/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11628683]

i'm only beginning to learn about pic rel now but i have a feeling he's going to be important for western civilization.

[Anonymous No.11629212]

>>11628683
>le augustine looked like pix relater gais

augustine was born to a north african family and looked like someone from this pic.

[Anonymous No.11629314]

>>11629212
Whatever you need to help yourself feel special at night Abdul!

[Anonymous No.11629693]

>>11629212
None of these guys are from North Africa. And Augustine was white.

[Anonymous No.11629705]

>>11629212
look buddy, every single person who contributed to society or was cool or was a king ever was a white guy. I need this.

[Anonymous No.11629709]

>>11628683
Sorry the thread got derailed. Why do you think he’s so important?

[Anonymous No.11629733]

>>11629212
You were the first to bring up ethnicity. St Augustus was probably a Berber, which would make him Caucasian, whether he was white or not is honestly a matter of opinion. He could have looked like OP's pic or he could have looked like one of the guys in your pic. Although, this is all completely irrelevant to this thread.
Why is he important, OP?

[Anonymous No.11629752]

>>11629212
Would be kind of like calling a Boer sub-saharan african.

[Anonymous No.11631033]

>>11629709
>>11629733

well, for one thing, he seems like he sets the model for a new kind of intellectual. there's nothing like a bishop in antiquity. during augustine's lifetime there's a kind of massive intellectual shift away from the culture of antiquity and into the beginnings of what will be the middle ages later on. but what makes augustine relevant is that he's not just responding to it, in many ways he's actively creating it. there are priests, to be sure, but nobody's proposing and working on anything like saeculum.

this is more of a generalization, but consider this also: there's nothing like heresy in antiquity, and also the idea of tragedy seems to disappear as well. i think this is a huge shift, but it's related, maybe, to this question of the problem of knowledge, guilt, suffering, and so on - stuff that augustine knows about, or is wrestling with. no philosopher in antiquity would write anything like the Confessions or the City of God. it was just a different world view.

and then on top of that there's the idea of the role of the church as well (and, again, the idea of heresy). it was on augustine to basically resolve philosophical questions of orthodoxy and doctrine into a unified whole with social and political ramifications. this is an incredibly complicated and difficult project, but it's going to be in many ways the project of the church for centuries afterwards. the whole concept of heresy itself is fascinating to me today given the state of modern outrage culture also: how else can you describe the animus people feel towards trump, or the stigmata of being branded a racist or otherwise? it's a judgement on history and other things.

so these are a couple of things i'm realizing and thinking about as i learn more about him. the idea of *making the philosophy of antiquity into a social and political orthodoxy* - huge. a massive project. there's just a sea-change in intellectual culture. and, i mean, look at his primary intellectual influences: cicero, mani, plato, christ. that's an incredible matrix of thinkers to synthesize. and out of it comes this guy, who makes a legitimate case for being one of the true endbosses of western civilization to come. absolutely fascinating reading.

[Anonymous No.11631047]

>>11629212
no he was BLACK

[Anonymous No.11631065]

>>11631047
Uh no sweatie he was a hippo

[Anonymous No.11631090]

>>11631033
>no philosopher in antiquity would write anything like The City of God

i know this seems completely stupid: obviously, plato writes something very close to this, and it's the foundation of much to come. i get that, of course. but augustine's project is different. for one thing, it's now wedded to roman ideas of political power. and for another, the kingdom of god is not plato's republic.

i said earlier that what i found interesting about augustine is this question of a growing body of doctrine, of an orthodoxy. and this really is the thing. the title of pic rel is kind of hilarious - it doesn't sound like a book published in the 21C, more like one published in the middle ages. but the way in which a doctrine arises out of this complicated push-pull of wedding philosophical questions to moral ones, and then doing a kind of *divine psychology,* and then extending the significance of that divine psychology outwards, to the world...and then on top of that, needing to build a system that will help people feel that they have their metaphysical ducks in a row so that they can Do The Right Thing...and so on.

where does heresy come from in the first place? from wrong-thinking. but there is no right thinking - if anything, what we learn from tragedy is that nobody can really predict or account for the fallibility of knowledge, the clinamen, the swerve of atoms, whatever else. and yes, it's true, heraclitus or whoever else has this much more hard-core attitude: war is the father of all things, so deal with it. and no doubt this is wise.

but things change. some people can't cope - for good reasons and for bad. but when christianity becomes the official religion of the roman empire, something really new begins.

of course you can say, who gives a fuck. after all, when you look at religious history, maybe you think, first of all, that it's not only all the history of violence, inquisition and crusade, blah blah, but then on top of that it all winds up in pointless confusion and then nietzsche says god is dead anyways, so who gives a fuck? don't waste your time. but again, i'm reading this in the context of 2018: sure, we can say, god is dead and so on, but look at how reactive people are today on twitter, in the news, anywhere else. we live in a ferociously inquisitorial time still, and are inwardly beholden to all kinds of old testament-style gods. the desire to punish and scapegoat is everywhere. some things haven't changed. the difference today is that it's very hard to forgive (who forgives racism?). we are the enlightenment thinkers foucault predicted: a society of planners, trying to prevent crimes in advance. in the social media world, the worst crimes are thought crimes. we have all kinds of inquisitors today, and the doctrines are created in universities.

but that's my salty and pointless ten-cent rant. so what i'm wondering is, how did we get to this point?

[Anonymous No.11631122]

>>11631090
everybody loves nietzsche, but there's a reason why, maybe, people began to switch from the greeks and into christianity. augustine is a complicated figure, no doubt, and he has Big Plans for the church, which is unlike anything that the classical world had seen.

i guess i just find myself thinking: okay, so i'm a devotee of heidegger and lacan. i really like psychoanalysis and i think it's super-helpful with dealing with concepts like hysteria and neurosis, guilt, anxiety, suffering, the rest of it. but if i have a choice to make between 100 or so years of really awesome modern psychotherapy, or 2000 years of complicated theology-philosophy waltzing, maybe the deep dive is worth taking.

we live in angsty and guilt-ridden times, intensely reactive and looking for political solutions to existential problems. it's a complicated affair. but where did that begin? it's an understatement to say that the church played a big role in shaping the way we think today: about history, society, politics, much else. and in terms of intellectuals and writers who shaped that, augustine is one of those pantheon guys. in many ways nietzsche is too. but this isn't his thread.

