Quotes About Augustine

We were ensnared by the wisdom of the serpent; we are set free by the foolishness of God .

Augustine started from God's grace and got it right, Pelagius started from human effort and got it wrong. Augustine passionately pursued God; Pelagius methodically worked to please God.

I often think . . . that the bookstores that will save civilization are not online, nor on campuses, nor named Borders, Barnes & Noble, Dalton, or Crown. They are the used bookstores, in which, for a couple of hundred dollars, one can still find, with some diligence, the essential books of our culture, from the Bible and Shakespeare to Plato, Augustine, and Pascal.

St. Augustine imagines standing on tiptoes, trying to catch a glimpse of a God who is unbound by time and space, who knows all, is all-powerful, and is entirely unbearably good. We can't imagine such a God. All our thoughts are bounded by time, space, weakness, our own sinfulness. But we can just brush up against the underside of such thoughts as we reach reach reach . . . and then we trip over the crucified slave who is washing our feet.

All is not lost. In fact, as ever with Augustine, God uses our sin to move us toward salvation. The theologian for whom the fall is a "happy fault," felix culpa, —since redemption will be sweeter after the fall than it would have been without it— argues that God can make use of our hard-headedness in teaching and being taught.

The key to interpretation, as Augustine once told Deogratias, is your delight as an interpreter. Your delight is what your listeners will notice. It is what will return you to the text for more. It is what has a chance to draw in your hearers. It is the tether God has left in your soul with which to draw you to God's self, and others through you.

Love and do what you will," said St. Augustine.

Augustine wrote, "That first way [to truth] is humility; the second way is humility, and the third way is humility."1 If humility does not precede our wisdom and help, our efforts are meaningless. Paul, it seems, would agree. Life in Christ starts with humility.

Augustine of Hippo, the future saint, would later become a Manichean and remain one for most of his young manhood.

This seems to have been St. Augustine's very notion of memory, not just nostalgia for some past moment, but connecting past, present, and future in one complete contemplative knowing.

St. Augustine admits in his Confessions: "Late have I loved you, Beauty so very ancient and so ever new. Late have I loved you! You were within, but I was without.

As I said, this Spirit has two jobs. First, she creates diversity, as exemplified in the metaphor of wind—just breathing out ever-new life in endlessly diverse forms. But then the Spirit has another job: that of the Great Connector—of all those very diverse things! All this pluriform life, the Spirit keeps in harmony and "mutual deference"267—"so there shall be one Christ, loving Himself," as Augustine daringly put it.268

Augustine has defined sin as the "love of self to the neglect of God" and opposes to this the "love of God to the neglect of self

There is a certain unbending rigidity about Augustine that offers little compassion to anyone with whom he disagrees. Cadfael was never going to surrender his private reservations about any reputed saint who could describe humankind as a mass of corruption and sin proceeding inevitably towards death, or one who could look upon the world, for all its imperfections, and find it irredeemably evil.

Augustine's own head was getting a little dizzy. All this—it was straight from the horse's mouth indubitably, but it sounded so unreal! The sort of thing which happened to people in "history," not people today, not real people. Anyway it was surely over now ... well—if only those crazy vindictive Frenchmen in the Ruhr

Augustine, the faithful interpreter of them, exclaims: "Our Savior, to teach us that belief comes as a gift and not from merit, says: `No one comes to me, unless my Father ... draw him' [John 6:44], and' ' . . it be granted him by my Father' [John 6:651. It is strange that two hear: one despises, the other rises up! Let him who despises impute it to himself; let him who rises up not arrogate it to himself.

In Book 4 of On Christian Doctrine Augustine restates broad Ciceronian principles and transposes them into homiletical theory. He addresses standard considerations of audience, diction, rhythm, and style, but subjects them all to the authority of the Bible, which, in Augustine's treatment, is not only a source of doctrine but also a handbook of style. Thus the preacher not only exegetes the text but also uses it as a stylistic model for his sermon.

All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins.

I see only one solution," said St. Augustine. "The penguins will go to hell." "But they have no soul," observed St. Irenaeus. "It is a pity"" sighed Tertullian.

Augustine says that you don't understand a nation by the throw weight of its military or the strength of its research universities or the size of its population, but by looking at what it loves in common. To assess a nation, you look at the health and strength of its ideals. And there's no question that the common love in America is freedom.

Augustine does not disagree with this when he teaches that it is a faculty of the reason and the will to choose good with the assistance of grace; evil, when grace is absent.

It was monks who first taught the art of reading in silence. During the Dark Ages. Augustine, perhaps, was first. And silence was a tongue Elena understood. Silence was her idiom for support and caring. Silence was permissive and contemplative and nonconfrontational and there was melody to it. It was both earth and ether.

Augustine can hold that fallen man is free to sin but not free not to sin, yet still possesses free will, because as a sinner Adam wants to sin. The will is both free and unfree

[Desire is] a perpetual rack, or horsemill, according to Austin [Saint Augustine], still going round as in a ring.