Life Tips & Miscellaneous Travel , History , Sports and Arts Navigation of this blog Zen, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, and Life Tips
Summary
From NHK Learning Basics, “Reading the Core of Christianity. In the previous article, I discussed the New Testament. This time, I will discuss the “Augustine” Confession.
who laid the foundation for Christian teaching.
In this article, I will discuss Augustine (354-430), a representative of the Christians who lived their lives as “travelers,” which has appeared as a keyword up to the aforementioned. Augustine lived in the Roman Empire in late antiquity and became one of the Church Fathers who created the foundation of Christian teaching. He is the man who laid the foundation for the theological and philosophical direction of the western boundaries (Catholicism and Protestantism), and he continues to be a man of great influence to this day.
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), one of the leading philosophers of the 20th century, was greatly influenced by Augustine’s theory of time in his major work, “Being and Time. Philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-75), who was also a student of Heidegger, wrote her doctoral dissertation entitled “Augustine’s Concept of Love.
Here, we will discuss Augustine’s autobiographical work, “The Confessions. Augustine’s “Confessions” is the original autobiographical literature, and in the history of philosophy as a whole, there are not many books that develop such profound philosophical ideas in an autobiographical manner.
Travelers in space, travelers in spirit
Augustine was born in the city of Tagaste in what is now Algeria. Since the Roman Empire at that time ruled the whole Mediterranean. North Africa, including present-day Algeria and Tunisia, was part of that territory, and in the category of the time, he could be said to have come from a part of Europe.
Augustine was a man of great vitality, and from childhood he had a desire to succeed in the center of the empire from the frontier of the Roman Empire where he was born, and after he had learned to live, he went to Madaura, a larger city, and then to Carthage, the largest city in North Africa. From there, he traveled to Rome, went to Milan to be baptized, and returned to Africa to live out his life as a Christian leader. He was literally a traveler.
Another aspect is that he was a traveler in the sense that he was a spiritual itinerant, and Augustine was not a Christian from the beginning; he was preoccupied with love and career in his youth and joined other religions, but after several turning points, he converted to Christianity. The Confessions tells the story of his spiritual journey, superimposed on the geographical journey described earlier.
The Confessions is the greatest classic for Christians and remains to this day the best manual for living the Christian life. At the same time, the book can be enjoyed like a great work of literature.
Beginning of the journey
The first part is “Great is Thy power, O Lord. Great is Thy power, and Thy wisdom is immeasurable…. Great is Thy power and immeasurable is Thy wisdom…. Who stirs us to rejoice and to praise, that is You. You have created us for Yourself. Therefore our hearts cannot rest until they rest in You.
As the introduction suggests, the book is written in the style of a retrospective of one’s own life, as if one were talking to a piece of paper. The first sentence is a praise of paper.
The next line, “You made us for yourself,” is a well-known expression. The first verse, “You have made us for Yourself,” is a famous expression, which means that no amount of worldly wealth or fame can bring us peace. Only when we reach paper can we find true contentment. Augustine begins his work by declaring that he will look back on his own life’s journey to God from this perspective.
He also quotes the biblical phrase “Great is Thy kingdom, O Lord! Great is the Lord, and truly He is to be praised. is a quote from the Old Testament book of Psalms.
The truth that can only be seen through reconstruction.
Next, he describes his childhood. This is the starting point of the journey, but Augustine writes that he “does not know” the starting point.
Indeed, Lord, I only want to say this: I do not know where I came into the world. I do not know whence I came into the world. …From this earthly father, in this mother, You created me in time. But I remember nothing of my earthquakes.”
We do not know the starting point of our journey. In other words, I was not born because I wanted to be. I existed in this world before I knew it, and I have no choice but to live my life in a way that takes care of it.
Augustine wrote a book called “The Theory of Free Will. In it, he states that free will, which determines what one chooses to do, is extremely fundamental to human beings. But then, it is not the case that one can decide one’s life entirely by free will. This is what he describes in his “Confession. Life, from its starting point, must begin in the manner in which we find ourselves placed in this world.
