Author: Timo Nisula Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004231684 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 434
Book Description
In Augustine and the Functions of Concupiscence, Timo Nisula offers a comprehensive analysis of Augustine’s developing views of sinful desire. The book demonstrates how and why concupiscence became such a pregnant concept in Augustine’s theology and philosophy.
Author: Bart van Egmond Publisher: Oxford Early Christian Studies ISBN: 0198834926 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 302
Book Description
Augustine's Early Thought on the Redemptive Function of Divine Judgement considers the relationship between Augustine's account of God's judgement and his theology of grace in his early works. How does God use his law and the penal consequences of its transgression in the service of his grace, both personally and through his 'agents' on earth? Augustine reflected on this question from different perspectives. As a teacher and bishop, he thought about the nature of discipline and punishment in the education of his pupils, brothers, and congregants. As a polemicist against the Manichaeans and as a biblical expositor, he had to grapple with issues regarding God's relationship to evil in the world, the violence God displays in the Old Testament, and in the death of his own Son. Furthermore, Augustine meditated on the way God's judgment and grace related in his own life, both before and after his conversion. Bart van Egmond follows the development of Augustine's early thought on judgement and grace from the Cassiacum writings to the Confessions. The argument is contextualized both against the background of the earlier Christian tradition of reflection on the providential function of divine chastisement, and the tradition of psychagogy that Augustine inherited from a variety of rhetorical and philosophical sources. This study expertly contributes to the ongoing scholarly discussion on the development of Augustine's doctrine of grace, and to the conversation on the theological roots of his justification of coercion against the Donatists.
Author: Saint Augustine Publisher: CreateSpace ISBN: 9781514266588 Category : Languages : en Pages : 204
Book Description
Augustine, the man with upturned eye, with pen in the left hand, and a burning heart in the right (as he is usually represented), is a philosophical and theological genius of the first order, towering like a pyramid above his age, and looking down commandingly upon succeeding centuries. He had a mind uncommonly fertile and deep, bold and soaring; and with it, what is better, a heart full of Christian love and humility. He stands of right by the side of the greatest philosophers of antiquity and of modern times. We meet him alike on the broad highways and the narrow footpaths, on the giddy Alpine heights and in the awful depths of speculation, wherever philosophical thinkers before him or after him have trod. As a theologian he is facile princeps, at least surpassed by no church father, schoolman, or reformer. With royal munificence he scattered ideas in passing, which have set in mighty motion other lands and later times. He combined the creative power of Tertullian with the churchly spirit of Cyprian, the speculative intellect of the Greek church with the practical tact of the Latin. He was a Christian philosopher and a philosophical theologian to the full.
Author: Saint Augustine (of Hippo) Publisher: CUA Press ISBN: 9780813208671 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 130
Book Description
Augustine of Hippo (b. A.D. 354) is considered the single most influential theologian in the history of the Church in the West. Among his many contributions, Augustine developed a sexual ethic that became decisive for all later teachings in the Christian West on issues of marriage, reproduction, and sexuality. Some of the most significant and representative passages on marriage and sexuality from his works are presented here. They recount Augustine's own struggle with sexuality, and stress the important role it played in his conversion to Christianity as well as its influence on his theological principles later in life. The passages in this collection are divided into four chapters which document the chronological development of Augustine's sexual ethic. The first chapter includes passages that pertain to Augustine's own life and illustrate some of his positive and negative models of marital relation. The second chapter recounts Augustine's responses to the Manichean teachings on the body, reproduction, and marriage, mostly from his early years as a Christian. The third chapter contains passages marking Augustine's reaction to the ascetic debates within late fourth-century Latin Christianity. And, finally, the fourth chapter illustrates Augustine's mature sexual and marital ethic, which he elaborated in the midst of--and in reaction to--arguments with Pelagian writers. In a separate introduction, Elizabeth Clark sets the development of Augustine's thought within the context of his own intellectual biography and views it against the background of related issues and movements in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, such as Manichaeism, Jovinianism, and Pelagianism. The selections she presents here offer a comprehensive and uncommonly well-balanced picture of Augustine and his work. St. Augustine on Marriage and Sexuality is the first in a projected series of volumes on various themes found in the writings of the church fathers. ABOUT THE EDITOR: Elizabeth Clark is John Carlisle Kilgo Professor of Religion at Duke University. She is a past president of the American Academy of Religion and the North American Patristic Society, and a member of the editoral board of the Fathers of the Church series.
