Tag Archives: St. Augustine

As you know, I’ve been busy writing and haven’t read much in a week or more so Augustine and Agee are still awaiting my return. But thanks to J-Walk, I found a great site to give you a quick review … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Saint Augustine is primarily a guidebook to common sense and therefore more needed today than ever before in our history.  I liked this: He was not utterly unskilled in handling his own lack of training, and he refused to be … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Even while Augustine’s purpose in this next section is likely primarily political, that is, to prove his recanting of his former belief in the teachings of Mani (Manichee), I find I must dig deeper into Augustine’s writings, and have been … Continue reading →

Augustine has an interesting comment on this: With the mind and intellect which you have given them, they investigate these matters.  They have found out much. (…) People who have no understanding of these things are amazed and stupefied.  Those … Continue reading → Continue reading →

You alone are always present even to those who have taken themselves far from you.  Let them turn and seek you, for you have not abandoned your creation as they have deserted their Creator [Wisd.5:7].  Let them turn, and at … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I like the way Augustine puts this: For I did not know that the soul needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth.  … Continue reading → Continue reading →

The text of Confessions is written as if Augustine is writing to God, certainly addressing Him in an informal manner, meaning not in letter style, but more perhaps as a diary.  Augustine plunges into his own past and his own … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Augustine, on the death of someone very close to him, a boyhood friend: ‘Grief darkened my heart.’ (Lam. 5:17) Everything on which I set my gaze was death.  My home town became a torture to me; my father’s house a … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Augustine, while granting God the first and last say in making the rules, argues that by a simple measure of doing good by not doing wrong to others or giving in to the excesses that bring man earthly pleasures without … Continue reading → Continue reading →

In this point of Confessions Augustine explains the laws of God as being universal, and that while circumstance of time may change rules, what is good for man is basic for all, and comes directly from the love of God.  … Continue reading →

Augustine tells us of the reasoning for when he (and as he suggests, others) come to dwell on the Bible and the word of God, as opposed to avoidance even when a basis for belief is acknowledged. I therefore decided … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Laughed aloud at this one: My studies which were deemed respectable had the objective of leading me to distinction as an advocate in the lawcourts, where one’s reputation is high in proportion to one’s success in deceiving people.  The blindness … Continue reading → Continue reading →

…the more they stay the same.  Barbara commented on the fact that some of what Augustine is writing about in his recollections of youth, such as peer pressure, exist as problems today.  Here, in the beginning of Book III, I … Continue reading → Continue reading →