotence: De civitate dei But he thought that Adam and Eve had been able to control their sexual organs voluntarily so as to limit their use to the natural purpose of procreation; in paradise, there had been sexuality but no concupiscence De civitate dei Original sin had destroyed this ideal state, and since then sexual concupiscence is an inevitable concomitant of procreation—an evil that may be put to good use in legitimate marriage, where the purpose of sexual intercourse is the procreation of children rather than bodily pleasure De nuptiis et concupiscentia 1.
In De Genesi ad litteram , in the Confessiones and, to a lesser extent, in De civitate dei Augustine presents his exegesis in a questioning manner and keeps the results open to revision. The reason is that, according to the hermeneutics developed especially in bk. Knuuttila —; Mayer —, each with references : God does not create in time but creates time together with changeable being while resting in timeless eternity himself Confessiones Creation occurs instantaneously; the seven days of creation are not to be taken literally but are a didactic means to make plain the intrinsic order of reality Confessiones Like the demiurge in the Timaeus , God creates out of goodness, i.
As the causality of the Trinity makes itself felt everywhere in creation, Augustine likes to describe created beings in their relation to the divine cause in a triadic manner, using, e.
Changeable being is not generated from God which, according to the Nicene Creed, is true only of the Son but created out of nothing, a fact that partly accounts for its susceptibility for evil. Incorporeal and purely intellectual beings, i.
Corporeal being is created when the Forms or rational principles contained in God and contemplated by the angels are even further externalized so as to inform not only intelligible but also physical matter De Genesi ad litteram 2. Whereas his accounts outside the Confessiones center on cosmic or physical time, he here focuses on how we experience time from a first-person perspective and what it means for us and our relationship to ourselves and to God to exist temporally.
In this sense, the purpose of the book is ethical rather than cosmological. This is so because time is present to us in the form of our present memory of the past, our present attention to the present and our present expectation of the future ib. The phenomenal proof of this claim is the experience of measuring time by comparing remembered or expected portions of time to each other or of repeating a poem we know by heart, when, as we proceed, the words traverse our attention the present , passing from expectation the future to memory the past; ib.
We would thus be unable to relate past, present and future events, to remember the history of our own lives and even to be aware of our personal identity if our being in time was not divided into memory, attention and expectation and, at the same time, unified by the connectedness and the simultaneous presence of these. Although he was soon accepted as a theological authority and consensus with him was regarded as a standard of orthodoxy throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, his views—or more precisely, the right way of interpreting them—continued to trigger controversies.
The philosophical discourse of early scholasticism 11 th —12 th centuries largely centered on Augustinian themes. With the growing influence of Aristotle from the thirteenth century onwards, Augustine came to be interpreted in Aristotelian terms that had largely been unknown to himself.
Medieval political Augustinianism projected the conflict of the Two Cities onto the Church and the State. Martin Luther — agrees with Augustine on the absolute gratuitousness of grace but does not follow the Augustinian and scholastic ideal of intellectus fidei and makes faith in the Gospel the decisive condition of salvation. In his debate with Erasmus on free will, he voices a quite Augustinian pessimism about human freedom.
The variety of Protestantism that was inaugurated by Jean Calvin — accepts double predestination. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the leading philosophers of Enlightenment, German Idealism and Romanticism showed little interest in Augustine, and even, in the case of Nietzsche, outright contempt. He remained, however, an important figure in Neoscholasticism or Neothomism, a philosophical reaction of Catholic philosophers against Enlightenment and Idealism which continued to inform Catholic theological scholarship on Augustine till the s and beyond.
Like their medieval predecessors, modern and postmodern appropriations of Augustine are selective and inevitably conditioned by contemporary concerns, sometimes resulting in secularized readings. Nevertheless, the richness of his thought continues to fascinate readers.
Almost all the books, the complete letters and a considerable portion of the sermons have been edited in the series. The most famous works of Augustine, Confessiones and De civitate dei , have often been translated in various modern languages, but for many of the other works only dated translations or none at all are available. A nearly complete modern translation is:. The last complete translations of Augustine into French date from the nineteenth century. The—still incomplete—standard translation series is:.
Here is a selection:. Christian theology, philosophy and divine: illumination emotion: in the Christian tradition ethics: virtue free will free will: divine foreknowledge and medieval philosophy moral responsibility Neoplatonism Plotinus political philosophy: ancient Porphyry skepticism: ancient Stoicism.
