Augustine of Hippo
This classic biography was first published thirty years ago and has since established itself as the standard account of Saint Augustine's life and teaching. The remarkable discovery recently of a considerable number of letters and sermons by Augustine has thrown fresh light on the first and last decades of his experience as a bishop. These circumstantial texts have led Peter Brown to reconsider some of his judgments on Augustine, both as the author of the Confessions and as the elderly bishop preaching and writing in the last years of Roman rule in north Africa. Brown's reflections on the significance of these exciting new documents are contained in two chapters of a substantial Epilogue to his biography (the text of which is unaltered). He also reviews the changes in scholarship about Augustine since the 1960s. A personal as well as a scholarly fascination infuse the book-length epilogue and notes that Brown has added to his acclaimed portrait of the bishop of Hippo.
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- I read quite a lot as a kid. Fiction and non-fiction. I'm intensely curious, and the "why" and the "how" of things leads you into new subjects. It doesn't hurt that history is also filled with stories as compelling as most fiction. Much of the old stuff also holds up quite well. Meditations by Aurelius is amazing. Also, Confessions by Augustine of Hippo.
I have many interests but botany became a big one, and the scientific naming scheme is mostly Latin and Greek, which leads to some interesting word history. "Sativa" means anything "cultivated" (example, "Avena sativa" is "cultivated oats" and "Crocus sativa" is "cultivated saffron"). "Nemo" means "no one" (so the "Search for Nemo" is the search for no one, haha), the root word for "service" means "slave". There are many more interesting associations.
I find the deepest and most awe-inspiring truths within physics (out of which biology and chemistry are arguably sort of abstractions in terms of order of complexity). Behind this is a long awkward history of curious people fumbling for answers in the dark. I am an odd nut, but it is connecting in a comforting way the way I can see others have asked the same burning questions of the "how" and the "why" of things, and the myriad subjects it has lead them to.
As John Muir once said: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."
- > Religious texts are made up fiction that hold no more meaning in my world view than Harry Potter or Game of Thrones
I have been downvoted many times (not sure why?) for stating this on HN, but I will state it again:
It's sad that this line of thinking has taken over the modern time. We now have "science", so we don't need any of that silly stuff like "philosophy" or "art" or "religion". All can be explained through the scientific method and all other branches of human intellect are null and avoid.
Of course, this comes from the new Atheists who influenced a lot of the younger generation years a go when they started but their ideas actually stems from older philosophers who shaped the modern day thinking.
Mainly Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche (who was also influenced by Feuerbach), Jean Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault.
For example, What did Jean-Paul Sartre say? "Existence precedes essence" and you can _clearly_ see how this has affected the modern Atheism mentality in the 21st century.
If existence precedes essence, then everything is relative and nothing can be objective and absolute; thus to claim things such as objective morality in the way that religion does is meaningless.
Don't forget that Sartre said: "If God exists, I can't be free, but I am free. Therefore God does not exist". Once again, if you look carefully enough, you absolutely see this in the modern world. The New Atheists for example, took all their ideas and spread them from these philosophers. What was Hitchen's famous quote? He would constantly regurgitate Karl Marx: "Religion is the opium of the people" which again.. is rooted from Sartre philosophy.
There is a great talk about this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KQcm0Mi5To
More to it, to anyone who claims religious people are intellectual inept, I would simply challenge you to read any of the material written by the intellectuals of the tradition. For example, for Christianity they would be: Augustine of Hippo, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas or John Henry Newman and tell me you're dealing with someone who has suspended his critical faculties.
You are welcome to disagree with them of course, but to claim that we should simply replace these materials with math books is disingenuous.
Just my 2c.
- Hah! Within the last couple of weeks I read Berdyaev's The Fate of Man in the Modern World, less for any special insight into theology than because the book was lying around, I had heard his name, and thought I might as well read it. On the other hand, I did read a fair bit of Plato and some Aristotle in 2020.
The one thing the modern synopsists will give you, though, is context. Jaroslav Pelikan quotes an American theologian to the effect that the Reformation was the reaction of Augustine's theology of grace on Augustine's theology of the church. I moderately well understand this, not through reading Augustine; I have read The Confessions and a smidgen each of On the Trinity and The City of God. But it was Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo and the first volume of Pelikan's history of Christian doctrine that told me.
- John Cassian's "The Conferences"[0][1] is a collection of interviews with the Desert Fathers, and one of the subjects discussed is that of focus and concentration (a selection of excerpts was recently compiled into a small book entitled "How to Focus", a review of which was posted here on HN two months ago [2]).
At one point, one of the monks interviewed by John Cassian and Germanus (either Abba Moses, Abba Serenus, or Abba Isaac, all of Scetis) compares the mind to a millstone driven by a water wheel. As long as the water flows, you cannot stop the millstone from moving and grinding whatever has been put into it. We cannot stop the millstone, but we can control what we feed into it and what is ground up by it.
Of course, there is also a long tradition of mortification of the flesh ("The Conferences" also discusses such things), crudely parodied and ridiculed by bad literature and trash Hollywood films. The basic understanding is that our bodily appetites can be unruly, grasping, wanting, desiring, imprudently and with no regard for the objective good that the intellect knows. Mortification is a way of training these insubordinate appetites and passions into obedience to the intellect through exercises of denial. Fasting is one example. An element of discomfort, and even suffering, can be involved as the lower is sacrificed for the sake of the higher, and the appetites throw their tantrums as we persevere and dominate them, reigning them in like a man on horseback reigns in his horse.
Our culture has sold us the idea that indulging our whims and desires with no regard for our objective good is freedom, but nothing could be further from the truth. This kind of lifestyle is a recipe for misery and enslavement, both to the chaos and disorder of unruly and even disordered appetites and passions, but also those who gladly exploit the appetites of such weak and blind men, herding and using them like mindless beasts. As Augustine of Hippo wrote, "a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices." The relevance to focus here is that if you do not learn to exercise restraint and self-mastery, you will have trouble with focus as your appetites and passions will pull you away from the matter at hand. Perseverance is thwarted by such softness [3]. Pour only good things into your millstone. Do not pollute your millstone with darnel. Endure truth, whether pleasant or painful. Let is grind away your marble you bring forth your sculpture. It is not mastered, repressed appetites that come back to bite you. On the contrary. It is repressed truth that does.
[0] https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3508.htm
- > I find the response that we’re talking about comes from the more “born again” literal types.
Augustine of Hippo wrote a book called The Literal Meaning of Genesis. In which he said that its literal meaning is that the Seven Days were all instantaneous and simultaneous.
"Biblical literalism" is fundamentally a (non-magisterial) Protestant position, and insists that the Bible "literally" says things which nobody ever thought it said until the 19th century (e.g. dispensationalism). Turns out that "literal" means whatever you want it to mean.
But a lot of people (particularly in the US) make the mistake of equating "evangelical Protestantism" with "Christianity", or even with religion in general, attributing to the latter two things which are rather unique to the former.
- > FWIW, the modern Catholic church's official stance is that Genesis should not be taken literally
The non-literal interpretation of the Bible is not modern: (Saint) Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) wrote about not taking it literally.
* https://spectrummagazine.org/article/news/2010/01/30/augusti...
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