DuranCesar/Augustine
Class/Reading Journal Week 6 “Augustine anti Manichean”
I have chosen the theme of the
freedom of the will as one of the most important points of the Augustine’s
theology against the Manichees, because this point is one of the most important
elements of the Arminian, Wesleyan, and Calvinist theology; obviously, each one
with its own perspective and meaning.
The freedom of the will is
important in the Augustine’s theology against Manichees because they believed
that each person carries inside him or hers a battle between the good and bad,
or light and darkness (p. 202). “Manichees saw the task of
redemption as a slow, painstaking recovery of the tiny tidbits of divine lights
trapped in matter” (p.203), so matter and flesh are bad, sin, evil, something
opposed to God. The creation of man and this world was a result of an emanation
of God that was captured by the kingdom of the darkness. So the material and
the man are evil for the way they were created. This means that man is evil in
himself.
Augustine teaches that God is not
the cause of the first kind of evil; each person is the author of the evil
because they do the things opposed to God voluntarily (p.221). Here is where
the Augustine meaning of the freedom of will is important against the Manichaeism,
because for Manicheans the man is evil in his own creation, and for Augustine
“Evils consists in the will’s turning away from the changeless good that God is
and in its turning to goods that are changeable. Since this turning from one
thing to another is not done from necessity, but freely” (p. 222). Augustine also says: “If this movement,
namely, the turning away of the will from the Lord, is unquestionably sinful,
we cannot say that God is the cause of the sin” (p. 222).
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