[Anonymous No.11631206]

>>11629212
WE

[Anonymous No.11631233]

here's one interesting factoid as well: the root of the word 'heresy' itself means 'to choose.'

obviously there's more going on with the intellectual life of augustine than the concept of heresy itself or alone. a lot more. but this near to the core of my interest in it.

we want to be happy these days. that's what capitalism is for, yes? happiness? freedom? all this. but on planet meme everything connects. and universities seem to be undergoing some kind of Cultural Revolution in a leftward direction, which is now provoking a conservative reaction. personally i don't think things are trending in a positive direction. maybe something equivalent to the thirty years' war is on the horizon over the values of the enlightenment. maybe we've hit Maximum Deconstruction and the great age of memetics is now upon us.

so what's the middle ground? is there one? is there a space for reason? is reason hopelessly compromised and flawed? if so, what does that portend to society? how ought one to live? all this old bullshit.

i don't think there's an easy answer, of course. technology is in and is driving the course of things now. the small thing that maybe is worth contributing is just a sense of intellectual history and context, how we got from there to here.

[Anonymous No.11631325]

>>11629212
He was specifically a berber so would have had somewhat fairer features than that.

[Anonymous No.11631478]

>>11631033
Lost
>why is this important
*wall of text*

Jesus, lovely thread

[Anonymous No.11632005]

>>11631478
yeah, this one's definitely going great so far

[Anonymous No.11632225]

I wish I could contribute more but I've only read bits of Augustine about his personal experiences and not much of his system. But I have been reading Nietzsche lately and from what you're saying it seems Augustine was a major player in the Christian "revaluation of values".

>>11631122
>it's an understatement to say that the church played a big role in shaping the way we think today: about history, society, politics, much else. and in terms of intellectuals and writers who shaped that, augustine is one of those pantheon guys.
Yeah, it's really too bad we don't focus much on Christianity in mainstream education, at least in the US. You have "separation of church and state" people complaining that public schools shouldn't "indoctrinate", and on the other hand you have religious people who would fight against looking at Christian history with a critical view. As a result we just kind of gloss over some of the thought most important in understanding Western society's growth.

>>11631478
>*wall of text*
>/lit/
>won't read
At least OP is presenting thoughts beyond retarded memeing about what color Augustine was.

[Anonymous No.11632320]

>>11632225
> it seems Augustine was a major player in the Christian "revaluation of values".

my man you've nailed it exactly. when we think of the concept of the 'revaluation of values' we think of nietzsche. but the fact is, this wasn't the *first* time that such a thing had happened. and periods like this define the meaning of intellectual *epochs.* anything that happens once can happen twice...and this has, imho, kind of interesting implications for how we think about intellectual history (and even the culture of today).

>Yeah, it's really too bad we don't focus much on Christianity in mainstream education, at least in the US. You have "separation of church and state" people complaining that public schools shouldn't "indoctrinate", and on the other hand you have religious people who would fight against looking at Christian history with a critical view. As a result we just kind of gloss over some of the thought most important in understanding Western society's growth.

and this as well. personally, i'm very charitable to the french postructuralists. i've read them fairly deeply to think i have a not-completely-fuckface opinion on them, and i'm not a die-hard or practicing catholic either. but the present state of the humanities is one that kinds of hides or occludes its christian roots in ways that are curious to me. and it's not like it would be hard to see why it might be unpleasant to draw the disquieting connections between heresies old and new.

in the ancient world the concept of a bishop would have been, it seems to me, a kind of a new thing. when you start creating a sociopolitical need to resolve philosophical disputation it's a whole new world, intellectually speaking. constantine adopting christianity as the state religion, theodosius closing the olympic games, julian the apostate et al all tell you that something big is transforming the ancient world. but how this is done, and why, is the task of a new kind of intellectual.

so i guess my thing would be to thread the needle between philosophy and theology in this sense, which means a kind of intellectual history. and augustine seems to me like a crucially important figure in this regard. indoctrination is hardly a new phenomenon. christianity is already a kind of critical view, and imho academia today is now working out its own orthodoxy of criticism, with as much political in-fighting as there was back then.

anyways. you already made the most important connection: the idea of the revaluation of values. it's not something that nietzsche alone invents, although he is the first to diagnose it, and he offers one of his own. and partly it's the influence of *his* thought that has me wondering about going way back to time to understand a parallel process, albeit one going in a very different direction, and with different results.

[Anonymous No.11632503]

>>11632320
>christianity is already a kind of critical view, and imho academia today is now working out its own orthodoxy of criticism
Makes me think about the state of Christian thinking (specifically Catholic thinking) of today vs of old. In Augustine's time until at least Aquinas's time, there was a lot of "revaluation" going on, Christian thought was evolving. But once an "orthodoxy" was established along with dogmatism, not much of this happens. You go from people debating about the nature of God and what it was that Christ's life and death really meant, to arguing "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin". I suppose there was Vatican II but I think that was mostly adopting values that came from elsewhere (Protestantism, secularism), and seems to me more of a "catching up".

[Anonymous No.11632625]

>>11632503
right. even today we are discovering that there is no upper limit on what you could call 'authoethnography.' whatever you want to write a paper on, go for it. some university somewhere will publish it.

the part about the growth of an orthodoxy is that it emerges through this need to present philosophical arguments in a context of morality that would have been unheard-of for the greeks. but it starts with this question of the problem of knowledge, and which is radically changed by the introduction of the meaning of christ into intellectual discourse.

> In Augustine's time until at least Aquinas's time, there was a lot of "revaluation" going on, Christian thought was evolving. But once an "orthodoxy" was established along with dogmatism, not much of this happens.

exactly this. but you have to wonder: how much of what we later call dogmatism emerges procedurally, as a kind of emergence? you don't know what you've done wrong until you're called to account for it. and then you're off to the races. but the formation of what later comes to be known as a dogma is a sort of dogma-in-becoming at every step of the way. as much as christianity borrows from pagan sources and roots, it also transmutes classical philosophy into an established soteriology with political ramifications. you can see why orthodox religions go so well with something like the divine right of kings, the idea of legislation, the rules, the order, and all of this.

but it's an emergent process. that's what's fascinating. it comes out of a sort of resolution of disputation - and not always fairly. it's not like 'successfully' branding or labeling somebody a heretic actually brings the questioning to an ending. in the long run you may just be fostering more forms of sectarianism and all the rest.

but there's this mysterious need to create a kind of imperial-philosophical OS that takes place. and it's not even like you can say it was imposed on an unwitting population in a hostile manner (although this happens, and of course the people accused of Heresy!11!!1 would disagree!). it happens because intellectuals and philosophers commit to this huge project, this 'revaluation of values' (and thank you, very kindly, for giving me the term i was looking for!)

[Anonymous No.11632754]

>>11632625
of course, there's always the obvious question: who gets to claim the right to say what is heresy and what isn't?

