Download or read book Augustine s Invention of the Inner Self written by Phillip Cary and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Augustine s Invention of the Inner Self The Legacy of a Christian Platonist written by St. David's Phillip Cary Director of the Philosophy Program Eastern College, Pennsylvania and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000-06-12 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Inner Grace written by Phillip Cary and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-26 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most theologians want to paint the development of Augustine's doctrine of grace as a turn away from Platonist philosophy to something more distinctively Christian, but Phillip Cary argues that it is a synthesis of the two, a development within Augustine's Christian Platonism.
Download or read book Augustine s Inner Dialogue written by Brian Stock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Augustine's philosophy of life involves mediation, reviewing one's past and exercises for self-improvement. Centuries after Plato and before Freud he invented a 'spiritual exercise' in which every man and woman is able, through memory, to reconstruct and reinterpret life's aims. In this 2010 book, Brian Stock examines Augustine's unique way of blending literary and philosophical themes. He proposes a new interpretation of Augustine's early writings, establishing how the philosophical soliloquy (soliloquium) has emerged as a mode of inquiry and how it relates to problems of self-existence and self-history. The book also provides clear analysis of inner dialogue and discourse and how, as inner dialogue complements and finally replaces outer dialogue, a style of thinking emerges, arising from ancient sources and a religious attitude indebted to Judeo-Christian tradition.
Download or read book Augustine and Philosophy written by Phillip Cary and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Augustine of Hippo was a philosopher as well as theologian, bishop and saint. He aimed to practice philosophy not simply as an academic discipline but as a love for divine wisdom pervading everything in his life and work. To inquire into Augustine and philosophy is thus to get to the heart of his concerns as a Christian writer and uncover some of the reasons for his vast influence on Western thought. This volume, containing essays by leading Augustine scholars, includes a variety of inquiries into Augustine's philosophy in theory and practice, as well as his relation to philosophers before and after him. It opens up a variety of perspectives into the heart of Augustine's thought. He frequently reminds his readers, 'philosophy' means love of wisdom, and in that sense he expects that every worthy impulse in human life will have something philosophical about it, something directed toward the attainment of wisdom. In Augustine's own writing we find this expectation put into practice in a stunning variety of ways, as keys themes of Western philosophy and intricate forms of philosophical argument turn up everywhere. The collection of essays in this book examines just a few aspects of the relation of Augustine and philosophy, both in Augustine's own practice as a philosopher and in his interaction with others. The result is not one picture of the relation of Augustine and philosophy but many, as the authors of these essays ask many different questions about Augustine and his influence, and bring a large diversity of interests and expertise to their task. Thus the collection shows that Augustine's philosophy remains an influence and a provocation in a wide variety of settings today.
Download or read book Augustine Our Contemporary written by Willemien Otten and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2018-05-30 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the massive literature on the idea of the self, the Augustinian influence has often played a central role. The volume Augustine Our Contemporary, starting from the compelling first essay by David W. Tracy, addresses this influence from the Middle Ages to modernity and from a rich variety of perspectives, including theology, philosophy, history, and literary studies. The collected essays in this volume all engage Augustine and the Augustinian legacy on notions of selfhood, interiority, and personal identity. Written by prominent scholars, the essays demonstrate a connecting thread: Augustine is a thinker who has proven his contemporaneity in Western thought time and time again. He has been "the contemporary" of thinkers ranging from Eriugena to Luther to Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. His influence has been dominant in certain eras, and in others he has left traces and fragments that, when stitched together, create a unique impression of the “presentness” of Christian selfhood. As a whole, Augustine Our Contemporary sheds relevant new light on the continuity of the Western Christian tradition. This volume will interest academics and students of philosophy, political theory, and religion, as well as scholars of postmodernism and Augustine. Contributors: Susan E. Schreiner, David W. Tracy, Bernard McGinn, Vincent Carraud, Willemien Otten, Adriaan T. Peperzak, David C. Steinmetz, Jean-Luc Marion, W. Clark Gilpin, William Schweiker, Franklin I. Gamwell, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Fred Lawrence, and Françoise Meltzer.
Download or read book On the Soul and Its Origin written by Saint Augustine and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-06-08 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Augustine the Reader written by Brian Stock and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stock displays an enviable and intimate knowledge of the text of Augustine, above all of his Confessions and, as the book progresses, of the De Trinitate.
Download or read book Outward Signs written by Phillip Cary and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-02 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cary's thesis is indicated in the subtitle - that Augustine's thought has no room for a concept of efficacious external means of grace, i.e., that neither word nor sacrament (both of which are outward signs) can convey to us the divine inner gift of grace. Therefore nothing external has the power to save us
Download or read book On the Trinity written by Saint Augustine of Hippo and published by Aeterna Press. This book was released on with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The following dissertation concerning the Trinity, as the reader ought to be informed, has been written in order to guard against the sophistries of those who disdain to begin with faith, and are deceived by a crude and perverse love of reason. Now one class of such men endeavor to transfer to things incorporeal and spiritual the ideas they have formed, whether through experience of the bodily senses, or by natural human wit and diligent quickness, or by the aid of art, from things corporeal; so as to seek to measure and conceive of the former by the latter. Aeterna Press
Download or read book The Spiritual Senses written by Paul L. Gavrilyuk and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-10 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it possible to see, hear, touch, smell and taste God? How do we understand the biblical promise that the 'pure in heart' will 'see God'? Christian thinkers as diverse as Origen of Alexandria, Bonaventure, Jonathan Edwards and Hans Urs von Balthasar have all approached these questions in distinctive ways by appealing to the concept of the 'spiritual senses'. In focusing on the Christian tradition of the 'spiritual senses', this book discusses how these senses relate to the physical senses and the body, and analyzes their relationship to mind, heart, emotions, will, desire and judgement. The contributors illuminate the different ways in which classic Christian authors have treated this topic, and indicate the epistemological and spiritual import of these understandings. The concept of the 'spiritual senses' is thereby importantly recovered for contemporary theological anthropology and philosophy of religion.