Author: Joshua M. Evans Publisher: ISBN: Category : Christian ethics Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Augustine of Hippo's account of sexuality and concupiscence (concupiscentia; libido) has long been both praised and vilified. Even so, scholars often cannot agree about what positions Augustine holds on fundamental issues within his account of concupiscence. The first issue is whether Augustine thinks concupiscence is caused exclusively or primarily by the soul, or whether concupiscence is often caused by the body. The second issue is whether Augustine thinks concupiscence in the form of sexual desire is wholly an effect of the fall or was present and good before the fall. Within these interpretive debates, Augustine's final book, contra Iulianum opus imperfectum (Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian), has been relatively neglected, especially in moral theology and ethics. Focusing on Augustine's later works and drawing significantly on contra Iulianum opus imperfectum, I argue that the bodily element of concupiscence is central to Augustine's mature theology of sexuality and is central to understanding Augustine's final position on Edenic concupiscence. Chapter one shows that rival interpretations of Augustine's claims about bodily desire and sexual desire in Eden often underlie rival evaluative claims about Augustine's views on sexuality and concupiscence. Chapter two examines Augustine's dispute with Julian of Eclanum and shows how Augustine's views on concupiscence and the fallen body emerge from Augustine's broader theological commitments regarding God, creation, and God's original plan for human nature. Chapter three shows that Augustine's mature theology holds that concupiscence is very often a desire of the body distinct from desires of the will. Here I show how Augustine's theory of bodily desire fits well with his broader anthropological commitments regarding sensation and embodiment. Chapter four applies Augustine's account of bodily desire to his development on the issue of sexual desire in Eden. I show that Augustine develops significantly on the issue, with his final position in contra Iulianum opus imperfectum being that sexual concupiscence might or might not have been present in Eden. I show how Augustine's final ambivalent position results from tensions within Augustine's account of bodily desire. Overall, the project is in conversation with scholarship in theology, philosophy, history, and gender and sexuality studies.
Author: Margaret R. Miles Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN: 1597527513 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 145
Book Description
Augustine's Confessions is one of the most powerfully evocative autobiographies of the Christian West. It recounts the complex experiences through which this formative theologian came to renounce the compulsive sexual practice of his youth, reinvesting his attention and affection in a disciplined spirituality. The Confessions is explicitly about desire, longing, passion--physical and spiritual. It narrates Augustine's desperate attempt to get, and to keep, the greatest degree of pleasure. Even his conversion to Catholic Christianity is narrated as a seduction to continence, and the model of spirituality he articulated relied intimately and profoundly on his sexual experience. Desire and Delight explores the erotics of asceticism as described by Augustine, noticing the gendered foundation of his model of spiritual aspiration. Going beyond the tormented, self-conscious Augustine of conventual interpretations, one discovers in this book a man impelled by the eros that defines human beings as such: the pursuit up the scale of pleasures to the ultimate Pleasure. The pursuit is analyzed here in the text, context, and subtext, with such intellectual and emotional engagement that the Confessions becomes a text of pleasure.
Author: St. Augustine Publisher: ISBN: 9781643730363 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 52
Book Description
This treatise, and the following, were written against somewhat that still remained of the heresy of Jovinian. "Jovinianus," he says, "who a few years since tried to found a new heresy, said that the Catholics favored the Manichæans, because in opposition to him they preferred holy Virginity to Marriage."
Author: Timo Nisula
Author: Bart van Egmond
Author: Saint Augustine
Author: Tarmo Toom
Author: Saint Augustine (of Hippo)
Author: Joshua M. Evans
Author: Margaret R. Miles
Author: Jon Todd Beane
Author: St. Augustine
Author: Jon T. Beane