This article intends to analyse philosophically the theory of compassion and its practical corollaries in Gregory of Nyssa’s fifth homily on the Beatitudes, particularly in its first section. The author tries to assimilate the Jewish and Christian biblical tradition with the classical conception of the Greeks, and for that he challenges some of the main assumptions of the Platonist, Peripatetic and Stoic philosophical schools. Gregory describes compassion as a fundamental human attitude that springs from love and is capable of transforming (...) the framework of society by restoring equality, justice and communion among human beings. Beginning with the traditional Greek understanding of ἔλεος, with all its rich literary references, philosophical significance and dramatic power, Nyssen slowly pours it into the mould of the Judeo-Christian language of mercy and love, more intimate, more far-reaching, filled with the zeal for justice and redemption. The result is a profound, theoretically complex and socially challenging speculation. From a private emotion to a bond of communion, from a passive reaction to an active and free commitment, from a disordered passion to the highest of human virtues, from requiring social distance to erasing all differences of dignity and honour, from being restricted to those around us to reaching out towards each and every human being: compassion truly emerges in a new form. (shrink)

The Confessions is an account of Augustine’s search for truth and happiness, terminating in his conversion to Latin Christianity. In recounting the story of his restless quest, Augustine also wrestles with a philosophical paradox related to the possibility of searching for anything. This paradox, first presented in Plato’s dialogue Meno, asks how one can successfully search for something of which one has no knowledge. Gareth Matthews breaks Meno’s paradox into two parts: 1) a targeting problem, which asks how we can (...) know to search for something we have never experienced, and 2) a recognition problem, which asks how we can know we have found something if we do not have any prior knowledge of it. In his paper, ‘The Paradox of Inquiry in Augustine’s Confessions’, Scott MacDonald argues that any successful resolution to the paradox must satisfy what he calls the ‘qualified knowledge constraint on searching’: namely, that, ‘if it is possible to come to know an object by searching for it, it must be that one already knows in some way or to some extent the object one is searching for’. MacDonald goes on to show how Augustine ultimately resolves this problem by considering how God can dwell in his memory. By MacDonald’s interpretation, Augustine discovers that he has memories of joy and truth in his mind which serve as finite ‘tokens’ of God, who is joy and truth itself. In this paper, I will argue that this model based on ‘tokens’ essentially works, though MacDonald’s presentation does not account for the cases of concupiscence and self-deception. To account for these cases, I will show how even ephemeral joys can solve the recognition problem, and how memories of truth can resolve the targeting problem by eliciting a search for higher forms of truth. Augustine's resolution to Meno’s paradox is at once philosophically satisfying and psychologically penetrating. (shrink)