IR 110, Mid-Term Çalışması: St. Augustine

the conditions that gave birth to augustine's thinking involve, at the very core, the death of christ. we see this in two parts, first, he was born into a world which was growing more and more disappointed each day by the fact that christ did not come back and bring the rule of god to the world. and this resulted in the second reason why the death of christ is so significant to augustine's way of thinking; he firmly believed that nothing else in this world would bring people to or away from salvation except the reappearance of christ and no event other than the death of him was significant. he believed that the world, as god created, was complete with everything in its right place, however, human beings had the capability of disobedience. to augustine, god had two attitudes towards his creations when such disobedience took place; disappointment, and forgiveness. if we do obey him however, we will live in the city of god, if we don't, if we act on our pride, in other words, if we commit the original sin, we will live in the city of earth. in this life; god has created two intermediaries to counteract the two effects of sin: church to mitigate the alienation of man to god, the civil government to negate the alienation of man to man. and what's even more shocking is that... augustine thinks this is it. vast majority of the people will never get to live in the city of god, they will continue to wallow in their sinful and wicked lives and nothing can be done to remedy that in a short period of time and the civil order had to remain here. but why did augustine think like this? what was the difference that made plato think that a hierarchical civil order was in the nature of human beings, that made aristotle think that belonging to a civil order, a poltical body was the core of humanity while causing augustine to think that the civil order was a divine concept instigated to remedy the sins of the irrevocably wicked human beings? the answer is simple; augustine thought that the original sin had caused the human beings to lose their nature. he believed that this city might achieve order, but it will never be like the order in the city of god.