Purpose. Via the life example of a great Christian hermit Augustine of Hippo and his «Confessions», the author of the essay considers the existential choice problem, which changes man’s course of life and displays its essence. Analyzing and deconstructing Augustine's self-reflection against the background of the texts by two other great Africans, the article traces the foundations and main stages of the process of self-seeking in people who want to find themselves in a lost world. The purpose of the article (...) is to analyze the intellectual, emotional and spiritual components of the process of taking epochal-making decisions versus the approaches of A. Camus and J. Derrida, prominent Augustine’s fellow countrymen, born in Algeria as well. Methodology. The research is based on the comparative historical analysis, allowing to identify and summarize some principles for the decision-making of the most important existential solutions. The use of comparative procedures made possible to show the ineffectiveness of self-contained Camus' and Darrida’s existential searches, and at the same time, demonstrate the success of finding selfhood and self-knowledge by Augustine, who was open for the gift descending from Above. The use of other general scientific methods, such as analysis, reduction, generalization, and retrospective method allowed the researcher to highlight some epistemological problems manifested in understanding and searching the Truth, as the most important and often unconscious human need. Augustine's openness to accepting Truth from Above and at the same time understanding the inability to seize it independently distinguishes him from similar searches of Jacques Darrida. Originality. The research has shown that the existential choice, which in contrast to ordinary choices, changes a man’s life and renders meaning to his existence, is made not with a volitional decision, but with a hardly explicable encounter connecting personal with over-personal being. Conclusions. The author concludes, that unlike the day-to-day choices-preferences, which can be made following a rational and ecstatic decision, the existential choice is a dialectic unity of Gift, coming from Above, and an intuitive unconscious faith of a person who accepts this Gift. (shrink)

In De ciuitate Dei (ciu.), Augustine famously calls people with disabilities created on purpose by an absolutely competent God (16.8). On the whole, however, Augustine's views on disabilities in ciu. are often misunderstood. The statement about the creation of people with disabilities is part of a discussion of the theodicy question that implies that the goodness of people with disabilities is not open to experience and must be accepted on faith. This negative background assumption results from Augustine's view that dignity (...) emerges from the embodied beauty, rationality, and utility of the ensouled body (22). Augustine gives several examples of how disabilities reduce dignity along with these dimensions, as “deformity defeats beauty” (19.4). In eternal salvation, however, disabilities will be removed (22). Martyrs will perhaps retain scars in heaven, but these particular scars will be of such a kind that there is “not deformitas in them, but dignitas” (22.19). If in the resurrection for eternal life God removes congenital disabilities that God created so competently, what is their purpose in the first place? Augustine regards disabilities as temporal embodied warnings of eternal corporeal punishment (21.8). As a concluding perspective, the alternative view of disabilities by the Apostle Paul will be considered. (shrink)