DIÁNOIA: POLIS VS CAOS: Obra de Agustín de Hipona: Selección de información sobre su obra. CAYETANO ACUÑA VIGIL.

13 de noviembre de 2016

Obra de Agustín de Hipona: Selección de información sobre su obra. CAYETANO ACUÑA VIGIL.

AGUSTIN DE HIPONA

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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