The philosophy of Augustine Aurelius

Augustine Aurelius was another representative of the patristic and an opponent to Origen in the question of salvation. He asserted that not all but the only few of the chosen ones would be saved. God having created the world endowed all creatures with a free will. But the human in the image of the prime ancestors Adam and Eve abused with the gift and fell into sin. The human nature thereby became corporal (that means also the mortal) and since the human is meant to peril. But thanks to the expiating sacrifice of Christ some part of humans got possibility of salvation to those who would believe and follow him. But to do it only the humans who were given Christ’s grace are able. This grace is given not to all but only to the chosen few. Without the grace nobody can be rescued. The choice is made by God arbitrarily and doesn’t depend on the human. But those who got no this gift and are thereby sentenced to peril shouldn’t blame the God for injustice because all people are sinful and worth of peril. But the God being kind nevertheless saves some few. This doctrine of the primal predestination conquered a wide popularity in lap of the Catholic Church though wasn’t accepted officially. After the outset of Reformation in the 16th c A.D. the Catholic Church refused it.

Among the purely philosophic questions regarded by Augustine Aurelius the most interesting for today is the question of the time’s nature. “When nobody asks me what time is – wrote Augustine Aurelius – I know what it is but as soon as somebody asks of it I cannot say a single word”. The past doesn’t already exist, the future doesn’t yet exist. An instant of the present continuously overflowing into the past from the future merely exists. The eternity isn’t an everlasting flow of time but the everlasting present where there is no time at all. It exists for the God’s own only because the God perceives all reality in its present, past and future in the same moment as the united present. Thus time is connected with the world but not with the God. It appeared with the world’s emergence and doesn’t exist without it. The question “what was before the creation” has no sense because before the creation the “before” itself (i.e. the time itself) hasn’t been existing yet. So the time according to Augustine Aurelius isn’t something absolute but relative and connected unbrokenly with the world. So the God rules are not only the world but also the time and it’s in his power to change not only the future but the past as well [4].

We should also mention the mystical branch of the medieval thought and its main representative Dionysius Areopagite who is considered as the founder of the so-called apophatic or negative theology, according to which the God is something indefinable, something above any definition and beyond rationalistic cognition. All that can be said of the God is what he is not. So touching different things the God isn’t we near him. The negative theology made a great impact on the medieval and modern theology and philosophy [4].

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 1379