Duran week 10 journal reading Augustine and the controversy against Pelagians

While I was reading the controversy against the Pelagians, I was thinking in a boxing fight, or wrestling, or UFC fight, where Augustine and Pelagius were the fighters. Serious, I could imagine the movie Rocky because both looks were very popular, famous theologians and every body knows them. As Harmless said, “the two men shared a wide network of aristocratic friends” (p. 378).  Both of them had different origin, Augustine belonged to the low class and Pelagius was part of the Aristocracy. Augustine was a clergy and Pelagius was a lay; in spited of all these, bot of them were contemporaries and very popular, both of them were excellent philosopher and theologians and both were against the Manichest, and Donatists. All the things around them look that both could be good friends and be the heroes of that time, but not. As two boxing fighters, they were growing separated and arrived to the moment when they had to fight between themselves and see who is the best! 

Also, while I was reading more deeply about Pelagius and his doctrine I began to compare him with the tele-preachers of this twenty first century or with Norman Vincent Peale the father of the positive thinking, because he was offering a gospel where the men could decide exactly all that they want, or the future is in their hands, or they have the capacity to live without sin, etc. etc. Putting aside the historical data of the controversy against the Pelagians, I want to go directly to the topic I chose about the controversies between Augustine against Pelagius. Harmless said that: “Augustine wrote a detailed commentary, On the Deeds of Pelagius (De gestis Pelagii) trying to excuse his Palestinian colleagues and to analyze what he perceived as Pelagius’s evasiveness and deceptions” (pp.379-380).  

Pelagius wrote his treatise On Nature and Augustine wrote his treatise On Nature and Grace, and there, Augustine describing the Pelagians theology, Augustine talked about the Pelagian teaching about the “sinlessness must exist, at least as a rethorical possibility” (p. 400). Clearly Augustine wrote: “It is impossible for a human being to be without sin” (p. 400). The second point about Pelagius here is: “given his moral rigorism, was outraged by those who blamed the sin of Adam for human sinfulness. He insisted that we do not inherit original sin; we imitate the original sinners” (p. 401). Augustine talking about the sin of Adam said: “ Our nature has been weakened and changed through sin” (p. 402) Augustine also expanded this point talking against the Adam descendants as weaker as him. The last point here was “Pelagius argued for the possibility of salvation beyond the borders (whether temporal or geographical) of Christianity” (p. 402). Augustine argued that God in his justice will judge them according to their facts, “by living rightly, even though it has not been tinged with any faith in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ” (p. 402).

DuranCesar/Augustine Class/Reading Journal Week 8 “ Augustine and the Trinity”.

Augustine used any of analogies to try to explain the Trinity. I have chosen one of these analogies trying to identify how Augustine was viewing the Trinity. Augustine lived times with a lot of difficulties and theological changes. The theological environment of those times was living the results of the Arian controversy, the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople and Cappadocians. The teaching about Trinity had been one of theological controversies, the church had been divided and Augustine had to defend the Catholic faith; I said in that way because the church had been divided for the Donatists. So Augustine stood as one of the defenders of the Catholic faith; also, today many could call him the defender of the Christian faith.

I am Christian and I belief in the teaching of the Trinity. We are a monotheist church and we belief in one God: one savior that is Jesus Christ, and one Holy Spirit, the three of them are the Only One truly God. So we belief in the trinity, we have the God Father, His son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, that are one in essence. However, I think, this topic of the Trinity is one of the most controversial themes of the Christian faith, today and in the past. In the Augustine times there were a lot of problems around this topic because the Arian ideas were strong in that time. As Harmless said: “In the 350s, there evolved various competing theologies that were not Arian, but were anti-Nicene. Some anti-Nicene bishops were willing to speak of Christ as God, but in some lesser, derived sense, and they envisioned an unequal hierarchy within the God-head” (p. 276). The Nicene Creed supported the Trinity belief, and the looser were the Arians. So Augustine had to be a strong defender of the Trinity.

Augustine wrote a lot about Trinity: sermons, and his book “On the Trinity”. He wrote many analogies trying to explain the Trinity. He recognized that any of his analogies were very weak and are not a strong support for the Trinity teaching. I chose the analogy of: Mind, Knowledge and Love because Augustine mixed these three concepts very well. As Harmless said, the first time you read this analogy you think that Augustine is playing with words (p. 298), but that he is doing is giving support to his idea of Trinity.

Augustine used an analogy of mind, knowledge and love to talk about Trinity, Augustine wrote about these three elements: “When the mind knows itself and loves itself, a trinity remains: the mind, love, and knowledge. And there is not confusion through any commingling, though each is a substance in itself and all are found mutually in all… all are one” (p. 299). After this, Augustine wrote about how these concepts are mixed and inter-related themselves, each one with each other. “But they are mutually in each other in such a way that the mind that loves is in the love, and the love is in the knowledge of the one that loves, and knowledge is in the mind that knows” (p. 299). Also, Augustine finish talking about this analogy saying: “These three, therefore, are in a marvelous way inseparable from one another, and yet each of them is a substance, and all together are one substance or essence, while the terms themselves express a mutual relationship” (p. 299).  

I enjoyed this analogy because Augustine mixed and inter-related these three elements in a way where we can see the same concept back of the concept of the Trinity, and we can say that the mind, love and knowledge show what the Trinity is. Harmless said it very well: “Namely, if each is the same substance, equal to each of the others, distinct (but not different) from one another, mutually inter-related, mutually indwelling, and united (but without any mixture)” (p. 288). Never I thought that Augustine could have written about this topic. Personally, I believe that this topic has to be accepted by faith because the support that for us is strong, this support could be weak for others, so, it's a topic that always will create conflicts, however it has to be accepted by faith.