Augustine and His Critics

Gerald Bonner, Robert Dodaro, George Lawless

Routledge, 2002-06-01 - 288 pages

Augustine of Hippo (AD 354-430) is arguably the most controversial Christian thinker in history. His positions on philosophical and theological concerns have been the subjects of intense scrutiny and criticism from his lifetime to the present.
Augustine and his Critics gathers twelve specialists' responses to modern criticisms of his thought, covering: personal and religious freedom; the self and God; sexuality, gender and the body; spirituality; asceticism; cultural studies; and politics.
Stimulating and insightful, the collection offers forceful arguments for neglected historical, philosophical and theological perspectives which are behind some of Augustine's most unpopular convictions.

 

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On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings

 

 

Peter King

Cambridge University Press, 2010-06-28 - 264 pages

 

The main objective of Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy is to expand the range, variety, and quality of texts in the history of philosophy which are available in English. The series includes texts by familiar names (such as Descartes and Kant) and also by less well-known authors. Wherever possible, texts are published in complete and unabridged form, and translations are specially commissioned for the series. Each volume contains a critical introduction together with a guide to further reading and any necessary glossaries and textual apparatus. The volumes are designed for student use at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and will be of interest not only to students of philosophy but also to a wider audience of readers in the history of science, the history of theology, and the history of ideas.

The works translated here deal with two major themes in the thinking of St. Augustine (354-430): free will and divine grace. On the one hand, free will enables human beings to make their own choices; on the other hand. God's grace is required for these choices to be efficacious. On the Free Choice of the Will. On Grace and Free Choice, On Reprimand and Grace, and On the Gift of Perseverance set out Augustine's theory of human responsibility, and sketch a subtle reconciliation of will and grace. This volume is the first to bring together Augustine's early and later writings on these two themes, in a new translation by Peter King, enabling the reader to see what Augustine regarded as the crowning achievement of his work. The volume also includes a clear and accessible introduction that analyzes Augustine's key philosophical lines of thought.

 

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Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation

 

Brian Stock

Harvard University Press, 1998 - 475 pages

Augustine of Hippo, a central figure in the history of Western thought, is also the author of a theory of reading that has had a profound influence on Western letters from the ages of Petrarch, Montaigne, Luther, and Rousseau to those of Freud and our own time. Brian Stock provides the first full account of this theory within the evolution of Augustine's early dialogues, his Confessions, and his systematic treatises.
Augustine was convinced that words and images play a mediating role in our perceptions of reality. In the union of philosophy, psychology, and literary insights that forms the basis of his theory of reading, the reader emerges as the dominant model of the reflective self. Meditative reading, indeed the meditative act that constitutes reading itself, becomes the portal to inner being. At the same time, Augustine argues that the self-knowledge reading brings is, of necessity, limited, since it is faith rather than interpretive reason that can translate reading into forms of understanding.
In making his theory of reading a central concern, Augustine rethinks ancient doctrines about images, memory, emotion, and cognition. In judging what readers gain and do not gain from the sensory and mental understanding of texts, he takes up questions that have reappeared in contemporary thinking. He prefigures, and in a way he teaches us to recognize, our own preoccupations with the phenomenology of reading, the hermeneutics of tradition, and the ethics of interpretation.

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Augustine: Political Writings

 

Saint Augustine, E. Margaret Atkins, Robert Dodaro

Cambridge University Press, 2001 - 299 pages

 

This collection brings together thirty-five letters and sermons of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo from 396 to 430 AD, that deal with political matters. The letters and sermons are both practical and principled and treat many essential themes in Augustine's thought, including the responsibilities of citizenship, the relationship between the church and secular authority, religious coercion, and war and peace. These texts complement Augustine's classic The City of God against the Pagans (also available in the Cambridge Texts series), and give students direct insight into the political and social world of late antiquity with which Augustine was immediately involved. The slave trade, tax collection, clerical harassment and murder are amongst the topics with which he deals. The volume contains clear, accurate modern translations, together with a concise introduction and informative notes designed to aid the student encountering Augustine's life and thought for the first time.

 

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Augustine De doctrina Christiana

 

Saint Augustine, R. P. H. Green

Clarendon Press, 1995 - 293 pages

The De Doctrina Christiana ('On Christian Teaching') is one of Augustine's most important works on the classical tradition. Undertaken at the same time as the Confessions, it sheds light on the development of Augustine's thought, especially in the areas of ethics, hermeneutics, and sign-theory. What is most interesting, however, is its careful attempt to indicate precisely what elements of a classical education are valuable for a Christian, and how the precepts of Ciceronian rhetoric may be used to communicate Christian truth. This long needed, completely new and up-to-date translation will be invaluable for all scholars of Augustine and the early church, as well as those studying the classical tradition, the history of literary criticism, or the development of biblical interpretation. It gives a close but stylish representation of Augustine's thought and expression. A succinct introduction and select bibliography embodies the results of recent work

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Language in the Confessions of Augustine

Philip Burton

Oxford University Press, 2007-10-11 -198 pages

Philip Burton explores Augustine's treatment of language in his Confessions - a major work of Western philosophy and literature, with continuing intellectual importance. One of Augustine's key concerns is the story of his own encounters with language: from his acquisition of language as a child, through his career as schoolboy orator then star student at Carthage, to professor of rhetoric at Carthage and Rome. Having worked his way up to the eminence of Court Orator to the Roman Emperor at Milan, Augustine rediscovered the catholic Christianity of his childhood - and decided that this was incompatible with his rhetorical profession. Over the next ten years, he gradually reinvents himself as a different sort of language professional: a Christian intellectual, commentating on Scripture and preaching to his flock.

