He seems to be a very interesting character. Has anybody else got an opinion of him?
I was taught roughly the same thing ... I always saw 'Pelagius v Augustine' as a kind of parallel to the
jiriki ('one's own strength') v
tariki ('other power') schools of Buddhism.
The video presents quite a critique of Augustine, and it's one I'm disposed to accept. It seems to me (I am not great Augustinian) that he started out as a optimistic type, who ended up a pessimist, or perhaps from glass half full to glass half empty ... could it be that he ended up as a somewhat curmudgeonly old man?
If I were offering an apologia for a certain dour outlook to his philosophy, two things may have played their part:
The first was that Augustine was, apparently against his will, ordained a priest of city of Hippo (a port-city, Annaba/Bône in Algeria). Five years later he succeeded as its bishop. This required the thinker take on pastoral, political, administrative and juridical duties – his responsibility for and experience of ordinary Christian congregations may have contributed to modify his views on grace and sin.
Secondly, the world was falling apart – he lived in a time when Christianity arose from an 'outsider' religion to the religion of state, but at the same time he witnessed the decline of the Roman Empire, the sacking of Rome, and eventually the sacking of his own Hippo by Vandals, dying that year.
Thanks for the reference.
