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Meditiations and Confessions

This is from the Meditations as quoted by John Sellars in his book, The Art of Living,
These three thoughts keep always ready to hand:
First, in what you do that you act not without purpose otherwise that Right itself would have done [...]
The second, to remember the nature of each individual from his conception to his first breath until he gives back the breath of life [...]
The third, to realize that if you could be suddenly caught up into the air and could look down upon human life and all its variety you would disdain it [...]
Sellars goes on to say that these three connect to the three divisions of Stoic philosophy. "The first is concerned with actions and impulses and corresponds to 'ethics'." The second, meanwhile, "is concerned with the true nature of individuals and corresponds to 'physics'." Finally, "the third is concerned with the analysis of impressions and value judgments and thus corresponds to 'logic'."

At the risk of stating the obvious, Sellars puts "ethics", "physics" and "logic" in scare quotes here because the Stoics don't use these terms the same way we do. There is overlap between their use and ours but they clearly had a different understanding of all three.

From an Augustinian perspective none of these would be right. Taking them in reverse order, 3)Augustine would have insisted that should we suddenly have such a perspective on human life our response should be to love it; 2) that we should, when considering the nature of human lives, hope that they will lead to eternal life with God, and 1) that we should act with faith that God has a special purpose for our lives. That said, however, Augustine does seem to take over the structure of Stoic thought much as the Genesis takes over the structure of Babylonian creation myths. He takes Stoic structure and uses it to a very different purpose.

Speculation: can we say that Augustine's faith, hope and charity correspond to Stoic ethics, physics and logic? That charity is the logic of Catholic Christian life according to Augustine?

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