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Historical View of Augustine (World History: Schema and its Consequences)
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Paul Jang
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2008-04-11 01:45:20, hit : 3,998 |
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Historical View of Augustine (World History: Schema and its Consequences)
AUGUSTINE'S HISTORICAL
VIEW OF THE WORLD
(1) WORLD HISTORY
A. Augustine's schema and its consequences
(1) The history of mankind is the story of Creation and man's original estate, of Adam's fall and the original sin that came with it, of the incarnation of God and the redemption of man.
(2) Now we are living in a period of indeterminate duration, to be concluded by the end of the world, after which there will remain only hell and the kingdom of heaven.
(3) The intervening history is essentially of no importance.
(4) All that matters is the salvation of every soul.
(5) But the great realities of the Roman state and the Catholic Church are present.
(6) After the conquest of Rome by Alaric (410), the pagans blamed the Christians for the catastrophe.
1) Because they have forsaken the old gods, the gods have forsaken Rome.
2) Augustine undertook to vindicate them in his great work, The City of God, in which a view of history plays an important part.
3) From the beginning, since Cain and Abel, there have been two states, the worldly state (cwitas terrena), which goes back to Cain and sin, and the divine state (civitas Dei), which goes back to Abel and his life that was pleasing to God.
4) Since Christ these states have been manifest.
5) All human existence is twofold.
① The fall of Adam ushered in a society based on natural reproduction, in which men are dependent on one another and have combated one another since Cain. Men form communities that wage war. They organize the sinful life.
② Yet at the same time each individual exists as a creature of God, in an immediate relation to God.
These individuals gather together in the community of faith. They encourage one another to lead the true life according to the will of God; however, in so doing they depend not on each other but only on God, that is, on revelation and the Church.
6) For Augustine the concrete consequences of these two aspects of human existence were Church and state, the Catholic Church and the Roman Empire.
(7) All history was a struggle between the divine state and the worldly state.
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Introduction
History 