From jod@ccat.sas.upenn.edu Sun Mar  3 16:41:55 2002
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From: jod@ccat.sas.upenn.edu (James J. O'Donnell)
Message-Id: <200203040041.g240fgE12114@ccat.sas.upenn.edu>
Subject: Re: Greek numerals
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Date: Sun, 3 Mar 2002 19:41:40 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <008601c1c313$9bf7fc80$43c1578a@cas.ilstu.edu> from "janice siegel" at Mar 3, 2002 06:29:11 pm
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So the interim dean is saying that after he's not interim he can talk 
more?  If that's a correct reading of his text, then he's playing you very 
straight and will be a supporter.  Chill some . . .

There's a vast literature on Aug. and "Platonism".  Henry Chadwick's
little book titled *Augustine* would be good either for you or a really
curious student.  Roughly the state of play is that at a decisive moment
Aug. read some neo-Platonic texts and was inspired by them and other
things in his head at the time to a spiritualized notion of Christianity
that was very influential later -- not least because in doing so he and a
couple of his Latin contemporaries were aligning themselves with strains
in the Greek Christianities that went back a couple of hundred years, and
so Latin and Greek churches seemed to be at one for another 600 years
until they started screaming at each other good and proper -- without a
few influential figures like that, the screaming could have started
sooner.  So "God" for Aug. is eternal and immutable and all-knowing and
all-good -- there isn't much biblical evidence for those propositions, and
they got him and Christianity into shitloads of trouble -- you go that way
and pretty soon you have to start explaining just how and why God decides
to send unbaptized babies who die shortly after birth to roast in hell for
eternity.  No matter *how* good you are at verbal shucking and jiving, not
many people are going to buy your story on that one.
.