Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (original) (raw)
'Augustine and Cyprian' (2011)
'Practicing what he had taught': Augustine's sermons on Cyprian', in: Jacob Albert van den Berg, Annemaré Kotzé, Tobias Nicklas, Madeleine Scopello (edd.), 'In search of truth'. Augustine, Manichaeism and other Gnosticism. Studies for Johannes van Oort at Sixty, (Brill) Leiden/Boston 2011; 97-108
AUGUSTINE'S THEOLOGY OF TWO CIITES .pdf
He has also left an abiding indirect influence on the cultural heritage of the West in general. Even today, irrespective of school and denomination, he attracts Christians and non-Christians, philosophers and theologians alike by his writings. 5
Reconsidering Charles Taylor's Augustine, in Pro Ecclesia
Pro Ecclesia
As Taylor says, "Understanding modernity aright is an exercise in retrieval." 3 Given the importance of the task, it is important that the retrieval be faithful to what is being retrieved. Although Taylor is to be credited for resisting some of the excesses present in other intellectual historians and commentators in making much too close an identification of these three figures, he nevertheless fails to see important substantive differences among them. This article will provide a critique of Taylor's thesis of strong continuity between Augustine and Descartes. 4 1 will argue that Augustine's intellectual ascent from exterior things (exteriora) to interior things (interiora) and ultimately to the superior things (superiora) of God and the eternal is decidedly different from Cartesian introspection as Taylor presents it. 5 Taylor inappropriately reads the modern subject/ object split and mind/body dualism into Augustine; he does not adequately address the important relationship and affinity of scientia and sapientia in Augustine; he does not mention the importance of the Incarnate Word in Christ or the role of religious faith in Augustine's ascent; and he misunderstands memoria in Augustine as a doctrine of the innate ideas in germ. There are three ways in particular Taylor identifies the Augustine-Descartes continuity. As he says, Descartes is in many ways profoundly Augustinian: the emphasis on radical reflexivity, the importance of the cogito, the central role of a proof of God's existence which starts from "within," from features of my own ideas, instead of starting from external being, as we see in the Thomistic proofs, all put him in the stream of revived Augustinian piety which dominated the late Renaissance on both sides of the great confessional divide. 6 This article will show that not only is Taylor's continuity thesis false with respect to reflexivity, the cogito, and the proof for God's existence, but that what Augustine was doing in each instance is opposed to what Descartes was doing. 7 By highlighting Taylor's missteps, I hope to bring into sharper focus what Augustine was up to, in order to further the retrieval and reconsideration of Augustine's thought.
This essay attempts to analyze Augustine’s hermeneutics and homiletics in his De doctrina christiana. I will offer a succinct synopsis of the work and highlight various points showing Augustine’s hermeneutical and homiletical characteristics. Augustine stresses the importance of humiliation in the study of Scripture. He also regards the duplex commandment of love in Matthew 22 as the heart of Christian faith. In Augustine’s hermeneutics, sign has an important role. God can communicate with the believer through the signs of the Scriptures. Thus, humiliation, love, and the knowledge of signs are an essential hermeneutical presupposition for a sound interpretation of the Scriptures. Although Augustine endorses some teaching of the Platonism of his time, he corrects and recasts it according to a theocentric doctrine of the Bible. Similarly, in a practical discipline, he modifies the classical theory of oratory in a Christian way. He underscores the meaning of diligent study of the Bible and prayer as more than mere human knowledge and oratory skills. As a concluding remark, Augustine encourages the interpreter and preacher of the Bible to seek a good manner of life and, most of all, to love God and neighbor. * Key words: Augustine, hermeneutics, humiliation, love, prayer
Augustine and the Trinity: Whose Crisis?
Pacifica: Australasian Theological Studies, 2003
This article analyses criticisms made of Augustine's Trinitarian theology by Colin Gunton. It demonstrates that many of these criticisms are unfair, or are based on inconsistencies and inadequacies in Gunton's own position. More constructively, it shows that Augustine's account of human consciousness is not that of an isolated monad, but of a consciousness always in relationship with the world.
Book Notes-Augustine and the Dialogue by Erik Kenyon
Ancient Jew Review, 2021
Anthony Crescio is a third year PhD student in Christian Theology at Saint Louis University. His research pursues the "ressourcement" of patristic understandings of virtue, and explores the intersection of moral, sacramental and liturgical theology.
