Augustine

Augustine prayed: give what you command, and command what you will. An example shows the way, but it cannot give a broken will the power to walk it. Only grace can.

Augustine had this argument with Pelagius fourteen hundred years before Finney. God may command what we cannot do by ourselves, because he gives what he commands. The command is real and so is the gift!

And this is the very sentence he could not sit still for.

Augustine had this argument with Pelagius fourteen hundred years before Finney. God may command what we cannot do by ourselves, because he gives what he commands. The command is real and so is the gift!

Augustine prayed, give what you command. If nothing from Adam reached us, we would not need God to give us the power to obey. Every Christian who prays that prayer admits that we do.

Augustine’s prayer against a system of permissions: give what you command, and command what you will.

Augustine’s prayer, give what you command, is not a Manichee prayer. It asks the good Creator to heal what he made. A wounded nature is not an evil one.

Luther says in the Bondage that Augustine agrees with him: free will can do nothing but fall. He names Augustine’s Spirit and the Letter.

It answers the sentence itself — the book was written at this man.

Everything rests on who Christ is. If his manhood had been swallowed up, there would be no man to stand in our place, and nothing for our salvation to rest on.

The church is not the states that fought in its name. It never was.

Augustine’s answer: baptism belongs to Christ, not to the minister. A traitor’s hands cannot undo what Christ gives.

The private inner experience is real. It is also not the thing faith rests on — that is outside you, finished, and does not rise and fall with how you feel about it on a given morning.

“There is no big story” is itself a big story, told by the age about itself. Augustine wrote the biggest one, two cities with two loves, after Rome had fallen, and he wrote it to people who had just watched a grand story collapse. The difference is what the story does to the powerful. His king is the one they executed.

The Flotilla is a very large raft. Augustine’s answer to a very large empire that thought itself eternal is that it stood on nothing, and the city that does stand has a different foundation.

Augustine answered with two cities. Rome was always a city of this world, and cities of this world rise and fall. The city of God does not fall with them.

Augustine’s two cities, one built on love of self and one on love of God, cut across every church and empire. Suffering alone does not show which city a person belongs to.

Augustine’s two cities are divided by two loves, not by two kinds of stuff. What went wrong in us is disordered love, not evil flesh.

Paul did not preach to Athens from the Word alone. He started with their altar and their poets. If Barth is right, Acts 17 should not have been written.

Augustine’s line is that the heart is restless until it rests in God. It is the collision Camus describes, said fifteen centuries earlier by the man he studied for his degree, and with an answer.

The cheerful, occupied man is restless and does not know it. The heart is restless until it rests in God.

Every people he names as older than Adam is a people with the same ache in it. One fall reaches all of them.

Pascal said that his account of man, wretched and great together, came from Augustine.

The Romantic looks in and expects to find home. Augustine looked in and found the ache — and said nothing finite, the self included, has ever stilled it.

Freud traces the restlessness to a child wanting its father. Augustine agreed it starts there, and said it does not stop there, because nothing finite has ever quieted it.

A good thing, made restless — which is the distinction he says cannot be drawn.

Camus grants the hunger and the silence, and calls their collision the absurd. Augustine and Lewis take the same hunger the other way. A hunger for something the world cannot supply is one of the ordinary signs that something else supplies it. Camus wrote his university thesis on Augustine.

Freud explains where the longing came from. He never asks the other question — whether a longing this specific, appearing in every culture, is evidence that it has an object.

Diotima’s ladder in the Symposium climbs from one beautiful body to all of them to beauty itself, because no particular thing ever finishes the wanting. Augustine makes that argument nearly eight centuries later and grants Plato every rung of it. What a Form cannot do is come looking for you.

Augustine found that nothing he chose could satisfy him until God changed what he loved. Grace did not only teach him. It changed his heart.

Pascal said that his account of man, wretched and great together, came from Augustine.

A duty to believe only on proof is itself believed without proof — the rule cannot pass its own test!

Anselm opens the Proslogion with Augustine’s counsel: believe so that you may understand. His own words are “I believe in order to understand.”

And this book is BUILT on that error — it has nowhere left to stand once the rule is read out.

And this book is BUILT on that error — it has nowhere left to stand once the rule is read out.

Irenaeus points to the one faith held by the churches everywhere: one God the Father, one Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. The church has always named three and counted one God.

Irenaeus shows the church has not grown through sharing secrets but by bearing witness (publicly!) to the truth, from Germany to Egypt.

Ptolemy wrote it privately, to one woman. Irenaeus’ test is a faith said aloud in every church, for anyone to compare.

Irenaeus points to the one faith held by all the churches together. The Donatists kept a pure church in one province, but the true church is spread through the whole world.

Irenaeus’ complaint was that no two Valentinian teachers described the aeons the same way. He compared their disagreements against the shared and consistent testimony of the church — the Rule of Faith.

