Augustine

“ It would be a vain and useless labor for me to undertake to day to prove that Augustine is a great saint; there is nothing better known in the world, both among the learned and the ignorant; it is proclaimed by the dumb books in libraries, written by pens in the universities, spoken of by tongues in the pulpits; whenever the name of Augustine is mentioned you hear the great Augustine spoken of. So that one who has even a little knowledge of the Saint must, whenever he thinks of him, look on him as a great saint. ”

“ What that is, some know, and many a man converted late in life has imagined with heart-wrung envy: an Augustine, already numbered with the Saints, a Prodigal robed and decked with more than pardon, haunted yet by dark shadows of the past, the husks and the swine. ”

“ Among the few great names which have most signally emblazoned the pages of history, and whose fame and influence have not been limited to their own age, country, or people, that of Augustine, saint and bishop, stands out pre-eminently as worthy of all the encomiums bestowed upon him by serious students of men and their times. He has been and is regarded as the greatest and most celebrated of theologians, the father and master of preachers of the Divine Word, the peer of the rarest and most enlightened minds, whose soaring is above all time. ”

“ Augustine. We see it in the old pictures of the saints, where the venerable and the strong, the gracious and the lovely, the meek and the winning, are so subtly blended by the pencil of an Angelico or a Perugino. We see it within many a modern cloister. It has its place, to the discerning eye, among the evidences of religion.
In the north the world now finds it more difficult than in the south to appreciate such a character as St. Gertrude. If it is sceptical as to visions and raptures, still more is it scandalized by austerities and mortification. ”

“ Augustine was not the first to formulate belief in the Holy Catholic Church; but no one before him had reflected so deeply, or expressed himself with such inimitable tenderness and devotion, on the church as the nurse and home of the Christian life, and the saving virtue of her means of grace. The church to him is the society of the saints, the Kingdom of God on earth. ”

“ This is the grace which we beg of the Holy Ghost, through the hands of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the holy angels, and also through the humility of the wonderfully humble St. Augustine.
To prove the great esteem and honor in which Augustine was held by the world I need not seek long; the gospel of to-day furnishes me with a sufficient basis for it: " A city seated on a mountain cannot be hid. An unusually brilliant light cannot fail to be remarked unless every one is stone-blind. ”

“ In God’s searching presence, Augustine undertakes to plumb the depths of his memory to trace the mysterious pilgrimage of grace which his life has been--and to praise God for his constant and omnipotent grace. In a mood of sustained prayer, he recalls what he can of his infancy, his learning to speak, and his childhood experiences in school. He concludes with a paean of grateful praise to God.
Chapter I 1. “Great art thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is thy power, and infinite is thy wisdom.” ”

“ In his natural endowments, so rich and finely blended, in his training and early experience, in the supernatural mode of his conversion, everything wrought together to give to men in the apostle Paul a man supremely fitted to be Christ’s ambassador to the Pagan world, and for all ages the “teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.” “A chosen vessel unto me,” said the Lord Jesus, “to bear my name.”
Such a gift to the world was St Augustine: a man of the most powerful intellect and will, master of the thought and life of his time. ”

“ The central theme in all Augustine’s writings is the sovereign God of grace and the sovereign grace of God. Grace, for Augustine, is God’s freedom to act without any external necessity whatsoever--to act in love beyond human understanding or control; to act in creation, judgment, and redemption ”

“ Augustine, its nearest prototype in literature—is so intensely theological. It is not the life of a man we read, it is the drama of a soul, and of a soul entirely occupied with the relations of itself to God. Surely few men have always lived their life so completely in the great Taskmaster's eye. ”

“ Augustine answered: We are neither made fouler by our washing, nor cleaner by yours. But when the water of baptism is given to any one in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, it is neither ours nor yours, but His of whom it was said to John, "Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on Him, the same is He which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost." [684] ”

“ Augustine the substantial formula of his ideology, the origin of that ideology, or the proofs of the stability, security, and irrefutable validity of that ideology, he would always have been obliged to answer by appealing to the universal principle established by reason and the Catholic faith, that is, to the principle of creation. Therefore the genesis of the Augustinian ideology, if it had not been already traced out or properly considered before to-day, would be now as clear and certain as the light, and with the eighth book of The City of God, we might predict that it would be immortal. ”

“ Despite its awkward form, however, the Enchiridion is one of the most important of all of Augustine’s writings, for it is a conscious effort of the theological magistrate of the Western Church to stand on final ground of testimony to the Christian truth.
For his framework, Augustine chooses the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. The treatise begins, naturally enough, with a discussion of God’s work in creation. Augustine makes a firm distinction between the comparatively unimportant knowledge of nature and the supremely important acknowledgment of the Creator of nature. ”

“ At the same time the hallmark of the Augustinian philosophy is its insistent demand that reflective thought issue in practical consequence; no contemplation of the end of life suffices unless it discovers the means by which men are brought to their proper goals. In sum, Augustine is one of the very few men who simply cannot be ignored or depreciated in any estimate of Western civilization without serious distortion and impoverishment of one’s historical and religious understanding. ”

“ Augustine, "either within or without the Church, as long as the patience of God leadeth them to repentance, and He 'visits their offences with a rod, and their sins with scourges.' For thus He does not utterly take away His mercy from them, if they would but at length have compassion on their own souls, pleasing God." ”

“ The views of Augustine were infinitely more cheerful than those of his adversary respecting salvation, since they gave more hope to the miserable population of the Empire who could not claim the virtues of Pelagius, and were impotent of themselves to break away from the bondage which degraded them. There is nothing in the writings of Augustine,--not in this controversy, or any other controversy,--to show that God delights in the miseries or the penalty which are indissolubly connected with sin ”