Augustine's Trinitarian Cosmos, March 18, 2017
AUGUSTINE’S TRINITARIAN COSMOS, for God Everyday and Everywhere, the 37th Annual Atlantic Theological Conference, June 22nd 2017 at the University of King’s College. Background Paper. After writing both this paper and “The Conversion of God in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae: Being’s Trinitarian and Incarnational Self Disclosure” for the “Wisdom Belongs to God” Colloquium, I see that they are related as the Way Up and the Way Down, more or less in the manner Aquinas understood the ancient law. Heraclitus had declared: “The way up and the way down are the same” “ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή” (Diels, B60). Without citing its source, Aquinas quotes the formula with approval at the beginning of the last Part of his Summa contra Gentiles: “eadem est via qua descenditur et ascenditur.” Confronting the inadequacy of the human intellect for “seeing the divine substance in itself,” St Thomas tells us we can get to the knowledge we need and desire starting from creatures, from “the things themselves”, because the way up and the way down are the same. There is a common structure at work whether the mind moves from God or from creatures. The starting and ending points differ, but, because of the universal return to source, they too are the same ultimately. The same fundamental form is discernable and at work in the beginning, the mediation, and the conclusion. Aquinas finds “the most perfect unity, in God, the highest summit of things”, from this emerges a greater and greater “diversity and variation in things.” So, “the process of emanation from God must be unified in the principle itself, but multiplied in the lower things which are its terms.” The emanation, or going out, is seen in God in a simple form, the one proper to its nature as cause. The same structure must be visible, opened up and multiplied, in the various creatures which are the end terms of the divine creative activity. This inclusive opening and multiplication is the mediating process. I seem to have exhibited this common structure in its downward emanation in “The Conversion of God in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae” and in its upward movement towards an ever clearer revelation of its fundamental constitution in what follows on “Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos”. In consequence, I hope that they will illumine each other and make reading both useful. I present here what I call a “background paper”. It provides the full argument of what I shall present in an abbreviated version at the Atlantic Theological Conference. *** I. INTRODUCTION This paper has two parts. In the first I bring out, almost exclusively from the Confessions, how God’s Trinitarian life is both his own being and that of everything else in the cosmos; in humans, God, as the structure of our being, is that by which we are, know and love; the power by which we do good and do evil. Augustine’s Trinitarian God is everyday and everywhere. In the second part, I bring before you the radical and deeply serious criticism of Augustine and Augustinian Christianity by a few great philosophical theologians of the 20th-century. Although such criticism can be found elsewhere, among Eastern Christian theologians for example, I confine myself to what is self-criticism because it comes from those raised by and deeply immersed in the Latin theological tradition.
Augustine and the Philosophers
Vessey/A Companion to Augustine, 2012
Because of the immensity of Augustine's corpus and the complex intellectual patrimony that informs it, attempts to place him within the history of philosophical traditions are often partial and in need of supplementation. In treating below of Augustine's engagement with Aristotelianism, Middle Platonism, Neoplatonism, and Stoicism, I shall be drawing attention to particular topics, lexical points, and philosophical arguments that have not received much attention in the literature up to this point, despite their centrality to Augustine's own philosophical interests. Discovery of the new philosophical material I present here is possible thanks to the use of a method only recently beginning to gain currency: that of looking for philosophical arguments and developments in Augustine's sermons and other exegetical texts (see e.g. Atkins and Dodaro 2001: xi-xii; Byers 2003: 433-4). In the past, philosophical scholarship on Augustine has treated the genre of a text as indicative of its discipline, an approach that has resulted in a fairly strict separation of philosophical research from rhetorical, "theological," or "pastoral" texts (this approach relies on methodological assumptions more appropriate to medieval scholasticism than to Augustine). In contrast, the alternative "integrative" method employed here yields a more complete picture of Augustine's relationship to various philosophical traditions. The reliability of this method is clear from the fact that its results cohere with what Augustine says on the same topics in his other, more systematic or straightforwardly philosophical works, as we shall see below. Thus the new claims here do not concern whom Augustine read (Plotinus in the translation of Victorinus or someone of similar interests and abilities, Apuleius, Cicero, Varro, Gellius, and Seneca), but rather to what degree he assimilated what he read. We turn first to what is perhaps the most controversial question, that of Augustine's Aristotelianism.
Augustine’s new Trinity: The anxious circle of metaphor
Religion and Society, 1992
Augustine of Hippo (354-430) would hardly have been pleased to hear himself described as an innovator. Like any other Church leader of his time, he would certainly have preferred to be thought of as a voice of the Church's tradition rather than an originator of any aspect of it. Recent scholarship, however, has come increasingly to see him as the source of some of the most distinctive features of the Western Christian tradition. He is now recognized not only as the originator of the doctrine of Original Sin and the peculiarly western interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity, but also as a major force in shaping for subsequent generations of Christians the relationship between the Church's spiritual role and its role as a power in the social and political world. With this recognition of the innovativeness of Augustine's thought has also come the question of how his original contributions are to be evaluated. How well, for example, did he understand the tradition he was trying to interpret? How well considered were his innovations? Did they introduce not only new perspectives, but perhaps also distortions of the tradition? Elaine Pagels, for example, in her recent book, Adam, Eve, and The Serpent, has said, regarding the influence of his doctrine of Original Sin: "Augustine would eventually transform traditional Christian teaching on freedom, on sexuality, and on sin and redemption for all future generations of Christians. Where earlier generations of Jews and Christians had once found in Genesis 1-3 the affirmation of human freedom to choose good or evil, Augustine, living after the age of Constantine, found in the same text a story of human bondage." 1 She describes this as a "cataclysmic transformation in Christian thought" (Ibid.) and suggests that it is time Augustine's distinctive contributions in this area were reexamined and reevaluated. "Since graduate school," she says, "I had taken for granted.. . the conventional orthodox view of Pelagius and his followers as superficial rationalists who stubbornly