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Tuesday, April 04, 2006
CH Newsletter on Augustine’s legacy
In an article for Christian History Newsletter written to recommend Phillip Cary’s audio lecture series on Augustine, CH’s Chris Armstrong writes:
For Augustine is even more to the modern West than its seminal theologian. Cary shows us how, whether we are Christian or not, Westerners’ very understanding of ourselves as human beings comes directly from Augustine. (For the full-blown, scholarly version of this argument, read Cary’s 2003 book, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist.) When we think of ourselves as having deep, inner psychological depths, we are speaking Augustine-ese. And there is much more than this to our Augustine-ness. Cary illuminates the ways in which our understandings of such central matters as God’s grace, the nature of evil and sin, and the relationship between religion and happiness have all been deeply formed by this seminal philosopher-saint.
As this list implies, the “saint” (or more accurately, “Church Father”) side of Augustine’s person and legacy is also carefully and artfully presented in this short course. Even as Cary clears pathways for us through some of the deeper thickets of the prolific North African’s philosophical thought, he never lets us lose sight of Augustine’s role as Church Father—interpreter of the Bible and teacher of Christian doctrine. We get to meet Augustine as conservator and explicator of the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity, elaborator of a distinctly new Christian understanding of love, and progenitor of understandings of church, sacraments, and church-state relations that have persisted as pillars of Western Christian thought until today.
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