thom space

Well here is a person who is not the most likely of people to draw my attention. But wait, if you stop and think you might remember that he died a failure, and failures are my favorite type of people to write about. They are just such inspiration. Wait you might have the feeling that I am not being entirely truthful in the way that I am telling this story. Didn’t Augustine basically found the modern Latin and protestant churches? well yes I guess he did. But he still died a failure.

In order to under stand how that is the case it is equally important to understand the context of his life. I don’t think though that I want to tell though a biographical tale explaining the ins and outs of the life of Augustine, why? well for starter he is a silly white male and for seconds he is a really not that interesting. His thought though has been been very important. and what I do think is interesting is why his work became so important.

So what did Augustine think? Well he thought that ultimate reality was located in necessary, immutable, and eternal truth, this “truth” he equated directly with the Christian God. He also considered ethics and morals to be to be necessary, immutable, and eternal. he thought that there had to be an ultimate reality that was the home of these ideas because things that are necessary, immutable, and eternal cannot come from something such as our minds that are temporal, changeling, and finite. (on a side note I think that it is suspect that the only reason that God is necessary is because we have an idea of him, and such an idea can not come from little finite us, so therefore it must come from God. It strikes me that god must already exist in this model in order for god to exist.) Augustine goes on to say that we all strive toward being god, not in the physical world but rather in the mental. (another side note, in the 20th century Sartre Identifies mans motivating force in life to be God. This is very similar to the idea that Augustine has and is most likely a reason that Augustine is sometimes referred to as the first existentialist thinker, a minor difference though is that Sartre thinks that the idea of god is contradictory and that his existence is impossible, Sartre’s critique of Augustine would a simple admonishment of Bad Faith. I love irony.)

The only reason Augustine’s work has proven to be so influential is not because of the “truth” and validity of his ideas, but rather because of the acuity of his pen. Augustine was trained as a young man to be a rhetorician, that is, he was trained in the art of oral and written persuasion. He was able to use his skills in this area to successfully promote himself and his works over that of his contemporaries. It is not that his work was better in it’s content, but rather that it was better in its form. Because of his great skill in self promotion his works were able to survive his death and hence influence later thinkers.

So what do I think of him? a failure. oops I guess I never adressed that. my bad