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| | Saint Augustine (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) |
 | | Part of this gradual change of attitude is attributable to his detailed study of scriptural texts (especially the Pauline letters), as well as his immersion in both the daily affairs of his monastic community and the rather focused sorts of controversies that confronted the Church in the fourth and fifth centuries. |
 | | In De Civitate Dei, for example, Augustine suggests that God created only one soul, that of Adam, and subsequent human souls are not merely genealogical offshoots (as in traducianism) of that original soul, but they are actually identical to Adam's soul prior to assuming their own individual, particularized lives [De Civitate Dei, 13.14]. |
 | | By the time Augustine completed De Civitate Dei in 427 C.E., he came even more emphatically to insist upon the conclusion to which his discussion in Ad Simplicianum had led him, i.e., that original sin is both universally debilitating and insuperable without the aid of unmerited grace [De Civitate Dei XIV.1]. |
| plato.stanford.edu /entries/augustine (13096 words) |
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