Augustine Of Hippo Research Paper

The ¬¬¬City of God is Saint Augustine of Hippo’s seminal Christian piece of literature. It is one of the most influential Christian works since the New Testament itself. Augustine was born in 354 AD, in a rural part of North Africa. His mother was a stern Christian woman, whose ideas he rejected in his youth. He turned to Manichaeism, a popular gnostic sect of Christianity. He was a firm believer of this during his formative years. Eventually, Augustine came to believe the “orthodox” Christianity of his time. This is when he wrote his Confessions and the City of God. After the shocking sack of Rome by the barbarians, there was great internal conflict among Romans; the traditional pagans blamed Rome’s turn to Christianity for its fall. Augustine

In the above excerpt is an important theological argument from Augustine, one which can be seen in the modern West. He first reminds us that from Thales’ point of view, there is no room for a divine intelligence. Thales believed that everything ultimately derives from water, and that everything in the universe simply exists due to this natural law, and that there is no divine influence behind it. Augustine implies, however, that to look upon the world’s supposed beauty and not believe there is a creator is foolish. Thales likely would have replied that any perceived beauty is simply a product of our own relative opinion; beauty or lack thereof is not indicative of how the universe actually works in any way. The argument Augustine used, a flawed one, is still in use by Christian creationists today. It is flawed, because beauty, as perceived by humans, is taken as a direct indicator of metaphysical or spiritual truth, instead of being the relative opinion it truly is. Before moving on to analyze Plato, Augustine makes some remarks about Socrates himself, the master of

Augustine, then, views Platonism as a proper evolution towards Christianity. Again, a point that Augustine seems to miss, or not worry about, is the difference in personality of their Gods. The Christian God is one who created man in his image, one who loves his people. The Platonic god, however, is a much more abstract god; one that is not truly embodied as anything like a human. Rather, it is simply a mathematical, scientific idea that is necessary for all other things to be created. This creation is no conscious act, rather, the universe simply arises the way it does because of the natural laws in the “creator.” Regardless of this difference on the nature of god, Augustine heavily capitalized on the similarities between Platonist philosophy and Christian