“And yet, my God our maker, what comparison can there be between the respect with which I deferred to her and the service she rendered to me? Now that I had lost the immense support she gave, my soul was wounded, and my life as it were torn to pieces, since my life and hers had become a single thing.” —Augustine, Confessions
Category: Augustine of Hippo
The August Theologian: Frenemies and Enemends
“Just as flattering friends corrupt, so quarrelsome enemies often bring us correction.” —Augustine, Confessions
The August Theologian: How Heresy Serves the Church
“The rejection of heretics brings into relief what your church holds and what sound doctrine maintains.” —Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
The August Theologian: Total Depravity and Original Sin
“At Rome my arrival was marked by the scourge of physical sickness, and I was on the way to the underworld, bearing all the evils I had committed against you, against myself, and against others—sins both numerous and serious, in addition to the chain of original sin by which ‘in Adam we die’ (1 Cor. 15: 22). You had not yet forgiven me in Christ for any of them, nor had he by his cross delivered me from the hostile disposition towards you which I had contracted by my sins. How could he deliver me from them if his cross was, as I had believed, a phantom? Insofar as the death of his flesh was in my opinion unreal, the death of my soul was real. And insofar as the death of his flesh was authentic, to that extent the life of my soul, which disbelieved that, was inauthentic.” —Augustine, Confessions
The August Theologian: A Confession about Confessions We Must Confess
“He who is making confession to you is not instructing you of that which is happening within him. The closed heart does not shut out your eye, and your hand is not kept away by the hardness of humanity, but you melt that when you wish, either in mercy or in punishment, and there is ‘none who can hide from your heat’ (Ps. 18: 7).” —Augustine, Confessions
The August Theologian: Growing up by the Scriptures into the Scriptures
“I therefore decided to give attention to the holy scriptures and to find out what they were like. And this is what met me: something neither open to the proud nor laid bare to mere children; a text lowly to the beginner but, on further reading, of mountainous difficulty and enveloped in mysteries. I was not in any state to be able to enter into that, or to bow my head to climb its steps. What I am now saying did not then enter my mind when I gave my attention to the scripture. It seemed to me unworthy in comparison with the dignity of Cicero. My inflated conceit shunned the Bible’s restraint, and my gaze never penetrated to its inwardness. Yet the Bible was composed m such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them. I disdained to be a little beginner. Puffed up with pride, I considered myself a mature adult.” —Augustine, Confessions
The August Theologian: Pleasing Pleasures
“If physical objects give you pleasure, praise God for them and return love to their Maker lest, in the things that please you, you displease him.” —Augustine, Confessions
The August Theologian: Enticing Education
“This experience sufficiently illustrates the truth that free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion. Nevertheless, the free-ranging flux of curiosity is channeled by discipline under you laws, God.” —Augustine, Confessions
The August Theologian: What We Were Made For
“You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” —Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
No Other Boast 