>answer: obviously, whoever has the most impressive hat, and may it ever be so

and of course this is what nietzsche exposes in his own critique, the radical instability of knowledge, power, the drives, aesthetics, much else. and he's so goddamn brilliant that he's probably right about a lot of that.

but what is overlooked if you only zero in on nietzsche's role in shaping intellectual history is the fact that *this kind of thing has happened before.* the grounds for moral punishment - scapegoating - are big questions. because augustine was, i think, actually doing something similar, although no doubt this will probably sound like one of the most ass-backwards stupid thing read on this board. he's saying: what do you do if you don't know? more than that: what if you *can't* comport yourself to tragedy? (i'm oversimplifying, massively). and rather than adopt, say, a kind of taoist position or humean skepticism or whatever else, he begins to author a kind of project like no other. and sets the model for all subsequent future authorings also.

nobody *wants* to be, i would think, an inquisitor (and the people who do probably shouldn't do it). but this idea of the meaning of the church and the role it played in mediating discussion not only between other intellectuals, but between intellectuals and the people, or between political players such as emperors and kings - well, we can look at history to evaluate that project.

>tldr: some dope on 4chan discovers christianity is stupidly interesting and beyond his capacity to express in greentext

anyways.

>You go from people debating about the nature of God and what it was that Christ's life and death really meant, to arguing "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin".

you do indeed. but a similar fate befalls marxism, i think. which was, i think, the intellectual inheritor of the church in academia, or at least in a significant enough number of schools to shape the way we talk about history today. back to the greeks is always a good look but early christianity is way, way more interesting than i thought it would be.

[Anonymous No.11632765]

>>11632625
>how much of what we later call dogmatism emerges procedurally
>it comes out of a sort of resolution of disputation - and not always fairly. it's not like 'successfully' branding or labeling somebody a heretic actually brings the questioning to an ending.
Yeah that makes sense. Sometimes people say Christianity is "Paulianity" because of how important he is to Christian "dogma". But he just got the ball rolling in terms of developing dogma. In the early years, there were various communities developing their own ideas, and Paul told them which of their ideas should be kept and which should be discarded, reconciling the various interpretations with his own and putting the churches on the path to becoming "the Church". So Paul maybe wasn't "dogmatic" but just another interpretation, and in bringing diverse people in line with his interpretation, dogma began to develop. Plus Paul had the added benefit of being early enough that his interpretation could later be considered the "Word of God".

[Anonymous No.11632818]

>>11632754
>if you only zero in on nietzsche's role in shaping intellectual history is the fact that *this kind of thing has happened before.* the grounds for moral punishment - scapegoating - are big questions. because augustine was, i think, actually doing something similar, although no doubt this will probably sound like one of the most ass-backwards stupid thing read on this board.
No, because Nietzsche was saying that very thing. Christianity was a "revaluation" into a "slave morality". Nietzsche saw it as a revaluation and would credit Augustine for being crucial in the revaluation, but to Nietzsche it was a life-denying valuation, saying "No" and marked a major degeneration from the "Yes"-saying valuations of pagan Rome.

[Anonymous No.11632913]

>>11632765
from the little i know about st paul (and i'd welcome any kind of illumination on this from anons ITT) it's hard to overestimate his role also in shaping the church. he might be the most influential theologian of all time. i think that was badiou's perspective.

zizek, also, always seems to enjoy discussions with theologians or about theology.

and maybe it just *felt good* for philosophers and intellectuals of that era to take a kind of missionary turn, to formulate the Imperial OS. especially after a few centuries of persecution. who knows? obviously i'm just speculating here, as i'm a newcomer to church history and so on. but it's fascinating stuff.

>>11632818
>Nietzsche saw it as a revaluation and would credit Augustine for being crucial in the revaluation, but to Nietzsche it was a life-denying valuation, saying "No" and marked a major degeneration from the "Yes"-saying valuations of pagan Rome.

right, i understand this. and, from what i understand, that's not even uncharitable to augustine: he really *is* vexed by the problems of the flesh, after all. he says as much in the Confessions, and temptation and the rest is a part of his world view. there's no doubt that there's an ascetic principle in his work, and that it suffuses much of the rest of his thought. asceticism has its charms for people who have self-destructive tendencies. no doubt there.

>a major degeneration from the "Yes"-saying valuations of pagan Rome
i agree with this also, although i don't know about the yes-saying/affirmative quality of thought in rome. greece, yes. but doesn't nietzsche say somewhere about rome that, in comparison to greece, "everything that should have gone into the flower went into the stem?" i think that's in the reader.

w/ev tho. you're right, of course. there's an epochal difference between greek and christian values, and showing these up is (among other things) what makes nietzsche who he is. but it's the reason *why* an ascetic turn would make sense then (and even now). look at what relentless neoliberal ideology does to you: excess advertising, excessive valorization of affirmation burns people out. it makes you sick of life and suspicious of it. it doesn't always presuppose that burnouts are sickly weaklings who can't keep up, it might mean that they suspect that capitalism wants to turn you into a duracell battery and affirmation of such in even its most maximally ironic form is a sham. things like this.

[Anonymous No.11633074]

>>11632913
>it's hard to overestimate his role also in shaping the church. he might be the most influential theologian of all time.
I'd agree, I'm just wondering how much of a "dogmatist" he really was, at the time he was writing.

>i don't know about the yes-saying/affirmative quality of thought in rome
I'm not sure exactly what FN thought about Rome but pagan Rome was at least superficially closer to Greek than Christianity, although the fact that Christianity dominated hints that maybe it was just superficial, at least around that time.

>look at what relentless neoliberal ideology does to you: excess advertising, excessive valorization of affirmation burns people out. it makes you sick of life and suspicious of it. it doesn't always presuppose that burnouts are sickly weaklings who can't keep up, it might mean that they suspect that capitalism wants to turn you into a duracell battery and affirmation of such in even its most maximally ironic form is a sham. things like this.
Maybe Nietzsche was over-simplifying when he said that "slave morality" was due to a "slave revolt", maybe there was something else in the waters in early first millennium Rome. I don't know enough about Roman culture to guess what that may have been, though.

>it might mean that they suspect that capitalism wants to turn you into a duracell battery
This aspect at least I think FN would be critical of. In Twilight of the Idols (chapter "Things the Germans Lack") he talks about how society pressuring people into a specialization, and to choose that specialization so early in life, can waste great minds, as almost happened to him with Philology.

Sorry if I'm going on about the Neech too much, I've just been reading him lately. Do you have any suggestions by Augustine besides Confessions and City of God?

[Anonymous No.11633192]

>>11633074
>I'm just wondering how much of a "dogmatist" he really was, at the time he was writing.
it's a good question. i'd be interested to know that too.

