人文科学paper代写 Humanities 201Wexelblatt

Humanities 201Wexelblatt

人文科学paper代写 The Greek secular philosophers believed we’re here to try to be happy. Augustine believes we’re here to be tried and redeemed from

Notes on Augustine  人文科学paper代写

                        God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.

-St. Augustine

1. Augustine was the first great Christian theologian. Theology differs from secular philosophy: the latter is founded on human reason, the former on divine revelation, sacred texts. Theologians provide the arguments for and examine the implications of religious doctrines.

2. Augustine is the pre-eminent transitional figure between the philosophy of the Ancient World and the religious preoccupations of the Middle Ages.

3. The two major problems Augustine had to resolve are posed by the Christian doctrine that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent:


4. Theodicy or the Problem of Evil: “If God is God, He is not good.  If God is good, He is not God” (A. MacLeish, anticipated by Epicurus).  How can we reconcile belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God with all the bad things that go on outside and inside us?


5. Free Will: If God knows everything, then He must know what choices we are going to make. How can we reconcile divine “predestination” with free will and moral responsibility?

4. Augustine in his time, c. 400 A.D. Gradual decay of the Roman Empire, rise of Christianity beginning with conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 313. The Council of Nicea in 325 worked out the orthodox beliefs of the Church which had become co-extensive with the Empire, and condemns all other forms of Christian belief as heresies.

   Yet in Augustine’s time there were still plenty of adherents of Greek philosophies (who condemned Christianity as “an offense to reason”) and Christians holding heterodox or heretical beliefs:  e.g., Arians (Jesus is not the same as God); Manicheans (God and Satan are equally powerful); Libertines (God’s already made up his mind about our eternal fate, so let’s party).

5. The life of Augustine, a North African. His father was a pagan, his mother a Christian. He was a fine scholar, a teacher of rhetoric, who pursued both pleasure (“Please God, grant me chastity and temperance, just not yet!”) and a searcher for ideas to which he could devote himself.  He studied the philosophers we have and ran through phases of Neo-Platonism, Stoic Pantheism, even Manichaeism, nagged all the while by his mother Monica who wanted to convert him to Christianity.  Eventually he did so, but not until the age of 32.

6. Two views of Augustine:


7. (The customary opinion): Augustine’s writings are abstract Church dogma and he rejected philosophy in favor of religion.


8. (Your instructor’s slightly different opinion): The issues Augustine wrestled with were intensely personal ones for him and he deliberately assimilated Greek philosophy into Christian doctrine, “converting” Plato and the others even as he was converted by St. Ambrose.  (See the summary at the end of this post on Augustine’s assimilation of secular Greek philosophy.)

Augustine rifled the Greeks for useful ideas:  Aristotle for his moderation (“Complete abstinence is easier than perfect moderation”); Epicurus for his withdrawal from a corrupt world; Epictetus for his belief in divine providence (whatever happens is in accord with God’s plan), and Socrates, of course, as the template for integrity and martyrdom.  人文科学paper代写

Moreover, Augustine is akin to the pagan philosophers of Empire, the Epicureans and Stoics, in wanting two things not easy to reconcile: first, a universe run by law or God, entirely orderly, predictable, and not evil, but second, free will for human beings.

7. Augustine’s Theodicy, reconciling a perfect God with corrupt people and atrocities galore runs like this:

All being is good.  Evil is only the absence of good.  God is perfect and in control, so the existence of evil is in accord with God’s will, even though the doing of evil is not.  Therefore, evil must be an instrument God uses to work the good, even if we’re too limited to see how.

Notice that Augustine’s logic is deductive, reasoning from general principles (“God is love”) to specific cases (the slaughter of these children must be in accord with God’s will).

8. Augustine’s position on Free Will

   God knows all, thus He knows what we’ll do.  But the idea that we’re mere puppets is as  unacceptable to Augustine as it was to Epicurus (whose atoms “swerved”) or Epictetus (whose nature-god controlled everything except our own wills).

The way Augustine gets out of the corner is by arguing that God’s advance knowledge of our choices is not the same as causing them.  Our free choice is still part of the cause of our actions, so we’re morally responsible for them.

9. How Augustine explains why people choose evil: An evil choice is one that neglects the good. We neglect the good out of excessive love of the “occasions of sin,” temptations like money and power.  The word “excessive” shows this idea has Aristotelian roots as does the view that money and power aren’t bad-in-themselves if properly used.

10. The City of God is the title Augustine gave his masterpiece, a deliberate echo of Plato’s Republic. Plato’s utopian city is ethical and political; Augustine’s is religious—it is Heaven. Augustine ultimately rejects secular Greek philosophy because he finds the philosophers’ promise of earthly happiness vain and human reason weak compared to the Christian faith in divine revelation.  This was, after all, his own experience.  Stoicism and Epicureanism both depend on a working empire, so to speak; but by Augustine’s time the Empire was no longer functioning smoothly.  But, even though Augustine was a great intellectual, his rejection of reason in favor of faith introduces into Christianity an anti-intellectual strain.  For him, it is the passion of faith, not detached, objective reason, that should be our guide.  In fact, he argues that without faith we cannot know the truth.  And without faith, he insists, the pagan virtues can turn into vices.


11. The Greek secular philosophers believed we’re here to try to be happy. Augustine believes we’re here to be tried and redeemed from a fallen world. This attitude dominated Western thought until the Renaissance, when secular philosophy was reborn with much else.  That will be our next destination.

Summary of What Augustine took from the Greek Philosophers

From Socrates:  人文科学paper代写

Distinction between seeming and being, real vs. apparent goods,

an immaterial and imperishable soul being higher than the body,

preserving integrity (keeping the faith) at the cost of martyrdom

from Plato:

Augustine’s “City of Man” = Plato’s cave

Augustine’s “City of God” = Plato’s world of perfect Ideas

Augustine’s Flesh vs. Spirit = Plato’s Appearance vs. Reality

Augustine’s Love of God = Platonic Love of the Good

From Aristotle:  人文科学paper代写

Virtue as moderation (view of worldly goods as means and to be regarded moderately)

Aristotle’s “Contemplative Life” becomes the Christian monastic life

Aristotle’s analysis of causation (events have many causes) as argument to reconcile

God’s foreknowledge of our choices with our moral responsibility for them

from Epicurus:

Epicurus states the Problem of Evil that Augustine tries to resolve, reconciling

God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence with evil in the world.

Withdrawal from the corrupt world is like Christian monasticism, Garden as

model for a monastery or convent

Preserving justice under and with respect for Civil Law (Rome was now Christian)

From Stoicism:  人文科学paper代写

“Divine Providence,” events occur by God’s will and so happen for the best

Free Will as a “gift from God”

更多代写：计算机作业代写    经济代考   essay代写      AI作业代写     统计代考  人文科学论文代写