Quotes from St. Augustine

I recently finished a course on early Christianity at college and the course ended with several lectures on St. Augustine of Hippo. I find Augustine extremely relevant, both personally and for this current age. Like me Augustine was born in a small town, Thagaste (located in the Roman province of Numidia and present day Algeria), which was not well known for intellectual prowess. The African hinterland had prospered during the first century AD but by the fourth its economy had stagnated. The Africans of Augustine's hometown were proudly Roman, but had customs and a Latin dialect that Romans in Italy found quite insophisticated. His parents scraped up money to give him a proper education with the hopes of turning their provincial son into a success. Though Augustine was certainly intelligent, he was a poor student as a child and preferred play to his studies; he would never learn Greek, the language of the eastern half of the empire and the Eastern Church. He was not a promethean thinker, forging uncharted paths into the future. Augustine was not the brilliant philosopher of his age, say a Plato or a Thomas Aquinas. Instead Augustine, trained in literature and rhetoric, was more like an artist who understood the spirit of the times. He was representative of and active in the transformation of the pagan, Roman world into the Christian Middle Ages. Augustine lived at the end of one era, Late Antiquity, and the beginning of another, the medieval period. In the same way, we live at the end of Late Modernity and on the fringes of Post-modernity. At the beginning of Augustine's life Roman power seemed to be eternal. The emperors of the third century, now carrying the banner of the cross, had stabilized the empire after a tumultous third century. However, Roman vitality waned as Augustine's life progressed and he died as the Vandals besieged his cathedral town of Hippo. Likewise the West, two decades ago confident in its superiority, faces financial crises, an aging population, and cultural stagnation. It's future is now uncertain. Perhaps more than anything else it was uncertainty that characterized the era that Augustine lived in, something that is endemic today. In any case, the thought of Augustine has proved to be enormously influential for the past 1600 years and, as the world once again undergoes dramatic changes, I believe he will continue to be so.

Here is a selection of quotations from St. Augustine:

"So blind was I, and so precipitate was my fall, that when I heard my contemporaries boasting of their exploits, I felt ashamed that I had less to be ashamed of. The more immoral their actions, the more they would brag about them. They lusted for such acts, and not for the acts alone; they lusted also for glory…I was afraid that the more innocent I was, the more of a coward I would seem; and the more chaste I was, the more contemptible I would be considered."

-The Confessions, 2.3.7.

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"He that is kind is free, though he is a slave; he that is evil is a slave, though he be a king."

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"In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?"

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"Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature."

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"Thou hast created us for Thyself, and our heart is not quiet until it rests in Thee."

-The Confessions, 1.1.1

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"There is no possible source of evil except good."

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"As to these natures [of man], however: the more they have being, and the more good that they do...the more they have efficient causes. On the other hand, insofar as they lack being, and for this reason do evil - for what, in this case, do they achieve but emptiness? - they have deficient causes. And I know also that, where the will becomes evil, this evil would not arise in it if the will itself were unwilling; and its defects are therefore justly punished because they are not necessary but voluntary. For the defections of the will are not toward evil things, but are themselves evil...it is the defection of the will itself which is evil. because against the order of nature. It is a turning away from that which has supreme being and towards that which has less."

-City of God, XII.8

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"What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like."

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"Can it be true, Lord God of truth, that whoever posesses this mathematical and astronomical knowledge is already pleasing in your sight? Unhappy indeed is the man who has this knowledge, but does not know you; blessed is the man who knows you, even if he does not have this knowledge. But blessed indeed is he who he knows you and also knows mathematics and astronomy. He is not more blessed on their account; he is blessd on your acount alone."

-The Confessions, 5.4.7