>slave revolt
i'm pretty sure he means the influence of christianity and judaism (or even ideas influenced by eastern thinking, such as stoicism - not for nothing is it called greek buddhism) more than, say, spartacus. the revolt of the theologians against the warrior-aristocrats. nietzsche is of course brilliant and picks his targets well but someone like marcus aurelius, for example, isn't exactly a sickly theologian or humanist. he's a pretty cool guy, although he's a long way from homer. but one of my own interior rules is basically that You Always Lose Arguments With Nietzsche, so i try and avoid starting them.

>In Twilight of the Idols (chapter "Things the Germans Lack") he talks about how society pressuring people into a specialization, and to choose that specialization so early in life, can waste great minds, as almost happened to him with Philology.
oh, for sure. no doubt. i mean to talk about things in a modern way, what else is fascism but a revolt against technology, against the reign of quantity? national socialism seduced heidegger and the italians opted for mussolini and futurism. even in japan...not so different. from the perspective of armchair cultural-psychology, all of this makes perfect sense. fascism is to me the quintessential modernist form of government, because it's a response to technology, which is what modernism is, in a nutshell (again, this is a huge oversimplification, but still).

and nietzsche would have been critical of much of that too - but not, i think, the unconscious impetus underneath it, the joy in living dangerously, the cult of health, sunshine, martial heroism. those he would have liked, i think. i think he always loved the culture of the italian renaissance and what it stood for - and it sure wasn't st augustine. those were his times. a couple of years ago nietzsche was the only guy i wanted to read or talk about. he is indeed amazing. now apparently i am just turning into sad passions man who talks about christianity. welp.

the book i linked to earlier (>>11631033) is interesting in terms of what augustine was thinking and trying to accomplish, and pic rel is dope too. peter brown is a pretty major scholar on the period, i've learned. i've found this biography quite interesting. more, in fact, that reading augustine's own writings, i've found.

[Anonymous No.11633236]

>>11629693
>>11629733
>>11629752
Why are you all responding to that anon like this? North Africa is not Sub-sharan Africa, you can just google berber and see that they look like Mediterranean Arabs which is what they are and that anon's post depicted

[Anonymous No.11633326]

>>11633192
>>11633074
i guess one other thing that is sort of just occurring to me now is the idea that it's not like christians haven't historically been the *tutors* of warriors. in the context of nietzsche you can see the kind of weird double-bind you can fall into when you think about the historical relationship of christianity to violence: on the one hand, it's castigated for being excessively violent (the crusades, the inquisition, &c) and then on the other, for promulgating weakness and sickly priests throughout europe (nietzsche's take).

kind of funny, when you think about it. even leaving outliers like marcus aurelius aside (proof that a moderate philosopher-emperor is perfectly capable of governing with martial force that doesn't go to extremes), the idea of chivalry is one of these things that nietzsche doesn't talk about all that much. and yet it's obviously there. true, when it comes to the *actual* seizure of jerusalem and the violence and the atrocities are committed there, that ideal goes out the window pretty fast...but this is more on pope urban II, it seems, than the crusaders themselves. they've been promised salvation in exchange for martial glory, they deliver the goods...and all hell breaks loose.

but the point of saying this - and it is a tangent - is only to raise to mind the sort of paradoxical view we have of the relationship and meaning of martial prowess and violence within christianity.
>and there's girard, of course, who will say that christianity is also uniquely positioned to talk about the cultural-anthropological meaning of violence more than any other religion and so on.

but this is not a girard thread either. just something that sort of came to mind. for what it's worth. but it is related, perhaps, to the question about augustine: why feel the need to create an orthodoxy? to keep order, i suppose. which begins with *metaphysical* order, harmony between realms and domains.

[Anonymous No.11633503]

>>11633236
Because St Augustine was born in the Roman colony Numidia and given the social class of his parents was probably Roman. Not that I care, I'm Armenian and have no emotional bond to St Augustine. I'm only interested in historical accuracy and think it's funny that people think that the people who are in the places they are in now were in the same places 1-5kya. Especially in the Mediterranean, holy fuck.

[Anonymous No.11633748]

>>11629705
>look buddy, every single person who contributed to society or was cool or was a king ever was a white guy.
how is it possible to fail this badly at ironic shitposting

[Anonymous No.11633785]

Worth pointing out, relative to this discussion, that Christianity splits from the vast paganism of Rome precisely because of its exclusive claim to the truth. The Romans had a very "go along to get along" attitude towards religion: you could worship whatever gods you wanted, so long as you acknowledged that those gods favored Roman authority. It was like an ancient world version of freedom of religion. But then Christianity comes along and declares that Christ is the only real God, and everyone else the Romans and their subjects have been worshiping is either a demon or a charade. Christians didn't go along to get along--it was their way or the highway. It's very much a break from the pagan world, with roots in Judaism, but even the Jews weren't quite so assertive about the supremacy of God.

[Anonymous No.11633965]

>>11633785
and the incredible thing was, it *worked.* for better and for worse.

the catholicism and universalism of the early church is kind of a complicated thing: it's saying, "we accept everybody, because we are the one way, the best way. we're also the only way." pretty clever. reminds me of that line in monkey island: "when there's only one candidate, there's only one choice." intolerance through tolerance, and vice versa. kind of makes you wonder how this would have struck people, the audacity of it. it would have been a hell of a thing for a classical athenian philosopher to now find themselves in the position of an evangelical preacher (to say nothing of being a monastic).

and you have to wonder how much of this is a result, in turn, of earlier centuries of persecution. it's not like the early christians would have *forgotten* what it meant to be subject to a political power. christianity - or at least a particular strain of it - does seem to me to be tailor-made for political influence. how much of this is due to history i don't know. and certainly there are the monasteries and other more ascetic traditions. but in the context of this thread at least and the guy we are discussing it's absolutely the case that Authority Rules.

and later on you get the jesuits and all kinds of other fascinating examples of intellectual power brokerage, often of a much more dubious nature ('Chapter VI: On The Mode Of Attracting Rich Widows'). but we're a long ways from discussing that atm, and that's the Dark Side of the Force anyways, i think.

http://avalonlibrary.net/Collection_of_193_EBooks/Secret%20Teachings%20of%20the%20Society%20of%20Jesus.pdf

[Anonymous No.11634065]

>>11633785
>The Romans had a very "go along to get along" attitude towards religion: you could worship whatever gods you wanted, so long as you acknowledged that those gods favored Roman authority. It was like an ancient world version of freedom of religion.

