Access to God in Augustine's Confessions

Access to God in Augustine's Confessions PDF Author: Carl G. Vaught
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791483525
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the final volume in Carl G. Vaught's groundbreaking trilogy reappraising Augustine's Confessions, a cornerstone of Western philosophy and one of the most influential works in the Christian tradition. Vaught offers a new interpretation of the philosopher as less Neoplatonic and more distinctively Christian than most interpreters have thought. In this book, he focuses on the most philosophical section of the Confessions and on how it relates to the previous, more autobiographical sections. A companion to the previous two volumes, which dealt with Books I–IX, this book can be read either in sequence with or independently of the others. Books X–XIII of the Confessions begin after Augustine has become Bishop of Hippo and they are separated by more than ten years from the episodes recorded in the previous nine books of the text. This establishes the narrative in the present and speaks to the "believing sons of men." Augustine explores how memory, time, and creation make the journey toward God and the encounter with God possible. Vaught analyzes these conditions in order to unlock Augustine's solutions to familiar philosophical and theological problems. He also tackles the frequently discussed problem of the alleged disconnection between the earlier books and the last four books by showing how Augustine binds experience and reflection together.

Access to God in Augustine's Confessions

Access to God in Augustine's Confessions PDF Author: Carl G. Vaught
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791483525
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the final volume in Carl G. Vaught's groundbreaking trilogy reappraising Augustine's Confessions, a cornerstone of Western philosophy and one of the most influential works in the Christian tradition. Vaught offers a new interpretation of the philosopher as less Neoplatonic and more distinctively Christian than most interpreters have thought. In this book, he focuses on the most philosophical section of the Confessions and on how it relates to the previous, more autobiographical sections. A companion to the previous two volumes, which dealt with Books I–IX, this book can be read either in sequence with or independently of the others. Books X–XIII of the Confessions begin after Augustine has become Bishop of Hippo and they are separated by more than ten years from the episodes recorded in the previous nine books of the text. This establishes the narrative in the present and speaks to the "believing sons of men." Augustine explores how memory, time, and creation make the journey toward God and the encounter with God possible. Vaught analyzes these conditions in order to unlock Augustine's solutions to familiar philosophical and theological problems. He also tackles the frequently discussed problem of the alleged disconnection between the earlier books and the last four books by showing how Augustine binds experience and reflection together.

The Journey toward God in Augustine's Confessions

The Journey toward God in Augustine's Confessions PDF Author: Carl G. Vaught
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791457917
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
A new interpretation of the first six books of Augustine's Confessions, emphasizing the importance of Christianity rather than Neoplatonism.

Encounters with God in Augustine's Confessions

Encounters with God in Augustine's Confessions PDF Author: Carl G. Vaught
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791484998
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book continues Carl G. Vaught's thoroughgoing reinterpretation of Augustine's Confessions—one that rejects the view that Augustine is simply a Neoplatonist and argues that he is also a definitively Christian thinker. As a companion volume to the earlier Journey toward God in Augustine's Confessions: Books I–VI, it can be read in sequence with or independently of it. This work covers the middle portion of the Confessions, Books VII–IX. Opening in Augustine's youthful maturity, Books VII–IX focus on the three pivotal experiences that transform his life: the Neoplatonic vision that causes him to abandon materialism; his conversion to Christianity that leads him beyond Neoplatonism to a Christian attitude toward the world and his place in it; and the mystical experience he shares with his mother a few days before her death, which points to the importance of the Christian community. Vaught argues that time, space, and eternity intersect to provide a framework in which these three experiences occur and which give Augustine a three-fold access to God.

