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From: laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.religion,net.women
Subject: Re: Judaism, Christianity and Sex
Message-ID: <1660@utcsstat.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 15-Jan-84 17:04:06 EST
Article-I.D.: utcsstat.1660
Posted: Sun Jan 15 17:04:06 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 15-Jan-84 17:33:44 EST
References: <483@ihuxq.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada
Lines: 32

there is another problem about St. Augustine and John Crysostom. A lot
of the writings of John Crysostom were discovered in an old monastery
in 195?. Nobody had known that they were there. Thus all through the
middle ages, people were reading Augustine and *not* Crysostom because
they didn't even know it was available.

John Crysostom's life is pretty parallel with Augustine's -- they
both had Christian mothers and pagan fathers and underwent a
conversion after a youth spent in what they later considered
"sinful ways". Crysostom does not appear to feel as guilty as
Augustine -- he writes about forgiveness in a way that make you
thinkt hat he thinks that he has been forgiven, where as
Augustine writes with less conviction upon the subject.

You get the impression that Augustine thinks that God had to make
a heroic effort to forgive Augustine -- possibly because Augustine
was very lousy (as he admitted) at forgiving other people. John
Crysostom, on the other hand, was not as terrible at it (which is
a good thing, because the Church eventually took away his position
as Bishop and he had to do a lot of forgiving) so he didn't think that
forgiving was something that God ought to find all that difficult.
Jesus had died, after all -- forgiving John Crysotom can't have been
all that difficult in comparison.

But Christianity read Augustine rather than Crysostom, and thereby gained
the repuation of being obsessed with guilt. I think that Christianity
today would have been radically different if it had been Augustine who
was buried until the 1950s and Crysostom who was studied all through the
dark and middle ages.

laura creighton
utzoo!utcsstat!laura