this was, once upon a time, what i thought postmodernism was supposed to be. in the very best sense, the one that shows derrida, foucault, baudrillard et al in their best possible light. and this is coming from a guy who really *likes* those guys. well, baudrillard anyways. derrida, meh. foucault, double meh with a side of ehhh. it's not to say that i don't admire their learning or sheer intellectual horsepower. say what you will about michel foucault, he certainly put the work in. and the same with derrida. i can't say i'm a fan of his work, but i also like heidegger and in general i don't think his heart was in the wrong place. it's the sensibility of the 90s: globalism with a kind of measured eye on making the world better by not taking anything too seriously. i really don't want to give the impression of having completely digested the gospel of JBP: he's responding to the acolytes and not those writers themselves, who absolutely had a reason to write what they were writing, and it wasn't the conscious sabotage of the west.

unfortunately this was all absolutely fine with turbocapitalism, and then we discovered along the way that even within postmodernism itself some concepts were apparently more relative than others. which brings us up to the present day, which i would like to cordon off with a large roll of yellow police tape because it seems to me to be becoming something like the Shimmer from annihilation. whatever contemporary social justice is, it's an outgrowth of postmodernism, and it has made a kind of faustian bargain with neoliberalism. and now we have a complete shitshow.

but all of these are, perhaps, so many acorns from a much bigger oak. and if the future has indeed been cancelled, then i guess it's back to the past.

[Anonymous No.11634143]

>>11633503
Except it's the historical consensus that St. Augustine's family were Romanised Berbers. You didn't have to be Italian to be Roman, at least for them.

[Anonymous No.11634345]

>>11633785
>Christians didn't go along to get along--it was their way or the highway.
Except before Roman authority backed it, it wasn't "our way or die" but "our way or we'll pray 4 u".

[Anonymous No.11634516]

>>11633965
>http://avalonlibrary.net/Collection_of_193_EBooks/Secret%20Teachings%20of%20the%20Society%20of%20Jesus.pdf
About as valid as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

[Anonymous No.11634570]

>>11634516
>tfw you get excited and fall for forgeries

good point.

[Anonymous No.11634764]

>>11634570
It's still not a completely worthless document (nor are the protocols) since it shines a light on what people outside of an in-group thought of said group.

[Anonymous No.11634769]

>>11634345
Another important point is that Christianity's post-Constantine intolerance comes from him utilizing it as a tool to smack down the traditional Roman establishment (of which the literal war against the Praetorian guard is just the most prime example) and replace the Roman bureaucracy with his own.

Hell, Christianity gave him a casus belli to literally move the capital of the empire, completely nullifying the vast Roman bureaucracy and administration and letting him set up his own from scratch.

[Anonymous No.11634877]

>>11628683
Fuck off, cuck. The only people who are important for Western civilization are whites, take your sandnigger shit back to North Africa.

[Anonymous No.11634990]

>>11634764
true.

>That the "Monita" are in reality what they pretend cannot possibly be maintained. They are known to be the work of one Jerome Zahorowski, a Pole, who, having been a member of the Society, had been discharged in 1611.

source:
https://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view.php?id=8106

my ego is wounded, but getting huckstered by resentful ex-jesuits from the 17C is kind of hilarious.

>>11634769
TIL about the battle of the milvian bridge. cool.

>>11634877
wrong board

[Anonymous No.11635007]

>>11634990
Anything that is said to be a "secret document" or "hidden teachings" should immediately arouse suspicion (unless of course you're studying Esoterism or Gnosticism or something). Same goes for anything that reveals something scandalous about a group or individual.

[Anonymous No.11635050]

>>11635007
duly noted, and thanks for the advice. i read about that work originally on - sigh - Return of Kings (and my shame is piled to the rafters at this point). so let this be an object lesson then in the hazards of self-education and going it alone.

[Anonymous No.11635413]

>>11631033
>>11631090
>>11631122
>>11631233
>>11632225
>>11632320
>>11632503
>>11632625
>>11632754
>>11632913
>>11633074
>>11633192
>>11633326
>>11633965
>>11634065


Dunno if you're the same anon but it appears you have a strong understanding of Christianity and it's history. I appreciate all the writings good sir.

[Anonymous No.11636386]

best thread in a while boys

[Anonymous No.11637147]

>>11635413
>>11636386
i'm most of those, not all of them. and thanks for the compliment. this is really the first time i've wanted to take a look at either augustine or the history of christianity in depth, but it is truly fascinating stuff. so thanks for coming along on the ride, i'm very happy to think that other anons are finding this interesting or informative also.

another thing that's interesting is pic rel. and augustine sees this, or at least hears about it. again, when you think about worlds or ideas colliding in this way it's kind of incredible. christianity becomes the official religion of the western roman empire...just in time for the western roman empire to be sacked. which happens in his lifetime: 410. imagine what that would do to your sensibilities. and it's not like he was somehow completely ignorant of libido dominandi ('lust of sovereignty'). he knows how people are:

>Thou didst at first desire a farm; then thou wouldest possess an estate; thou wouldest shut out thy neighbours; having shut them out, thou didst set thy heart on the possessions of other neighbours; and didst extend thy covetous desires till thou hadst reached the shore: arriving at the shore, thou covetest the islands: having made the earth thine own, thou wouldest haply seize upon heaven.

that much hasn't changed. it's easy to want things. there's no end to want.

but these are the kinds of things that sadden me when i think about what a humanities education could or should be today. it shouldn't be about a critique of society but a critique of self. i find myself sometimes reflecting that it's way too easy to presume, with a little philosophy, that somehow you know something the rest of the world doesn't, that being able to name-drop a few french and german guys somehow immunizes you against criticism; showing up preparing to believe in nothing. we're all so fucking snarky, cynical, and ironic. in augustine's time there would have been plenty of people chuckling at the fall of rome and how much they deserved it, blah blah. and surely in some sense that is true. but there's nothing more to it than a sort of bitter embrace of nihilism.

from another book:
>For even if all material desires were satisfied, the lust for power and glory would still remain and would continue to drive men into personal and societal struggles and wars. The final irony of the human condition is that the earthly city, though it seeks for mastery and attempts to enslave the nations of the world, "is itself ruled by its lust of rule."

low-hanging fruit, perhaps. but sometimes you think, look, is the fall of rome in this way really *tragic?* maybe it's just sad and inevitable. what was missing? maybe something beyond the concept of glory. but this is the ancient world - after all, what's better than glory? we will like glory today. we love fame, we love being looked at. who doesn't want to be seen as a big success?

[Anonymous No.11637171]

>>11633192
>one of my own interior rules is basically You Always Lose Arguments With Nietzsche
How do people live like this? How can you let yourself be brow-beaten by a hack like Nietzsche?