“ None can deny the greatness of Augustine s soul his enthusiasm, his unceasing search after truth, his affectionateness, his ardour, his self-devotion. And even those who may doubt the soundness or value of some of his dogmatic conclusions, cannot hesitate to acknowledge the depth of his spiritual convictions, and the strength, solidity, and penetration with which he handled the most difficult questions, and wrought all the elements of his experience and of his profound Scriptural knowledge into a great system of Christian thought. ”

“ Augustine in the wonderful passage about light, 'sliding by me in unnumbered guises'—he can only end by praying to be delivered from the temptation to enjoy the sight of dawn and sunset, as setting his affections too much upon the things of earth. ”

“ S. Augustine observes that her name signifies chaste in Greek, and a lamb in Latin. She has been always looked upon in the Church as a special patroness of purity. We learn from S. Ambrose and S. Augustine, that she was only thirteen years old at the time of her death. She suffered in the persecution of Diocletian. Her riches and beauty excited one of the young nobles of Rome, the son of the prefect of the city, to attempt to gain her hand in marriage. ”

“ Man’s end and the beginning meet at a single point!
The Enchiridion is a briefer treatise on the grace of God and represents Augustine’s fully matured theological perspective--after the magnificent achievements of the De Trinitate and the greater part of the De civitate Dei, and after the tremendous turmoil of the Pelagian controversy in which the doctrine of grace was the exact epicenter. Sometime in 421, Augustine received a request from one Laurentius, a Christian layman who was the brother of the tribune Dulcitius (for whom Augustine wrote the De octo dulcitii quaestionibus in 423-425) . ”

“ In this way Augustine also had to believe, and all the saints, and we too, every one for himself alone.
For this reason St. Augustine's words cannot bear the interpretation they put upon them; but they must be understood of the external proof of faith, by which heretics are refuted and the weak strengthened in faith, when they see that all the world preaches and regards as Gospel that which they believe. And if this meaning cannot be found in St. Augustine's words, it is better to reject the words; for they are contrary to the Scriptures and to all experience if they have that other meaning. ”

“ Not obeying, but receiving, is the substance of the gospel. A man cannot merit salvation; he cannot buy it; but one thing he must do,—he must take it. And the least faith makes salvation ours, because it makes Christ ours.
Augustine conceived of justification as a continuous process, proceeding until love and all Christian virtues fill the heart. There is his chief difference from Paul. Augustine believes in sin and grace. But he has not the freedom of the children of God, as Paul has. The influence of Augustine upon Roman Catholic theology has not been wholly salutary. ”

“ There is a manifest eagerness to have him share in his own flashes of insight and his sudden glimpses of God’s glory. Augustine’s style is deeply personal; it is therefore idiomatic, and often colloquial. Even in his knottiest arguments, or in the labyrinthine mazes of his allegorizing (e.g., Confessions, Bk. XIII, or Enchiridion, XVIII) , he seeks to maintain contact with his reader in genuine respect and openness. He is never content to seek and find the truth in solitude. ”

“ Augustine, boldly but humbly reveals to the eyes of the Church the wretchedness of his early sinful life, we admire, in awe, the strange manifestation of a sublime spirit of Christian virtue, and we bless the Divine Wisdom that hath caused it to be vouchsafed to us. But the struggles of one who has not compensated his 339 weaknesses by any noble results, who withdraws from our sight a combatant, and not a victor; who only presents us the spectacle of a frail nature, such as we all may have, wrestling with daily and anxious trials, and not overcoming them ”

“ Augustine answered: Seek with greater care to know in what sense the words which you have quoted from Scripture in proof of your position were really uttered, and how they should be understood. For that all unrighteous persons are wont to be called dead in a mystical sense is clear enough; but Christ, to whom true baptism belongs, which you say is false because of the faults of men, is alive, sitting at the right hand of the Father, and He will not die any more [Pg 260] through any infirmity of the flesh: death will no more have dominion over Him. ”

“ Augustine, which distinguishes the just from the carnal Christian: it is the invisible spirit which animates them. Pious actions are frequently common to the good and to the wicked; it is the disposition of the heart which discriminates them. All run, says the Apostle, but all reach not the goal, for it is not the same spirit which impels them. ”

“ Augustine, whose fearful catalogue of heresies served as a guide to intolerance throughout the Middle Ages, condemned with the same holy horror those who expressed doubt as to the orthodox number of years since the beginning of the world, and those who doubted an earthquake to be the literal voice of an angry God, or who questioned the plurality of the heavens, or who gainsaid the statement that God brings out the stars from his treasures and hangs them up in the solid firmament above the earth every night. ”

“ The Doctrine of Augustine.―During the first period of his Christian life, when the conflict with Manichæism still stood in the forefront of his thinking and controversial activity, Augustine, looking at faith as a self-determining of the human will, had thought a certain measure of free co-operation on the part of man in his conversion to be necessary and had therefore refused to maintain his absolute want of merit. ”

“ One does not read far in the Confessions before he recognizes that the term “confess” has a double range of meaning. On the one hand, it obviously refers to the free acknowledgment, before God, of the truth one knows about oneself--and this obviously meant, for Augustine, the “confession of sins.” But, at the same time, and more importantly, confiteri means to acknowledge, to God, the truth one knows about God. To confess, then, is to praise and glorify God; it is an exercise in self-knowledge and true humility in the atmosphere of grace and reconciliation. ”