Christianity: St. Augustine and the incomplete soul
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two hundred years after Marcus Aurelius’ death, Christianity was no longer the religion of a persecuted minority. Roman Catholicism had become the official state religion of Rome and was rapidly replacing Stoicism as the dominant personal philosophy of Romans of all classes, from slaves to the very wealthy (Brown, 2012). Christianity changed the way that the ancient world thought about the fundamentals of life and has had an enormous impact on Western philosophy and psychology ever since. As in previous chapters, the psychological perspective that was built into Christianity will be discussed as an outgrowth of the historical period in which it became widely accepted and in the words of a scholar who wrote one of its most enduring formulations. The historical period is the last decades of the collapsing Western Roman Empire. The scholar is Aurelius Augustinus (AD 354–430), a popular orator and teacher, later an influential bishop in North Africa, and now known as one of the great fathers of the Roman Catholic Church, St. Augustine of Hippo. St. Augustine was born in Thagaste in the Roman North African colony of Numidia in AD 354. (Thagaste is now Souk Ahras, a city in northern Algeria.) St. Augustine was one of the privileged people of his era. His father was a Roman citizen and official, who was well enough connected to arrange a classical education for his son. Augustine was never enslaved, tortured, or caught up in war until the very last days of his life. Nonetheless, his life story is a saga of continuous dislocation and grief. The mission of the rulers of Numidia, puppets of the distant Roman state, was to exploit the local population in order to maximize grain shipments to Rome. In an age where people fought to the death over matters of religion, his mother and father were so fundamentally at odds in religious belief that he had to take sides, repudiating his father.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".