St. Augustine

From each, readers can extrapolate considerations pertinent to the significant causes of exorbitant health care costs in modern America: 1) Is there an intrinsic "right to life," e.g. should disproportionate costs be borne extending the lives of the non-viable newborn, aged, or "vegetative" patient? 2) Is a theoretical model provided, therein, supporting a basis for eugenics, i.e. the removal of the genetically "inferior" individual? and 3) Should societal resources be expended toward ameliorating the results of "unhealthy" or risky lifestyles, e.g. smoking, sedentary behavior, unsafe sex, etc? A closer examination of these nexii reveals that Platonic and Augustinian ethics may conflict but their metaphys

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n of the flesh nonetheless, eternally vulnerable to corruption (Book II, Chapter II), disease (Book X, Chapter XXXVI), and ignorance. Even following the Saint's enlightenment and conversion, he still contends in Book XI (the most purely philosophical in his autobiography, concerned with the nature of creation and time), "My soul yearns to know this most entangled enigma" and "I confess to Thee, O Lord, that I am as yet ignorant..." Unlike Plato's, there are insuperable limits in the Augustinian epistemology. Echoing Heisenberg, there are simply things which man cannot know (Book X, Chapter V): "You judge me, O Lord, for, although no one "knows the things of a man but the spirit of man which is in him," there is something further which not even that spirit of man which is in him knows. But you, Lord, who made him, know all things that are in him." What's more, not to acknowledge prima facie this immutable human inability constitutes, for Augustine, the sin of hubris. The Platonists do not have "a contrite and humbled heart" for they do not learn from the "meek and humble of heart" (Book VII, Chapter XXI) and, therefore, cannot be redeemed. Indeed, Augustine suggests that only through the grace of Christ and faith in the
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Approximate Word count = 1978
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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