It goes on to say
‘Now this human milk, full of comfort, has taken care of me, but it is not my mother nor my nanny who has filled her breasts. For Yourself, through them, You have given me the sustenance of infants, according to Your provision, according to the riches with which You have endowed even the lowest creature.”
It was not a mother or a nanny who gave him milk, but God. and the events of the past, and it can be said that he is speaking the truth by calmly capturing and reconstructing the essence of these events later, after a period of time has passed.
What do I have to love and pull through?
As a boy, Augustine had begun learning the art of oratory at the behest of his parents. In ancient times, the best way for those who could not attain high social status to rise in society was to acquire the power of oratory, which enabled them to defeat their opponents in court or in parliament.
Augustine’s desire for worldly success grew stronger as he began to learn the art of oratory, and looking back on those days, he realized that he had fallen into a way of life in which honor and career were the most important things, and that this had blinded him to the possibility of something more important than honor and career in the world. He was in a “dark state of mind” that blocked his eyes from seeing that there could be something more important than honor and success in this world, and thus he was estranged from God.
As a young man, Augustine came to Carthage, the largest city in Africa, to further his studies.
‘I was not yet in love, but I was in love with love. And I hated myself for not feeling so much scarcity, but that was because scarcity was lurking deep inside. I was in love, but I was looking around for what to be in love with, and I hated the path that was peaceful and without traps. It was because, O God, in the innermost recesses of my heart, I hungered for Yourself, the food within, and yet through that hunger I did not feel hungry and did not aspire to the food of immortality.”
Augustine was not thinking only of love, but also of career, friends, fame, and various other things, from which he had a certain amount of satisfaction, but which he could not fully satisfy, and which, because he had a certain amount of satisfaction, he could not fully satisfy. But because he had obtained a certain amount of satisfaction from these things, it became clear to him that these things could not satisfy his empty heart. Augustine’s final destination is love for “God. In other words, Augustine’s journey is an itinerary of love.
But until he arrived there, he was deficient in himself. But until he got there, he was deficient, because he did not even realize that he was hungry for the inner plant, You yourself. Here, too, is a fact that comes into view through retrospection, or reconstruction, from the point of view after one’s conversion to Christianity.
Precious Encounters in Youth
As a young man, Augustine was given a variety of important encounters that would define his life. The first was the famous “Hortensius experience,” in which he read Cicero’s book “Hortensius.
He says, “This book has changed my mind. It has turned my prayer, O Lord, toward Youself, and made my desires and hopes into something else. Suddenly all vain hopes became absurd, and with an incredibly eager heart I began to get up and return to You, seeking the wisdom of immortality. … The love of wisdom is called philosophia in Greek, and that book set me ablaze with the fire of this love of wisdom. … The only thing that made me feel so inflamed was that I could not find the name of Christ in it.
Augustine read this book because Cicero was a great orator, and while he was reading Cicero’s books to train himself for worldly success, he came across this book, subtitled “Philosophy. I began to read it, and I felt a longing to pursue immortal wisdom beyond worldly success.
However, he also stated that he was not completely satisfied because he could not find the name of Christ.
The importance of being “the little guy.”
Augustine then decided, “Then I will read the Bible. However, when he came into contact with the Bible, he was not satisfied with its humble style and was disappointed.
He then went on a journey to God, “converting” through the process of slowly becoming able to read a book called the Bible.
Furthermore, he states that the prerequisite for being able to read the Bible is to be “small,” that is, to have a “margin” or “room” in one’s heart to accept “God,” to humbly and honestly accept one’s weaknesses and limitations, and to rely on something beyond oneself.
This would be, in the words of Jesus, “You must become like an infant to enter the Kingdom of God.
Guidance through unfortunate events
Up to this point, Augustine had an encounter with philosophy, an encounter with the Bible, and an encounter with a good friend and a parting of ways. After the Hortensian and biblical experiences mentioned earlier, he entered Manichaeism, a religion founded by Mani under the influence of Christianity and Zoroastrianism, which held the worldview that not only a “good God” but also an “evil God” existed.
