Church history week 5
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Philosophy
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Apr 3, 2024
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Uploaded by davisveronica
What did you learn about Augustine's conversion? From Augustine's life we can have confidence that God will bring His elect to faith, even if the path of some pass-through pagan philosophy, deceptive teachings, and the lure of the lusts of this
world. Augustine was a passionate seeker of truth: he was from the beginning and then throughout his life. Faith in Christ brought Augustine's long search on the journey to truth to completion. Only a God who made himself "tangible", one of us, was finally a God to whom he could pray, for whom and with whom he could live. This is the way to take with courage and at the same time with humility, open to a permanent purification which each of us always needs. This attitude of profound humility before the only Lord Jesus led him also to experience an intellectual humility. Augustine, in fact, who is one of the great figures in the history of thought.
Even today, as in his time, humanity needs to know and above all to live this fundamental reality: God is love, and the encounter with him is the only response to the restlessness of the human heart; a heart inhabited by hope, still perhaps obscure and unconscious in many of our contemporaries but which already today opens us Christians to the future. Augustine is a witness to the way in which the spirituality of martyrdom undergoes a transition between the era of persecution and the development of the new ideal of Christian holiness, an ideal that he himself helped to shape.
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Augustine is one of the many great Saints whose words have the power to pierce through your heart and awaken you to the Truth of who you are. He has been and continues to be a source of great strength, faith, wisdom, and inspiration for people.
Who witnessed to him? Augustine was witness to by the bishop. In one of Augustine’s letters, he addressed Bishop as “most blessed and venerable lord” and “your holiness” and repeatedly referred to him as old (senex).
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Valerius gave him the freedom to pursue his convictions and desires and effectively become his own kind of presbyter. Valerius went a step further and gave him some land on which to build a house in the garden by the Hippo church, where he could establish a community
of clergy and “servants of God.
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What other factors led to his coming to faith in Christ?
Augustine was a gifted communicator, teacher, writer, and orator in debate. Valerius put him to work where those skills were needed in the church and where Valerius himself was unable to meet the need. Though later as a bishop Augustine performed duties that he did not care for or that left him drained, Valerius’s wisdom to involve Augustine in ministries that corresponded with his strengths seems to be an important quality of a mentor.
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1
Servais Pinckaers, The Spirituality of Martyrdom to the Limits of Love
. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000). 135.
2
Edward Smither. Augustine as Mentor
. (Nashville, Tn: B&H Publishing, 2009). 3
Ibid., 4
Ibid.,
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