Greetings folks.  I have been fascinated by how many philosophers of different stripes turn to Augustine.  This can be found in Descartes, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Derrida, etc.  I currently am reading John Rist, Real Ethics: Reconsidering the Foundations of Morality.  At one point he speaks to how one way of understanding Sartre is to see Sartre as affirming Augustine's anthropology (in a very general sense) while denying Augustine's doctrine of God.  Here is what Rist writes:

Reflect on the universe proposed by Augustine without Augustine's God and we are left in the universe of Sartre, where values are constructed at random whenever 'honest' folk see the necessity, where hell is other people seen as ineluctably predatory, and where life itself seems an absurdity which can only be transcended in the ultimately hopeless or destructive pursuit of a genuinely 'free' act. (p. 43)

Rist's book is proving to be a great read.

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