augustine :: essays research papers

Augustine"I loved the happy life but I feared to find it in Your house and so I ran from it even as I sought after it. I thought that I would be miserable if I were kept from a womans arms. I did not commit that a cure for this disease lay in Your mercy I had no experience of such a cure. I believed that continence was within a mans own powers, though I was unaware of such a power within me. I was a fool and did not make do - as it is written in Scripture - that no man can be untainted unless You grant it to him. And this You surely would have given to me if, with inward groanings, I had knocked at your ears and with a firm faith had cast my many cares upon You."(from The Confessions, Book 6, Chapter 11, circa 397-400 A.D.)     Augustine was innate(p) in A.D. 354 in the town of Thagaste in Algeria. His father was a infidel and his mother was a devout Christian. Augustine was educated as a speechmaker in the former North African cities of Tagaste, Mad aura, and Carthage. Augustine died in A.D. 430 identifying himself as the unconditional doctor of grace. Augustine is, arguably, the greatest theologian-philosopher of all time.Some elements of Platonism can be seen in Augustines teaching. His view of the world is Platonic, there is the outer and the knowledgeable world, the lower and the higher, the sensible and the intelligible, and the carnal and the spiritual. To become wise requires a effect of the mind inwards and upwards to divinity, an opening of the mind to truth which provided the genial vision that has been purified by faith. His theme of the divine in the world and in man is more biblical than Platonic, which allowed him to regard the material world with a reverence that would be impossible for a Platonist. His doctrine of vile as no-thing, a privation, is different from both Platonic thought and Manichaeism. A philosophic question faces Christians, and in fact all theists, that challenges the belief in perfection . To theists, God is an omnipotent, perfect God. He is good. Theists accept this, and embrace it, for how else can they worship God and give their lives to Him unless He is good? However, in this world, everything is consumed by evil. If God is the source of all things in this world, and he is good, theists must then ask themselves what is evil and where it came from.