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Reflection on saint augustine
What is the impact of Augustine
Reflection on saint augustine
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Just War Theory is the belief the war is morally or legally justified. There are four most important tenets, also known as belief, principle, or creed, from the Just War Theory of Saint Augustine.
Saint Augustine was born in A.D. 354 and adopted the Christianity doctrine in A.D. 386 during the decline of the Roman Empire. Saint Augustine believed everything was made from God; therefore everything made is good and perfect. Saint Augustine believed evil, was due to the fall of man, which introduced sin into the world. Prior to the fall of man, there was no death, sickness or suffering in the world.
Saint Augustine understood that war was a result of the fall of man and sin being introduced into the world. Saint Augustine had accepted “war and violence as legitimate means of attacking subjective assessments of evil” (Christopher p42). Saint Augustine had four important tenets which are
“(1) There must be a just cause; (2) Wars must be declared and carried out by proper authority; and (3) The final objective must always be peace. Moreover, Augustine insists that soldiers shoul...
This takes us to the concept of just war. Aristotle saw just war as a means to a higher goal. You don't just fight the war to win the war there needs to be a purpose to fighting the war. He goes on to tell us how others view just war. The Romans said war was just only when conducted by the state, and only accompanied by a declaration of hostilities, meaning war had to be declared on someone. Rebellions and revolutions were not considered just wars. The Japanese did not define when war was just or proper. Early Christians rejected war; this came from the effort to be more Christ like, the Golden Rule, due unto others as you would have them do to you. Later the Christians could no longer be pacifists; they were going to have to go to war sometime after Constantine became emperor and declared Christianity as the main religion of the time.
War is the means to many ends. The ends of ruthless dictators, of land disputes, and lives – each play its part in the reasoning for war. War is controllable. It can be avoided; however, once it begins, the bat...
In “On Free Choice of the Will”, Augustine indicates the importance of his beliefs and opinions of human nature and of God. He thinks as greatly of God as possible and centralizes his thoughts of goodness with the concept of being/form (God); he also gives a description of how God’s rightness can be interpreted clearly through the evil doings of the world. One of the biggest and most difficult problems facing people is the problem of doing evil. If God is being, unchanging, eternal and all-powerful, then how is it that people do evil? Augustine tries to solve the problem by examining the “source of evil” and “what evil is”. He explores the ways in which to live a happy life and an evil-free life by having a perfectly ordered soul—a life willed by the virtues—through free will. In the pursuit to find out how it is that evil exists, Augustine explores how people sin with inordinate desire as the driving force and free will. He lists the things we need to possess in order to sin and to live a happy life—goods of the will and temporal goods—that is, one cannot sin without temporal goods, inordinate desire, and free will. In the same way, one cannot live a happy life without goods of the will and free will.
Augustine illustrated on the prevailing Roman doctrine of justum bellum and the Old Testament stories of wars fought on Israel’s behalf, as demanded by God. Augustine aimed that fighting on behalf of the Roman Empire was a Christian obligation since the empire was Christian. Augustine maintained that this was fighting on behalf of God against God’s enemies, just as Israel defended itself against God’s enemies in Old Testament times. Augustine’s thinking has backed greatly to the discussion of what makes warfare justifiable right up until the modern day.
In the 5th century, a Christian Bishop of Hippo named Augustine wrote a book called The City of God. In an effort to defend the Church against the accusations made by the Pagans, he divided the world into two groups. Each group consisted of a city, which was based on either a love of God or on a love of self. The first city was the city of God which was associated with the love of God. Next, was the city of Man, who was linked with the love of self. Augustine used different eras of time in order to look back a history, showing that he was different than those who came before him and that he knew what was going to happen.
Throughout the ten-century, particularly in France, the world had become an extremely violent place. Feudal Knights were often quarreling over land possession, looting, and looking to lay people to provide them with sustenance . Likewise, the power of these knights and the extent of violence flourished due to the increasingly lacking power and authority of the kings . The Church, in an attempt to halt the violence and anarchy attempted to take control and issued such concepts as “the Peace of God” . Similarly, at this time other movements for peace by the Church were underway, and one of the commonly held ideas was the need to transform the world to more “monkish ideals”. From these ideals also sprouted the concept of the laity having “God-given functions to perform, functions that could include fighting to protect the Church”. Pope Leo IX (1049-1054) is an example of this idea; he often used militia to fight against his opponents. In the early eleventh century, there came a pivotal figure in the ideas of Church sanctioned war, Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085). Pope Gregory was involved in the Investiture Contest, and soon turned to scholars to seek out “justification for his conviction that violence could be used in defense of the Church and could be authorized by it”. The movements generated by Pope Gregory, as well as the results of the Inve...
