He impacted many Christians faith and provided perspective. Augustine helped Christianity by helping the Church by finding answers to questions that could have damaged the Church if they went unanswered. He explained to the Church original sin, the Trinity, and clarified the concept of predestination. Church theologians argued many foundations of the church, Augustine of Hippo helped solve many problems. His works and ideas are still discussed today and have changed the Churches view on a lot of theological issues.
Many of the sins he writes about were scandalous for the time, what were his motives for confessing them through a book? Through the mode of narration, language and form its possible to abstract the importance of confession to Augustine. Augustine addresses God in his writing, making the novel itself akin to a confession in church. In the opening passage Augustine establishes the rhetorical mode of narration he will use throughout the whole text. By quoting a psalm, “Grant me Lord to know and understand” (Augustine, 3) on the faith one must have in God, Augustine establishes himself with a knowledge base to better communicate that he is well versed in scripture and that his musings in the narrative have their basis in the Holy Book.
Before meeting Lady Continence, Augustine feels torn “between [the lust] against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh”; he wants to harmonize his feelings so he can “become [Y] our soldier” (VIII.11), who is not “bound to the earth… afraid of being rid of all my burdens” (VIII.11). Augustine feels guilty for being between a righteous life with God and an imperfect life with his secular desires, because he has acknowledged that a better life exists than he is living. However, he has not been able to make the full jump to being right with God. As a result of his internal dissonance, Augustine’s guilt manifests in a physically as Lady Continence. She appears to Augustine as “serene and cheerful without coquetry”, and tells Augustine to join the others who have already relinquished their earthly desires: “Cast yourself upon him, do not be afraid… Make the leap without anxiety; he will catch you and heal you” (VIII.27).
This claim prompted Augustine to write The City of God in 413 CE. In his book, Augustine explained his doctrine of two cities: one earthly and one heavenly. He described the four essential
We can see the struggles and the conflictions he faces throughout his life in the Confessions. Augustine faces many decisions in his life which lead to him feeling grief or sorrow about the decisions he makes. This allows the reader to relate to Augustine because many people have felt the same way before about their own life. The emotions that Augustine feels and the struggle he has with his belief in God and the Christian belief are very relatable to many people. I mean in today society many people struggle with their own standing with the Christian
This was the first dilemma that Augustine had to face. God is the ultimate being and is Infinite. Language is a human institution and it deals with finite things. That is why rhetoric cannot be used in the concept of God. Augustine’s response to this dilemma was to introduce or to develop such rhetoric that could be used in explaining the concept of God.
Petri tells us that, when St. Thomas was commenting on Augustine’s position that man is in the image of God but woman is in the image of man, he agrees, but only in a secondary sense. he says; “The Image of God in its principle signification, namely the intellectual nature, is found both in man and woman. According to the
For instance, in 404 C.E., Augustine records, “Most, if not very many in our day, who though not denying the Holy Scriptures, do not believe in endless torments” (Works of Augustine). Basil the Great affirms, “The mass of men (Christians) say there is to be an end to punishment and to those who are punished” (Basil the Great). Gregory of Nyssa, an influential Bishop of the fourth century who was later canonized a saint, played a significant role in the development and perceived necessity of core Christian doctrines such as the Trinity. Despite his influence on expanding the declared essentials of Christianity, Gregory never advocated for belief in eternal torment in the afterlife; instead, he continued the overwhelmingly majority theology of advocating for free will and purgatorial cleansing, for everyone, either in this life or the
. with the very ending of the sentence, it was as though a light of utter confidence shone in all my heart, and all the darkness of uncertainty vanished away” (Puchner et al. 1194). It is this author’s stance that, in that moment, Augustine knew what path he needed to then take in
St. Gregory became the Father of the First Armenian Church, and the king asked him to baptize his child and the rest of the people who converted to Christianity. This conversion was a unity of the nation to boost the ethnic identity between the two superpowers, the Roman Empire and the Persian Empire. The same year Armenia adopted Christianity, the Mother Church of Etchmiadzin, which is the country's spiritual capital, was built. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Armenian Apostolic Church experienced multiple difficulties that caused the church to shrink. While the Ottoman Empire was in rule, the members of the church were assassinated by the Turks, causing the numbers of the church to decrease drastically.