"Faith Seeking Understanding"
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Don’t let this baby’s unbearable cuteness deceive you. She’s a helpless, natural born sinner according to Augustine.
Hi everyone, we will be covering Book I, chapters 1 – 10.
Augustine titled his deeply philosophical and theological autobiography Confessions to implicate two aspects of the form the work would take. To ‘confess’, in Augustine’s time, meant both to give an account of one’s faults to God and to praise God or to speak one’s love for God. These two aims come together in the Confessions in an elegant but complex sense: Augustine narrates his ascent from sinfulness to faithfulness not simply for the practical edification of his readers, but also because he believes that his narrative itself is really a story about God’s greatness and of the fundamental love all things have for Him. Thus, in the Confessions form equals content to a large degree—the natural form for Augustine’s story of redemption to take would be a direct address to God, since it is God who must be thanked for such redemption. (That said, a direct address to God was a highly original form for Augustine to have used at the time).
We had a very good opening session last night to start the new semester.
We delved into Plotinus’ general philosophy and how it influenced Christian philosophy. We can see its legacy even to this day in Christian circles.
Diagram of Plotinus’s philosophy.
We will have our first meeting tomorrow on Thursday as we discuss Plotinus’ philosophy on the immortality of the soul.
Reading Plotinus is not an easy task and his philosophy takes some taking used to, but you’ll begin to see traces of him as we go through the Confessions and the topic of the immortality of the soul will come up again as we go through Augustine’s work.
It’s been a while since I last posted here, but we’re ready to kick things off with our new semester.
As stated, before heading straight into Augustine’s Confessions it is highly beneficial to understand where Augustine is coming from. Before coming to the Christian faith, he was heavily influenced by the philosophy of Plotinus and Neo-Platonism. You’ll find echoes of Plotinus and Neo-Platonism laced throughout Confessions.
Plotinus (205 – 270)
Before we delve into Confessions, we will start exploring the development of Augustine’s philosophy and theology.
For a while, Augustine had been influenced by Manichaeism, a Persian adaptation of Christianity, which added in Zoroastrianism, speculative philosophy and superstition. Augustine was a Manichee for nine years. Then during a trip to Rome in 383, due to his education in the liberal arts, he began to question Manichaeism when he saw that its understanding of the universe owed more to astrology than astronomy.
The next year, he met the formidable figure of Ambrose, bishop of Milan. His great intellect and fiery sermons left a deep impression on Augustine. In Ambrose, Augustine found someone who could communicate at his own intellectual level, further confirming his rejection of the Manichees and opening the way for his return to the Christian faith.
I know that I stated that we’d be doing Augustine’s Confessions later on this month, but I’ve decided to hold off a bit longer to see if we can recruit some more people into the group, so we will not begin until June.
In the meantime, we will spend the rest of the month getting to know Augustine and the world he lived in better.
The video above gives an overview of Augustine’s philosophy and the world he lived in, which is vital to understand what and why he wrote. Although much of the video focuses on his monumental The City of God, we still get a good general overall sense of his beliefs, especially his political philosophy, and why he is still relevant today.
Well, we’ve come to the end after two years of reading “Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years” and we share our final thoughts here.
Howard and Chris share what they have learned and gained from reading this book; Michael writes about the historical development of how Greek pagan philosophy seeped into Western theology and how it has affected our contemporary reading of the Bible; I share my thoughts on divine intervention (or non-intervention more specifically) and history or my attempt to understand God’s role in history after having read this book.
We hope and pray that we will use the knowledge gained from this session wisely. I believe that this is just the beginning of our journey into learning more about the history of the Church.
After a long hiatus, we will share our final thoughts on MacCulloch’s book.
Please write a summary of these main points:
We will have our final meeting on Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years next Sunday, May 3.
“The Conversion of St. Augustine” by Fra Angelico, (circa 1395–1455)
‘You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness.
You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness.
You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you.
I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you.
You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.’
– Augustine of Hippo, Confessions (Book 10.27)
Starting in May, we will be taking an in-depth study into one of the most influential books ever written by one of the greatest and influential minds of the West, Confessions by Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis, otherwise known as Augustine of Hippo (or St. Augustine).
Perhaps you had to read Confessions as a requirement for your classics or liberal arts classes during college, but only spent a couple of sessions on it. Or maybe you read it a long time ago and now want to visit it again and ruminate on Augustine’s thoughts a bit more thoroughly now. Whatever the reason may be, we invite you to join us as we begin a new venture into the heart and mind of a man deeply and passionately committed to his faith and whose thoughts still resonate vibrantly till this day.
In a brief article in the ‘Opinion‘ section of New Scientist titled “Should We Thank God for Civilization” recently discusses how the current model of how civilizations first developed in human history is being challenged, namely with the discovery of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.
As the article states:
The answer once seemed clear: food. Farming was more efficient than foraging and so people gravitated towards it. Cities, writing and organised religion soon followed… Yet the people who built them were nomads, not farmers. So the radical suggestion now is that it was not agriculture that drove the revolution, but religion. Some archaeologists oppose this idea, arguing that the ruins could have been domestic buildings, or were once surrounded by dwellings that did not survive. But the ceremony-first model is in the ascendancy, supported by further evidence unearthed in the Levant.
Keep in mind that Göbekli Tepe dates back to around 11,000 BCE. That in and of itself is amazing.
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