St. Augustine Net Worth

Augustine is recognized as a saint in the Catholic Church, the Eastern Christian Church, and the Anglican Communion and as a preeminent Doctor of the Church. He is also the patron of the Augustinians. His memorial is celebrated on 28 August, the day of his death. Augustine is the patron saint of brewers, printers, Theologians, the alleviation of sore eyes, and a number of cities and dioceses. Many Protestants, especially Calvinists and Lutherans, consider him to be one of the theological fathers of the Protestant Reformation due to his teachings on salvation and Divine grace. Lutherans, and Martin Luther in particular, have held Augustine in preeminence (after the Bible and St. Paul). Luther himself was, from 1505 to 1521, a member of the Order of the Augustinian Eremites.

Augustine's formulation of the doctrine of original sin was confirmed at numerous councils, i.e. Carthage (418), Ephesus (431), Orange (529), Trent (1546) and by popes, i.e. Pope Innocent I (401–417) and Pope Zosimus (417–418). Anselm of Canterbury established in his Cur Deus Homo the definition that was followed by the great 13th-century Schoolmen, namely that Original Sin is the "privation of the righteousness which every man ought to possess", thus separating it from concupiscence, with which some of Augustine's disciples had defined it as later did Luther and Calvin. In 1567, Pope Pius V condemned the identification of Original Sin with concupiscence.

In October 1695, some workmen in the Church of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia discovered a marble box containing some human bones (including part of a skull). A dispute arose between the Augustinian hermits (Order of Saint Augustine) and the regular canons (Canons Regular of Saint Augustine) as to whether these were the bones of Augustine. The hermits did not believe so; the canons affirmed that they were. Eventually Pope Benedict XIII (1724–1730) directed the Bishop of Pavia, Monsignor Pertusati, to make a determination. The bishop declared that, in his opinion, the bones were those of Saint Augustine.

The Augustinians were expelled from Pavia in 1700, taking refuge in Milan with the relics of Augustine, and the disassembled Arca, which were removed to the cathedral there. San Pietro fell into disrepair, but was finally rebuilt in the 1870s, under the urging of Agostino Gaetano Riboldi, and reconsecrated in 1896 when the relics of Augustine and the shrine were once again reinstalled.

Much of Augustine's conversion is dramatized in the oratorio La conversione di Sant'Agostino (1750) composed by Johann Adolph Hasse. The libretto for this oratorio, written by Duchess Maria Antonia of Bavaria, draws upon the influence of Metastasio (the finished libretto having been edited by him) and is based off an earlier five-act play Idea perfectae conversionis dive Augustinus written by the Jesuit priest Franz Neumayr. In the libretto Augustine's mother Monica is presented as a prominent character that is worried that Augustine might not convert to Christianity. As Dr. Andrea Palent says:

Martin Heidegger refers to Augustine's descriptive philosophy at several junctures in his influential work Being and Time. Hannah Arendt began her philosophical writing with a dissertation on Augustine's concept of love, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (1929): "The young Arendt attempted to show that the philosophical basis for vita socialis in Augustine can be understood as residing in neighbourly love, grounded in his understanding of the Common origin of humanity."

Philosopher Bertrand Russell was impressed by Augustine's meditation on the nature of time in the Confessions, comparing it favourably to Kant's version of the view that time is subjective. Catholic Theologians generally subscribe to Augustine's belief that God exists outside of time in the "eternal present"; that time only exists within the created universe because only in space is time discernible through motion and change. His meditations on the nature of time are closely linked to his consideration of the human ability of memory. Frances Yates in her 1966 study The Art of Memory argues that a brief passage of the Confessions, 10.8.12, in which Augustine writes of walking up a FLIGHT of stairs and entering the vast fields of memory clearly indicates that the ancient Romans were aware of how to use explicit spatial and architectural metaphors as a mnemonic technique for organizing large amounts of information.

Augustine believed that Adam and Eve had both already chosen in their hearts to disobey God's command not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge before Eve took the fruit, ate it, and gave it to Adam. Accordingly, Augustine did not believe that Adam was any less guilty of sin. Augustine does praise women and their role in society and in the Church. In his Tractates on the Gospel of John, Augustine, commenting on the Samaritan woman from John 4:1–42, uses the woman as a figure of the Church in agreement with the New Testament teaching that the Church is the bride of Christ. "Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her."

Soon, their relationship grew, as Augustine wrote, "And I began to love him, of course, not at the first as a Teacher of the truth, for I had entirely despaired of finding that in thy Church—but as a friendly man." Augustine visited Ambrose in order to see if Ambrose was one of the greatest speakers and Rhetoricians in the world. More interested in his speaking skills than the topic of speech, Augustine quickly discovered that Ambrose was a spectacular orator. Eventually, Augustine says that he was spiritually led into the faith of Christianity.

Augustine held that "the timing of the infusion of the soul was a mystery known to God alone". However, he considered procreation as one of the goods of marriage; abortion figured as a means, along with drugs which cause sterility, of frustrating this good. It lay along a continuum which included infanticide as an instance of ‘lustful cruelty’ or ‘cruel lust.’ Augustine called the use of means to avoid the birth of a child an ‘evil work:’ a reference to either abortion or contraception or both."