Trilogy on Faith and Happiness by St. Augustine & Roland Teske

Author:St. Augustine & Roland Teske
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Religion, Classics, Theology, Patristics, Christianity
ISBN: 9781565483989
Publisher: New City Press
Published: 2010-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

2. Purpose of the Work

The Advantage of Believing has a strictly limited goal. In his final chapter Augustine says expressly that he intended neither a refutation of Manicheanism nor a comprehensive presentation of Catholic teaching. “I only wanted to weed out from you, if I could, the false opinions about Christian truths that were instilled in us through malice or ignorance and to raise your mind to learn certain great truths about God.”[5] Augustine’s concern was thus primarily protreptic or exhortatory. He wanted to “turn” his friend to the Catholic faith. But in order to win him over to that faith, he had first to overcome the negative prejudice of a Manichean against the views of the Church.

Honoratus was especially critical of the Catholic Church’s demand for faith and its retention of the Old Testament. On the one hand, then, the issue was the method of appropriating truth; on the other, it was the valid method of interpreting texts. Before there could be any discussion of doctrinal content, fundamental questions of methodology had to be clarified. This requirement gave the work a further apologetical, anti-Manichean intention.

Augustine wanted to win Honoratus over to the Catholic Church by showing that the Church’s position on both of these questions of method was the correct one. At the same time, these explanations would protect other Christians against Manichean propaganda. The entire set of arguments thus aims at a defense of the Catholic Church against Manichean attacks. Manicheanism as the opposing position is always in mind.

In addition, Augustine was pursuing a personal apologetical goal. About five years earlier, when still a supporter of the Manicheans, he himself had successfully defended their views in public debates with Catholic Christians.[6] He desired, therefore, to explain to his fellow believers the reasons for his change from Manicheanism to the Church. He also had to forestall an a priori condemnation of himself by Manicheans such as Honoratus, if he were to get any hearing at all from them. For the Manicheans rejected anyone who had turned away from them: their judgment was that “the light has passed through that person.”[7] Augustine had therefore to make plausible his personal reasons for thus turning away. It is to this concern that we owe one of the first descriptions of the path Augustine followed in his conversion.[8]

Even here, however, there was no question solely of a personal justification of Augustine against Manichean criticism. Rather, using himself as an example, he sketches in The Advantage of Believing 8, 20 the process which he wishes to initiate in Honoratus by means of his book. In describing the path he himself followed, he is describing the path which the friend of his youth also followed to some extent. When he harks back to his journey through the Manichean error that led him away from the religion of his childhood.[9] he is beginning to describe his subsequent return to the Christian religion[10] and to justify it. His friend has plenty of opportunity to raise his objections;

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