True Confessions

I’m enjoying reading through St. Augustine's Confessions. It is thrilling to read something over 1,600 years old and think as the author thought, and feel as the author felt, so long ago and far away. And especially enlightening to see that he still has much to say about current events, 1,600 years later.

For example:


Of the spiritual quest: “All who look for him shall find him.”

“You come close only to men who are humble at heart.”


Of school and education: “a period of suffering and humiliation.”

“We learn better in a free spirit of curiousity than under fear and compulsion.”


Of the traditional lot of males: “No one pities either the boys or the men, though surely we deserved pity.”


Of flaming: “If he were worsted by a colleague in some petty argument, he would be convulsed with anger and envy.”


Of worldly success: “Man’s insatiable desire is for the poverty he calls wealth and the infamy he knows as fame.”

“To love this world is to break faith with God.”

“Come down from the heights. For then you may climb, and, this time, climb to God. To climb against him was your fall.”


“I lived in misery, like every man whose soul is tethered by the love of things that cannot last and then is agonized to lose them.”

“If the senses could comprehend the whole, we would wish that whatever exists in the present should pass on, so that we might gain greater pleasure from the whole.”

“A man who has faith in you owns all the wealth of the world, for if he clings to you, whom all things serve, though he has nothing yet he owns them all.”


Of pacifism: “Sloth poses as the love of peace.”


Of romantic love: “a snare of my own choosing.”


Of evil: “Evil is nothing but the removal of good until finally no good remains.”

It is to “set one’s heart on some one part of creation instead of on the whole.”


Of moral relativism: “Each age and place forms rules of conduct best suited to itself, although the [underlying] Law itself is always and everywhere the same and does not differ from place to place.”


Of homosexuality: “Sins against nature, like the sin of Sodom, are abominable and deserve punishment wherever and whenever they are committed.”

Augustine considers such actions even worse than sins against other men, things like theft or murder, because these are sins directly against God: “the relationship which we ought to have with God is violated when our nature, of which he is the author, is desecrated by perverted lust.”

An important distinction is perhaps missed here: while it makes sense that the state not rule against homosexuality, because it does not harm other members of the state, this in no way ought to imply that homosexuality is moral. Morality is not determined by the state, and is not punished by the state. The state’s job is to protect citizens’ rights and to preserve good order.


Of marriage: “contracted for the purpose of having children.”


Of truth: “the soul is weak and helpless unless it clings to the firm rock of truth.”


Of self-actualization: “What greater madness could there be than to assert, as I did in my strange madness, that by nature I was what you [God] are?”

Developing.