The Authority of Augustine1 Augustine speaks: `The thirteenth of November was my birthday. After a lunch (light sufficient to keep from putting a burden on our moral faculties), I called the whole group that dined together that way either day, to go and sit in the baths, for that seemed a suitably mystical spot.2 Some of those present had probably spent the morning interpretation a bit of Vergil and were now ready for higher and nobler things. What followed was the colloquy recorded in the first book of Augustines de beata vita. And so we ar here, 1505 years later on that laternoon in the baths, 1537 years after Augustines birth, speaking of this man long deceased as though we know him. This lecture is about him, it belongs to a series named after him, and it has the sponsorship of a venerable and international regularize of religious hands dedicated to his name and pr consummationice. I scram spent my entire adult life reading him, and writing books about him. We brave out in a clipping, moreoer, in which his words have reached their largest reference (if we count rather than weigh readers), but it is a time that imagines itself more free of his influence than any other since his lifetime, and that views or so of his most characteristic ideas as rebarbative.
But even uncongeniality is a token of esteem: if you despise Augustine and write or speak about him in that vein, you judge him worth despising somehow; and so even there he hovers over us. The power of this mans name is much with us. My topic is just now that power. How did he come to have it? And what are we to make of it? why have we made of Augustine a saint of this sort? Did he wish to be treated so? What right have we to acclaim him? And what decorum should govern our applause? For holy custody often attract a veneration that they would deprecate. To take an example Augustine could have known, the first paragraph of the ostensibly quite holier-than-thou Life of Plotinus by his chief disciple Porphyry records an act of rebellion against the... If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com
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