"Confessions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Augustine of Hippo St)

was no mere eclectic. The center of his "system" is in the Holy
Scriptures, as they ordered and moved his heart and mind. It was
in Scripture that, first and last, Augustine found the focus of
his religious authority.

At the same time, it was this essentially conservative genius
who recast the patristic tradition into the new pattern by which
European Christianity would be largely shaped and who, with
relatively little interest in historical detail, wrought out the
first comprehensive "philosophy of history." Augustine regarded
himself as much less an innovator than a summator. He was less a
reformer of the Church than the defender of the Church's faith.
His own self-chosen project was to save Christianity from the
disruption of heresy and the calumnies of the pagans, and, above
everything else, to renew and exalt the faithful hearing of the
gospel of man's utter need and God's abundant grace. But the
unforeseen result of this enterprise was to furnish the motifs of
the Church's piety and doctrine for the next thousand years and
more. Wherever one touches the Middle Ages, he finds the marks of
Augustine's influence, powerful and pervasive -- even Aquinas is
more of an Augustinian at heart than a "proper" Aristotelian. In
the Protestant Reformation, the evangelical elements in
Augustine's thought were appealed to in condemnation of the
corruptions of popular Catholicism -- yet even those corruptions
had a certain right of appeal to some of the non-evangelical
aspects of Augustine's thought and life. And, still today, in the
important theological revival of our own time, the influence of
Augustine is obviously one of the most potent and productive
impulses at work.

A succinct characterization of Augustine is impossible, not
only because his thought is so extraordinarily complex and his
expository method so incurably digressive, but also because
throughout his entire career there were lively tensions and
massive prejudices in his heart and head. His doctrine of God
holds the Plotinian notions of divine unity and remotion in
tension with the Biblical emphasis upon the sovereign God's active
involvement in creation and redemption. For all his devotion to
Jesus Christ, this theology was never adequately Christocentric,
and this reflects itself in many ways in his practical conception
of the Christian life. He did not invent the doctrines of
original sin and seminal transmission of guilt but he did set them
as cornerstones in his "system," matching them with a doctrine of
infant baptism which cancels, ex opere operato, birth sin and
hereditary guilt. He never wearied of celebrating God's abundant
mercy and grace -- but he was also fully persuaded that the vast
majority of mankind are condemned to a wholly just and appalling
damnation. He never denied the reality of human freedom and never
allowed the excuse of human irresponsibility before God -- but
against all detractors of the primacy of God's grace, he