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Catherine Conybeare takes the notion of St Augustine as rigid and dogmatic Father of the Church and turns it on its head. She reads his early works to discover the anti-dogmatic Augustine who valued changeability and human interconnectedness and deplored social exclusion.
Augustine's Confessions is a text that seduces. But how often do its readers respond in kind? Here three scholars who share a longstanding fascination with sexuality and Christian discourse attempt to do just that. Where prior interpreters have been inclined either to defend or to criticize Augustine's views, Virginia Burrus, Mark Jordan, and Karmen MacKendrick set out both to seduce and to be seduced by his text. Often ambivalent but always passionately engaged, their readings of the Confessions center on four sets of intertwined themes--secrecy and confession, asceticism and eroticism, constraint and freedom, and time and eternity. Rather than expose Augustine's sexual history, they explore how the Confessions conjoins the erotic with the hidden, the imaginary, and the fictional. Rather than bemoan the repressiveness of his text, they uncover the complex relationship between seductive flesh and persuasive words that pervades all of its books. Rather than struggle to escape the control of the author, they embrace the painful pleasure of willed submission that lies at the erotic heart not only of the Confessions but also of Augustine's broader understanding of sin and salvation. Rather than mourn the fateful otherworldliness of his theological vision, they plumb the bottomless depths of beauty that Augustine discovers within creation, thereby extending desire precisely by refusing satisfaction. In unfolding their readings, the authors draw upon other works in Augustine's corpus while building on prior Augustinian scholarship in their own overlapping fields of history, theology, and philosophy. They also press well beyond the conventional boundaries of scholarly disciplines, conversing with such wide-ranging theorists of eroticism as Barthes, Baudrillard, Klossowski, Foucault, and Harpham. In the end, they offer not only a fresh interpretation of Augustine's famous work but also a multivocal literary-philosophical meditation on the seductive elusiveness of desire, bodies, language, and God.
"By analyzing a variety of texts from across Augustine's career, Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account traces the development of Augustine's thinking on the human will. Augustine's most creative contributions to the notion of the human will do not derive from articulating a monolithic, universal definition. He identifies four types of human will: the created will, which he describes as a hinge; the fallen will, a link in a chain binding human beings to sin; the redeemed will, which is a root of love; and the fully free will to be enjoyed in the next life when perfection is made complete. His mature view is "theologically differentiated," consisting of four distinct types of human will, which vary according to these diverse theological scenarios. His innovation consists in distinguishing these types with a detail and clarity unprecedented by any thinker before him. Augustine's mature view of the will is constructed in intensive dialogue with other Christian thinkers, and, most of all, with the Christian scriptures. Its basic features shape, and are shaped by, his doctrines of Christ and the Holy Spirit, as well as creation and grace, making it impossible to abstract his views on willing from his account of the central Christian doctrines of Christology, Pneumatology, and the Trinity. The multiple facets of Augustine's conception of will have been cut to fit the shape of his theology and the biblical story it seeks to describe. From Augustine, we inherit a theological account of the will. Augustine Will Free will Voluntas Uoluntas Grace Fall creation eschaton Christ"--
Phillip Cary argues that Augustine invented the concept of the self as a private inner space - a space into which one can enter and in which one can find God. This study pinpoints what was new about his philosophy of inwardness and situates it within a narrative of his intellectual development and relationship to the Platonist tradition.
In this book, Phillip Cary argues that Augustine invented the concept of the self as a private inner space-a space into which one can enter and in which one can find God. Although it has often been suggested that Augustine in some way inaugurated the Western tradition of inwardness, this is the first study to pinpoint what was new about Augustine's philosophy of inwardness and situate it within a narrative of his intellectual development and his relationship to the Platonist tradition. Augustine invents the inner self, Cary argues, in order to solve a particular conceptual problem. Augustine is attracted to the Neoplatonist inward turn, which located God within the soul, yet remains loyal to the orthodox Catholic teaching that the soul is not divine. He combines the two emphases by urging us to turn "in then up"--to enter the inner world of the self before gazing at the divine Light above the human mind. Cary situates Augustine's idea of the self historically in both the Platonist and the Christian traditions. The concept of private inner self, he shows, is a development within the history of the Platonist concept of intelligibility or intellectual vision, which establishes a kind of kinship between the human intellect and the divine things it sees. Though not the only Platonist in the Christian tradition, Augustine stands out for his devotion to this concept of intelligibility and his willingness to apply it even to God. This leads him to downplay the doctrine that God is incomprehensible, as he is convinced that it is natural for the mind's eye, when cleansed of sin, to see and understand God. In describing Augustine's invention of the inner self, Cary's fascinating book sheds new light on Augustine's life and thought, and shows how Augustine's position developed into the more orthodox Augustine we know from his later writings.
