Augustine for Armchair Theologians

Top Highlights

“His late teens found him an enthusiastic member of a Christian-gnostic group. The sect of the Manichees saw themselves as the sole possessors of true Christian knowledge and interpretation of the Bible.” (Page 8)

“Augustine shows us the self in process: the self in doing, or being, now one thing, now the other, in the search for a spiritual identity; and most of all the self as it reflects upon its travelled paths and the ways that lie open in the future. How do I understand why I did what I did? And where was God? Why wasn’t I able to see the darkness of my path or the twisting roads that seemed to start straight enough? Did I really have to go the wrong way to get back on the true path? And how was I led astray in the first place, when I just followed a well-worn track?” (Page 6)

“Augustine argues that a natural sense of right and wrong is present within us, even apart from God’s revealed law. But, as John Calvin would later emphasize in his own theological system, this knowledge can never be the basis for salvation.” (Page 45)

“This notion of the forbidding Augustine could not be more different from one of his major roles in the history of Christian theology: champion of the grace of Christ, God’s redeeming gift to a wayward and recalcitrant humanity.” (Page 2)

“Augustine’s researches into the recesses of the human mind were stimulated by his own need to come to terms with himself. The Confessions is an odyssey of the soul, a story of one person’s pilgrimage through this life. Augustine relates his odyssey by a particular type of autobiographical account: a confession, the story of a conversion to God. Interest in Augustine, then, is a sure sign that the question of the self continues to be asked in a theological vein. A theological inquiry into the nature of the self always draws the questioners themselves into question, for to be a self, theologically speaking, means to be a self before God.” (Pages 2–3)