As a former atheist seeking meaning in philosophy texts in my youth, I am delighted to learn about st. Augustine now as a recent convert to Catholicism at 31. Kindred soul
Thank you sir I enjoyed your short rendition on the confession of Saint Augustine. I think you were reading excerpts from Pinecoffin version from penguin Classics. Saint Augustine is my all-time favorite.
Thank you for this lecture. I am currently reading City of God and this is helpful background. I probably should have started with Confessions, but oh well. That'll be next!
I thought the Confessions were fantastic. While reading the text, I kept finding similarities between my own experiences and struggles. It was quite shocking initially, but then I realized what Augustine speaks about is quite common and many can relate. City of God I will tackle once I read all the main Roman works which Augustine talks so much about. Livy, Varro, Sallust etc…without that, I would not be able to follow Augustine as well as he constantly brings up other works! 😅
Thank you for this very insightful video, which helps comprehend Augustine much better (for me at least). Please let me just make a remark on neoplatonism: This should not be so bluntly put aside as some other, completely different "religion". It is by the way perfectly compatible with christianity, which is sometimes referred to as neoplatonism for the masses. This could certainly apply to Augustine, who could probably not have become a christian without neoplatonism, and he certainly could not have been the Augustine we know today. He did go beyond it, however, finding in christianity a more adequate emphasis on things like agape, which, let's not forget, is a neoplatonist concept to start with. Another example: the nicene creed is probably unintelligible without knowing the "language" of neoplatonism, which in my view is a main reason why people today struggle so much with it.
As an African just line Augustine was, I may say that my Berber ancestors had chosen donatism rather than Rome Catholicism , simply because they were persecuted by these latters. And later on when they got in touch with the new coming religion Islam, they simply embraced it , cuz it made sense to them and mostly because they also never forgot the oppression and the persecution during the times of Augustine. So from donatisme to Islam , that was the journey of freedom of northern African berbers.
Interesting. I did not know this piece of history, thank you! Camus speaks a bit about the struggles in that part of the world that you refer to. But that is the modern world long long after Augustine.
Donatism pave the way for Islam. I have some Berber background in my own family goes back 150 years and I am a practising Roman Catholic and I attend a traditional Latin mass but I do have to say the Donatists we’re in the wrong they were dividing the church, saying that the unworthiness of a priest, when he sinned couldn’t be reconciled, well, it can be through confession. It’s unfortunate. North Africa went from Christianity to Islam, but I pray for the reconversion of Islam back into the Catholic church. I’ll pray for you brother.
With all due respect , I am not having things mixed up , actually I am fully aware of the global situation back then during the donatist movement. Sure they were Christian,no doubt, but the question is : what pushed them to become Donatist , and leave the Roman Catholics church? What made them become Muslim later on ?? I can tell you that the treatment they were having from the Roman Catholic Church was responsible for that schism. Africans always felt different , and mostly their beliefs were always related to One God , whether furring the Neo punic period or the Roman pagan period . Again I am not mixing up ,I am just explaining to you how things evolved.
I am not an expert in Donatism but it seems to me that you have thing mixed up. Donatists were Christians. The struggle was an internal one. They were persecuted because they were Donatists. They didn’t become Donatists because they were persecuted. It was an argument about the validity of a certain elder’s appointment (called bishop, actually presbyter in Greek). From what I have read it seems that Augustine did join Roma in persecuting the Donatists. I do not look back to men such as Augustine as church fathers, only God is our Father spiritually. This is another stain on Augustine’s character. I heard an interview with a Prof. Kenny (sp?) with M. Barrett. He said that Augustine had trouble understanding the gospels and that Ambrose told him to read Plato then the gospels. That threw me for a loop. Plato takes precedence over the Holy Spirit??? The post-Apostolic period was messy. IMO Augustine isn’t a great saint or a great thinker. He was a hedonist. Then he got wrapped up into the Roman domineering ways. The people in Rome patterned their Christianity after the leaders of the Empire and ruined the communal ways of simple humble Christianity. To this day Roma is a corrupting influence on real Christianity.
I was a Christian, became an Atheist, and am something of an Agnostic now. I won't say I'll be coming back, but I do find the history interesting. I also no longer have time for atheists that argue in bad faith, the sort that'd mock Augustine for talking about stealing pears or going to the theatre.
