Does serving one year in prison make you a criminal for the rest of your life? Does one racist tweet you posted about ten years ago, still make you a racist today? With other words, does your past have a big influence on whether you are a good or bad person, or is it okay to forgive people for bad actions of their past. This is a subject that keeps coming back and people never seem to agree on. Especially for politicians, or celebrities in general, little details from their past can keep on hunting them for the rest of their life.
While we usually put the actions of today’s celebrities under the loop, we often ignore the ‘bad’ decisions of some famous historical figures. There are even people that are known as saints today but used to act horribly before they got famous and so remembered. One of these saints I would like to discuss is Saint Augustine, a philosopher that lived over a 1500 years ago. We remember him as the author of the famous ‘confessions’, where he used philosophy as an exercise for everyday life. However, in his early adult years he lived a somewhat questionable life that, simply said, contained a lot of alcohol and women. After about thirty years converted, became and academic and developed into a good man who cared about the people around him and moreover left us some great philosophical works.
If we can forgive Saint Augustine for the action of his early years and celebrate him about who became, does this not mean that we should cut today’s celebrities, politicians and writers some slack as well? I believe that people can change, and we should keep supporting people to better themselves, in stead of only focusing on the bad of their past.
Medieval philosophy Lecture 1 