Download St Augustine Being Nothingness Emilie Zum Brunn Books
Download St Augustine Being Nothingness Emilie Zum Brunn Books
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St Augustine Being Nothingness Emilie Zum Brunn Books Reviews
- This book is a long-time friend of mine with many repeat readings. Strongly recommended to anyone interested in Augustine or patristics. I qoute from the front jacket
"Zum Brunn's unique approach in this book is more ontological than the usual psychological and epistemological approach. The major theme treated here is that of the soul suspended between God-Being and nothingness; the first gives the soul being, the second annihilates it. Through a step-by-step analysis of thought in Augustine's Dialogs, this theme is orchestrated in a series of fundamental questions the immortality of the soul, the free arbiter (liberium arbitrium), the origin of evil, the creation of the Universe, and 'self-creation' of man when he is converted to God. Spiritual experience is at the heart of this metaphysic in which Augustine succeeds in joining the Christian quest for salvation with the Greek search for Being, a symbiosis which is at the origin of Western religious and metaphysical thought."
The book consists of four chapters
1. The Participation of Wisdom, and the Participation of Simple Existence
2. Existence Finalized in Being
3. The Fall Towards Impossible Nothingness
4. Conversion Constitutive of Being
In many ways a "spiritual manual" for the Augustinian inclined Christian, the book guides and explains to the soul the metaphysics of Christian life as much as it reveals the thought of Augustine. However, the book is for the academically inclined. Zum Brunn seldom translates her Latin, and endnotes often contain the source material in the original language. If this book ever went into a new printing, I would like to see a glossary in the back that would aid the general reader. Otherwise, a book highly recommended. I will always keep my copy with me.
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