I could say the same except that I have been restored to the faith. In my times of doubt, I drew great comfort from C.S. Lewis’s Pilgrims Regress in which he describes a truly joyous scene of becoming an atheist…one should be an atheist to an evil, judgmental god! But what joy when I found that the “fairytale” was true but in a much better and much more real way. Kind of like the fairytale of standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon or the fairytale of having a true friend of gold in times of trouble. All that love is true? I went to hear Richard Dawkins and came away thinking he was just as dogmatic as religious people. He did me a great favor because after that I started praying “Okay God you show yourself to me. I am not going to try to prove you to me anymore. Wow! Did God do that for me!! If it is the science that stumps you, take a listen to James Tour, a renowned nanochemist. If you are an agnostic because you just hope a loving God might be there, just start talking to him…and tell him your doubts. Look at the disciple Thomas, who said “I will not believe unless…” I lost my brother, I was depressed for years, I lost my husband after finally meeting him (he had had his atheist period, too) when our son was 4 months old. Wow, but God works in mysterious ways. How he speaks through the dark night of the soul…Atheism, agnosticism, are often just stages of a searching soul. God looks kindly upon our humble estate of ignorance. We love because he first love us. And our faith is not of ourselves, it is the work of God.
True faith is a gift of God, that isn’t lost, but may be tested by our sinful nature. True faith comes through the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit and accompanied by evangelical repentance (the sorrow for having offended the beatitude of God) and a desire for holiness because God is holy and it pleases God.
Hippo is now Annaba in Algeria north Africa, Augustine lived in this town and killed by vandals who came from western Europe .you are talking about the western civilization but in fact it was a Mediterranean civilization because at that time north Europe was wild and savage
Ad young man I was looking for stimulation for my intellect which I nurtured as it was the most valuable position I had. I was called "the philosopher" in my family. O remember the day my father told me to keep away from philosophy of man because it will only feed my ego and interfere with my faith and will damage or even destroy it. I do not need to make sense of everything.... Faith is about trust in God and His Word which is incorporated in Jesus. Jesus is the Word of God made flesh and lived among us humans. Jesus said: if you have seen me you have seen the father. Jesus did not use philosophy and made knots in our thoughts... His message of faith is simple. It is not blind faith... It is trust in someone who sais about himself: "I am the Way the Truth and the Life" This words destroyed all philosophy I looked to for satisfaction and helped me believe and trust God his Word and his Promises. Love and blessings from Sweden 🇸🇪
Arianism is not Gnosticism. I believed this to be true for years, but after much research I have found that they are different. Arianism is focused on the nature of Jesus Christ within a framework that accepts the basic tenets of Christian orthodoxy, such as the authority of the Bible and the importance of the Church's teachings. Gnosticism, on the other hand, often involved alternate scriptures, radically different interpretations of Jesus' teachings, and divergent views on God and the material world. Simply said, the only tangible way that Arius diverged from orthodoxy was his insistence that Jesus was not co-eternal with God the Father, or in other words "not of the same substance".
Yes he was it was the new hip order at the time Augustine’s order was considered old and strict ironically Luther chose to join that order and complained about the strictness when he could have joined another order not to say he didn’t have legitimate complaints but it was ironic.
I defend Zacharias as I defend king David, who stole a woman from her husband by having said husband killed. RZ has books and videos that are profound and useful.
Well I have a problem with David. According to the law a murderer was supposed to die. David got off with a slap on the wrist. In contrast the man who took some clothes and gold from Ai, a village that was destroyed by Joshua, got engulfed by the earth along with his family. There is a lot of inexplicable stuff going on in the Old Testament.
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As a former atheist seeking meaning in philosophy texts in my youth, I am delighted to learn about st. Augustine now as a recent convert to Catholicism at 31. Kindred soul
The catholicism of Christianity is not the Catholicism of Roma. I hope you will continue on your journey by the help of the Holy Spirit.
Well spoken, my wife’s family was from Algeria, near Hippo
Isn’t Hippo inside of Algeria?
Thank you for this great introduction. It is very insightful and enjoyable to follow the way you narrate it.
Just discovered this channel. How wonderful! I have subscribed. Thank you!
This was excellent.
Thank you.
Thank you sir I enjoyed your short rendition on the confession of Saint Augustine. I think you were reading excerpts from Pinecoffin version from penguin Classics. Saint Augustine is my all-time favorite.
