Louis J Sheehan 110907.10950

Augustine was one of the most prolific Latin authors, and the list of his works consists of more than a hundred separate titles.[9] They include apologetic works against the heresies of the Arians, Donatists, Manichaeans and Pelagians, texts on Christian doctrine, notably De doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine), exegetical works such as commentaries on Genesis, the Psalms and Paul's Letter to the Romans, many sermons and letters, and the Retractationes (Retractions), a review of his earlier works which he wrote near the end of his life. Louis J Sheehan Esquire Apart from those, Augustine is probably best known for his Confessiones (Confessions), which is a personal account of his earlier life, and for De civitate Dei (The City of God, consisting of 22 books), which he wrote to restore the confidence of his fellow Christians, which was badly shaken by the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. His 'On the Trinity' (De Trinitate), in which he developed what has become known as the 'psychological analogy' of the Trinity, is also among his masterpieces, and arguably one of the greatest theological works of all time.

Louis J Sheehan 110907.10949

From 978 to 986, Hugh Capet allied himself with the German emperors Otto II and Otto III and with Archbishop Adalberon of Reims to dominate the Carolingian king, Lothair. By 986, he was king in all but name. After Lothair and his son died in early 987, the archbishop of Reims and Gerbert of Aurillac convened an assembly of nobles to elect Hugh Capet as their king. In front of an electoral assembly at Senlis, Adalberon gave a stirring oration and pleaded to the nobles:
Crown the Duke. He is most illustrious by his exploits, his nobility, his forces. The throne is not acquired by hereditary right; no one should be raised to it unless distinguished not only for nobility of birth, but for the goodness of his soul.
He was elected and crowned rex Francorum at Noyon in Picardy on 3 July 987, by the prelate of Reims, the first of the house that would later bear his name to rule France. Immediately after his coronation, Hugh began to push for the coronation of his son Robert. Hugh's own claimed reason was that he was planning an expedition against the Moorish armies harassing Borrel II of Barcelona, an invasion which never occurred, and that the stability of the country necessitated two kings should he die while on expedition.[6] Ralph Glaber, however, attributes Hugh's request to his old age and inability to contol the nobility.[7] Modern scholarship has largely imputed to Hugh the motive of establishing a dynasty against the pretension of electoral power on the part of the aristocracy, but this is not the typical view of contemporaries and even some modern scholars have been less sceptical of Hugh's "plan" to campaign in Spain.[8] Robert was eventually crowned on 30 December that same year.

Louis J Sheehan

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10th century West Francia (France).
Hugh Capet possessed minor properties near Chartres and Angers. Between Paris and Orléans he possessed towns and estates amounting to approximately 400 square miles (1,000 km²). His authority ended there, and if he dared travel outside his small area, he risked being captured and held for ransom, though, as God's anointed, his life was largely safe. Indeed, there was a plot in 993, masterminded by the Bishop of Laon and Odo I of Blois, to deliver Hugh Capet into the custody of Otto III. The plot failed, but the fact that no one was punished illustrates how tenuous his hold on power was. Beyond his power base, in the rest of France, there were still as many codes of law as there were fiefdoms. The "country" operated with 150 different forms of currency and at least a dozen languages.[citation needed] Uniting all this into one cohesive unit was a formidable task and a constant struggle between those who wore the crown of France and its feudal lords. As such, Hugh Capet's reign was marked by numerous power struggles with the vassals on the borders of the Seine and the Loire.
While Hugh Capet's military power was limited and he had to seek military aid from Richard I of Normandy, his unanimous election as king gave him great moral authority and influence. Adémar de Chabannes records, probably apocryphally, that during an argument with the Count of Auvergne, Hugh demanded of him: "Who made you count?" The count riposted: "Who made you king?"[9]

