Throughout his career Augustine wrote often about the attainment of the vision of God, in which God would be seen face-to-face without the need of signs and symbols. He understood this vision to be the ultimate goal of Christianity, for in this contemplation of the divine believers attain true happiness through the enjoyment ofGod. Given the centrality ofthe vision of God in Augustine's writings, one would expect the secondary literature to be replete with references to this facet of his thought. However, this is not the case. While minor studies have been produced on the vision of God and Augustine, no major study exists. This thesis is an attempt to address, at least in some measure, this scholarly lacuna.
In this thesis I attempt to examine Augustine's conception of the attainment of the vision of God as formulated at different points of his career in order to analyse the evolution of his thought. To accomplish this task I chose three principal writings from his corpus in which the vision of God plays an especially prominent role, each of which provides a window into the mindset of Augustine at a particular period of his life; they are De Quantitate Animae (The Greatness ofthe Soul), written c. 387; Confessiones, completed between 397 and 401; and De Trinitate (On the Trinity), completed c. 420.
Through an analysis of Augustine's conception ofthe vision of God in each of these writings, I argue that his understanding ofthe means by which the vision is attained evolves as his career progresses. For example, in De Quantitate Animae Augustine posits that the soul can attain the vision of God in this life through a Plotinian-style interior withdrawal, and while he suggests that the church and the incarnate Son of God play a role in the soul's ascent to God, precisely what role they play is ambiguously formulated. Later writings, however, indicate that Augustine's conception of the vision of God evolved and I argue that the development of Augustine's conception of the attainment of the vision of God is a development which sees him moving steadily away from a positive understanding ofhuman potentiality toward a conception ofthe drastic consequences of human fallenness which is directly related to wrongly-ordered love, and away from an emphasis on interiority as a means of purification and toward an understanding of God as purifier in and through the Holy Spirit, whereby the individual is purified through the collective purification of the community manifesting the love that is the Holy Spirit. A more pronounced and nuanced conception ofthe role of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and ofthe community ofthe church in the attainment ofthe vision of God eschatologically thus characterises the evolution of Augustine's conception of humanity's ascent to the divine. This development also finds Augustine placing progressively less emphasis on the attainment of the vision of God in this life. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/15652 |
| Date | 09 1900 |
| Creators | Hillis, Gregory K. |
| Contributors | Widdicombe, Peter, Religious Studies |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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