Unless you had proved to me my infirmity and quickly admonished me either to take the sight as the start for some reflection enabling me to rise up to you or wholly to scorn and pass the matter by, I would be watching like an empty-headed fool. The hunt turns me to an interest in the sport, not enough to lead me to alter the direction of the beast I am riding, but shifting the inclination of my heart. But if by chance I am passing when coursing occurs in the countryside, it distracts me perhaps indeed from thinking out some weighty matter. I now do not watch a dog chase a rabbit when this is happening at the circus. How often do we slip, who can count? How many times we initially act as if we put up with people telling idle tales in order not to offend the weak, but then gradually we find pleasure in listening. “Nevertheless, there are many respects, in tiny and contemptible matters, where our curiosity is provoked every day. So indeed we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it tends toward non-existence.” If then, in order to be time at all, the present is so made that it passes into the past, how can we say that this present also 'is'? The cause of its being is that it will cease to be. How can they 'be' when the past is not now present and the future is not yet present? Yet if the present were always present, it would not pass into the past: it would not be time but eternity. But I confidently affirm myself to know that if nothing passes away, there is no past time, and if nothing arrives, there is no future time, and if nothing existed there would be no present time. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know. What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. We also know what is meant when we hear someone else talking about it. “What is time? Who can explain this easily and briefly? Who can comprehend this even in thought so as to articulate the answer in words? Yet what do we speak of, in our familiar everyday conversation, more than of time? We surely know what we mean when we speak of it. The Consequences of Ideas: Understanding the Concepts that Shaped Our World For him, all truth is God's truth, and when one encounters truth, one encounters the God whose truth it is.” This is why Augustine encouraged students to learn as much as possible about as many things as possible. Not only are the truths in Scripture dependent on God's revelation, but all truth, including scientific truth, is dependent on divine revelation. He is also concerned with "general" or "natural" revelation. When Augustine speaks of revelation, he is not speaking of Biblical revelation alone. So just as an external source of light is needed for seeing, so an external revelation from God is needed for knowing. But a man with the keenest eyesight can see nothing if he is locked in a totally dark room. We have eyes, optic nerves, and so forth- all the equipment needed for sight. In our present earthly state we are equipped with the faculty of sight. “The concept of divine revelation was central to Augustine's epistemology, or theory of knowledge. In Job's Balances: On the Sources of the Eternal Truths Dostoevsky says openly in the Diary of a Writer that the only idea capable of inspiring a man is that of the immortality of the soul.” Obviously Augustine and Dostoevsky were terrified and appalled by the mere thought of the possibility of such men as Scaevola and Gradovsky - men capable of loving virtue for its own sake, of seeing virtue as an end in itself. Both were convinced Christians, both spoke so much of love, and suddenly - such hate! And against whom? Against the Stoics, who preached self-abnegation, who esteemed virtue above all things in the world, and against the Liberals who also exalted virtue above all things! But the fact remains: Dostoevsky spoke in rage of Stassyulevitch and Gradovsky Augustine could not be calm when he spoke the names of those pre-Stoic Stoics, Regulus and Mutius Scaevola, and even Socrates, the idol of the ancient world, appeared to him a bogey. At first sight this seems a quite inexplicable peculiarity. Augustine hated the Stoics, Dostoevsky hated the Russian Liberals.
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