Thank you for this lecture. I am currently reading City of God and this is helpful background. I probably should have started with Confessions, but oh well. That'll be next!
I thought the Confessions were fantastic. While reading the text, I kept finding similarities between my own experiences and struggles. It was quite shocking initially, but then I realized what Augustine speaks about is quite common and many can relate. City of God I will tackle once I read all the main Roman works which Augustine talks so much about. Livy, Varro, Sallust etc…without that, I would not be able to follow Augustine as well as he constantly brings up other works! 😅
so informative. thanks.
Thank you for this very insightful video, which helps comprehend Augustine much better (for me at least). Please let me just make a remark on neoplatonism: This should not be so bluntly put aside as some other, completely different "religion". It is by the way perfectly compatible with christianity, which is sometimes referred to as neoplatonism for the masses. This could certainly apply to Augustine, who could probably not have become a christian without neoplatonism, and he certainly could not have been the Augustine we know today. He did go beyond it, however, finding in christianity a more adequate emphasis on things like agape, which, let's not forget, is a neoplatonist concept to start with. Another example: the nicene creed is probably unintelligible without knowing the "language" of neoplatonism, which in my view is a main reason why people today struggle so much with it.
Which version of Augustine do we believe? There were about 4 in my reckoning.
I think its James Joyce too who spoke on the inverted morality on teachers of a child following too his own experinces as a child.
How do I find the next video on this???
As an African just line Augustine was, I may say that my Berber ancestors had chosen donatism rather than Rome Catholicism , simply because they were persecuted by these latters. And later on when they got in touch with the new coming religion Islam, they simply embraced it , cuz it made sense to them and mostly because they also never forgot the oppression and the persecution during the times of Augustine. So from donatisme to Islam , that was the journey of freedom of northern African berbers.
What freedom did you get under Islam? Your language is gone, your religion is gone ... You are now Arabs
Interesting. I did not know this piece of history, thank you! Camus speaks a bit about the struggles in that part of the world that you refer to. But that is the modern world long long after Augustine.
Donatism pave the way for Islam. I have some Berber background in my own family goes back 150 years and I am a practising Roman Catholic and I attend a traditional Latin mass but I do have to say the Donatists we’re in the wrong they were dividing the church, saying that the unworthiness of a priest, when he sinned couldn’t be reconciled, well, it can be through confession. It’s unfortunate. North Africa went from Christianity to Islam, but I pray for the reconversion of Islam back into the Catholic church. I’ll pray for you brother.
With all due respect , I am not having things mixed up , actually I am fully aware of the global situation back then during the donatist movement. Sure they were Christian,no doubt, but the question is : what pushed them to become Donatist , and leave the Roman Catholics church? What made them become Muslim later on ?? I can tell you that the treatment they were having from the Roman Catholic Church was responsible for that schism. Africans always felt different , and mostly their beliefs were always related to One God , whether furring the Neo punic period or the Roman pagan period . Again I am not mixing up ,I am just explaining to you how things evolved.
I am not an expert in Donatism but it seems to me that you have thing mixed up. Donatists were Christians. The struggle was an internal one. They were persecuted because they were Donatists. They didn’t become Donatists because they were persecuted. It was an argument about the validity of a certain elder’s appointment (called bishop, actually presbyter in Greek).
From what I have read it seems that Augustine did join Roma in persecuting the Donatists. I do not look back to men such as Augustine as church fathers, only God is our Father spiritually. This is another stain on Augustine’s character. I heard an interview with a Prof. Kenny (sp?) with M. Barrett. He said that Augustine had trouble understanding the gospels and that Ambrose told him to read Plato then the gospels. That threw me for a loop. Plato takes precedence over the Holy Spirit??? The post-Apostolic period was messy. IMO Augustine isn’t a great saint or a great thinker. He was a hedonist. Then he got wrapped up into the Roman domineering ways. The people in Rome patterned their Christianity after the leaders of the Empire and ruined the communal ways of simple humble Christianity. To this day Roma is a corrupting influence on real Christianity.
I was a Christian, became an Atheist, and am something of an Agnostic now.
I won't say I'll be coming back, but I do find the history interesting. I also no longer have time for atheists that argue in bad faith, the sort that'd mock Augustine for talking about stealing pears or going to the theatre.
