Page:King Alfred's Old English version of St. Augustine's Soliloquies - Hargrove - 1902.djvu/33

RELATION OF ALFRED TO ST. AUGUSTINE XXVII From the certainty of the possession by man of some truth, he proceeds to establish the fact" of the existence of God as the truth per se; 'but our conviction of the existence of the material world he regards as only an irresistible belief. Combating heathen religion and philosophy, Augustine defends the doctrines and institutions peculiar to Christianity, and maintains, in particular, against the Neo-Platonists, whom he rates most highly among all ancient philosophers, the Christian theses that salvation is to be found in Christ alone; that divine worship is due to no other being beside the triune God, since he created all things himself, and did not commission inferior beings, gods, demons, or angels to create the material world; that the soul with its body will rise again to eternal salvation or damnation, but will not return periodically to renewed life upon the earth; that the soul does not exist before the body, and that the latter is not the prison of the former, but that the soul begins to exist at the same time with the body; that the world both had a beginning and is perishable, and that only God and the souls of angels and men are eternal.' He believes, further, in the theory that divine grace is not conditioned on man's worthiness, and holds to the doctrine of absolute predestination.

The writings of Augustine are unusually extensive and varied. In his Retractiones, written near the close of his life, he enumerates as many as ninety-three works composed by himself, not counting numerous epistles. But his City of God and Confessions are the two works that have gained the widest popularity, and have run through the largest number of editions. The former is called by Schaff 'the deepest and richest apologetic work of antiquity'. It is a comprehensive philosophy of universal history, in which he undertakes to show that the powers of this world are to be overthrown by that Kingdom of God which will last forever. In his Confessions he gives us an intensely inter-

Ueberweg: op. cit., 333 f.