Just as truly as the Confessions are the autobiography of St. Augustine, The City of God is the autobiography of the Church written by the most Catholic of her great saints.
When the will abandons what is above itself and turns to what is lower, it becomes evil – not because that is evil to which it turns, but because the turning itself is wicked. Therefore it is not an inferior thing which has made the will evil, but it is itself which has become so by wickedly and inordinately desiring an inferior thing.
O man, that which My Scripture saith, I say: and yet doth that speak in time; but time has no relation to My Word; because My Word exists in equal eternity with Myself. So the things which ye see through My Spirit, I see; like as what ye speak by My Spirit, I speak. And so when ye see those things in time, I see them not in time; as when ye speak in time, I speak them not in time.
Purity both of the body and the soul rests on the steadfastness of the will strengthened by God’s grace, and cannot be forcibly taken from an unwilling person.
For he who in every forthputting of activity does not look back on the beginning, does not look forward to the end. Wherefore it is necessary that prospective intention be connected with retrospective memory. For how shall one find how to finish anything, if he has forgotten what it was which he had begun?
This only I know, that woe is me except in Thee: not only without but within myself also; and all abundance, which is not my God, is emptiness to me.
So You have ordained and so it is: that every disorder of the soul is its own punishment.
And what is the origin of our evil will but pride? For “pride is the beginning of sin.”92 And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation? And this is undue exaltation, when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself.
For you have imposed order, and so it is that the punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.
While therefore each one of us is trying to understand in the sacred writings what the writer meant by them, what harm if one accepts a meaning which You, Light of all true minds, show him to be in itself a true meaning, even if the author we are reading did not actually mean that by it: since his meaning also, though different from mine, is true?
Their irreligious pride makes them withdraw from you and eclipse your great light from reaching themselves. They can foresee a future eclipse of the sun, but do not perceive their own eclipse in the present.
The Incarnate Word has been spoken. It calls the soul back to its place of peace that cannot be disturbed and love that will never be disappointed.
How often we slip, who can count? How many times we initially act as if we put up with people telling idle tales in order not to offend the weak, but then gradually we find pleasure in listening.
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not:.
This power is that of my mind and is a natural endowment, but I myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am. Is.
People are moved to wonder by mountain peaks,13 by vast waves of the sea, by broad waterfalls on rivers, by the all-embracing extent of the ocean, by the revolutions of the stars. But in themselves they are uninterested. They.
Let us not, therefore, be prompt in arguments and indolent in prayers.
I will refrain, if I can, from attacking their weak points, which I know well, with the violence with which they attack what they know nothing of; for I wish them, if possible, to be cured rather than conquered.
The perfection of all our good things and our perfect good is God.
I have learned to give this reverence and honor to those books of Scripture alone which are now called canonical, as firmly to believe that no one of their authors erred in writing anything... but I so read the others, that however excellent in purity of doctrine, I do not therefore take a thing to be true because they thought so; but because they can persuade me, either through those canonical authors, or probable reason, that it does not differ from the truth.
How do I respond to those who ask what God was doing before he made heaven and earth? Not as one is said to have responded by way of jest, to avoid the brunt of the question, claiming God spent the time getting hell ready for those who pry into serious matters. Since mocking is not solving, I would not say that.