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

vigorously insisted on both double predestination and irresistible
grace.

For all this the Catholic Church was fully justified in
giving Augustine his aptest title, Doctor Gratiae. The central
theme in all Augustine's writings is the sovereign God of grace
and the sovereign grace of God. Grace, for Augustine, is God's
freedom to act without any external necessity whatsoever -- to act
in love beyond human understanding or control; to act in creation,
judgment, and redemption; to give his Son freely as Mediator and
Redeemer; to endue the Church with the indwelling power and
guidance of the Holy Spirit; to shape the destinies of all
creation and the ends of the two human societies, the "city of
earth" and the "city of God." Grace is God's unmerited love and
favor, prevenient and occurrent. It touches man's inmost heart
and will. It guides and impels the pilgrimage of those called to
be faithful. It draws and raises the soul to repentance, faith,
and praise. It transforms the human will so that it is capable of
doing good. It relieves man's religious anxiety by forgiveness
and the gift of hope. It establishes the ground of Christian
humility by abolishing the ground of human pride. God's grace
became incarnate in Jesus Christ, and it remains immanent in the
Holy Spirit in the Church.

Augustine had no system -- but he did have a stable and
coherent Christian outlook. Moreover, he had an unwearied, ardent
concern: man's salvation from his hopeless plight, through the
gracious action of God's redeeming love. To understand and
interpret this was his one endeavor, and to this task he devoted
his entire genius.

He was, of course, by conscious intent and profession, a
Christian theologian, a pastor and teacher in the Christian
community. And yet it has come about that his contributions to
the larger heritage of Western civilization are hardly less
important than his services to the Christian Church. He was far
and away the best -- if not the very first -- psychologist in the
ancient world. His observations and descriptions of human motives
and emotions, his depth analyses of will and thought in their
interaction, and his exploration of the inner nature of the human
self -- these have established one of the main traditions in
European conceptions of human nature, even down to our own time.
Augustine is an essential source for both contemporary depth
psychology and existentialist philosophy. His view of the shape
and process of human history has been more influential than any
other single source in the development of the Western tradition
which regards political order as inextricably involved in moral
order. His conception of a societas as a community identified and
held together by its loyalties and love has become an integral
part of the general tradition of Christian social teaching and the