St. Augustine and Gothic Architecture

Chipotle? Baja Fresh? or In-n-Out? At the moment, probably Chipotle... Is my decision to choose Chipotle really my decision or was it sealed in fate that I was going to choose Chipotle? If I change my mind to Baja Fresh, would that account for fate also?

Fortunately, I am ignorant enough to not really spend too much time contemplating about these issues, becuase I wouldn't have time to do my CORE homework like this blog entry. However, for St. Augustine, he really had deep thoughts on whether humans really had the power to free will or whether we are all playing dumb under God. Well, it seems rather clear that he believed in free will over the destined fate, as indicative of the fact that he wrote a doctrine on free will. Freedom under Augustine's definition is the capacity for doing what one wants. So even if God, or any other supernatural being, already knows what a person wants, it does not have an effect in causing a person to take certain actions. With this said, St. Augustine also blieved that (he believed in a lot of things) humans have a tendency to make bad decisions based on their sensory knowledge and not by the divine wisdom, an idea that destroyed the purpose of people being able to have the power to choose in the first place. There is no point of us making decisions ourselves if we continuously made bad decisions, and to St. Augustine, our decision based upon our sensory knowledge was a bad decision, for he believed that only through divine wisdom can we cleanse ourselves and achieve happiness through making the better decisions. To do that, he figured the only way possible was via God's grace, which allows us to access his good. It is only through introspection that we may be able to recieve God's grace, which enabled us with the "inner experience".

Now the Gothic Architecture of the time can be a great reflection of St. Augustine's Neo-Platonic belief of divine wisdom and how we can achieve it. First of all, Gothic architecture was heavily elaborate with meticulous designs and fantastic, almost ostentatious, architecture both on the exterior and on the interior. Now, taking a look at the interior designing of Gothic architecture, there are many stained glass windows that reflect the suns's lights that light the building in an aura of beautiful lights everywhere. The main purpose of Gothic architecture was to let light inside the building. This architecture can connect with St. Augustine's doctrine in that many followers of Christian religion, most of whom were illiterate at the time, can enjoy the beautiful and aesthetic pictures on the stained glass windows, which will help them to introspect to get to the Beatific Vision. The designs on the stained glass windows, for this purpose, mainly included scenes form the Bible, so that people don't have to take the extra effort to become literate and read the Bible, but be able to quickly visualize scenes form the Bible so that they can have a better grasp of their faith, almost like catharsisin a way. By looking at the art, they are purging themselves of their sensory knowledge and taking on the goods through introspection.