{"id":16825,"date":"2016-08-12T16:00:13","date_gmt":"2016-08-12T20:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/?p=16825"},"modified":"2017-03-16T13:57:15","modified_gmt":"2017-03-16T17:57:15","slug":"16825","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/2016\/08\/12\/16825\/","title":{"rendered":"Przywara and Augustine I"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1930, the English Catholic publisher, Sheed\u00a0and Ward, brought out a book called A\u00a0Monument to St Augustine, with chapters\u00a0contributed by contemporary Catholic\u00a0luminaries, English and Continental. Sheed and\u00a0Ward republished the book in 1945, and\u00a0it was\u00a0reprinted in several\u00a0paperback editions,\u00a0beginning in 1957, under the name St\u00a0Augustine: His Age, Life, and Thought. This\u00a0useful companion to the study of St Augustine\u00a0was once to be found in nearly all Catholic\u00a0Among the essays is a rare English publication from the hand of the\u00a0Jesuit theologian, Erich Przywara (1889-1972), \u201cSt Augustine and the\u00a0Modern World.\u201d (Przywara was influential on the development the\u00a0thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar and others in the nouvelle th\u00e9ologie\u00a0movement. His masterwork, Analogia Entis, has recently been translated\u00a0by John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart in the Ressourcement series\u00a0published by Eerdman\u2019s.)<\/p>\n

\"erichIn this introduction to Przywara\u2019s essay, the first of several posts,\u00a0Przywara sets up his discussion of the relation of St Augustine and “As in his religious and theological aspect Augustine was claimed by\u00a0the Reformation, so the modern philosophy which began with Descartes\u00a0seems likewise the understanding (intelligere) of that belief (credere). It\u00a0is thus, in the first place, the progressive working out (to use Hegel\u2019s\u00a0terminology) of the Protestant interiority until it becomes the interiority\u00a0of the \u201cpure intellect,\u201d from the Cartesian cogito to Kant\u2019s \u201csynthetic\u00a0unity of the ego\u201d and on to Hegel\u2019s \u201cself-conscious intellect.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the process is at the same time the working out of the inner logic of\u00a0that interiority. For on the one hand it is the radical laicizing of the\u00a0secular sphere\u2014that is to say, the installation of the \u201cinward\u201d in the\u00a0realism of a purely secular world\u2014and on the other hand this takes\u00a0place as the logical result of the Reformers\u2019 doctrine of Original Sin: it\u00a0emphasizes the transcendental significance of this world as manifesting\u00a0the irresolvable conflict between God and the Devil, or, more\u00a0fundamentally, the contrast between a demonic God of wrath and a\u00a0truly divine God of mercy.<\/p>\n

This \u201claicizing\u201d is realized in the new philosophy on the one hand by the\u00a0tendencies that originated with Bacon and reached their climax in Locke\u00a0and Hume, the realism which renounces an \u201cunreal identity,\u201d on the\u00a0other by the \u201ctheo-logic,\u201d as we may term it for brevity\u2019s sake, which\u00a0carrying through with the theme which Jacob Boehme decisively marked\u00a0out, passes through Pascal\u2019s extr\u00e9mit\u00e9s to Kant\u2019s \u201cantinomies,\u201d\u00a0Schelling\u2019s \u201cindistinction of opposites,\u201d Hegel\u2019s \u201ccontrast in unity and\u00a0unity in contrast,\u201d and Kierkegaard\u2019s \u201cdialectic of equivocality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus the problem, \u201cAugustine and the modern world,\u201d appears in its full\u00a0stringency. For the \u201cand\u201d in this title we might, it would seem, substitute\u00a0to a very large extent \u201cin,\u201d if not indeed \u201cas.\u201d\u00a0But as we proceed it will become evident that a deeper point of view\u00a0demands an \u201cabove\u201d and an \u201cagainst.\u201d The modern world is indeed the\u00a0advent of Augustine, but an advent to overcome it from within.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1930, the English Catholic publisher, Sheed\u00a0and Ward, brought out a book called A\u00a0Monument to St Augustine, with chapters\u00a0contributed by contemporary Catholic\u00a0luminaries, English and Continental. Sheed and\u00a0Ward republished the book…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16828,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[74],"tags":[75,76,87],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/st_augustine_hippo_24.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s8brX6-16825","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16825"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16825"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16832,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16825\/revisions\/16832"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}