Louis J Sheehan 110907.10948

Hugh Capet descended from the Robertians and is the son of Hugh the Great, Duke of France, and Hedwige of Saxony, daughter of the German king Henry the Fowler, Hugh was born about 940. His paternal family, the Robertians, were powerful landowners in the Île-de-France. His grandfather had been King Robert I and his grandmother Beatrice was a Carolingian, a daughter of Herbert I of Vermandois. King Odo was his great uncle and King Rudolph Odo's son-in-law. Hugh was born into a well-connected and powerful family with many ties to the reigning nobility of Europe.[2] But for all this, Hugh's father was never king. When Rudolph died in 936, Hugh the Great organized the return of Louis d'Outremer, son of Charles the Simple, from his exile at the court of Athelstan of England. Hugh's motives are unknown, but it is presumed that he acted to forestall Rudolph's brother and successor as Duke of Burgundy, Hugh the Black from taking the French throne, or to prevent it from falling into the grasping hands of Herbert II of Vermandois or William Longsword, Count of Rouen.[3]
In 956, Hugh inherited his father's estates and became one of the most powerful nobles in the much-reduced West Frankish kingdom. However, as he was not yet an adult, his uncle Bruno, Archbishop of Cologne, acted as regent. Young Hugh's neighbours made the most of the opportunity. Theobald I of Blois, a former vassal of Hugh the Great, took the counties of Chartres and Châteaudun. Further south, on the border of the kingdom, Fulk II of Anjou, another former client of Hugh the Great, carved out a principality at Hugh's expense and that of the Bretons. Louis J Sheehan Esquire.
The kingdom in which Hugh grew up, and of which he would one day be king, bore no resemblance to modern France. Hugh's predecessors did not call themselves rois de France ("Kings of France"), and that title was not used until the time of his distant descendant Philip the Fair (died 1314). Kings ruled as rex Francorum ("King of the Franks") and the lands over which they ruled comprised only a very small part of the former Carolingian Empire. The eastern Frankish lands, the Holy Roman Empire, were ruled by the Ottonian dynasty, represented by Hugh's first cousin Otto II and then by Otto's son, Otto III. The lands south of the river Loire had largely ceased to be part of the West Frankish kingdom in the years after Charles the Simple was deposed in 922. The Duchy of Normandy and the Duchy of Burgundy were largely independent, and Brittany entirely so, although from 956 Burgundy was ruled by Hugh's brothers Odo and Henry.[5]

Louis J Sheehan 110907.10947

It was at Milan that Augustine's life changed. While still at Carthage, he had begun to move away from Manichaeism, in part because of a disappointing meeting with a key exponent of Manichaean theology. In Rome, he is reported to have completely turned away from Manichaeanism, and instead embraced the skepticism of the New Academy movement. At Milan, his mother Monica pressured him to become a Catholic. Augustine's own studies in Neoplatonism were also leading him in this direction, and his friend Simplicianus urged him that way as well.[5] But it was the bishop of Milan, Ambrose, who had most influence over Augustine. Ambrose was a master of rhetoric like Augustine himself, but older and more experienced.
Augustine's mother had followed him to Milan and he allowed her to arrange a society marriage, for which he abandoned his concubine (however he had to wait two years until his fiancée came of age; he promptly took up in the meantime with another woman). It was during this period that he uttered his famous prayer, "Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet" [da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo] (Conf., VIII. vii (17)).
In the summer of 386, after having read an account of the life of Saint Anthony of the Desert which greatly inspired him, Augustine underwent a profound personal crisis and decided to convert to Catholic Christianity, abandon his career in rhetoric, quit his teaching position in Milan, give up any ideas of marriage, and devote himself entirely to serving God and the practices of priesthood, which included celibacy. Key to this conversion was the voice of an unseen child he heard while in his garden in Milan telling him in a sing-song voice to "tolle lege" ("take up and read") the Bible, at which point he opened the Bible at random and fell upon the Epistle to the Romans 13:13, which reads: "Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying" (KJV). He would detail his spiritual journey in his famous Confessions, which became a classic of both Christian theology and world literature. Ambrose baptized Augustine, along with his son, Adeodatus, on Easter Vigil in 387 in Milan, and soon thereafter in 388 he returned to Africa.[5] On his way back to Africa his mother died, as did his son soon after, leaving him alone in the world without family.
Upon his return to north Africa he sold his patrimony and gave the money to the poor. The only thing he kept was the family house, which he converted into a monastic foundation for himself and a group of friends.[5] In 391 he was ordained a priest in Hippo Regius (now Annaba, in Algeria). He became a famous preacher (more than 350 preserved sermons are believed to be authentic), and was noted for combating the Manichaean religion, to which he had formerly adhered.
In 396 he was made coadjutor bishop of Hippo (assistant with the right of succession on the death of the current bishop), and became full bishop shortly thereafter. He remained in this position at Hippo until his death in 430. Augustine worked tirelessly in trying to convince the people of Hippo, who were diverse racial and religious group, to convert to the Catholic faith. He left his monastery, but continued to lead a monastic life in the episcopal residence. He left a Rule (Latin, Regula) for his monastery that has led him to be designated the "patron saint of Regular Clergy", that is, Clergy who live by a monastic rule.
Louis J Sheehan Esquire
Augustine died on August 28, 430 during the siege of Hippo by the Vandals. On his death bed he was read the Enneads of Plotinus. He is said to have encouraged its citizens to resist the attacks, primarily on the grounds that the Vandals adhered to Arianism, a heterodox branch of Christianity. It is also said that he died just as the Vandals were tearing down the city walls of Hippo.
After conquering the city, the Vandals destroyed all of it but Augustine's cathedral and library, which they left untouched. Tradition indicates that his body was later moved to Pavia, where it is said to remain to this day.[5]

