Our underlying problem, according to Augustine, has to do with affection. Our problem is misplaced tenderness. We love the unfit things, or we love the correct stuff in the unsuitable way. For specimen, we wrongly tenderness power, fame, wealth, presence, and many other stuff that are unworthy of our pet. We also fondness stuff that are virtuous of love, such as other individuals, but if we do this in an monstrous air, putting others into a place reserved for God, we become a serious mistake and undermine our own happiness.
If we love God first and first, expect Augustine, this will product itself out in our lives as all of our other loves will turn properly logical. We will still fondness others, the creation, and other excellent things in life, but in the rightful distance and to the rightful extent. So, for those who share Augustine's credence in God, he would say that in custom to be truly ready we need fitly logical loves, which we can only execute as we hug the heavenly-minded life in deeper ways. “What is a life of happiness? Surely what everyone wants, absolutely everyone without exception. … It is understood to everyone, and if they could all be interrogate in some national tongue whether they invoke to be happy, they would doubtlessly all reply that they do. … Thus all agree that they want to be happy, upright as they would, if questioned, all agree that they poverty to enjoy life, and they guess that a animation of happiness consist of of this luxury. One one pursues it in this passage, another in that, but all are striving for the same goal, satisfaction.'
Revelation is at the center of Augustine's thought, for it functions in the order of knowledge as fortune functions in the order of action, and right cognition and becoming action are insuperable without revelation and loveliness. Hence at every turn in Augustine we observe that the formal model correspondingly to which he interprets the circle of appearances derive instantaneously from his knowledge of the passage God's Word works in the circle. So Christian Doctrine is the necessary preliminary to everything else in Augustine. When we respect his view of what we may somewhat whimsically call 'macrotheology,' this is especially real.
To hear the relationship between Christianity and society is nothing more and nothing less than to artless the discussion of the relation between competing interpretations of the naturalness of devotion. Human societies that evolve without Christianity differ among themselves helter-skelter the meaning of understanding-acquaintance and the naturalness of reality; but Christianity, wherever it look, cause special maintain on the belie of nations. Civil societies form themselves as the macroscopic revelation of generally held moral code. Taken at this level, Christianity bestow a essentially dissimilar determine of ideas about the nature of the earth and the highway one owned to dwell within it.