Carl von Clausewitz, “What is War?” On War. Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, 139. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976.
Augustine and Pelagius were two of the great fourth century theologians, whose work has an effect on the theology of Christianity today, which centers in the areas of original sin and free will. Pelagius did not believe that because of the sin of Adam that this was passed down to all of creation. He believed that this was an isolated event and only Adam had to deal with the consequences of his actions. Adam made the decision himself to sin which caused him to then become sinful. Pelagius believed that everything that God created was good. For some reason he believed that Christians should be able to live up to Christian standards. Pelagius believed that most Christians assumed that God loved them.Therefore; Adam is a creation of God was good. Being a creation of God according to Pelagius means that we are not made to have corruption in us. He believed that we did not come into the world with sin, but with a free will. It is because of the change in our acts and different behaviors that causes us to be sinful, but we still remain true to the nature of God. Mankind had been just like Adam was before the fall.
This paper will outline specific points in Saint Augustine’s Confessions that highlight religious views following the fall of Rome. Though Augustines views on religion may not reflect that of most people in his time period, it still gives valuable insight into how many, namely Neoplatonists,, viewed God and his teachings.
Even though many credit St. Augustine with founding the just war theory, this view is partially misleading. Augustine synthesized ideas from classical Greco-Roman and Christian philosophy to construct his theory, so credit can also be given to philosophers like Aristotle and Cicero. Since then, it has been modified by many notable thinkers such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Hugo Grotius, and Francisco Suarez (Orend). Technicalities aside, Augustine was a pivotal figure in developing our contemporary understanding of this tradition (Massaro 70).
In his Confessions, St. Augustine writes about a large number of topics that continue to have relevance today. The text documents the development of Augustine’s faith and his Christian philosophy, and one thing of particular interest is his argument for the nature of evil. Christianity predicates several important ideas that Augustine builds upon in his philosophy, and within its context, he presents a thorough, compelling argument against the problem of evil that identifies evil as a misperception.
Throughout the many years of Christianity, there have been numerous theologians who have attempted to copiously interpret Scripture in the means of guiding a society through God’s teachings. One of these theologians is St. Thomas Aquinas and another group of thinkers were the Anabaptists; both of whom shared fairly different views on how a just society should act. In order to compare these two distinct views of Scripture, I will state the Anabaptists’ perspectives, principally on legitimate war and violence, and then contrast them with Aquinas’s teachings followed by a discussion of the background context on their time periods and how both of them employ Scripture or previous thinkers in their writings in respective alternation. In short, the
Saint Augustine (354-430) better known by Augustine of Hippo was a North African native. Most of his life was spent as a Christian bishop at Hippo Regius, North Africa, it was also where he earned his common name Augustine of Hippo. He was born in a small town named Tagaste (modern Algeria) and lived a morally life as his thoughts on life changes as he ages. Although he lived through tough times, throughout his life, he was most famously known for his autobiography (Confessions), his great educational accomplishments, and his spread of Christianity. His mother, Monica, was a Christian, while his father, Patritius, did not care for the belief. However, his whole family died a Christian family. Augustine was raised a Christian to a family who lived in poverty, but during his early years he did not care much for the Bible, and instead showed very sinful behaviors toward the Bible.
In the beginning, God created the world. He created the earth, air, stars, trees and mortal animals, heaven above, the angels, every spiritual being. God looked at these things and said that they were good. However, if all that God created was good, from where does un-good come? How did evil creep into the universal picture? In Book VII of his Confessions, St. Augustine reflects on the existence of evil and the theological problem it poses. For evil to exist, the Creator God must have granted it existence. This fundamentally contradicts the Christian confession that God is Good. Logically, this leads one to conclude evil does not exist in a created sense. Augustine arrives at the conclusion that evil itself is not a formal thing, but the result of corruption away from the Supreme Good. (Augustine, Confessions 7.12.1.) This shift in understanding offers a solution to the problem of evil, but is not fully defended within Augustine’s text. This essay will illustrate how Augustine’s solution might stand up to other arguments within the context of Christian theology.
The etymology of the word “war” can be traced back to the Old High German language word “werra” meaning strife; akin to Old High German “werran” to confuse. These words were used sometime in the 12th century. Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman philosopher, once defined war as "a contention by force" and the working definition of war for the purpose of this essay will be Cicero's definition.