Natural Law and Augustine Essay

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Cicero's Thoughts

Augustine'sThoughts

Similarities and Contrasts

Marcus Tullius Cicero had been born on January 3, 106 B.C.E; and he demised on December 7, 43 B.C.E. in a murder. His life overlapped with the downfall and eventually decimation of the Roman realm, during which time he has been a significant factor in political affairs, and as such, his writings are a valued source of information and knowledge regarding those events. He was a philosopher, politician, lawyer, orator, among other things. To grasp the logic of his work and to appreciate his philosophy necessitates us to have that in mind. Philosophical study was important but it was even more significant as a way to a more effectual action politically, so he put politics higher than philosophical study. During times when he was inhibited to take part in politics against his will, he made his philosophical writings. St. Augustine's submission that Hortensius (an exhortation to philosophy) by Cicero that transformed him from his sinful life and to philosophy and eventually to God, is the best example of Cicero's influence. According to Clayton (2016), Augustine later embraced the definition of Commonwealth by Cicero, using the former in his argument that the Rome's ruin by the barbarians cannot be attributed to Christianity.

A Catholic bishop of Hippo in northern Africa, St. Augustine (354-430 C.E.) was formerly known as Aurelius Augustinus. He was the first Christian philosopher, an expert Roman-instructed rhetorician, an inexhaustible writer who delivered over 110 works, with extensive approval, continually for over 30 years. His political views and social philosophy creates a significant intellectual channel between late antiquity and the medieval world that was evolving. This is because he was writing from an inimitable background and having an advantageous position as an ardent viewer of the society preceding the collapse of the Roman Empire. a lot of scholars revere him as the most significant and instrumental Western philosopher. According to Mattox (2016), although Augustine would not have considered himself as a philosopher, politically or socially, per se, but his writings on subjects such as the nature of human society, the nature and the part of the state, justice, just and unjust war, peace, and the association between church and state; all have contributed significantly in determining the evolution of Western civilization.

Cicero's Thoughts

Clayton proposed that Cicero thought of philosophy as inferior to politics, therefore, it must not shock us to learn that there is a political goal behind his philosophy: the protection and security, and if possible the advancement, involving the Roman Republic. He held that during his time, the politicians had been corrupt without possession of a noble appeal that was the major Romans quality in the primal Roman days. He believed that the reason for the Republic's difficulties was the loss of virtue. He wished that the forerunners of Rome, specifically within Senate, might heed his pleas to restore the Nation.

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This is possible only if the elite Romans chose to mould their personality and be dedicated to social stability as well as individual virtue more than their aspiration for recognition, fortune, and power. If such character transformation were to manifest, the elite might pass legislation that may oblige others to stick to identical benchmarks, and the Republic might regain its lost glory. Whether this idea illustrates a venerable vow to the ideas of nobility and virtue or sightlessness to the nature of the extraordinarily unsettled and vicious politics of Cicero's time, or maybe both, is difficult to claim with conviction.

In his time, the Epicureans and the Stoics represented the left and the right wing in ethical philosophy, respectively. The Peripatetics assumed middle ground. The Epicureans held happiness or, according to their initiator, painlessness as the only objective and conclusion of moral conduct. They thus set all virtue into prudence, or sensible self-love, a dogma that recognized virtue in the ultimate self-culture, that solely by itself was favorable to the happiness of the absolute selfhood - intellectually, spiritually, as well as physically. The Stoics viewed virtue as the solitary objective and conclusion of life, and in their philosophy, virtue is the submission of the will and conduct to collective nature, inherent fitness hence being the rule and the gauge of the right. Complete conformity or faultless virtue is rendered by this school as achievable only by strictly prudent. Its earlier followers, although not sure that humans, even Zeno, the grand master, had ever achieved this idyllic perfectness, thus far acknowledged no moral difference among those who fell slightly short of perfection and those who had been unable to make any significant advancement toward it. The later Stoics, nevertheless, acknowledged gradation of goodness, and were persistent expositors and instructors of the responsibilities within the range of those who are not wise, by the exercising which there may perhaps be an ever-closer move toward perfection. According to Cicero, from the time of Cicero until Christianity achieved domination, this belief was the lone antidote that saved Roman society from absolute and remediless dishonesty.

The Peripatetic viewpoint makes virtue to involve in moderation, or the dilution of extremes, and identifies each of the distinct virtues midway among opposite iniquity, as sobriety between excess and abstinence; openhandedness between prodigality and greed; humbleness between quick-temperedness and timidity. Cicero (1887) further explains that it acknowledges the certainty of the inherently right as separate from the purely beneficial and valuable. However, that happiness is the absolute objective and conclusion of life; and virtue, though important, is not enough without peripheral goods, so that the astutely upright man, though he will never violate the right, will follow by all valid means such external benefits as possibly within his grasp.

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