Christianity Flashcards
What was the context of St. Augustine’s life before he converted to really strict Christianity?
His parents violently disagreed on religious issues, eventually forcing Augustine to side with his mother.
He was a teacher of rhetoric for quite a while before he got sick of heaping praise on undeserving emperors.
Prior to converting to Christianity, he was a Manichean.
He lived with a common-law wife for 15 years and had a son with her. He felt pressured to contract an arranged marriage but indulged in a brief period of promiscuity after breaking up, followed by the death of his mother and son.
Both his father and his best friend had already died by this time.
He also lived in a Roman Empire that was on the brink of collapse.
According to Augustine, human beings are what?
incomplete souls who need to form a close relationship with God to find meaning and fulfillment
What was St. Augustine’s most famous book? What type of text is it?
His most famous book, The Confessions, is addressed to God in the form of a long prayer.
What is The Confessions about?
It is largely the story of Augustine’s early attempts to achieve happiness, without turning to the Christian God. The futility of these attempts was supposed to serve as an illustration of why such attempts are always futile.
Plato would have said this was a very unjust society in which happiness was not possible - St.A was trying to find happiness in this place
Decided fame was not the path to happiness
Love (of another person) was also not the way
Although his goal was theological, St. Augustine made what other kinds of observations in The Confessions?
he made many acute observations about psychological topics such as memory and human agency
Essentially an autobiography - very different from any writings of his era - very much a psychological work (about his thoughts, feelings, inner world) in a very honest way
What did St. Augustine think about MA’s concept of the self?
Augustine was aware that people have a self (sometimes called a daemon in Marcus Aurelius), but thought it was a disruptive influence that takes people’s attention away from God. Rejection of the daemon was so total that the word “demon” is derived from it.
What was St. Augustine’s problem with Plato’s rationalism?
Augustine totally rejected the use of organized, systematic thought as a pathway to God.
In fact, he delighted in pointing out contradictions in Christian doctrine, and took these as proof that God cannot be encompassed by logic.
St.A valued faith over logic – to him, this proved that God was too complex to be understood by human minds (e.g., the concept of the Holy Trinity - God is divided but not divided)
How did St. Augustine perceive childhood mischief? What does he believe are the motives?
as abhorrent sins
A sin is something that turns attention away from God.
He stole pears even though there were better ones in his own garden.
Part of the motive was a yearning to imitate divine liberty.
Part of the motive was a perversion of friendship.
What did St. Augustine think about corporal punishment in school?
He recognizes that the ferocious punishments meted out in schools did not enhance learning.
However, even the relatively trivial transgressions being punished were abhorrent, and punishing them was therefore right.
What six other things did St. Augustine view as sinful acts? Why?
Sex distracts from God; that there is something of a political component to sex is illustrated by his sin of having sex in a church.
Worldly success leads to worry and is driven by a quest for glory. But what is glory if it is not derived from the glory of God?
Familial love and friendship are also sins unless they are done “in God.”
Earthbound virtue is futile without connection to God - not sins in themselves but cannot be done for recognition – must be done only to increase the glory of God (in the service of a better relationship with God)
Science can also be a temptation, one great enough to get the special name “the lust of the eyes”.
Self-respect is also a sin (recall his disdain for stoicism).
If one is able to abstain from sex, overeating, etc., in St. A’s opinion, the credit for this goes to whom?
the credit goes to God (this is not your own will)
What was St. A’s opinion on the mind-body problem?
how an immaterial God could create and control the material world
Material things are never perfect and God is perfect so God cannot be material
Even human beings seem to have a material part and immaterial part (mind, thoughts, etc) - the immaterial part of us has control over the material part
St.A’s conclusion was that God is all-powerful
solved the problem by looking within himself and being answered by God (who was immaterial, and therefore spoke to something immaterial in him).
What are psychology and philosophy’s answers to the mind-body (material/immaterial) problem?
Material monism
Interactionism
Psychophysical parallelism
Dual aspect monism
What is material monism?
- all we have is material and the rest is an illusion (e.g., neurons firing) - there is no self separate from the material world - experiences are nothing more than physical brain processes as we know them
(popular idea within psychology/science) but this does not seem intuitive (inner experience feels like a real, immaterial phenomena)
What is interactionism related to the mind/body problem? Who introduced this idea?
there are two different substances (mind and matter) and they interact in some way - there is a way for an immaterial entity to interact with a material entity, although it may not yet have been discovered in science
Descartes said that pineal gland did this (likely very wrong) but introduced the idea - this idea does not solve the problem though because its based on the premise that through will alone, humans rotated the gland by tiny amounts, controlling the direction of efferent energy. However, will alone does not produce any physical energy so this doesn’t really solve the problem
