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AGUSTIN DE HIPONA |
Comparto información publicada en la WEB sobre la obra de Agustín de
Hipona:
Información que considero de valor y que comparto con fines de estudio.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Saint Augustine
First published Fri Mar 24, 2000; substantive
revision Fri Nov 12, 2010
Aurelius Augustinus [more commonly “St.
Augustine of Hippo,” often simply “Augustine”] (354–430 C.E.): rhetor,
Christian Neo-Platonist, North African Bishop, Doctor of the Roman Catholic
Church. One of the decisive developments in the western philosophical tradition
was the eventually widespread merging of the Greek philosophical tradition and
the Judeo-Christian religious and scriptural traditions. Augustine is one of
the main figures through and by whom this merging was accomplished.
He is, as well, one of the towering figures of
medieval philosophy whose authority and thought came to exert a pervasive and
enduring influence well into the modern period (e.g. Descartes and especially
Malebranche), and even up to the present day, especially among those
sympathetic to the religious tradition which he helped to shape (e.g. Plantinga
1992; Adams 1999).
But even
for those who do not share this sympathy, there is much in Augustine's thought
that is worthy of serious philosophical attention. Augustine is not only one of
the major sources whereby classical philosophy in general and Neoplatonism, in particular, enter into the mainstream of early and subsequent medieval
philosophy, but there are significant contributions of his own that emerge from
his modification of that Greco-Roman inheritance, e.g., his subtle accounts of
belief and authority, his account of knowledge and illumination, his emphasis
upon the importance and centrality of the will, and his focus upon a new way of
conceptualizing the phenomena of human history, just to cite a few of the more
conspicuous examples.
1. Context
Only four of his seventy-five years were spent
outside Northern Africa, and fifty-seven of the remaining seventy-one were in
such relatively out-of-the-way places as Thagaste and Hippo Regius, both
belonging to Roman provinces, neither notable for either cultural or commercial
prominence. However, the few years Augustine spent away from Northern Africa
exerted an incalculable influence upon his thought, and his geographical
distance from the major intellectual and political capitals of the Later Roman
Empire should not obscure the tremendous influence he came to exert even in his
own lifetime.
Here, as elsewhere, one is confronted by a figure both strikingly
liminal and, at times, intriguingly ambivalent. He was, as already noted, a
long time resident and, eventually, Bishop in Northern Africa whose thought was
transformed and redirected during the four brief years he spent in Rome and
Milan, far away from the provincial context where he was born and died and
spent almost all of the years in between; he was a man who tells us that he
never thought of himself as not being in some sense a Christian [Confessions
III.iv.8], yet he composed a spiritual autobiography containing one of the most
celebrated conversion accounts in all of Christian literature; he was a
classically trained rhetorician who used his skills to eloquently proclaim at
length the superiority of Christian culture over Greco-Roman culture, and he
also served as one of the central figures by whom the latter was transformed
and transmitted to the former.
Perhaps most striking of all, Augustine
bequeathed to the Latin West a voluminous body of work that contains at its
chronological extremes two quite dissimilar portraits of the human condition.
In the beginning, there is a largely Hellenistic portrait, one that is notable
for the optimism that sufficiently rational and disciplined life can safely
escape the ever-threatening circumstantial adversity that seems to surround us.
Nearer the end, however, there emerges a considerably grimmer portrait, one
that emphasizes the impotence of the unaided human will, and the later
Augustine presents a moral landscape populated largely by the massa damnata [De
Civitate Dei XXI.12], the overwhelming majority who are justly predestined to
eternal punishment by an omnipotent God, intermingled with a small minority
whom God, with unmerited mercy, has predestined to be saved.
The sheer quantity
of the writing that unites these two extremes, much of which survives, is truly
staggering. There are well over 100 titles [listed at Fitzgerald 1999, pp.
xxxv–il], many of which are themselves voluminous and composed over lengthy
periods of time, not to mention over 200 letters [listed at Fitzgerald 1999,
pp. 299–305] and close to 400 sermons [listed at Fitzgerald 1999, pp. 774–789].
It is arguably impossible to construct any moderate-sized and manageable list
of his major philosophical works that would not occasion some controversy in
terms of what is omitted, but surely any list would have to include
Contra
Academicos [Against the Academicians, 386–387 C.E.],
De Libero Arbitrio [On
Free Choice of the Will, Book I, 387/9 C.E.; Books II & III, circa 391–395
C.E.],
De Magistro [On The Teacher, 389 C.E.],
Confessiones [Confessions,
397–401 C.E.], De Trinitate [On The Trinity, 399–422 C.E.],
De Genesi ad
litteram [On The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 401–415 C.E.],
De Civitate Dei [On
The City of God, 413–427C.E.], and
Retractationes [Reconsiderations, 426–427
C.E.].
La filosofía de Agustín de Hipona
(354 -
430)
Vida y obras
- 0. El contexto histórico, sociocultural y filosófico de Agustín de Hipona (354 a 430)
- 1. La Filosofía de Agustín d
- .
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