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The Cambridge Companion to Augustine

Eleonore Stump, Norman Kretzmann

Cambridge University Press, 2001-03-15 - 307 pages

It is hard to overestimate the importance of the work of Augustine of Hippo, both in his own period and in the subsequent history of Western philosophy. Until the thirteenth century, when he may have had a competitor in Thomas Aquinas, he was the most important philosopher of the medieval period. Many of his views, including his theory of the just war, his account of time and eternity, his understanding of the will, his attempted resolution of the problem of evil, and his approach to the relation of faith and reason, have continued to be influential up to the present time. In this volume of specially-commissioned essays, sixteen scholars provide a wide-ranging and stimulating contribution to our understanding of Augustine, covering all the major areas of his philosophy and theology.

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The Journey Toward God in Augustine's Confessions

Carl G. Vaught

SUNY Press, 2003 - 193 pages

A new interpretation of the first six books of Augustine's Confessions, emphasizing the importance of Christianity rather than Neoplatonism. This detailed discussion of Augustine's journey toward God, as it is described in the first six books of the Confessions, begins with infancy, moves through childhood and adolescence, and culminates in youthful maturity. In the first stage, Augustine deals with the problems of original innocence and sin; in the second, he addresses a pear-stealing episode that recapitulates the theft of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden and confronts the problem of sexuality with which he wrestles until his conversion; and in the third, he turns toward philosophy, only to be captivated successively by dualism, skepticism, and Catholicism. Augustine's journey exhibits temporal, spatial, and eternal dimensions and combines his head and his heart in equal proportions. Vaught shows that the Confessions should be interpreted as an attempt to address the person as a whole rather than,through our intellectual or volitional dimensions exclusively. The passion with which Augustine describes the end of his journey is reflected best in a sentence found in the opening chapter of the text--"You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." Interpreting this statement, Carl G. Vaught presents a more emphatically Christian Augustine than is usually found in contemporary scholarship. Refusing to view Augustine in an exclusively Neoplatonic framework, Vaught holds that Augustine baptizes Plotinus just as successfully as Aquinas baptizes Aristotle. It cannot be denied that Ancient philosophy influences Augustine decisively. Nevertheless, heholds the experiential and the theoretical dimensions of his journey toward God together as a distinctive expression of the Christian tradition.

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The Theological Epistemology of Augustine's De Trinitate

Luigi Gioia

Oxford University Press, 2008 - 330 pages

Luigi Gioia provides a fresh description and analysis of Augustine's monumental treatise, De Trinitate, working on a supposition of its unity and its coherence from structural, rhetorical, and theological points of view. The main arguments of the treatise are reviewed first: Scripture and the mystery of the Trinity; discussion of 'Arian' logical and ontological categories; a comparison between the process of knowledge and formal aspects of the confession of the mystery of the Trinity; an account of the so called 'psychological analogies'. These topics hold a predominantly instructive or polemical function. The unity and the coherence of the treatise become apparent especially when its description focuses on a truly theological understanding of knowledge of God: Augustine aims at leading the reader to the vision and enjoyment of God the Trinity, in whose image we are created. This mystagogical aspect of the rhetoric of De Trinitate is unfolded through Christology, soteriology, doctrine of the Holy Spirit and doctrine of revelation. At the same time, from the vantage point of love, Augustine detects and powerfully depicts the epistemological consequences of human sinfulness, thus unmasking the fundamental deficiency of received theories of knowledge. Only love restores knowledge and enables philosophers to yield to the injunction which resumes philosophical enterprise as a whole, namely 'know thyself'.

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Augustine's Text of John: Patristic Citations and Latin Gospel Manuscripts

 

H. A. G. Houghton

Oxford University Press, 2008-11-15 - 407 pages

What sort of Bible did Augustine have? How did he quote from it -- and was he accurate? Do Augustine's biblical citations transmit readings not found in any surviving manuscripts? This book is part of a major project on the Old Latin versions of the Gospel according to John, and uses Augustine as a test-case to examine the importance of the evidence provided by the Church Fathers for the text of the Gospels. The early history of the Latin Bible is reconstructed from Augustine's comments in his treatise De doctrina christiana (On Christian teaching). Details are assembled from sermons, letters, and other writings to show how Augustine and his contemporaries used the Bible in the liturgy of the Church, public debates, and in composing their own works. Augustine's own methods of citing the Bible are analysed, and features are identified which are characteristic of citations produced from memory rather than read from a gospel codex. The second part of the book is a chronological survey of the biblical text in Augustine's works, showing how he switched from using the older versions of the Gospel to the revised text of Jerome, which later became known as the Vulgate. Finally, a verse-by-verse commentary is provided on all the significant readings in Augustine's text of John, assessing their significance for the history of the Latin Bible, and in some cases the Greek tradition as well. Details are also given of Augustine's exegesis of particular verses of the Gospel, making this an indispensable handbook for biblical scholars and church historians alike.

 

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