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Augustine (Thought-Criticism) (06)
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Augustine (Thought-Criticism) (06).
3. Augustine's Meaning for Us
(1) In Augustine, as in scarcely any other thinker, we may study the reality of Christian-Catholic faith (but not of Jesus or of New Testament Christianity).
(2) Through him eminently we become acquainted with the fundamental problems that came into the world with Christian thinking.
(3) Through Augustine we study the themes of Catholicism in their profoundest meaning.
(4) Through him we can discern at the highest level the eternal opposition that has run through the whole life of the Church:
1) between catholicity and reason,
2) between monolithic authority and the openness of freedom,
3) between the absolute order in the world as the actuality of transcendence and the relative orders in the world as existence with its many compatible possibilities,
4) between cult and free meditation as the center of life,
5) between the outward community of prayer, in which each man shuts himself up in his solitude to find God, and the loneliness before God, which strives to transcend itself in communication with men, through the never-ending process of loving self-fulfillment.
(5) The self-penetration that set in with Augustine continued down through the Christian thinkers to Pascal, to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. -
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Introduction
Theology 