But this book, which also argues that the pursuit of truth through philosophy is the route to a happy life, moved him deeply: for the first time, he "longed for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardor in my heart. It should also be noted that Augustine does not consider the Hortensius to be the most redemptive book that he could have loved at that point that, of course, would have been the Bible. Specifically, he is at pains here to point out the apostle Paul's warning in the scriptures not to be deceived by philosophy to the exclusion of Christ.
Throughout his Confessions, Augustine will take care to intersperse his philosophy with plentiful doses of praise to God and Christ. Feeling that Hortensius was compromised by the lack of any reference to Christ he attributes this feeling to Monica's early influence , Augustine finally decided to take a look at the Christian Bible. Unfortunately, the early Latin bible was crudely worded and somewhat obscure. For a student of rhetoric and oratory like the young Augustine, its language was blunt and repulsive.
He put it aside, missing what he now recognizes as its sublime simplicity, its "inwardness. Most of the remainder of Book III is devoted to an initial rundown of basic Manichee beliefs, their conflicts with the Catholic faith, and Augustine's errors in falling in with them he would remain a Manichee for close to ten years.
Augustine's first criticism of the Manichee doctrines he believed concerns their dependence on an elaborate mythology. The sun and moon are venerated as divine beings, and Manichees tended to picture divinity in terms of "physical images" or "bodily shapes.
Augustine offers a brief account of the proper view here, noting that God is not a body or even a soul the life of the body. Rather, God is "the life of souls, the life of lives," more truthful and reliable than either bodies or the soul.
Augustine now turns to the three primary Manichee criticisms of Catholic belief the refutation of these criticisms will be one of his central focuses toward the end of the Confessions. The first, and most famous, Manichee challenge concerns the nature and source of evil. If God is supremely good, and if he is also all-powerful, eternal, and the cause of all existence, how can evil exist? Where can it come from except God?
At the very least, why can't God eliminate it? Manichees insisted that God is not all-powerful and that he is in fact in constant struggle against his opposite, the dark, material world that is by nature evil.
The second Manichee challenge concerns the nature of God as a being: "is God confined within a corporeal form? In the Manichee view, God is limited--he is not everywhere, and does not control everything.
The rebuttal Augustine introduces to these first two challenges is Neoplatonic in nature, and its use for the defense of Catholic theology is one of the central achievements of his work. Simply put, God is Being itself, the most pure and supreme form of existence. Everything else is God's creation, and fits into a descending scale of Being--the further something is from God, the less true existence it has.
Perhaps; but Augustine is unwilling to concede that it is better, in the name of recognizing the agency of others, to let them continue to wallow in evil practices. Augustine argues,. The aim towards which a good will compassionately devotes its efforts is to secure that a bad will be rightly directed. For who does not know that a man is not condemned on any other ground than because his bad will deserved it, and that no man is saved who has not a good will? Exactly how God is to bring about his good purposes through the process of war may not be clear to man in any particular case.
Moreover, those of good will shall administer discipline to those erring by moving them toward repentance and reformation. All of this leads conveniently to a second point: War can bring the need to discipline by chastening. Those of good will do not manifest cruelty in the proper administration of punishment but, rather, in the withholding of punishment. For Augustine, it is always better to restrain an evil man from the commission of evil acts than it is to permit his continued perpetration of those acts.
Writing after the time when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, Augustine holds that there is no prohibition against a Christian serving the state as a soldier in its army.
Neither is there any prohibition against taking the lives of the enemies of the state, so long as he does it in his public capacity as a soldier and not in the private capacity of a murderer. Nevertheless, Augustine also urges that soldiers should go to war mournfully and never take delight in the shedding of blood. He becomes quite pessimistic though in his view of human nature and of the ability and desire of humans to maintain themselves orderly, much less rightly.
Augustine holds that, given the inextricable mixing of citizens of the two cities, the total avoidance of war or its effects is a practical impossibility for all men, including the righteous. Happily, he holds that the day will come when, coincident with the end of the earthly city, wars will no longer be fought.
For, says Augustine, citing words from the Psalms to the effect that God will one day bring a cessation of all wars,. This not yet see we fulfilled: yet are there wars, wars among nations for sovereignty; among sects, among Jews, Pagans, Christians, heretics, are wars, frequent wars, some for the truth, some for falsehood contending.
For the present, however, man—particularly Christian man—is left with the question of how to live in a world full of war. As the Roman Empire collapses around him, Augustine confronted the question of what justifies warfare for a Christian. On the one hand, the wicked are not particularly concerned about just wars. On the other hand, the righteous vainly hope to avoid being affected by wars in this life, and at best they can hope for just wars rather than unjust ones.
This is by no means a perfect solution; but then again, this is not a perfect world. If it were, all talk of just wars would be altogether nonsensical. Perfect solutions characterize only the heavenly City of God. Its pilgrim citizens sojourning on earth can do no better than try to cope with the present difficulties and imperfections of the earthly life. Thus, for Augustine, the just war is a coping mechanism for use by the righteous who aspire to citizenship in the City of God.
In terms of the traditional notion of jus ad bellum justice of war, that is, the circumstances in which wars can be justly fought , war is a coping mechanism for righteous sovereigns who would ensure that their violent international encounters are minimal, a reflection of the Divine Will to the greatest extent possible, and always justified.
In terms of the traditional notion of jus in bello justice in war, or the moral considerations which ought to constrain the use of violence in war , war is a coping mechanism for righteous combatants who, by divine edict, have no choice but to subject themselves to their political masters and seek to ensure that they execute their war-fighting duty as justly as possible.