Louis J Sheehan 110907.10946

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Influential quotations from Augustine's writings

"Give what Thou dost command, and command what Thou wilt." ("Da quod jubes, et jube quod vis," Confessions X, xxix, 40)
"Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it repose in Thee." (Confessions I, i, 1)
"Love the sinner and hate the sin" (Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum) (Opera Omnia, vol II. col. 962, letter 211.), literally "With love for mankind and hatred of sins "[13]
"Excess [i.e., 'extravagant self-indulgence, riotous living'] is the enemy of God" (Luxuria est inimica Dei.)
"Heart speaks to heart" (Cor ad cor loquitur)[14]
"Nothing conquers except truth and the victory of truth is love" (Victoria veritatis est caritas}[15]
"To sing once is to pray twice" (Qui cantat, bis orat) literally "he who sings, prays twice"[16]
"Lord, you have seduced me and I let myself be seduced" (quoting the prophet Jeremiah 20.7-9)
"Love, and do what you will" (Dilige et quod vis fac) Sermon on 1 John 7, 8[17]
"Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet" (da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo) (Conf., VIII. vii (17))
"God, O Lord, grant me the power to overcome sin. For this is what you gave to us when you granted us free choice of will. If I choose wrongly, then I shall be justly punished for it. Is that not true, my Lord, of whom I indebted for my temporal existence? Thank you, Lord, for granting me the power to will my self not to sin.(Free Choice of the Will, Book One)"
"Christ is the teacher within us"[18] (A paraphrase; see De Magistro - "On the Teacher" - 11:38)
"Hear the other side" (Audi partem alteram) De Duabus Animabus, XlV ii
"Take up [the book], and Read it" (Tolle, lege) Confessions, Book VIII, Chapter 12
"There is no salvation outside the church" (Salus extra ecclesiam non est) (De Bapt. IV, cxvii.24)
"To many, total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation." (Multi quidem facilius se abstinent ut non utantur, quam temperent ut bene utantur. - Lit. 'For many it is indeed easier to abstain so as not to use [married sexual relations] at all, than to control themselves so as to use them aright.') (On the Good of Marriage)
"We make ourselves a ladder out of our vices if we trample the vices themselves underfoot." (iii. De Ascensione)
"Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are." (quoted in William Sloane Coffin, The Heart Is a Little to the Left)

Louis J Sheehan 110907.10945

KAI RYSSDAL: There's a technical term for what we're doing as we eat, shop, drive and go about our daily lives. The word is "overshoot" -- when a population uses up resources faster than they can be replaced.

Today, we're consuming about 30 percent more trees, fish and fossil fuels than the planet can regenerate. We can run a deficit like this for a little while, but there are limits to how big a hole we can dig before it gets too deep to get out of.

Louis J Sheehan 110907.10944

TEXT OF STORY

KAI RYSSDAL: There's a technical term for what we're doing as we eat, shop, drive and go about our daily lives. The word is "overshoot" -- when a population uses up resources faster than they can be replaced.

Today, we're consuming about 30 percent more trees, fish and fossil fuels than the planet can regenerate. We can run a deficit like this for a little while, but there are limits to how big a hole we can dig before it gets too deep to get out of.

