Cambridge historian Henry Chadwick argued that Augustine “marks an epoch in the history of human moral consciousness.”47 For the first time the supreme goal of life was not self-control and rationality but love. Love was required to redirect the human person away from self-centeredness toward serving God and others. Augustine’s Confessions laid the groundwork for what we would call psychology in a way that non-Christian classical thought could not have done.48 The older idea of the body being bad and the soul good—of the emotions (resident in the body) as bad and reason as good—changed under
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