Download or read book Augustine in a Time of Crisis written by Boleslaw Z. Kabala and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses our global crisis by turning to Augustine, a master at integrating disciplines, philosophies, and human experiences in times of upheaval. It covers themes of selfhood, church and state, education, liberalism, realism, and 20th-century thinkers. The contributors enhance our understanding of Augustine’s thought by heightening awareness of his relevance to diverse political, ethical, and sociological questions. Bringing together Augustine and Gallicanism, civil religion, and Martin Luther King, Jr., this volume expands the boundaries of Augustine scholarship through a consideration of subjects at the heart of contemporary political theory.
Download or read book The Legacy of sovereign joy written by JOHN PIPER and published by Inter-Varsity Press. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An uplifting look at three famous and flawed fathers of the Christian church and how their lives can inspire us to fall in love with God and find the power to overcome our weaknesses. Augustine grappled with sexual passion. Martin Luther struggled to control his tongue. John Calvin fought the battle of faith with the world's weapons. Yet despite their failings, each man will always be remembered as a founding father to the Christian faith because of the messages they declared. And even with their deaths hundreds of years ago, their messages still speak today. John Piper explores each man's life, integrating Augustine's delight in God with Luther's emphasis on the Word and Calvin's exposition of Scriptures. Through their strengths and struggles, he teaches us how to better live today, for when we consider their lives, we behold the glory and majesty of God - and in that, find the power to overcome our weaknesses.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Augustine s Confessions written by Tarmo Toom and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-05 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the best scholarship on Augustine's Confessions which will facilitate a better understanding of this masterpiece.
Download or read book The Integrated Self written by Brian Stock and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-01-24 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Well before his entry into the religious life in the spring of 386 C.E., Augustine had embarked on a lengthy comparison between teachings on the self in the philosophical traditions of Platonism and Neoplatonism and the treatment of the topic in the Psalms, the letters of St. Paul, and other books of the Bible. Brian Stock argues that Augustine, over the course of these reflections, gradually abandoned a dualistic view of the self, in which the mind and the body play different roles, and developed the notion of an integrated self, in which the mind and body function interdependently. Stock identifies two intellectual techniques through which Augustine effected this change in his thought. One, lectio divina, was an early Christian approach to reading that engaged both mind and body. The other was a method of self-examination that consisted of framing an interior Socratic dialogue between Reason and the individual self. Stock investigates practices of writing, reading, and thinking across a range of premodern texts to demonstrate how Augustine builds upon the rhetorical traditions of Cicero and the inner dialogue of Plutarch to create an introspective and autobiographical version of self-study that had little to no precedent. The Integrated Self situates these texts in a broad historical framework while being carefully attuned to what they can tell us about the intersections of mind, body, and medicine in contemporary thought and practice. It is a book in which Stock continues his project of reading Augustine, and one in which he moves forward in new and perhaps unexpected directions.
Download or read book Human Identity at the Intersection of Science Technology and Religion written by Christopher C. Knight and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humans are unique in their ability to reflect on themselves. Recently a number of scholars have pointed out that human self-conceptions have a history. Ideas of human nature in the West have always been shaped by the interplay of philosophy, theology, science, and technology. The fast pace of developments in the latter two spheres (neuroscience, genetics, artificial intelligence, biomedical engineering) call for fresh reflections on what it means, now, to be human, and for theological and ethical judgments on how we might shape our own destiny in the future. The leading scholars in this book offer fresh contributions to the lively quest for an account of ourselves that does justice to current developments in theology, science, technology, and philosophy.
Download or read book Secret Selves written by Stephen Prickett and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who are we and how do we define our inner selves? In his last work, Professor Stephen Prickett presents a literary and cultural exploration of our inner selves – and how we have created and written about them – from the Old Testament to social media. What he finds is that although our secret, inner, sense of self – what we feel makes us distinctively 'us' – seems a natural and permanent part of being human, it is in fact surprisingly new. Whilst confessional religious writings, from Augustine to Jane Austen, or even diaries of 20th-century Holocaust victims, have explored inwards as part of a path to self-discovery, our inner space has expanded beyond any possible personal experience. This development has enhanced our capacity not merely to write about what we have never seen, but even to create fantasies and impossible fictions around them. Yet our secret selves can also be a source of terror. The fringes of our inner worlds are often porous, ill-defined and susceptible to frightening forms of external control. Mystics and poets, from Dante to John Henry Newman or Gerard Manley Hopkins, sought God in their secret spaces not least because they feared the 'abyss beneath.' From the origin of human consciousness through modern history and into the future, Secret Selves uses literature to consider the profound possibilities and ramifications of our evolving ideas of self.
