Suchergebnisse

I argue that St. Augustine of Hippo was the first in the history of Christian spirituality who expressed a key tendency of Christian mysticism, which implies a gradual intellectual ascent of the human soul to God, consisting of the three main stages: external, internal, and supernal. In this ascent a Christian mystic proceeds from the knowledge of external beings to self-knowledge (from outward to inward), and from his inner self to direct mystical contemplation of God (from inward to higher). Similar doctrines may be found in the writings of the Greek Fathers (Great Cappadocians, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, etc.). Although there are many similarities in the overall doctrine and in particular details between them, it does not imply the direct impact of Augustine's theological thought on the Greek Fathers but rather the influence of the Neoplatonic philosophy on both Western and Eastern Christianity, in particular, of Plotinus' theory of intellectual cognition.

The article is devoted to the comparison of the doctrine of time in Aristotle and Aurelius Augustine. Given that Augustine had two basic complementary concepts of time: subjective-psychological and objective-physical, the author consistently examines four points in which Augustine's doctrine on time resembles Aristotle's doctrine: first, the concept of time as a number or measure of movement of things in relation to the preceding and the following; secondly, the fluidity of time and the elusiveness of its moments (i.e. "paradoxes of time"); third, the concept of time as an infinitely divisible continuum, in which the moment of "now" is the boundary of time and the unit of its measurement; fourthly, the role of human soul in the perception and measurement of time. The author demonstrates that, de­spite the widespread opinion about the predominance of Neoplatonic influence on the thought of Augustine, his doctrine of time in its basic principles goes back to Aristotle. At the end of the article, the main differences in views on the phe­nomenon of time in Augustine and Aristotle are indicated.

The results of four gas tracer experiments of atmospheric dispersion on a regional scale are used for the benchmarking of two atmospheric dispersion modeling codes, MINERVE-SPRAY (CEA), and NOSTRADAMUS (IBRAE). The main topic of this comparison is to estimate the Lagrangian code capability to predict the radionuclide atmospheric transfer on a large field, in the case of risk assessment of nuclear power plant for example. For the four experiments, the results of calculations show a rather good agreement between the two codes, and the order of magnitude of the concentrations measured on the soil is predicted. Simulation is best for sampling points located ten kilometers from the source, while we note a divergence for more distant points results (difference in concentrations by a factor 2 to 5). This divergence may be explained by the fact that, for these four experiments, only one weather station (near the point source) was used on a field of 10 000 km2, generating the simulation of a uniform wind field throughout the calculation domain.