Patristic/Medieval
Augustine
354–430
“Those causes which are called fortuitous are not a mere name for the absence of causes, but are only latent.”
Augustine of Hippo was a North African bishop whose path from rhetoric and philosophy into the Church shaped Latin Christian thought for centuries. The traces a restless will until it rests in God. The divides human history by two loves, of self and of God, intermingled until the end of time. Grace does the decisive work. Original sin and the pilgrimage of the faithful became the terms in which the West argued about freedom, the earthly city, and the soul.
In the Conversation
57 of the Great Ideas
Ethics
Justice
Without God, there is no true justice. Earthly kingdoms without divine order are 'but large robber bands.'
Good and Evil
Evil is not a thing but a privation: the corruption or absence of good.
Virtue and Vice
True virtue is rightly ordered love: faith, hope, and charity above the classical cardinal virtues.
Happiness
Our hearts are restless until they rest in God; true happiness is enjoyment of the eternal.
Love
Two loves have built two cities: the love of self unto contempt of God, and the love of God unto contempt of self.
Desire
Disordered desire is the root of sin; the soul finds rest only when its loves are rightly ordered toward God.
Punishment
Sin deserves suffering, and God's eternal punishment is no cruelty but the unflinching consequence of a will that chose against the Good.
Honor
The Romans' love of glory was real virtue — but it was pride, and pride is the root of all sin.
Habit
Habit reveals that the will is divided against itself — and no training program can heal that division without grace.
Custom and Convention
Human customs are local and shifting, but divine law is eternal; custom becomes sinful when it contradicts God's order.
Politics
Liberty
Free will is real but fallen. True liberty is liberation from sin by divine grace.
Government
Earthly government is a remedy for sin: a necessary restraint on fallen human nature.
War and Peace
War is a consequence of sin. Peace is the true desire of every heart, even those who wage war.
State
The earthly city is ordered by love of self; the city of God by love of God. No earthly state achieves true justice.
Family
The household is the school of virtue and the smallest unit of the City of God's earthly realization — but it is also marked by sin.
Citizen
Every person belongs to one of two cities defined by love, not law; citizenship in the earthly city is real but provisional.
Slavery
Slavery is not natural but penal: a consequence of sin imposed by the just order of God.
Theology & Metaphysics
God
God is Being itself, and the restless heart of every creature seeks its rest in Him.
Soul
The soul is the seat of memory, will, and understanding, and the image of the Trinity within.
Being
God alone truly is ('I AM WHO AM'), and all other beings exist by participating in his being.
Cause
Creation is a unique kind of causality — not the rearrangement of existing matter but the giving of being itself from nothing.
Time
Time exists only in the mind: as memory of the past, attention to the present, and expectation of the future.
Religion
Faith is a gift of grace, not the product of reason; the City of God pilgrimages through the earthly city until the end of time.
Immortality
Each soul is created by God for one body and faces divine judgment after death, destined for the City of God or the city of the damned.
Sin
Pride is the root of all sin; the will turned from God toward itself generates the disorder from which every particular transgression flows, and only grace can heal what nature cannot.
Theology
Faith seeks understanding: reason serves theology, but revelation provides what reason alone cannot reach.
Prophecy
The Hebrew prophets spoke by divine inspiration, foretelling Christ and the destiny of the City of God; pagan oracles were demons.
Metaphysics
Chance
What men call chance is only the hidden face of divine providence; nothing happens at random in God's world.
Change
Change is intelligible only to a creature who lives in time, and time itself is a creation — God neither changes nor endures.
Form
The Forms are the eternal exemplars in the divine mind, according to which God creates and by which creatures are intelligible.
Necessity and Contingency
God foreknows all things necessarily, yet human wills remain genuinely contingent.
One and Many
God is one simple substance in three persons, and creation is a many held in being by the One.
World
God created the world from nothing, freely and in time; the world is good but fallen, and time itself began with creation.
Eternity & Infinity
Angel
Angels are God's first creatures, the 'heaven of heavens', intellectual beings who cleave to God and know all things in the Word.
Eternity
God's eternity is an ever-present 'To-day' in which no year comes or goes; time belongs only to creatures.
Fate
Drop the word 'fate'; what rules the world is providence, and providence does not crush the free will it created.
Infinity
God's infinity embraces all numbers and times at once, known not successively but in a single eternal act of understanding.
Epistemology
Truth
God is Truth itself. The mind knows eternal truths by participating in the divine light.
Knowledge
The mind knows eternal truth by divine illumination: God is the inner light of the intellect.
Mind
The mind is an image of the Trinity: knowing itself, remembering itself, loving itself.
Will
The will is free but divided against itself; only grace can heal what sin has broken.
Language
Words are signs that point beyond themselves; understanding requires inner illumination, not merely hearing sounds.
Memory and Imagination
Memory is a vast palace, the storehouse of images and ideas; even forgotten things remain in it, for otherwise we could not search for them.
Idea
Ideas are the eternal rationes in the mind of God, and the human mind knows truth by divine illumination.
Sign and Symbol
Signs are things that make us think of something beyond themselves; some are natural, some are conventional, and Scripture requires special hermeneutics.
Philosophy & Practical
Education
The true teacher is not the speaker but Christ within. Signs can prompt, only truth can instruct.
Wisdom
True wisdom is knowledge of God; it begins in fear of the Lord and ends in the vision of eternal truth.
Philosophy
Philosophy leads the mind toward God, but reason alone cannot reach him; faith must complete what inquiry begins.
Man
Man is made in God's image but fallen through sin; his will is divided against itself, and he cannot heal himself.
Aesthetics & History
Beauty
Late have I loved thee, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new; all earthly beauty points beyond itself to God.
Art
Art's rightly-ordered beauty can lead the soul to God, or seduce it, when loved for itself.
History
History is the drama of two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, moving under providence to the end of time.
Progress
History is not cyclical but directional: from creation through the fall to redemption to final judgment; earthly progress is real but provisional, and the only progress that ultimately matters is the soul's movement toward God.
Natural Science
Astronomy
Theology and astronomy address entirely separate questions; scripture teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.
Evolution
God created all things simultaneously, implanting seminal reasons that unfold in time; the forms of life were present from the beginning, even if they appeared gradually.