Everything but the one sentence. Augustine read these books and found the Word in them, and did not find him made flesh.

Diderot scores the silence as a verdict against God. Augustine answers that the silence has a measure to it — more would collapse the last judgment into the present, less would deny providence exists at all.

Calvin quotes this very sentence of Augustine’s in the Institutes (1.5.10). If God punished every sin now, no judgment would be left to come. If he punished none, it would look as if he did not rule.

Augustine went inward before any of them, and further. Book X is the report: not a true self at the bottom of the search — a God who had been in there the whole time, while the seeker was out among the fair forms He had made.

He sings a requiem in the empty churches and asks what they are now. Augustine answers from inside one: not a tomb — the place the living God was found to have been all along.

Granting every word about the dead: the earth that moved is not a malevolent thing, and neither was the sea. There is no evil nature anywhere to carry the blame for Lisbon — only good ones with something gone missing out of them.

Aquinas takes from Augustine the teaching that evil is the lack of a good (Summa I, q.48).

Granting every word about the dead: the earth that moved is not a malevolent thing, and neither was the sea. There is no evil nature anywhere to carry the blame for Lisbon — only good ones with something gone missing out of them.

The poem asks who authored the horror. Augustine answers that nothing did. An evil will has no cause that makes it, only a failure that leaves it — and hunting for the cause of a defect is, in his own comparison, trying to see darkness or hear silence.

The poem asks who authored the horror. Augustine answers that nothing did. An evil will has no cause that makes it, only a failure that leaves it — and hunting for the cause of a defect is, in his own comparison, trying to see darkness or hear silence.

Aquinas follows Augustine on this too: a bad will has a deficient cause (Summa I, q.49).

Voltaire is right about the morning and wrong about what it proves. Augustine refuses to read the rubble back into the design: the world was made good, by a good God, for no reason except that he is good. A ruined thing is a good thing ruined.

Voltaire is right about the morning and wrong about what it proves. Augustine refuses to read the rubble back into the design: the world was made good, by a good God, for no reason except that he is good. A ruined thing is a good thing ruined.

James collects religion as inner experience, varieties of a feeling. Augustine’s question went the other way — out to the earth, the sea and the stars — and what answered him was not a feeling he had but the look of things that are not him.

Marx says your creed is the position you are standing in. Augustine grants the first half — both cities want the same bread and walk the same roads — and denies that using a thing settles what you love. What the ledger cannot show is the grip, not the goods.

Lyotard’s grief is honest. Augustine spends a book counting how little this life gives before he calls anyone blessed, and then calls him blessed in hope. A big story that admits the graveyard is not the kind Lyotard is suspicious of.

Camus tells us to imagine Sisyphus happy. Augustine says a person can be happy now, in hope of something to come. That is not a leap that destroys reason. It is what a person is when the story has an ending.

Russell files hope under fear. Augustine spends most of a book counting how little this life delivers before he says one word about hope — the miseries first, and at length. A man who has done that accounting and still calls himself blessed is not flinching from anything.

Paul did not argue the Athenians out of their poets. He quoted them, agreed with them, and then said the one thing the poets had never reached.

Tertullian hands the charge back. The crowds cheering in the arena are the ones who hate mankind. The Christians are the ones dying there.

It answers with the one mark he cannot claim — but nobody wins this one cleanly.

Ignatius wrote that where Jesus Christ is, there is the universal church. What cleanses is Christ’s presence, not the conscience of the man pouring the water.

Teresa writes that when she read how Augustine heard the voice in the garden, it felt as if the Lord had spoken to her (Life 9.9).

Jewel cites Cyprian in the Apology for the same point: the apostles were equal, and the bishop’s office is one. He reads it against the pope’s claim.

Calvin quotes this chapter of Cyprian’s against the papacy (Institutes 4.6.4). He reads it as a call to unity and finds no pope in it.

Cyprian taught that the church is one, and that nobody who leaves it takes it with him. A congregation that splits over a minister’s sin leaves the body it meant to keep pure.

Cyprian taught that the church is one. Breaking away over other people’s sins divides the body Christ made one.

A man who says there is no fact of the matter has just told you a fact about the matter.

Augustine met the same man in the fourth century. A person who doubts everything is still there, doubting, and cannot doubt that. The complete sceptic needs one solid thing to stand on, and he has just admitted it.

The exact answer, and he cannot dodge it: he has never once managed to live inside the doubt he is selling.

Augustine: if I am mistaken, I exist. A mind that trusts only itself has already trusted something it did not make.

He cannot live the indifference he boasts of. Nature keeps handing him back the certainties he says he has thrown off.

Freud’s account is itself a claim about how every mind works — and it has to be exempt from its own suspicion to be worth stating.

Even a proof that lands gives the wrong God. A first cause is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.