This book is a systematic study of Descartes' relation to Augustine. It offers a complete reevaluation of Descartes' thought and as such will be of major importance to all historians of medieval, neo-Platonic, or early modern philosophy. Stephen Menn demonstrates that Descartes uses Augustine's central ideas as a point of departure for a critique of medieval Aristotelian physics, which he replaces with a new, mechanistic anti-Aristotelian physics. Special features of the book include a reading of the Meditations, a comprehensive historical and philosophical introduction to Augustine's thought, a detailed account of Plotinus, and a contextualization of Descartes' mature philosophical project which explores both the framework within which it evolved and the early writings, to show how the collapse of the early project drove Descartes to the writings of Augustine.
Were holy men historical figures or figments of the theological imagination? Did the biographies devoted to them reflect facts or only the ideological commitments of their authors? For decades, scholars of late antiquity have wrestled with these questions when analysing such issues as the Christianization of Europe, the decline of paganism, and the 'rise of the holy man' and of the hagiographical genre. In this book Peter Turner suggests a new approach to these problems through an examination of a wide range of spiritual narrative texts from the third to the sixth centuries A.D.: pagan philosophical biographies, Greek and Latin Christian saints' lives, and autobiographical works by authors such as Julian and Augustine. Rather than scrutinizing these works for either historical facts or religious and intellectual attitudes, he argues that a deeper historicity can be found only in the interplay between these types of information. On the textual level, this analysis recognises the genuine commitment of spiritual authors to write truthfully and to record realistically a world felt to be replete with spiritual and symbolic meaning. On the historical level, it argues that holy men, expecting the same symbolism within their own lives, adopted lifestyles which ultimately provoked and confirmed this world view. Such praxis is detectable not only in the holy men who inspired biography but also in the period's scattered autobiographical writings. As much a historical as a textual phenomenon, this spiritually-minded scrutiny of the world created interpretations which were always open and contested. Therefore, this book also associates spiritual narrative texts with only one possible voice of religious experience in a constant dialogue between believers, opponents, and the sceptical undecided.
An exhaustive guide to every significant Christian theologian who lived from the first century to 1308, the year in which John Duns Scotus died. The dictionary encompasses the Catholic, Orthodox, Nestorian and Monophysite traditions, including information not previously available in English. Thoroughly indexed, the dictionary incorporates common variants of names and concepts which will help and direct the reader. The main criterion for inclusion has been contribution to the development of Christian theology. Sub-criteria by which that is measured include, above all, originality and influence on later figures. With over 290 entries, the dictionary provides a handy summary of theologiansi lives and writings together with recent scholarship,as well as an up-to-date, definitive bibliography listing primary texts, translations and secondary literature in the major western European languages. Useful for all levels of academia; no other text matches the depth of the dictionaryis bibliographies. The unprecedented thoroughness of Hill's compilation provides an essential resource for studies at all levels on such a large and varied range of Church thinkers.
The Emergence of Subjectivity in the Ancient and Medieval World: An Interpretation of Western Civilization represents a combination of different genres: cultural history, philosophical anthropology, and textbook. It follows a handful of different but interrelated themes through more than a dozen texts that were written over a period of several millennia and, by means of an analysis of these texts, presents a theory of the development of Western civilization from antiquity to the Middle Ages. The main line of argument traces the various self-conceptions of different cultures as they developed historically, reflecting different views of what it is to be human. The thesis of the volume is that through examination of these changes we can discern the gradual emergence of what we today call inwardness, subjectivity, and individual freedom. As human civilization took its first tenuous steps, it had a very limited conception of the individual. Instead, the dominant principle was that of the wider group: the family, clan, or people. Only in the course of history did the idea of what we now know as individuality begin to emerge, and it took millennia for this idea to be fully recognized and developed. The conception of human beings as having a sphere of inwardness and subjectivity subsequently had a sweeping impact on all aspects of culture, including philosophy, religion, law, and art: indeed, this notion largely constitutes what is today referred to as modernity. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that this modern conception of human subjectivity was not simply something given, but rather the result of a long process of historical and cultural development.