Augustine

Augustine's place in the history of Christianity is so familiar and so firmly fixed that it may seem a fool's errand to attempt to offer an evaluation of his views and gauge his importance to the Western religious tradition. However, as Peter Brown points out in an addendum to his biography of Augustine, previously unknown and uncatalogued late fourth- and early fifth-century documents written by Augustine were discovered in the last half of the 20th century. Brown explains that their principal value is historical and not theological, in particular providing information of the culture of northern Africa at a time of transition and early decline of the Roman Empire. Even so, Augustine's position as a bishop of the emergent church must be taken into account in any full account of his life. As Brown puts it, letters discovered in 1975 and 1990 supply the "voice" not of theologian or thinker but "the living voice of Au

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k of love for you, God, light of my heart, bread of the inner mouth of my soul, strength of my mind, and quickness of my thoughts." It is a way of admitting that he squandered the gift of literacy, which is a gift from God, by Augustine's logic, on morally, though not poetically, inferior subjects. Preoccupation with the content of pagan studies distracted him from what should have been his constant concern, "something sweeter than all these alluring pleasures that I sued to follow, [] so that I may love you with all my strength. . . . For you granted me your discipline when I was learning useless things." Disdaining classical literature as useless is part of Augustine's project of rejecting the things of the world and embracing fully what could be called the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. That point is driven home when Augustine describes his intellectual journey from the life of a more or less secular academician and teacher to a serious scholar of the Scriptures, and it involves his critique of whatever is not spiritually orthodox. Initially, he explains, he "thought that some of the Manichaean criticisms of your Scriptures were unanswerable," which was consistent with what he describes as a quest for ce
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Approximate Word count = 3489
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)