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Augustine

The purpose of this research is to compare the portrait of Augustine of Hippo presented in Peter Brown's modern biography with the portrait that Augustine himself presents in the Confessions. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical context for the life and work of Augustine and then to discuss the linkage between spiritual and ecclesiastical ideas in Augustine's text, the means by which those ideas are developed, and Brown's evaluation of Augustine's place in the evolution of Christianity's spiritual content and its ecclesiastical structures.

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 Augustine the bishop, caught, in turns, at its most intimate and at its most routine." This was the administrator, the manager, the pastoral figure involved in the process of shaping the ecclesial structure that was eventually to dominate public as well as spiritual administration in Europe and the Mediterranean area for more than a thousand years and lend substance to the characterization of the period as "the age of belief."

Brown also says that the newly co...

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Augustine. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 22:05, March 18, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689269.html