To help understand those limits we spoke with Jared Diamond. He's a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. You might know him better though his books -- Collapse, among others. When we talked, I asked him whether we've overshot our resources already:

JARED DIAMOND: Of course we are in overshoot and everybody knows that we are in overshoot -- and we are overshooting the things that people talk most about. First thing we're running out of is oil, and everybody knows it. Second thing we're running out of is water. Something like 70 percent of the fresh water in the world is already utilized. Topsoil -- we're exploiting it and it's running off into the ocean. We've already exhausted something like maybe half of the topsoil that was originally in the Great Plains. And then fish and forests...

RYSSDAL: Is the rate of use increasing? Are things getting worse more quickly than they did 20 years ago?

DIAMOND: Yes, things are getting worse more quickly, for obvious reasons -- namely, the human population is increasing, and worse yet, average consumption rates are increasing. That's to say, out of the world's six-and-a-half-billion people, the majority are in the so-called Third World, but they are working hard to catch up.

RYSSDAL: The same way that I would imagine there's no one thing you can point to where you'd say that's the tipping point of decline, is there one thing that can be done to reverse that decline?

DIAMOND: Yes, and that is to stop looking for the one thing that we could do to reverse the decline. The reason is that there are about a dozen major problems and we got to solve them all. If we solve 11 of those problems, but we don't solve the water problem, we're finished. Or if we solve 11 of those problems but we don't solve the problem of topsoil and agriculture, we're finished. So we've got to solve all 12 problems and not look for that one problem that's most important.

RYSSDAL: It seems to me what we're missing is the "or else" part of this discussion... There's a whole list of things we have to fix -- what happens if we don't?

DIAMOND: History is full of the "or elses." For example, the most advanced Native American society of the New World, the Maya, had astronomy and astronomical observatories and writing and books. They chopped down their trees, they ran into water problems, and the big Maya cities that American tourists go to visit today, they go abandoned.

RYSSDAL: Are we seeing those crashes anywhere today?

DIAMOND: Absolutely. The African country of Rwanda, the most densely population country in Africa, began to get deforested, massive problems of soil erosion, too many people and not enough food... And in 1994 Rwandans transiently quote "solved" -- if I can put it in quotes -- their population problems in the most awful way imaginable. Namely, six million Rwandans killed, one million Rwandans in brutal ways, and drove another two million into exile. That's an example of a country that did not master its environmental problems.

RYSSDAL: How much time to we have left?

DIAMOND: If we carried on as we are now, then I would expect that we will not have a First World lifestyle anywhere sometime between 30 and 50 years from now.

RYSSDAL: Concentrates the mind...

DIAMOND: Yes it does. To know that you could get shot tomorrow does grab your attention.

RYSSDAL: Jared Diamond teaches geology at UCLA and is the author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

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An "alternative view" to Jared Diamond's Collapse:

JERRY TAYLOR: The case for sustainability seems reasonable enough. After all, who is for "unsustainability"? But trying to pin down what sustainability means is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall.

One of the more popular definitions comes from the U.N., which defines sustainability as that which "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." But how can we reasonably be expected to know what the needs of people in 2107 might be? The challenges they might face are no more obvious to us than our present-day challenges might be to people living in 1907.

Nevertheless, the U.N. definition can be read as a call to improve human welfare over time. An entire profession has grown up around that proposition. It is known as economics. Accordingly, let me suggest that Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was the world's first and best blueprint for sustainable development as defined by the U.N.

Some understand sustainability as a call to protect the natural resource base from deteriorating so that future generations will be as blessed as we are. But the wealth created by exploiting resources is often more beneficial than the wealth preserved by "banking" those resources for future use. Otherwise, there would be little point in exploiting resources for commercial use in the first place.

Are present generations truly worse off because past generations drew down stocks of minerals and metals to make advanced satellites, build modern industry, and -- through the wealth thereby created -- develop advanced medicines and dozens of other life-enhancing technologies and practices? I don't think so.

Fine, you might say. But isn't there a case for making sure that important resources are maintained at a "minimum critical level" and that the proceeds of their use be preserved for future generations? Sure -- but that's functionally indistinguishable from the mission to maximize human welfare over time.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with sustainability. It just doesn't add much to the intellectual conversation.

Jerry Taylor is a senior fellow at the CATO Institute.