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The book presents human history as a conflict between what Augustine calls the Earthly City (often colloquially referred to as the City of Man, and mentioned once on page 644, chapter 1 of book 15) and the City of God, a conflict that is destined to end in victory for the latter. The City of God is marked by people who forgo earthly pleasure to ...
Augustine of Hippo (/ ɔː ˈ ɡ ʌ s t ɪ n / aw-GUST-in, US also / ˈ ɔː ɡ ə s t iː n / AW-gə-steen; [22] Latin: Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430), [23] also known as Saint Augustine, was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa.
Augustine proposed that evil could not exist within God, nor be created by God, and is instead a by-product of God's creativity. [13] He rejected the notion that evil exists in itself, proposing instead that it is a privation of (or falling away from) good, and a corruption of nature. [ 5 ]
The work is not a complete autobiography, as it was written during Augustine's early 40s and he lived long afterwards, producing another important work, The City of God. Nonetheless, it does provide an unbroken record of his development of thought and is the most complete record of any single person from the 4th and 5th centuries.
The opposition arose because Augustine’s view rejected the traditional view of election based upon God's foreknowledge, replacing it with a predestination as "necessity based upon fate". [89] Similarly, the Council of Arles (475) condemned the idea that "some have been condemned to death, others have been predestined to life". [ 90 ]
Augustine says that a feature of the Scriptures is obscurity and that obscurity is the result of sin: that is, God made the Scriptures obscure in order to motivate and challenge our fallen minds. Augustine claims there are seven steps to wisdom in interpretation of the Scriptures: fear of God, holiness and faith, scientia (or knowledge ...
Augustine offered the Divine command theory, a theory which proposes that an action's status as morally good is equivalent to whether it is commanded by God. [16] [17] Augustine's theory began by casting ethics as the pursuit of the supreme good, which delivers human happiness, Augustine argued that to achieve this happiness, humans must love objects that are worthy of human love in the ...
One of the more notable assertions made by Augustine in De Genesi ad litteram is the idea that everything in the universe was created simultaneously in eternity by God and that the six-day structure presented in the book of Genesis represents how creation manifested itself in a temporal sense.