The Legacy of sovereign joy

The Legacy of sovereign joy PDF Author: JOHN PIPER
Publisher: Inter-Varsity Press
ISBN: 1789740592
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 153

Get Book Here

Book Description
An uplifting look at three famous and flawed fathers of the Christian church and how their lives can inspire us to fall in love with God and find the power to overcome our weaknesses. Augustine grappled with sexual passion. Martin Luther struggled to control his tongue. John Calvin fought the battle of faith with the world's weapons. Yet despite their failings, each man will always be remembered as a founding father to the Christian faith because of the messages they declared. And even with their deaths hundreds of years ago, their messages still speak today. John Piper explores each man's life, integrating Augustine's delight in God with Luther's emphasis on the Word and Calvin's exposition of Scriptures. Through their strengths and struggles, he teaches us how to better live today, for when we consider their lives, we behold the glory and majesty of God - and in that, find the power to overcome our weaknesses.

The Quest for Wholeness

The Quest for Wholeness PDF Author: Carl G. Vaught
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438422792
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
"This book has been written for the artist, for the theologian, and for the philosopher, each of whom must be concerned with the question, "What does it mean to be human?" But at a deeper level, it is written for any reader who knows what it means to be fragmented, and who is willing to undertake a quest for wholeness in experiential and reflective terms." — from the Preface The Quest for Wholeness is a philosophic odyssey into humankind's feelings of fragmentation, and the search for unity born of those feelings. It blends the concreteness of art and religion with the discipline of philosophy to illuminate those places in experience and reflection where fragmentation is encountered and the meaning of wholeness is first discovered. Carl Vaught discusses the problems of fragmentation and unity, beginning with the aesthetic concreteness represented by the quest in Herman Melville's Moby Dick; moving through the religious dimension represented by the biblical stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses; passing on to the reflective discourse in Plato's Euthyphro; and ending in a confrontation with Hegel that unites the concrete particularity of religious and communal life with the dialectic of Socrates' normative reasoning. This book is written with the conviction that the professional philosopher should not address a merely professional audience, but the larger world as well, and that in the end he must come to terms with himself and with the most pressing questions that confront the human spirit.

Retrieving Augustine's Doctrine of Creation

Retrieving Augustine's Doctrine of Creation PDF Author: Gavin Ortlund
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830853251
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
How might premodern exegesis of Genesis inform Christian debates about creation today? Pastor and theologian Gavin Ortlund retrieves Augustine's reading of Genesis 1-3 and considers how his premodern understanding of creation can help Christians today, shedding light on matters such as evolution, animal death, and the historical Adam and Eve.

The Cambridge Companion to Augustine's “Confessions”

The Cambridge Companion to Augustine's “Confessions” PDF Author: Tarmo Toom
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108491863
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Get Book Here

Book Description
Presents the best scholarship on Augustine's Confessions which will facilitate a better understanding of this masterpiece.

The Theology of Augustine's Confessions

The Theology of Augustine's Confessions PDF Author: Paul Rigby
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107094925
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study of Augustine's Confessions presents his testimony of conversion as an antidote to modern culture's tendency toward disbelief.

The Cambridge Companion to Augustine

The Cambridge Companion to Augustine PDF Author: David Vincent Meconi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107025338
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Get Book Here

Book Description
This second edition of the Companion has been thoroughly revised and updated with eleven new chapters and a new bibliography.

The Mysticism of Saint Augustine

The Mysticism of Saint Augustine PDF Author: John Peter Kenney
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134442726
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book Here

Book Description
Augustine's vision at Ostia is one of the most influential accounts of mystical experience in the Western tradition, and a subject of persistent interest to Christians, philosophers and historians. This book explores Augustine's account of his experience as set down in the Confessions and considers his mysticism in relation to his classical Platonist philosophy. John Peter Kenney argues that while the Christian contemplative mysticism created by Augustine is in many ways founded on Platonic thought, Platonism ultimately fails Augustine in that it cannot retain the truths that it anticipates. The Confessions offer a response to this impasse by generating two critical ideas in medieval and modern religious thought: firstly, the conception of contemplation as a purely epistemic event, in contrast to classical Platonism; secondly, the tenet that salvation is absolutely distinct from enlightenment.