[Anonymous No.11637315]

>>11637171
define 'live.'

i mean, have you read him? seriously? because he's basically pic rel. or, to use another metaphor, he's the ultimate sword-sharpening whetstone. but you will lose your grip on things before he will. that's been my experience, anyways.

in my own admittedly questionable personal experience, it's very hard to argue with his ideas. a tragic perspective on life is both a noble one and may indeed be the best model of reality. and i agree with peterson on this much: it's not necessarily power that leads to conflict, it's weakness. so it's unwise to dismiss nietzsche completely out of hand. the twentieth century belongs to him, and a few others. and it includes a whole host of absolutely top-flight thinkers who were inspired by him, or were responding to him, and i've found them all pretty convincing as well: heidegger, lacan, baudrillard, deleuze, many more...it's a long list.

but i'm finding myself asking these days if i want to try to go through life on that model. radical perspectivism really fucks you up. the thing is that *nobody really has the trump card in nihilism.* you never have enough power, you can always suffer more, someone else is always suffering more...and then there are all the joys of reactivity and mimesis. in the long run, it leads to social breakdown and chaos. maybe this is an issue for you, maybe not. personally i tend to see everything as being connected, and on top of that driven by forces of technology and economics and other things so absolutely massive we can barely glimpse the forest for the trees.

and in times of chaos and uncertainty, nietzsche strikes me as being almost always right. shit, he's even right in times of relative peace and prosperity. in terms of human psychology he's the sorcerer supreme. Become Who You Are is a fucking 14/10 maxim for all time like that. his reputation isn't ill-deserved. nietzsche is a fucking colossus of modern thought.

but we are entering, imho, a pretty wild and woolly postmodern landscape: something like post-postmodernity, which might have been a phenomenon that wouldn't have surprised him. where we double down on the interpretations, knowing that they are the interpretations, but not giving a fuck. where the map divorced from the territory returns with a vengeance, because maybe we are suffering from severe reality deficiency. nietzsche is a big deal. he's no hack.

so i'm looking for something to balance out my perspective.

[Anonymous No.11637318]

>>11629212
Who the fuck cares? You're also retarded, leave this board right now.

[Anonymous No.11637545]

>>11637315
to follow up on this, in terms of where the *positive* influence of nietzsche wanes it has a lot to do with these two guys. massively oversimplifying:

on the one hand, land will argue that whatever is affirmative in deleuze ultimately gets co-opted by humanity's slow dance with cybernetic capitalism. you want to affirm? great, there's a protein bar for that. tell your friends. and on the other, fisher will say that the critique of capitalism once it changes from class-conscious economic structural analysis to cultural study basically winds up affirming what is really a negation: the propagation of guilt.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/mark-fisher/exiting-vampire-castle

put these forces together and you radically transform the concept of the university (and in ways that the university is struggling to digest). we have evolved what is essentially a new philosophical register: autoethnography, a perfect literary fusion between market-driven capitalism and academic pedigree. and it is, imho, the proving grounds of social justice orthodoxy: Bloody Neo-Marxism.

the Neo is crucial. the complete story is much more complicated than this. but those two brits have i think recognized the condition of 21C postmodernism and its consequences. it is what is keeping peterson awake at night. peterson doesn't really read the french poststructuralists, and that's fine. we can.

the question i ask myself is, where does this go? because i don't think it's to an especially happy place. there's no *outsmarting* capitalism, but we have also lost the ability to mount an effective critique of it in terms other than those of identity politics, which are absolutely cancerous for anything like a constructive or useful dialogue. idpol creates more idpol, ressentiment creates more ressentiment. and nobody - you can see the connection to augustine - has the high hand in the critique of morality. that's one of the fundamental truths that nietzsche uncovers. nobody's really all that pure. but where do we derive the moral impetus to punish?

university academics today cannot help themselves from getting tangled up in questions that strike me as becoming part of a kind of doomed 21C orthodoxy of psycho-social engineering. racism, i think, means a kind of perilous judgment on history that shouldn't be allowed to become an inquisitorial project. same for [x]-phobia. once you say that there is now a *prohibition on fear* - the pre-emptive criminalization of unconscious bias - you're doing things that even augustine would have said won't work. that historical perspective will clearly show won't work. anxiety is part of what it means to think, to live at all. the real question is what you do with that anxiety. the bishop has to be both inquisitor *and* confessor, no? they can't *only* be a critic...

so it's why i treat nietzsche so carefully. he's right about a lot of things. maybe too right. but we're not all as intellectually acrobatic as he was.

[Anonymous No.11638152]

>Rulers are, as St. Paul said, God's ministers, avengers against those that do evil. But a province or a state can only be ruled by instilling fear in those who are ruled, and the fear of punishment can never produce true righteousness or justice. By their fear of the laws and of the punishments attached to them, men can be kept from performing certain injurious actions, but they cannot be made good or righteous by these means. Civil laws do not "bring men to make a good use of their wealth," but "those who make a bad use of it become thereby less injurious." Augustine states the kernel of the problem in one sentence: "But, ruling a province is different from ruling a Church; the former must be governed by instilling fear, the latter is to be made lovable by the use of mildness."

>In other words, a truly just society would be the City of God brought down from heaven to earth, and that for Augustine is an absolute impossibility. Even when he is defending Christianity against pagan charges that it is incompatible with patriotism and the well-being of the state, he is careful to retain the contrary-to-fact conditional form in speaking of the possibility of a state made up of true Christians.

"absolute impossibility." and yet it's augustine who provides the divine origin of political power:

>The state and its instruments of coercion and punishment are, in Augustine's view, divinely ordained institutions designed as remedies as well as punishments for the sinful condition of fallen man. God uses the evil desires of fallen man as means for the establishment of earthly peace and order and for the just punishment of his vices. The state is thus a gift of God to man, despite the inadequacies and imperfections that necessarily mark the peace and justice that it can maintain among the unredeemed.

>One of the primary reasons why Augustine insists so strongly on the divine origin of political authority and on the subjects' duty of absolute obedience to it is that, like Hobbes, he is so keenly aware of the need for a strong power to restrain the boundless appetites and ceaseless conflicts of men. He would agree with Hobbes's warning that any suggestion that resistance or disobedience to established rulers may be permissible or desirable in certain circumstances would serve as an invitation to anarchy. Factious, self-seeking individuals and groups would use such doctrines in order to rationalize their own desires to evade the laws, to escape punishment for their evil deeds, and to acquire domination for themselves. Once egoism and ambition are unleashed in this way, the intricate fabric of social peace and order is in danger of being rent apart, and the dreadful specter of unending civil strife roams the land.

hobbesian thought seems to me to make augustine's thought less attractive, tho. ideally, it would seem that the church is at its best when it has a more indirect relation to the state: governing the virtues and vices rather than the votes.

[Anonymous No.11638396]

It's said he was influenced by Manichaeism having been brought up in the religion. It's even speculated as to whether Manichaean customs weren't adopted by Christian churches after him in order to appease people in places where they competed with Manichaeism such as Gaul. Also some of what is known of Manichaeism is through him.

