Of all the fathers of the church, St. Augustine was the most admired and the most influential during the Middle Ages. He was well suited by background and experience to conduct a fundamental examination of the relationship of the Christian experience to classical culture. Augustine was an outsider — a native North African whose family was not Roman but Berber (today regarded as "Arabs"). ... Not born to the imperial power elite, he could disassociate himself from the empire and its destiny.
Augustine was enormously learned. He was a genius — an intellectual giant — and he received a thorough classical education. He was not much of a linguist (his Greek was poor, and he never learned Hebrew) but he was a master of Latin rhetoric; certain passages in The City of God equal the writings of Cicero in complexity and eloquence.
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Norman Cantor, in The Civilization of the Middle Ages (1993), p. 74.Augustine of Hippo
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There would be no end to quotations that bring out the unequalled influence of Augustine’s thought and work on the Latin West. « No work by a Christian author in the Latin tongue was to stir such great admiration and inquietude and enjoy such glory » (Dominique de Courcelles, Augustin ou le génie de l’Europe). To the point that the author of this passage, while aware that he is speaking, as he says, « of a Christian Berber », nevertheless gives his book the title Augustine or the genius of Europe. And the genius was a Numidian of the Roman Empire. What a decanting of wisdom from the south to the north of the Mediterranean!
Augustine of Hippo
As a Theologian, I learned from my master, St. Augustine, a Berber, that all nations are necessarily a mixture, which it is not impossible for us to disentangle, of the City of Good and the City of Evil.
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine, the North African of Berber descent, is today the spiritual father of multitudes who are remote indeed from him racially, politically, and culturally.
Augustine of Hippo
In the history of thought and civilization, Saint Augustine appears to me to be the first thinker who brought into prominence and undertook an analysis of the philosophical and psychological concepts of person and personality. These ideas, so vital to contemporary man, shape not only Augustine's own doctrine on God but also his philosophy of man: man as an individual, man as a member of societies and institutions -- the family, the city, the state and the church.
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine, the father of theologians, was walking on the ocean shore and pondering over the truth, "three distinct persons, not separate, but distinct; and yet but one God;" and he came upon a little boy that was playing with a colored sea- shell, scooping a hole in the sand, and then going down to the waves and getting his shell full of water and putting it into the hole. Augustine said, "What are you doing, my little fellow? " The boy replied, "I am going to pour the sea into that hole." "Ah," said Augustine, "that is what I have been attempting. Standing at the ocean of infinity, I have attempted to grasp it with my finite mind."
Joseph (reverend) Dare
Augustine of Hippo
Augustus
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