Sometimes that duty might arise in the most trying of circumstances, or under the most wicked of regimes; for. In sum, why would a man like Augustine, whose eye is fixed upon attainment of citizenship in the heavenly city, find it necessary to delineate what counts as a just war in this lost and fallen world? In general terms, the demands of moral life are so thoroughly interwoven with social life that the individual cannot be separated from citizenship in one or the other city.
In more specific terms, the just man who walks by faith needs to understand how to cope with the injustices and contradictions of war as much as he needs to understand how to cope with all other aspects of the present world where he is a stranger and pilgrim. Augustine takes important cues from both Cicero and Ambrose and synthesizes their traditions into a Christianized world view that still retains strong ties to the pre-Christian philosophic past.
He resolves the dilemma of just war and pacifist considerations by denying the dilemma: war is simply a part of the human experience that God Himself has ordained or permitted. War arises from, and stands as a clear manifestation of, the nature of fallen man. His approach explains how a morally upright citizen of a relatively just state could be justified in pursuing warfare, in prosecuting war, and ultimately, although unhappily, in taking human life.
Augustine as a Christian philosopher achieves a full synthesis of the Roman and Christian values associated with war in a way that legitimizes war as an instrument of national policy which, although inferior to the perfect ideals of Christianity, is one which Christians cannot altogether avoid and with which they must in some sense make their peace.
Traditionally, the philosophical treatment of the just war is divided into two categories: jus in bellum and jus in bello. The former describes the necessary and, by some accounts, sufficient conditions for justifying engagement in war.
The latter describes the necessary conditions for conducting war in a just manner. Concerning jus in bello , Augustine holds that wars, once begun, must be fought in a manner which:. Augustine distinguishes the two cities in several important ways, as well as the kind of peace they seek:. There is, in fact, one city of men who choose to live by the standard of the flesh, another of those who choose to live by the standard of the spirit. The citizens of each of these desire their own kind of peace, and when they achieve their aim, that is the kind of peace in which they live.
Because the common choice of fallen man is a peace of his own liking—one that selfishly serves his own immediate or foreseeable ends, peace becomes, in practice, merely an interlude between ongoing states of war. Augustine is quick to point out that this life carries with it no guarantee of peace; that blessed state is reserved for the saved in heaven. Augustine delineates three kinds of peace: the ultimate and perfect peace which exists exclusively in the City of God, the interior peace enjoyed by the pilgrim citizens of the City of God as they sojourn on earth, and the peace which is common to the two cities.
Sadly, Augustine is abundantly clear that temporal peace is rather an anomalous condition in the totality of human history and that perfect peace is altogether unattainable on earth:. Such is the instability of human affairs that no people has ever been allowed such a degree of tranquility as to remove all dread of hostile attacks on their dwelling in this world.
That place, then, which is promised as a dwelling of such peace and security is eternal, and is reserved for eternal beings. However, Augustine insists that, by any estimation, it is in the best interest of everyone — saint or sinner—to try to keep the peace here and now; and indeed, establishing and maintaining an earthly peace is as fundamental to the responsibilities of the state as protecting the state in times of war.
Interestingly, Augustine gives no suggestion whatsoever that the rest of the earth will be at peace while this violence against the church continues. On the contrary, the entire tenor of his argument suggests that anti-Christian violence is merely typical of the violence and disorder that will accompany the human experience until the second coming of Christ.
While men do not agree on which kind of peace to seek, all agree that peace in some form is the end they desire to achieve. Even in war, all parties involved desire—and fight to obtain—some kind of peace. Ironically, although peace is the end toward which wars are fought, war seems to be the more enduring, more characteristic of the two states in the human experience.
War is the natural albeit lamentable state in which fallen man finds himself. But if there is not this, there is not a people, if our definition be true, and therefore there is no republic; for where there is no people there can be no republic [emphasis added]. No people, no republic: for Augustine the congregation comes first, then the people, and only afterwards its political life. But does Augustine intend to say that a people that does not recognize God is not a people to begin with?
To Thomas Aquinas, as Elsthain notes, Christian universality was the overarching principal of political organization to which nations were subordinate.
Aquinas, in fact, prescribes political organization only in one location, but his views are unambiguous. Was the destruction of the Roman Republic inevitable? A widely-held interpretation attributes its collapse to the introduction of a slaved based economy: The Roman conquests of Carthage, Macedonia and Greece in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC altered what was once a luxury and privilege for the ruling elite into the predominant factor driving both social and economic policies for the Republic as a whole.
The mass influx of slaves during this time period first was a sign of great wealth and power, but later destabilized an already fragile Roman class system. Farms originally run by small business families throughout Italy were soon gobbled up and replaced by enormous slave run plantations owned by the aristocratic elite. Cheap slave labor replaced work for the common man and the roles of the unemployed massive grew to epidemic proportions.
These issues had a great destabilizing effect on the social system which had a direct role in the demise of the Republic.
As the rift between Senatorial elite optimates and social reformers populares grew, the use of the unemployed, landless, yet citizen mobs were an overwhelming ploy grinding away at the ability of the Senate to govern. Though there are many factors involved in the Fall of the Republic, slavery and its effects rippled throughout every aspect of that turbulent time period.
Not only did slavery help push the Roman lower classes into organized mobs, but the slaves themselves understandably revolted against oppression.
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