[Anonymous No.11638521]

>>11638396
makes total sense, no? are a lot of his sensibilities not a kind of interiorization or psychologization of manichaean thought, that in turn came to have these huge sociopolitical implications?

the more i read, the more i find myself thinking that augustine really is an epochal figure. and maybe that that is how we can today begin to find a way out of the labyrinth of the postmodern, also.

[Anonymous No.11638789]

>>11638521
>>11638396
>Besides the momentous events of 386–387 that led to his being baptized and becoming a servant of God, there is Augustine’s conversion to Manichaeism in 373.

when you take plato, mani, cicero and christ and put them together you don't just have a renaissance man for late antiquity. augustine is more like Naissance Man. here's some more from recent reading that is relevant to this:

>[two doctrines] lie I suggest, at the heart of Augustine’s philosophical legacy to the Western world: his concept of nonbodily realities, such as the soul and God, and his concept of nontemporal reality, such as the utterly unchanging reality of God.

>Prior to Augustine, at least in Western Christianity, there was no philosophical concept of incorporeal being, of being that is whole wherever it is (totus ubique). Once again the philosophical views of Tertullian and the corporealism of the Stoics were the common philosophical patrimony of the West. In the West prior to Augustine, the term “spirit” was, of course, used in the Bible, in medicine, and in philosophy. But when the meaning of spirit was spelled out, it seems to have meant a subtle kind of body, not something nonbodily. So too, we use “spirits” to refer to a beverage, and pneumatic tires are certainly bodily. In holding that God and the soul were bodily, the Manichees were not being singular, but rather were in full accord with the common philosophical view of the age...Augustine’s spiritualist understanding of God and the soul, however, became the dominant view in the West for centuries to come. Indeed, the Augustinian revolution was so effective that many anachronistically suppose that the concept of spiritual reality is biblical and explicitly contained in the Christian revelation.

>At the time at which he wrote [On Free Choice of the Will], he was still very much concerned with Manichaeism and its theological objections to the Catholic faith, and so it is understandable that Augustine would in these early writings respond to the Manichees and try to win over his Manichaean friends to his newly found faith, especially since he had lured many of these same friends into Manichaeism. Hence, one would expect that these early writings reflect Augustine’s own theological problems prior to 385–386 and the solutions to them that he discovered. However, Augustine did not differ with the Manichees over whether or not there was a God, but over whether or not God was bodily. Further- more, if, as we shall see, the inability to conceive a spiritual substance is the main ground for Augustine’s becoming and staying a Manichee, then there is even stronger reason to suppose that he is here concerned with conceiving of God as a spiritual substance.

i mean this can sound like counting the number of angels on the head of a pin, for sure. but it's how ideas are made.

[Anonymous No.11640435]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11640445]

>>11629212
im north african. i have white skin, smooth black hair, and blue eyes.

[Anonymous No.11640463]

>>11628683
>tries to reckon the age of the earth by using biblical genealogical records
holy FUCK nigga what are you doing???
they literally had archeological evidence at the time of his life that demonstrated the world to be tens of tens of thousands of years old and he literally thought that the bible was a chronological record starting with first man ever evolved I mean holy fuck
>the world is about 7,000 years old bro
why did nobody tell him and how could anyone take him seriously?

[Anonymous No.11640536]

>>11631233
>factoid
Please don't use this word unless you mean it, factoid means it seems like a fact but it is not a fact. It triggers my autism when people say this.

[Anonymous No.11640564]

>>11638152
As a faithful Catholic who has become increasingly illiberal, I think "indirect" is a good way to describe the ideal relationship of the Church to the State. The Church should not have a direct say in the affairs of the State; that would be theocracy, which has never been a part of either Judaism or Christianity. But neither should there be a "wall of separation" between Church and State. Rather, let us say that the Church should be everything and nothing in a State. Cardinals and bishops should not hold princely authority, and yet princes should pay attention to them, and the people should follow their guidance.

But this only works if the people of the State genuinely believe in what the Church teaches. And it also only works if the Church is telling the truth about what, exactly, it is. Which just comes back to the great test of Christianity: is it true? Did Jesus really rise from the dead? And did he really create the Church to carry out his will on Earth?

[Anonymous No.11640631]

>>11640463
it's not a crazy question.

>they literally had archeological evidence at the time of his life that demonstrated the world to be tens of tens of thousands of years old
source? i've read that the greeks, for instance, had already calculated the circumference of the earth. i didn't know about an archaeological record. but i would guess that that's connected to the second point.

>why did nobody tell him and how could anyone take him seriously?
i guess one reason might be that, however old the earth have been shown to be, that perhaps it would have stuck commentators like augustine as a work of divine creation ex nihilo regardless. that, i imagine, is the key detail. whether the available evidence shows that it's seven thousand years old or seventy (or much larger modern estimations) doesn't necessarily change the theological meaning. and this can't always just be attributed to doctrinaire narrow-mindedness, either.

my goal is not to defend creation science, although obviously it plays a part in augustine's thinking. but for me it's just not a productive conversation. look at it another way: if you resurrected heraclitus or democritus today and showed them the latest findings from the CERN particle accelerator or other things in quantum physics...they would no doubt be amazed, but wouldn't there be some part of them that would say, 'see, i told you! the universe is made of fire!' or whatever else. and we would have to agree that, yes, in a sense, they are indeed right. ancient insight and modern science together make a beautiful thing.

so i don't think there's any great need to jump down augustine's neck for a lack of scientific accuracy by modern standards. i understand the point you're making, but i don't think it diminishes his contribution to philosophy. true, we can say that, again, with modern science at our disposal the writings of someone like heraclitus (or laozi, for that matter) bear up better in the light of what we know about the nature of the physical universe. but augustine isn't a materialist philosopher. he's a christian one. and that means he's going to see things in a particular way.

the other thing that comes to my mind here is that, for all that a view like augustine's seems (and is) anti-scientific, it's scholasticism - admittedly, a much later idea - that lays the groundwork for the scientific revolution. fwiw.

>>11640536
no problem. thanks for the correction.

[Anonymous No.11640640]

>>11640631
>no problem. thanks for the correction.
Thank YOU for your posts. They are a delight to read. I actually want to read Augustine now. Unfortunately I just started another book, but I won't forget about ol' Auggie now.

