Confessions
St. Augustine
Book III
Ch. 1
In loving for the sake of loving, some pleasure is to be found because love was created by God. But love, not rooted in God, is unsatisfying.
Love, when abstracted for its own sake, opens man to the scourging of jealousy, fear, anger and strife.
Augustine polluted the spring of friendship with lust. (The notion here of polluting at the spring of friendship is interesting. It denotes that all the water coming forth from the spring is polluted. Later in the chapter he uses another water analogy, the rivers are flowing but he questions where they wind up).
Ch. 2
What kind of compassion is it that arises from viewing fictitious and unreal sufferings? Without considering God in this compassion we pervert it, turn it into pity and seek to achieve some sort of feeling from the sorrows of others. It is not compassion at all, but selfish.
Augustine sought out the sorrowful plays because the sorrow captured his imagination. Apart from God, being in his own sorrowful place because of it, it was obvious why Augustine sought it out. In seeking out the imagined sorrows of the stage, he didn't have to dig deeper into his own sorrow, which stemmed from his ignoring of God.
Ch. 3
Even in this state God's mercy hovered over Augustine from afar.
The wreckers (a group of intellectuals who mocked others with their eloquence) became wreckers because they were wrecked themselves. It's a "hurt people hurt people" kind of thing.
Ch. 4
Augustine was struck by Cicero's Hortensius. It was through this lost book that a sudden realization came over Augustine. He was struck by the substance and not the style of Cicero. Now, Augustine would seek wisdom for its own sake and not for the glory that studying would bring him.
Ch. 5
After Cicero, Augustine read the Scriptures and was nonplussed. He regarded them as beneath him and stylistically inferior to the Roman writers.
Ch. 6
He tried the Manicheans but the dishes they served him did not satisfy his hunger.
The spirit is before the material: "For thy spiritual works came before these material creations, celestial and shining though they are".
God had mercy on Augustine before he confessed his sins.
Ch. 7
Evil is nothing but a privation of good. Evil has no being.
To judge the patriarchs for their "sins" or "follies" is to judge men whom God called righteous as unrighteous. They apply a human standard to something that is divine. That they judge this way is not surprising because they do not know God; they do not know the divine. "It is as if a man in an armory, not knowing what piece goes on what part of the body, should put a greave on his head and a helmet on his shin and then complain because they did not fit."
Augustine then makes some interesting points on men being upset with the Scriptures because men whom God had called righteous were allowed to do something that they are now no longer permitted to do. "Or as if, on some holiday when afternoon business was forbidden, one were to grumble at not being allowed to go on selling as it had been lawful for him to do in the forenoon." Some of Augustine's arguments could be used to favor a very stratified society and likely has been some of the foundation stones for aristocratic thinking. But, his point in showing it is that God is just in all his actions towards man. He also takes on the idea that this makes justice a relative concept. He answers this by saying that, no, justice is not variable but the times over which she presides are.
Ch. 8
"The fellowship that should be between God and us is violated whenever that nature is polluted by perverted lust".
God is the greatest authority of all and to be obeyed over all.
When men sin against God they also sin against their own souls.
This is arrogance or a false sense of freedom: to love our own good more than God, the common good of all.
Ch. 9
There are also sins committed by men who are making progress towards God. These men are to be censored for their sins but not condemned, because, "they show the hope of bearing fruit, like the green shoot of the growing corn"
Ch. 10
Augustine condemns Manichean teaching as it focuses on the created things rather than who the things were created for and for whom the things were created by.
Ch. 11
Augustine's mother saw by the light of faith that Augustine was dead.
Ch. 12
Augustine admits that deep in his Manichean thought he was unteachable and taken in by the novelty of heresy. She even implored a bishop to talk with him but the bishop refused. When Monica persisted and wept the bishop exclaimed that, a man who is surrounded by so many tears can not perish. Monica took these exclamations as a word from God
No comments:
Post a Comment