From his youth, Augustine had been troubled by the problem of evil, wondering why the world was so full of “evil,” “misery,” and “suffering. To him, Manichaeism seemed to offer a rational explanation for many things in the world, including evil.
So Augustine dragged his childhood friend and close friend with whom he had studied oratory into Manichaeism.
But what then?” he said, “You, who are both the God of vengeance and the fountain of mercy, pursued them from behind as they fled, and in a mysterious way caused them to turn toward you. In other words, You have taken a friend from the world.
The friend died suddenly of illness, and in the midst of a fever, he was baptized into Christianity and died embracing his faith. Augustine falls into a grief so very deep that it is difficult to recover. But now that I am writing the “Confessions,” I am reminded that the death of a friend who believed in Manichaeism, who was taken away from him, and who became a Christian at the same time, was a great step in God’s direction to turn him to Christianity.
This is not to justify that his friend’s death was a good thing, but rather that God’s guidance comes in many ways that go beyond the human mind, not only through a chain of happy events, but also through unfortunate ones. The journey to God is such a journey.
I become a mystery to myself.
The story goes on to say that the death of his friend brought Augustine’s psyche to a crisis point, and now everything that reminded him of his friend was painful.
Now I have become a great mystery to myself. I asked my soul, “Why are you so sad? I asked my soul, “Why are you so sad? Why do you make me suffer so much? … And I was still in an unhappy place where I could neither be there nor escape from it.
I become a great mystery to myself. The word translated as “mystery” is quaestio, a Latin word, which is the root of the English word question, meaning “problem” or “question. What had previously been two people, myself and my friend, were one, but with the loss of that half, I had no idea who I was at all. Also, the last unhappy place was that when you are placed in some kind of deep sorrow, even if you physically move somewhere, you will not be able to get away from yourself in the end, because you will be followed by yourself. The feeling is that you have become an unhappy place for yourself.
Coincidence” and “inevitability” overlap
Augustine then left Carthage for Rome, where he met Ambrosius, a renowned Christian leader, who gave him a clue to read the entire Bible.
Augustine describes his decisive encounter with Paul’s letters in the New Testament, saying that he was inspired by the voice of a strange boy or girl, took a book that happened to be there, read it, and was so deeply moved by what was written in it that he was definitively led back to God.
What is being described here is the subtle relationship between the accidental and the providential. Here, the accidental nature of the book, and the providential guidance of God, are combined like two sides of the same coin to produce the event of conversion.
Even in our daily lives, when we are doing our best to research something, we happen to flip through an unrelated book by chance as a way of taking a break. It happens that a book you picked up casually at a bookstore contains something directly related to a problem you have been pondering for a long time.
It is sometimes a very coincidental encounter that has a certain inevitability to it, as if the problem I was thinking about would never have been solved without this encounter, and that I really needed to come across these words at some point in time.
In this way, “coincidence” and “necessity” are not opposites, but rather overlap each other like the two sides of a situation. I connect this to Augustine’s Hortensian experience: I had read the Bible before, but at some point it began to enter my mind with an unprecedented intensity. Or it could be said that I was able to read the Bible because my arrogant belief that I was something big had gradually been shattered and I had become something small.
What it means to confess about life
Having thus retraced his steps, Augustine analyzes not his past but his present. In Book X of his “Confessions,” he asks where the meaning of writing this book lies in the first place.
If there is an omniscient and omnipotent God, He must be able to see beyond the distinctions between past, present, and future, and know everything about each person’s life, so what is the point of confessing one’s life?
Life is a “never-ending ordeal.
Augustine’s life was a journey from the countryside of North Africa, out to Rome and Milan, and back home again. It was also a spiritual journey, with ambitions to rise in the world and become a Manichaean, but ultimately arriving at the Christian God.
His journey did not end there. And not only in one but in a double sense. In other words, there is a fear that adversity may someday come in the midst of good circumstances, and the joys of good circumstances will someday perish.
In other words, life is a “never-ending ordeal.
In the next article, I will discuss Christianity and modernity.
コメント