Confessions And Enchiridion
contributor: Eric Lease Morgan (Infomotions, Inc.)
creator: Augustine
date: 0000-00-00
extent: 988877
format: text/plain
language: en
publisher: Wiretap Electronic Text Archive
rights: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/
source: confess.txt
subject: god
subject: man
subject: public
subject: domain
subject: chalcedonian
subject: chalcedon
subject: augustine
subject: confessions
subject: enchiridion
subject: western
subject: philosophy
type: text
local mirror: augustine-confessions-276.txt
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sort title: Confessions And Enchiridion
full text: CONFESSIONS and ENCHIRIDION by SAINT AUGUSTINE Digitized by Harry Plantinga <planting@cs.pitt.edu> Originally: confessions+enchiridion1.0.txt on kuyper.cs.pitt.edu Scanned from an uncopyrighted 1955 Westminster Press edition, Vol. VII of the Library of Christian Classics, printed in the United States. This text is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN, posted to Wiretap 7/94. AUGUSTINE: CONFESSIONS & ENCHIRIDION Newly translated and edited by ALBERT C. OUTLER, Ph.D., D.D. Professor of Theology Perkins School of Theology Southern Methodist University Dallas, Texas First published MCMLV Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 55-5021 Introduction LIKE A COLOSSUS BESTRIDING TWO WORLDS, Augustine stands as the last patristic and the first medieval father of Western Christianity. He gathered together and conserved all the main motifs of Latin Christianity from Tertullian to Ambrose; he appropriated the heritage of Nicene orthodoxy; he was a Chalcedonian before Chalcedon -- and he drew all this into an unsystematic synthesis which is still our best mirror of the heart and mind of the Christian community in the Roman Empire. More than this, he freely received and deliberately reconsecrated the religious philosophy of the Greco-Roman world to a new apologetic use in maintaining the intelligibility of the Christian proclamation. Yet, even in his role as summator of tradition, he 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 t…