scholarly journals The Limits of Grief in Augustine of Hippo’s Sermones 172-173 and Sermo 396

Vox Patrum ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 78 ◽  
pp. 293-310
Author(s):  
Joseph L. Grabau
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Human Mortality ◽  
Human Emotion ◽  
The City

This contribution explores select sermons of Augustine relating to the pastoral and existential phenomena of grief and human mortality (ss. 172-173 and s. 396). In particular, it evaluates these themes in conversation with philosophical reflections on human nature in the City of God, Books 13-14. Drawing upon Platonic and Stoic views in the latter, St. Augustine prefers a more compassionate and permissive understanding of human emotion in the former. Nevertheless, the author argues that while Augustine makes extensive textual appeal to Pauline and Johannine sources, which is likewise evident in his philosophical work, he remains implicitly committed to a cognitivist theory of emotion also in his preaching. In order to support this claim, I first present the philosophical traditions at work within the biblical horizon of the City of God, through a careful reading of pertinent texts, including work of Sarah Byers. Second, I attend to shifts of tone and emphasis detected in three public sermons, two of which have been successfully dated to 418 and 419, where evident differences of genre and audience help to account for Augustine’s heightened pastoral sensitivity. This comparative approach illuminates, finally, how the bishop of Hippo maintains philosophical continuity and navigates his pastoral responsibilities.

Se perdre afin de se retrouver : l'importance du passage entre l’absence et la présence dans Œdipe sur la route de Henry Bauchau

2012 ◽  
pp. 116-123
Author(s):  
Alicja Ślusarska
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
The Road ◽  
De Se ◽  
The City ◽  
Oedipus At Colonus

Retracing in his novel the labyrinthine journey that leads Oedipus from the place of his abomination (Thebes) to the city of his future glory (Colonus), Henry Bauchau fills the emptiness between Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus. Bauchau’s hero, a powerful king, loses everything and stabs his eyes out when the cruel truth about his real identity is revealed. Blind, homeless, devoid of meaning of life, Oedipus leaves on a journey to pass away anywhere. However, his way to death turns out to be, thanks to benevolent presence of others and art’s liberating power, the road to personal elucidation. The story of Bauchau’s Oedipus, who finally recognizes himself as a truly human, is based therefore on the passage between absence and presence, between darkness and lucidity, on the union of contradictions which symbolize the complexity of human nature. This paper attempts to analyse different representations of absence in Bauchau’s novel. Afterwards, the article focuses on the ways which facilitate Oedipus’s road leading from depersonalization to rediscovery of his own identity.

The Holy City

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Oldfield
Keyword(s):  
City Of God ◽  
Religious Buildings ◽  
Church Hierarchy ◽  
Patron Saints ◽  
Heavenly City ◽  
The City ◽  
Holy City

This chapter examines praise of cities through the prism of their religious virtues. It does so through the two main, but interrelated, approaches within which the medieval city was linked to the sacred. The first embedded the role of the city within wider Christian narratives about man’s salvation. It was invariably rooted in biblical and other patristic texts (particularly St Augustine’s City of God) and later connected to medieval Christian thinking on Jerusalem, the Heavenly City, and the triumph of Christianity. The second approach drilled down onto specific manifestations of the sacred character of a particular city—its patron saints, its religious buildings and shrines, its religious officials, its place within the universal Church hierarchy, and its pious citizenry.

The City of God. By J. H. S. Burleigh. Nisbet. 12s. 6d.

1950 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 426-429
Author(s):  
S. L. Greenslade
Keyword(s):  
City Of God ◽  
The City

Ni fatalidad ni casualidad: el desarrollo histórico de la ciudad de Dios en su peregrinación en la ciudad terrena

Augustinus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-25
Author(s):  
Martin Bellerose ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Christian Faith ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
Theology Of History ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

The article deals with the foundations of Augustine’s Theology of History, as can be read in Book V of The City of God. A distinction among the pagan belief in destiny and Christian faith is made. The text which is analyzed is considered as the source of Augustine’s Theology of History, in Books XV-XVIII of the City of God, and also of his doctrine about Predestination. The article also deals with the relationship within the process of salvation, between divine grace and human deeds.

THE CONCEPT OF CO-INHERENCE IN THE WORK OF CHARLES WILLIAMS

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-128
Author(s):  
O.B. Lukmanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Holy Trinity ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Unique Interpretation ◽  
Refusal To Participate ◽  
Charles Williams ◽  
The City

The article examines the concept of coinherence (or co-inherence) as one of the central and unifying concepts in the life and work of Charles Stansby Williams (1886 – 1945), English poet, writer, and literary critic, also known as “the third Inkling” in conjunction with C .S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Through a close study of the writer’s biography and letters as well as his poetry, novels, theological treatises and essays we trace the origin of the term “coinherence,” borrowed from the Church Fathers in the meaning of mutual indwelling of the Persons of the Holy Trinity, uncover the unique interpretation that Williams gave to the term, and look at various ways he used to integrate it into his writing. Understanding coinherence as a fundamental ontological principle of comprehensive mutual interdependence, exchanged life, and substitution as direct fulfillment of the Gospel commandment “to carry each other’s burdens,” Williams portrays it as a necessary condition of any truly human existence and expounds its universal nature on every level of life, from childbirth to money as a means of exchange, to mutual services of empathy, to intercessory prayer, and to self-sacrifice for another’s sake. In his thinking, people can carry each other’s burdens even through barriers of space and time, since they are simultaneously co-inherent to each other and to God who exists both outside of time and space and in all time and space. Thus, in his novels Williams often employs a version of Dante’s vertical chronotope of simultaneity, and one of the most important symbols that reflect the nature of coinherence is the City as a web of continuous mutual exchange and substitution, in its turn coinherent to the City of God. Williams portrays refusal to participate in the principle of co-inherence as “descent to hell” which is seen as a gradual unraveling of any personhood and ultimate annihilation.

Augustine and the Humanists. Reading the City of God from Petrarch to Poliziano

10.54179/2102 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Della Schiava
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Western World ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Present Volume ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The City

Augustine and the Humanists fills a persistent lacuna by investigating the reception of Augustine’s oeuvre in Italian humanism during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In response to the call for a more extensive and detailed investigation of the reception of Augustine’s works and thought in the Western world, numerous scholars have addressed the topic over the last decades. However, one of Augustine’s major works, De civitate Dei, has received remarkably little attention. In a series of case studies by renowned specialists of Italian humanism, this volume now analyzes the various strategies that were employed in reading and interpreting the City of God at the dawn of the modern age. Augustine and the Humanists focuses on the reception of the text in the work of sixteen early modern writers and thinkers who played a crucial role in the era between Petrarch and Poliziano. The present volume thus makes a significant and innovative contribution both to Augustinian studies and to our knowledge of early modern intellectual history.

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