Saint Augustine First published Wed Sep 25, Life 2. Work 3. Augustine and Philosophy 4. Theory of Knowledge 5. Anthropology: God and the Soul; Soul and Body 6. Ethics 7. History and Political Philosophy 9. Gender, Women, and Sexuality Creation and Time Gender, Women, and Sexuality Outright misogyny is rare in Augustine, but he lived in a society and worked from a tradition—both Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian—that took the natural and social subordination of women to men largely for granted cf.
New critical editions are continually being prepared and older ones replaced. A complete work list is also found in Fuhrer a: — Translations The most famous works of Augustine, Confessiones and De civitate dei , have often been translated in various modern languages, but for many of the other works only dated translations or none at all are available.
A Translation for the 21st Century , 46 vols. Rotelle et al. Reliable and modern, but almost without annotation. French The last complete translations of Augustine into French date from the nineteenth century. Bilingual editions with rich annotation that often comes close to a commentary.
Gesamtausgabe seiner antipelagianischen Schriften , 8 vols. Edizione latino-italiana , 44 vols. Introduction, text and commentary. Critically revised text, translation and commentary. Flasch, Kurt, , Was ist Zeit? Augustinus von Hippo. Das XI. Watson, Gerard, , Saint Augustine. Articles in English, French and German, lemmata in Latin. Also available online license required. Corpus Augustinianum Gissense , a Cornelio Mayer editum 3.
License required. Drecoll, Volker Henning ed. Fitzgerald, Allan D. Encyclopedia in one volume, translated into French: Saint Augustin. With full bibliography down to ib. Pollmann, Karla ed. A Biography. Translated into German: Augustinus von Hippo.
Catapano, Giovanni, a, Agostino , Roma: Carocci. Lynch trans. Matthews, Gareth B. Meconi, David Vincent and Eleonore Stump eds. Revised and enlarged edition of Stump and Kretzmann eds. Rist, John M. Stump, Eleonore and Norman Kretzmann eds.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of eminent philosophers , Tiziano Dorandi ed. Plato, Opera , Elizabeth A. Duke, et al. Porphyry, Sententiae ad intelligibilia ducentes , Erich Lamberz ed. Possidius, Sancti Augustini vita , Herbert T. Weiskotten ed. Sextus Empiricus, Opera , Hermann Mutschmann et al. Long, Anthony A. Sedley eds. Brown, Peter, , The Body and Society. Translated into German: Die Keuschheit der Engel.
Bubacz, Bruce, , St. Burnell, Peter J. Reprinted in Matthews — Cassin, Mireille, , Augustin est-il mystique? Catapano, Giovanni and Beatrice Cillerai eds. Rivista di storia della filosofia medievale 27 , Padova: Il Poligrafo. Chappell, Timothy D. Clark, Elizabeth A. King ed. Colish, Marcia L. How Augustinian are Neo-Augustinian Politics? A New Alliance against Modernity? Leuven: Peeters, pp. Hughes, and Kim Paffenroth eds.
Dutton, Blake D. Social and Political Ideas in the Writings of St. Augustine of Hippo , Woodbridge: Boydell. It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian.
It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are.
In view of this and in keeping it in mind constantly while dealing with the book of Genesis, I have, insofar as I was able, explained in detail and set forth for consideration the meanings of obscure passages, taking care not to affirm rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation.
For that reason, as I have noted repeatedly, if anyone, not understanding the mode of divine eloquence, should find something about these matters [about the physical universe] in our books, or hear of the same from those books, of such a kind that it seems to be at variance with the perceptions of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the scriptures.
In short, it must be said that our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies, but it was not the intention of the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, to teach men anything that would not be of use to them for their salvation. Let us, then, omit the conjectures of men who know not what they say, when they speak of the nature and origin of the human race. For some hold the same opinion regarding men that they hold regarding the world itself, that they have always been They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not years have yet passed.
According to Augustine, God, in his creative decree, has expressly excluded every order of things in which grace would deprive man of his liberty, every situation in which man would not have the power to resist sin, and thus Augustine brushes aside that predestinationism which has been attributed to him. Quotes by augustine of hippo -- Explore a large variety of famous quotes made by augustine of hippo on the Quotes. Church Father Theologian.
The numerical value of augustine of hippo in Chaldean Numerology is: 6. The numerical value of augustine of hippo in Pythagorean Numerology is: 4. We're doing our best to make sure our content is useful, accurate and safe. If by any chance you spot an inappropriate comment while navigating through our website please use this form to let us know, and we'll take care of it shortly.
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Term » Definition. Word in Definition. Princeton's WordNet 0. Freebase 0. Suggested Resources 0. Matched Categories Church Father Theologian. How to pronounce augustine of hippo? Alex US English. David US English. Mark US English. Daniel British. Libby British.
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