✠︎☧ GeneralStudios ☧✠︎

I'm not beating the fucking allegations

I don’t even disagree with the idea of prevenient grace, lol. You have absolutely no idea what I actually believe. What I disagree with in St. Augustine are ideas like unconditional election (heresy), his ideas about free will, concupiscence being considered sin even before sin is actually carried out, massa damnata, where there is no pre-existing purpose for creation and salvation turns into a mere whim of God (as if God did not already intend to unite Himself to creation before creating it), the idea of transferred personal guilt (and yes, I know you’ll try to argue otherwise), and his instability in constantly changing his mind. I also don’t like his writing style... it’s very boring! I also dislike theology based not on personal purification, but on excessive speculation, and the way he sometimes seems to view God in a mechanical way. You don’t have to agree with me. I don’t have a problem with St. Augustine himself, even though I dislike his style because it differs so much from what I read in the Eastern Fathers. My problem is with Augustinianism as a form of theological terrorism (on the part of some of its followers): a corrosive virus that tries to impose itself over every other perspective that doesn’t agree with it down to every tiny detail. This sectarianism that alienates Orthodoxy comes from spiritual papists and newly converted crypto-Calvinists. Nobody calls themselves "Gregorian," "Maximian," "Damascenian," "Basilian," or "Isaacian," but there are Augustinian sectarians and their parallel one-saint church (sometimes with two or three more saints added in). This attempt to divide the Church into sects is a product of medieval Roman Catholicism, which gave rise to schools of speculation, and that is the origin of the Protestant spirit of division. I want absolutely nothing to do with any of that, sorry. I tend to be holistic in my approach.