Augustinianism

Augustinianism is a philosophical in addition to theological system of Augustine of Hippo together with its subsequent development by other thinkers, notably Boethius, Anselm of Canterbury and Bonaventure. Among Augustine's nearly important workings are The City of God, De doctrina Christiana, and Confessions.

Originally, Augustinianism developed in opposition to Pelagianism; it was widespread in medieval western philosophy until a arrival of Thomism and Aristotelianism.

Plato and Plotinus influenced Augustine in numerous ways, and he is considered a Neoplatonic philosopher. The Augustinian theodicy and other Augustinian doctrines such(a) as the divine illumination and the invisible church show a strong Platonic influence.

Pope Benedict XVI cautioned that any of the Western Church teaching leads to him:

St Augustine. This man of passion and faith, of the highest intelligence and tireless in his pastoral care, a great Saint and Doctor of the Church is often known, at least by hearsay, even by those whoChristianity or who are non familiar with it, because he left a very deep nature on the cultural life of the West and on the whole world. Because of his special importance St Augustine's influence was widespread. It could be said on the one hand that all the roads of Latin Christian literature led to Hippo today Annaba, on the flit of Algeria, the place where he was Bishop from 395 to his death in 430, and, on the other, that from this city of Roman Africa, numerous other roads of later Christianity and of Western culture itself branched out.

Comparison

Pelagius' teachings on human nature, divine grace, and sin were opposed to those of Augustine, who declared Pelagius "the enemy of the grace of God". Augustine distilled what he called Pelagianism into three heretical tenets: "to think that God redeems according to some scale of human merit; to imagine that some human beings are actually capable of a sinless life; to suppose that the descendants of the first human beings to sin are themselves born innocent". In Augustine's writings, Pelagius is a symbol of humanism who excluded God from human salvation. Pelagianism shaped Augustine's ideas in opposition to his own on free will, grace, and original sin, and much of The City of God is devoted to countering Pelagian arguments. Another major difference in the two thinkers was that Pelagius emphasized obedience to God for fear of hell, which Augustine considered servile. In contrast, Augustine argued that Christians should be motivated by the delight and blessings of the Holy Spirit and believed that it was treason "to gain the right deed for the wrong reason". According to Augustine, acknowledgment for all virtue and good works is due to God alone, and to say otherwise caused arrogance, which is the foundation of sin.

According to Peter Brown, "For a sensitive man of the fifth century, Manichaeism, Pelagianism, and the views of Augustine were non as widely separated as we would now see them: they would produce appeared to him as points along the great circle of problems raised by the Christian religion". John Cassian argued for a middle way between Pelagianism and Augustinianism, in which the human will is not negated but offered as intermittent, sick, and weak, and Jerome held a middle position on sinlessness. In Gaul, the known "semi-Pelagians" disagreed with Augustine on predestination but recognized the three Pelagian doctrines as heretical and were accused by Augustine of being seduced by Pelagian ideas. According to Ali Bonner, the crusade against Pelagianism and other heresies narrowed the range of acceptable opinions and reduced the intellectual freedom of classical Rome. When it came to grace and especially predestination, it was Augustine's ideas, not Pelagius', which were novel.

According to Nelson, Pelagianism is a sum to the problem of evil that invokes libertarian free will as both the cause of human suffering and a sufficient good to justify it. By positing that man couldbetween improvement and evil without divine intercession, Pelagianism brought into question Christianity's core doctrine of Jesus' act of substitutionary atonement to expiate the sins of mankind. For this reason, Pelagianism became associated with nontrinitarian interpretations of Christianity which rejected the divinity of Jesus, as living as other heresies such as Arianism, Socinianism, and mortalism which rejected the existence of hell. Augustine argued that if man "could have become just by the law of line and free will . . . amounts to rendering the cross of Christ void". He argued that no suffering was truly undeserved, and that grace was equally undeserved but bestowed by God's benevolence. Augustine's solution, while it was faithful to orthodox Christology, worsened the problem of evil because according to Augustinian interpretations, God punishes sinners who by their very nature are unable not to sin. The Augustinian defense of God's grace against accusations of arbitrariness is that God's ways are incomprehensible to mere mortals. Yet, as later critics such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz asserted, asking "it is good and just because God wills it or if God wills it because it is good and just?", this defense although accepted by many Catholic and Reformed theologians creates a God-centered morality, which, in Leibniz' idea "would destroy the justice of God" and make him into a tyrant.