[Anonymous No.11640693]

>>11640564
these are the kinds of posts i was hoping to find ITT, so thanks for contributing anon. there are a lot of things in augustine's social and political theory that interest me. his handling of the donatist heresy, for example:

>The Donatists claimed to be rigorists in matters of church discipline; they insisted that the visible Church should be a church of the pure, that is, that it was possible as well as desirable to exclude from the Church anyone who was guilty of sinful or immoral conduct. In practice, they tended to focus most of their attention on one aspect of morality-How had believers behaved during the persecutions of the early fourth century? If members of the Church had com promised in any way with the persecuting state in order to avoid punishment or martyrdom, and especially if they had been guilty of traditio- the surrender of the sacred Scriptures to the authorities- they had irrevocably cut themselves off from the Christian community. Any priest or bishop who was guilty of traditio or of any other sin lost his power to administer valid sacraments. As a result, the Donatists argued, the Catholic Church in Africa after the persecution of Diocletian was no longer a true church. Its bishops and priests had been ordained and consecrated by men like Felix or Caecilian whom they regarded as traditores. Thus they insisted that the Catholic clergy had not received valid ordination or consecration, and that the sacraments which they then administered-such as baptism, the Eucharist, or ordination-were also without validity.

this is an example of something that goes under-reported: the role of the bishop in fighting *excessive* zeal, excessive literalism. augustine won't let prospective sectarians get away with *too much* puritanism. he's fully aware of the danger of creating martyrs. but, and this is perhaps the more important part, bad men can be redeemed and good men can decline and do bad things. that's crucial, and explains the need for moderation and temperament in conflict resolution. true, he does rely in the end on state power and authority, which of course is a thing that one has to be used judiciously so that it doesn't become tyranny. and that's why it has to be reasonable and *justified.* but the heroic efforts that he puts forward to this end, and the breadth and depth of his learning, are a testament to how strong his conviction was.

augustine seems to understand that the state is, unfortunately, a kind of naturally despotic enterprise. and he has this hobbesian perspective. but there is at least one key difference between augustine and hobbes: that is, that man can be redeemed. which makes all the difference in the world.

>>11640640
thank ye very kindly & good luck then. thanks for visiting the thread.

[Anonymous No.11640817]

>>11640693
>but there is at least one key difference between augustine and hobbes: that is, that man can be redeemed. which makes all the difference in the world.

Ironically, Augustine has every bit as negative a view of humans as Hobbes does. I mean, when Calvin says he gets the idea of "total depravity" from Augustine, he's not just blowing smoke up your ass.

But what separates them is that Augustine really and truly does believe in the power of God. As you say, Augustine thinks that, through the grace of God, all men can be redeemed, even those who are the vilest and most wicked. And he knows this because he counts himself among the vile and wicked, yet God did great things in his life.

Hobbes is effectively an atheist. Read the bits in the Leviathan about miracles; Hobbes is sort of winking at the reader that all supposed acts of God are hokum, but he has to pretend so as not to upset the established Church of England. But it's not hokum for Augustine. God's no joke for Augustine.

[Anonymous No.11640922]

>>11640817
>God's no joke for Augustine.
indeed he is not. but that aspect - grace - is just so important. look at carl schmitt, for instance. he unironically believed in the antichrist, and found a role for the state in preventing this. but that is what happens with a kind of theological response to modernity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katechon

complex stuff. and it seduced heidegger too, or for a while, anyways. and that's why it's best, perhaps, to bear in mind what >>11640564 was alluding to, perhaps. theopolitics are dangerous things. and it was a distinction that augustine was highly alert to, i think, with his carefully worked-out notion of saeculum. he was having ideas about these relations of church and state, laity and clergy, the world and the kingdom that are way more nuanced than i had thought. usually when i encounter a writer or philosopher i find i tend to get comfortable with them fairly quickly, but augustinian theology really requires a deep dive.

i also wanted to post this, because i never noticed it on wikipedia before. a kind of rare cultural Steam Achievement, this. once you get this on your wikipedia entry you're in rarefied air.

[Anonymous No.11642129]

bump

[Anonymous No.11642541]

>>11640463
I don't really understand this line of criticism. Was Augustine a naturalist? Do we remember his contributions in this regard? Not particularly. And why should we? How many thinkers over the ages delve into matters outside of their specialization or expertise and get it wrong? Augustine's other works stand on their own, and I just don't see how his speculation on the physical world bear any relevance to this discussion.

[Anonymous No.11642843]

>It is not inapposite to use the expression 'political theology' in relation to Augustine. At the heart of his evaluation of political life lie two transformational themes that were in the nature of the case absent from classical conceptions. These themes are the impairment of the relationship between mankind and God by sin, and the conviction that this impairment has consequences for every aspect of man's individual and collective existence. It is under the influence of these themes that Augustine so largely abandons the political morality associated with Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, even while retaining so much of their philosophical outlook. It is also under their influence that he dismisses the traditional moral and political claims of Rome. Man's nature has become so disordered by the sin of his first parents that he is born incapable of not living a sinful, wretched, destructive life.

>Augustine's politics, is, then, in what may be an overworked phrase, a politics of imperfection. Perhaps it is better to call it an eschatological politics. He does not so much abandon the traditional values of peace and justice as postpone the hope of their realization to the next world. The best that mortals can hope for in this world is a set of arrangements that is less bad than it might be. Any government is better than nothing, because without restraint there could be only chaos. But all government is defective because its mechanisms are the devices by which a fallen world is regulated. Even pagan governments can accomplish justice and peace of a kind. States presided over by Christian rulers can accomplish these things better than any other States, at least partly by devoting their resources to the service of spiritual ends. But the virtues of the Christian State are not, strictly speaking, political virtues. They arise from the use that righteous individuals make of faulty instruments; but the instruments remain faulty, and not even Christian government can rise above imperfection. The best earthly versions of justice and peace are not true justice and peace, and even tyrannical rule, from which justice is absent by definition, has its part to play in God's plan. If true justice could exist on earth, there would be no need for the State. It is precisely the impossibility of true justice on earth that makes the State necessary. True justice and peace are ideas: ideas in the technical, Platonist sense. Members of the civitas Dei peregrina, the pilgrim City of God, will not enjoy them until they have arrived at their destination. They exist only in heaven; they will be apprehended in their completeness only when this world's history is at an end.

pic tangentially related. you can see the connections: why, for example, hegel doesn't just see Napoleon but the world-spirit on horseback. the dialectic and the politics of imperfection are similar but not identical. but, of course, german idealism is another one of those paradigm-shifting moments.

[Anonymous No.11643312]

great thread thx

[Anonymous No.11644823]

bump

[Anonymous No.11645395]

>>11638396
He was Manichean. He dropped it after Ambrosia came into his life.

[Anonymous No.11645398]

if we could all please stop talking about his ideas and the substance of his philosophy and return to the issue of whether he was white or not?

someone redpill me on this. I don't want to waste my time reading about someone who didn't even know how to be born white