I could say the same except that I have been restored to the faith. In my times of doubt, I drew great comfort from C.S. Lewis’s Pilgrims Regress in which he describes a truly joyous scene of becoming an atheist…one should be an atheist to an evil, judgmental god! But what joy when I found that the “fairytale” was true but in a much better and much more real way. Kind of like the fairytale of standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon or the fairytale of having a true friend of gold in times of trouble. All that love is true? I went to hear Richard Dawkins and came away thinking he was just as dogmatic as religious people. He did me a great favor because after that I started praying “Okay God you show yourself to me. I am not going to try to prove you to me anymore. Wow! Did God do that for me!! If it is the science that stumps you, take a listen to James Tour, a renowned nanochemist. If you are an agnostic because you just hope a loving God might be there, just start talking to him…and tell him your doubts. Look at the disciple Thomas, who said “I will not believe unless…” I lost my brother, I was depressed for years, I lost my husband after finally meeting him (he had had his atheist period, too) when our son was 4 months old. Wow, but God works in mysterious ways. How he speaks through the dark night of the soul…Atheism, agnosticism, are often just stages of a searching soul. God looks kindly upon our humble estate of ignorance. We love because he first love us. And our faith is not of ourselves, it is the work of God.
True faith is a gift of God, that isn’t lost, but may be tested by our sinful nature. True faith comes through the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit and accompanied by evangelical repentance (the sorrow for having offended the beatitude of God) and a desire for holiness because God is holy and it pleases God.
Hippo is now Annaba in Algeria north Africa, Augustine lived in this town and killed by vandals who came from western Europe .you are talking about the western civilization but in fact it was a Mediterranean civilization because at that time north Europe was wild and savage
Ad young man I was looking for stimulation for my intellect which I nurtured as it was the most valuable position I had.
I was called "the philosopher" in my family.
O remember the day my father told me to keep away from philosophy of man because it will only feed my ego and interfere with my faith and will damage or even destroy it.
I do not need to make sense of everything.... Faith is about trust in God and His Word which is incorporated in Jesus. Jesus is the Word of God made flesh and lived among us humans. Jesus said: if you have seen me you have seen the father. Jesus did not use philosophy and made knots in our thoughts... His message of faith is simple. It is not blind faith... It is trust in someone who sais about himself: "I am the Way the Truth and the Life"
This words destroyed all philosophy I looked to for satisfaction and helped me believe and trust God his Word and his Promises.
Love and blessings from Sweden 🇸🇪
Arianism is not Gnosticism. I believed this to be true for years, but after much research I have found that they are different.
Arianism is focused on the nature of Jesus Christ within a framework that accepts the basic tenets of Christian orthodoxy, such as the authority of the Bible and the importance of the Church's teachings. Gnosticism, on the other hand, often involved alternate scriptures, radically different interpretations of Jesus' teachings, and divergent views on God and the material world.
Simply said, the only tangible way that Arius diverged from orthodoxy was his insistence that Jesus was not co-eternal with God the Father, or in other words "not of the same substance".
I WAS CONFIRMED AT THE CATHEDRAL
OF ST AUGUSTINE IN TUCSON, ARIZ.
AT AGE 5. ST. AUGUSTINE/ST MONICA
PRAY FOR US.🔥A. M. D. G.🔥
Difficult to travel in algeria? That is not first hand information I presume.
Pear pressure, lol.
I knew someone who told me that stolen fruit tasted better precisely because it was stolen.
I believe Aquinas was a dominican.
Yes he was it was the new hip order at the time Augustine’s order was considered old and strict ironically Luther chose to join that order and complained about the strictness when he could have joined another order not to say he didn’t have legitimate complaints but it was ironic.
Walker David Jackson Timothy Wilson Matthew
34:30 ouch, that Ravi Zacharias quip hasn't aged well :-/
I defend Zacharias as I defend king David, who stole a woman from her husband by having said husband killed. RZ has books and videos that are profound and useful.
Well I have a problem with David. According to the law a murderer was supposed to die. David got off with a slap on the wrist. In contrast the man who took some clothes and gold from Ai, a village that was destroyed by Joshua, got engulfed by the earth along with his family. There is a lot of inexplicable stuff going on in the Old Testament.
Don't you think Augustine's deterministic view of the Sovereignty of God comes from Manichaeism?
Stoicism, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism as well.👍