Western Thinkers: Augustine, Essay Example

St. Augustine was a theologian as well as a philosopher. Western Christians, both Catholics and Protestants, revere him. Augustine believed in salvation by grace and predestination. He also believed in the canon of the scriptures contained the Greek canon, what today is referred to as deuterocanonicals. His influence in Christian and political thought continues to be felt to this day.

Augustine was also a believer in an authoritative tradition. He also believed that for salvation to exist there has to be baptism. However, he allowed for an exception, what he called baptism of blood or desire or martyrdom. According to him, the authority of the church was very necessary for peaceful coexistence among all people to be achieved.

To the early Christians, the great adversary, who can today be equated to the devil, was Jewish and Roman systems. In 70AD, the Jewish system died while opposition from the Roman Empire ceased to exist. With no visible adversary being seen by early Christians, they came up with the conclusion that Satan was cosmic and invisible. It is at this time that Augustine came in and codified the Christian thought on the Satan. Against this backdrop, he is revered for bravely confronting the question of the origin or evil. He claimed that evil is nothing since God created everything and everything that he created was good. Therefore he could not have created evil.

In City of God, Augustine critiqued love of glory among all Romans. He argued that they behaved in this manner because they were not willing to come to terms with fear of death. Aspects of these very arguments were expounded by Dodaro, 2004 in his critique of City of God. Through his critical work, it becomes clear that Augustine’s thoughts are attributed to today’s concept of state and political leadership. The virtues of humility and faith in Christ within modern economic and political setting as practiced today have their origins in Augustine’s thoughts (Gregory, 2008).

Evaluation on Augustine’s Work

Augustine’s definition of Satan and sin landed him into trouble with religious thinkers of his time. His belief in the concept of duality was an attempt to explain the greatest challenge of faith facing today’s Christians: that of separating God and occurrence of problems, difficulties and hardships. Augustine attributed sins to presence of free will, and this again brought him at loggerheads with the clergy. This shows that Augustine set a good precedent by trying to address a question that many clergy of his time were trying to shy away from.

Today, studies on Augustine’s political thought have not focused a lot on how his religious views continue to shape politics today. Rather, they have concentrated on persuasive statements that Augustine made in relation to political events of his day. The inference here is always that these statements are a representation of his religious convictions.

Augustine was a staunch critic of Rome, which he claimed was never a res publica by virtue of failing to pursue justice. The relationship between justice in its true sense and the commonwealth, according to Augustine can only be conceptualized through reference to Cicero. Augustine concurred with Cicero conception that leaders had a very critical role to play in ensuring that true justice was established and that it always prevailed. To this extent, his thoughts are very relevant to today’s political and religious discourse. The western thought has been influenced a lot by his thoughts, which continue to manifest themselves to this day.

However, Augustine is unable to address the issue of how virtue is learnt without getting himself into matters of the original sin. In this case, he attributes failure of Rome to sins of the citizenry, which resulted from misleading counsel offered by the leadership of the day. Today, the belief that grace should be there for virtue to prevail is very prevalent in leadership circles. Augustine is credited with propounding this thought.

Works Cited

Dodaro, R. Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Gregory, E. Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2008.