PHILOSOPHY - Augustine

Augustine was a Christian philosopher who lived in the fourth and fifth century AD on the fringes of the rapidly declining Roman Empire in the North African town of hippo he served as bishop for 35 years proving popular and inspirational to his largely uneducated and poor congregation in his last days a Germanic tribe known as the Vandals burnt hippo to the ground destroyed the legions made off with a town's young women but left Augustine's Cathedral and library entirely untouched out of respect for the elderly philosophers achievements he matters to us non-christians today because of what he criticized about Rome its values and its outlook and because Rome has so many things in common with a modern West especially the United States the Romans believed in two things in particular one earthly happiness they were on the whole an optimistic lot the builders of the pandu garv and the Coliseum had faith in technology in the power of humans to master themselves and in their ability to control nature and plot for their own happiness and satisfaction writers like Cicero and Plutarch had a degree of pride ambition and confidence in the future which with some revisions wouldn't be out of place in modern day Palo Alto or the pages of Wired the Romans were keen practitioners of what we would now adays call self-help training their audiences to greater success and effectiveness in their eyes the human-animal was something eminently open to being perfected to adjust social order for long periods the Romans trusted that their society was marked by justice giustizia people of ambition and intelligence could make it to the top the Army was trusted to be meritocratic the capacity to make money was held to reflect both practical ability and also a degree of inner virtue therefore showing off one's wealth was deemed honourable in a point of pride and fame was considered a wholly respectable ideal Augustine disagreed furiously with both of these assumptions in his masterpiece the City of God he dissected each of these two points that human life could be affected and societies were just in ways that continue to prove relevant to us today it was Augustine who came up with the idea of original sin he proposed that all humans not merely this or that unfortunate example were crooked because all of us are unwitting heirs to the sins of Adam our sinful nature gives rise to what Augustine called a libido domain and II a desire to dominate which is evident in a brutal blinkered merciless way we treat others in the world around us we cannot properly love for we are constantly undermined by our egoism and our pride our powers of reasoning and understanding of fragile in the extreme lust haunts our days and nights we fail to understand ourselves we chase phantoms with the set by anxieties Augustine concluded his assault by chiding all those philosophers who in his words have wished with amazing folly to be happy here on earth and to achieve bliss by their own efforts it might sound depressing but it may turn out to be a curious relief to be told that our lives are awry not by coincidence but by definition simply because we're human and because nothing human can ever be made entirely straight we are creatures fated to Intuit virtue in love while never quite being able to secure them for ourselves our relationships careers and countries are necessarily not as we'd want them to be it isn't anything specific we have done the odds are simply stacked against us from the start Augustine Ian's pessimism takes off some other pressure we might feel when we slowly come to terms with the imperfect nature of pretty much everything we do and our we shouldn't rage or feel that we've been persecuted or singled out for undue punishment it's simply the human condition the legacy of what we might as well even if we don't believe in Augustine's theology call original sin Romans had in their most ambitious moments thought themselves to be running a meritocracy a society where those who got to the top were deemed to have done so on the back of their own virtues after the Emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity the philosopher Eusebius even proposed that earthly power was God's instrument for establishing Christianity on so that the powerful in Rome were now not just privileged but also blessed and righteous in God's eyes what arrogant boastful and cruel claims responded Augustine there never was nor ever could be justice in Rome or indeed anywhere else on earth God didn't give good people wealth and power and nor did he necessarily condemn those who lacked them Augustine distinguished between what he called two cities the city of men and the City of God the latter was an ideal of the future a heavenly paradise whether good would finally dominate where power would be properly allied to justice and where virtue would reign but men could never build such a city alone and should never believe themselves capable of doing so they were condemned to dwell only in the city of men which was a pervasively flawed society where money could never accurately track virtue in Augustine's formulation true justice has no existence save in that Republic whose founder and ruler is Christ again it may sound bleak but it makes Augustine's philosophy extremely generous towards failure poverty and defeat our own and that of others it's not for humans to judge each other by outward markers of success from this analysis flows a lack of moral ISM and snobbery it's on duty to be skeptical about power and generous towards failure we don't need to be Christians to be comforted by both these points they are the religions universal gifts to political philosophy and human psychology they stand as permanent reminders of some of the dangers and cruelties of believing that life can be made perfect or the poverty and obscurity are reliable indicators of Vice in a city of men you

Channel: The School of Life

Views: 1,338,738

Rating: 4.8185167 out of 5

Keywords: mood, philosophy, life, wisdom, interest, lecture, augustine, SOL, alain de botton, relationships, the school of life, mad adam films, love, London, think, TSOL, curriculum, self, wonder, thought, secular, improvement, big questions, talk, education, sermon, school

Id: hBAxUBeVfsk

Length: 6min 25sec (385 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 27 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/timerever]

The videos from The School of Life are a lightweight introduction to philosophy targeted at the average Joe, as such they have to skip most details and make broad simplifications so the audience can engage. Hopefully they'll take a liking to philosophy and then discover/learn more by themselves.

[u/ParkerAdderson]

I guess I'm not the audience for this kind of video, but it fell a little flat for me:

1) Some of the arguments about connections between the west and rome were incredibly thin. How is Cicero's view of republican virtue appropriate for palo alto? Is the point of his rhetorical writing to get rich and be famous? Or serve your city? And surely getting rich in a roman economy isn't necessarily morally equivalent to getting rich (or maintaining your family's wealth) in contemporary capitalism.

2) both the reconstruction of Augustine's 'original sin' and the 'city of god' arguments seem to me to be vulgar christian opinions (maybe not in his day but more recently) rather than true to Augustine's argument. Missing, in particular, I thought was his particular theodicy, that is, sin as a privation of God, rather than 'evil' being something real and determinate. Would a closer reading have led to the same conclusions drawn in the video? I'm not sure.

3) Anybody else think he made Augustine sound like Richard Rorty? Change 'original sin' to 'contingency' and you're basically there. Why bother imagining what a long-dead bishop would say to critique the west (especially while repeatedly telling us to set aside his FAITH) when there are available ideas in our own context that make similar points?