Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Augustine

  • Desert Light Draws Us into the Mystical

    Just as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like the lambent light of the desert. The low humidity, the sparseness of vegetation that even in its arboreal forms hugs the ground, the long, long vistas that draw the…

  • Augustine Against the Stoics

    Today, August 28th, is the Feast of St. Augustine on the Catholic calendar.  In honor of the Bishop of Hippo I pull a quotation from his magisterial City of God, Book XIX, Chapter 4: And I am at a loss to understand how the Stoic philosophers can presume to say that these are no ills,…

  • Alypius and the Gladiators

    Here is my post on Alypius.  And here is Anthony Esolen's.

  • Pet Love as Idolatry? Problems of Attachment and Grief

    I buried my little female cat Caissa at sunrise this morning in a beautiful spot in the Superstition Mountains in the same place where I buried my male cat Zeno in October of 2002.    When I buried Zeno, just before leaving the burial site, I prayed, "May we love the perishable as perishable and…

  • Augustine and the Child at the Seashore: Trinitarian Metatheory

    I was told this story as a child by a nun. One day St. Augustine was walking along the seashore, thinking about the Trinity. He came upon a child who had dug a hole in the sand and was busy filling it with buckets of seawater. Augustine: "What are you doing?" Child: "I am trying to…

  • Augustine and the Epistemic Theory of Miracles

    In The City of God, Book XXI, Chapter 8, St. Augustine quotes Marcus Varro, Of the Race of the Roman People: There occurred a remarkable celestial portent; for Castor records that, in the brilliant star Venus, called Vesperugo by Plautus, and the lovely Hesperus by Homer, there occurred so strange a prodigy, that it changed…

  • Nocturnal Permission

    This sometimes happens: You dream you are amorously entangled with a woman not your wife. But you know you are dreaming, and you  begin philosophizing within the dream about the moral propriety of enjoying the sexual intercourse in the dream.  You ask yourself: Should  I give my nocturnal permission to this nocturnal emission? If I am not mistaken,…

  • Augustine on an Analogy for the Incarnation

    On this, the Feast of St. Augustine, it is fitting to meditate on an Augustinian passage. There is an interesting passage in On Christian Doctrine that suggests a way to think about the Incarnation. Commenting on the NT text, "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us," Augustine writes: In order that what we are…

  • Augustine, Husserl, and Certainty

    In his magisterial Augustine of Hippo, Peter Brown writes of Augustine, "He wanted complete certainty on ultimate questions." (1st ed., p. 88) If you don't thrill to that line, you are no philosopher. Compare Edmund Husserl: "Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben nicht leben." "I just can't live without certainty." Yet he managed to live for…

  • Alypius and the Gladiators

    At the time of the Nicholas Berg beheading, a correspondent wrote to say that he watched the video only up to the point where the knife was applied to the neck, but refused to view the severing. He did right, for reasons given in Book Six, Chapter Eight of Augustine’s Confessions.  Alypius was a student…