philosohpy st augustine

St Augustine was born in the Ad period of 13 November 354- 28 August 430. He was an early Christian theologian. whose had writings became very influential in the development of Western Christianity and Western philosophy. He was bishop of Hippo Regius which is located in the Roman province of Africa. Saint Augustine started writing during the Patristic Era, he is widely viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers. His much widely praised work which is still read to this very day is writing on the City of Gods and Confessions. His most profound impact comes from his very own interpration of chrsitanity. He believed that the grace of Christ was indispensable to human freedom, Augustine helped formulate the doctrine of original sin and made seminal contributions to the development of just war theory. His key accomplishments Augustine lived in an era when the pillar of strength and stability, the Roman Empire, was being shattered, and his own life, too, was filled with turmoil and loss. First he lost his mistress, then his mother, and finally his son. To believe in God, he had to find an answer to why, if God is all-powerful and also purely good, he still allows suffering to exist.Augustine’s answers to this question would forever change Western thought. He states “Evil exists because we have free will. God enables humans to freely choose their actions and deeds, and evil inevitably results from these choices. Even natural evils, such as disease, are indirectly related to human action, since they become evil only when in contact with people”.-- (Saint Augustine) According to this theory, a disease spreads only because men and women put themselves in harm’s way. Augustine gave a more theological explanation later on in his life he also states, “We cannot understand the mind of God, and what appears evil to us may not be evil at all”. – (Saint Augustine). What he is trying to say is that we cannot judge God’s judgment. The roots of both of these
answers stemmed from two philosophies, Manicheanism and Neoplatonism, which helped shaped many of Augustine’s ideas. It was Augustine’s appropriation of Plato’s two- level view of reality that produced the mysterious non- material God who exists outside of all space and time. St Augustine brought to christanity an intellectual account and body of reasoned to ground a lot of his ideas.