The Seat of Man's Intellect: What Says Your God?

[Pyrrho]

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If he does, I can make some suggestions for him.  I have read some Augustine.  If he wants a brief introduction to his thought, The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love is probably the best choice.  The Confessions is a popular choice, and one can read in it what a total asshole he was (both before and after he converted; for example, his attitudes toward women are appalling).  One should make sure one gets an unabridged version, as there is an interesting discussion of time in it that is worth reading.  It is theologically motivated, of course, but it is strikingly modern and interesting for his era.  The City of God is probably his most famous book, but it is long.  And that is a vice in a book by Augustine, as he has a tediousness about him that is hard enough to stomach [figure of speech intended] even in a short book.

One can find a list of his works here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_...bliography

Almost no one is going to read all of them.  And for the sane reader, all it will take is reading a couple of them to convince one not to try to read them all.

And once one has read some Augustine, if one wants worse, one can move on to Aquinas.

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Thank you that pretty much sums up my feelings about Augustine and Aquinas.

You seem to have good taste and judgement.

  I haven't really read then since college (read thirty or more years ago).  I can remember finding them exciting in that they had well thought out systems of thought to explore.  Now I mostly notice that as freshman and sophomores we could find the holes.  So, historically relevant to philosophical thought, worth pondering, not so much.

In the history of philosophy, neither of them are extremely important.  They are certainly not "first tier" sorts of philosophers (or even close to first tier), and can be avoided even if one gets a degree in philosophy.  

In the history of Christian theology, both are extremely important.

The philosophers who one must know something about (if one studies philosophy) are Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and Kant.  They are all unavoidable for the philosophy major at a decent school.  (Fortunately, all of them wrote something worth reading.)  Of course, if one goes to a religious school, then one is going to have the writings of religious nuts forced on one.  And the school will pretend that the religious nuts are more important to philosophy than they are.

For what it is worth, I have never found Augustine or Aquinas "exciting."  They are both tedious and awful.  But of the two, Augustine is more palatable (which is really a strong criticism of Aquinas, as Augustine is more than bad enough, though as I say, his discussion of time in his Confessions is worth reading).


And again, for Nestor, I recommend reading Aquinas after Augustine, only if one wants something worse to read on the same sorts of things.  The snippets you get from the "proofs" for the existence of God should give you some reason to think that I am giving you an accurate description of what you will be facing if you choose to read Aquinas.  But if you must see for yourself, go ahead and pick something he wrote to read.  Just don't say I didn't warn you.