Quotes About Augustine

Augustine concluded that war, if necessary to save the state, could be a lesser evil than peace—and that the procedural prerequisites for necessity could be stated. Had provocation occurred? Had competent authority exhausted peaceful alternatives? Would the resort to violence be a means chosen, not an end in itself?

There were, of course, precedents for questioning the wisdom of war: Artabanus, Archidamus, and Nicias had all done that, if unsuccessfully, and Thucydides' doomed Melians had raised timeless misgivings about the conduct of wars once started. No one before Augustine, however, had set standards to be met by states in choosing war.

In the time of to Augustine, the conversation in the West mostly had been a Christian reaction to outside ideas. After Augustine, the Great Conversation would be about his ideas for centuries.

Women should not be enlightened or educated in any way. They should, in fact, be segregated as they are the cause of hideous and involuntary erections in holy men.

Preaching on the Eucharist in his Homily on the Feast of Pentecost, Augustine says to his congregation, "You are the mystery that is placed upon the Lord's table. You receive the mystery that is yourself. To that which you are, you will respond, Amen.

Augustine explains: The flesh needs many things even for this life, and this, too, it seeks from God, because not only spiritual things but also earthly things are to be sought from no one but God.

We must read the Fathers cautiously, and lay them in the gold balance, for they often stumbled and went astray, and mingled in their books many monkish things. Augustine had more work and labor, to wind himself out of the Father's writings, then he had with the heretics.

Thus Augustine says: "We know that we owe our existence to His goodness. We know that we are creatures because of the kindness of God, not because of merit. For it has pleased God that no one should glory except in the Lord.

For such unjust acts of robbery lead automatically to vengeance and punishments, as Augustine's statement bears out. "Gain in the coffer," he says, "harm in the conscience." 55 No unjust gain is without most unjust harm.

Therefore Augustine was right when he said: "The external works of the Godhead are indivisible.

In The Prince he says that "a just war is a necessary war," thus cutting through the Gordian knot formed by endless Medieval discussions of Just War from Saint Augustine to Saint Thomas Aquinas.

At about the same time that St. Augustine lived, the Roman jurists ruled, under the Code of Mathematicians and Evil-Doers, that "to learn the art of geometry and to take part in public exercises, an art as damnable as mathematics, are forbidden.

Augustine was right when he said that we love the truth when it enlightens us, but we hate it when it convicts us.

Not only do Christians believe, they are those who "think in believing and believe in thinking," as Augustine expressed it. The world of Christian faith is not a fairy-tale, make-believe world, question-free and problem-proof, but a world where doubt is never far from faith's shoulder.

The ultimate challenge of a Jesus-centered hermeneutic is that it makes love the lens through which we must henceforth read, interpret, and apply all Scripture. "The whole Bible does nothing but tell of God's love," says Augustine of Hippo.