Hello all!
As of now, I am on a brief break from my Masters program (which I'll finish in
December) and so I will be getting back to writing here more often (as opposed
to writing for that). So, in order to initiate this period of my life, I want
to start with a brief recount of the "Father of Western
Christianity", Saint Augustine of Hippo. Also, I will post two links to a
couple songs that were directly inspired by his writing and use his words verbatim.
Of all of the founding fathers of the Christian tradition,
few if any can lay claim to being as influential for the worlds of philosophy
and theology as Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Often referred to as the
Father of Western Christianity, Augustine imparted much of the verbiage of
Christianity in the West as well as many of the distinctions that most modern
Christians take for granted.
Aurelius Augustinus was born and died in the town of Hippo
in North Africa in the region that is now known as Algeria. His father was a devout pagan of Rome and his
mother was a Christian of simple faith. At age 17, Augustine went to Carthage
to study rhetoric. There he encountered world views other than Christianity and
quickly fell into Manichaeanism, a philosophy that maintained that the forces
of good and evil in the world were eternally at a stalemate. This philosophy
was appealing to the young, pleasure-seeking Augustine who indeed enjoyed all
the pleasures that were available to a young man at the time. The year 384
found Augustine headed to Carthage to teach in Rome and finally Milan where he
encountered the writings of Plotinus and promptly converted to Neoplatonism,
abandoning his Manichaeanism leanings. Only two years later he himself recorded
the story of his Christian conversion.
While sitting in a friend’s garden, Augustine claims to have
heard a small voice like that of a child repeatedly telling him to “pick it up
and read”. Having picked up Saint Paul’s letters to the church, he opened up to
Romans 13:13-14 which blatantly called Augustine from his life of fleshly
self-gratification. Thus Augustine returned to the faith of his childhood,
imparted to him by his mother, and went on to spend a 40 year pastoral career,
quite literally, shaping Christianity into the religion that we know it to be
today.
One of Augustine’s biggest contributions to our faith
tradition was his fusion of Christianity with the philosophy of Plotinus and,
by extension, Plato. This was possible because Christianity, unlike Buddhism
and other eastern religions, has no strict philosophical basis, but instead is
based on the events of history surrounding the Jewish people and the man, Jesus
of Nazareth. His method was more or less to lay Christianity over Neoplatonism
and wherever Neoplatonism’s logical results conflicted with Christianity,
Augustine gave preference to the Christian teaching; his belief that divine
revelation trumped human reason was the power house behind much of his
ground-breaking philosophy.
Augustine left to the annals of history two of the most
profound works of literature ever produced from Christendom: Confessions and The City of God. The latter was his magnum opus of how Christians
ought to view their role in this world. Drawing on Plato’s realm of forms,
Augustine puts forth that there is a City of God that is founded on absolute
truths and idealism and, contrastingly, there is the City of Man that is a
shadow of the former’s perfection; in this way, he outlines ideal Christian
living. In Augustine’s Confessions,
we are given the known world’s first autobiography in the modern sense. This
work was even more notable for the multiple applications that can be drawn from
it; that is, not only is it biographical, but also introspective and revelatory
into how Christians (according to Augustine) ought to deal with their own
depravity.
It is no exaggeration to say that “Western Christianity is
Augustinian Christianity”; this, however, does not necessarily mean that the
man was in any way infallible. Along with giving the academic world works that
largely anticipated philosophical giants like Kant, Descartes, Aquinas, Luther
and Calvin, Augustine gave us more harmful doctrine like that of predestination
that was used in the middle ages to justify the grotesque slaughter heretics
and informed Marxism which played a significant role in Hitler’s persecution of
the Jewish people.
All in all, Augustine was a man who pioneered not only new
ground in philosophy but also in church orthodoxy and literature. Imperfect as
a man and affected by his historical context, Augustine still stands above most
as the father of modern and Western Christianity on a global scale.
Here and Here are the two songs that I promised at the
beginning. The first is by a band called Gungor and the second by a band called
Disciple.
Peace,
C.M.
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