Day 4 – PASTORAL Augustinian spirituality is not authoritarian and hierarchical even in the Church. It will be a spirituality for a church attempting to replace a hierarchical and authoritarian clerical style with a pastoral one. There is in Augustine no “divine” bishop. Though the bishop is a priest, pastor, father and preacher, he is not the perfect or divine hierarchy, nor the causally mediating link between the heavenly and …
Day 3 – CONVERSION Confronting a narcissistic culture, what is called the “me” generation, we shall acknowledge that the secular western self has not and will not disappear. The attempts to deconstruct it and to make it only intuitive, immediate, impulsive, extatic, nothing but spontaneous erotic creativity have not succeeded, though this has been the chief effort of humanistic education, many religious and most cultural institutions for some time. Even …
Day 2 – NO SPARATION BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND SACRED DOCTRINE For Augustine, Christian faith is our philosophy. For him revelation exposes the structure of the self to be image of the Trinity, and thus the believer passes from self-knowledge to the highest mystery of faith. For him, revelation heard from without moves the soul to find the very point where it touches God and to seek the knowledge of all …
Day 2 – NO SEPARATION BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND SACRED DOCTRINE Kompli aqra »
Day 1 – SELF-KNOWLEDGE Self-knowledge is the key to spiritual life in Augustine. This is not a mere experience of the self, a narcissistic introspection, and it is the very opposite of the self as bundle of experiences. No, for Augustine the revelation of God in Christ, recorded in the Holy Scripture and understood in the Spirit ruled Councils of the Church, restores to humans their proper knowledge of the …
