Summary of Saint Augustine & Henry Chadwick's St. Augustine Confessions

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 To praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. Yet, to praise you is the desire of man because you have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
#2 I ask who I am. I am God who is Lord. I am most high, utterly good, utterly powerful, most omnipotent, most merciful and just. I am deeply hidden yet most intimately present. I am the perfection of both beauty and strength, and I am always active, always in repose.
#3 I do not know where I came from, and I do not remember how I lived before I was born. I was welcomed by the consolations of human milk, and I did not wish for more than they were giving me.
#4 I was like an infant, crying and throwing my limbs about. I was not understood, and when I did not get my way, I was angry with my seniors for their disobedience and with free people who were not slaves to my interests.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 04 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669350002
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Saint Augustine & Henry Chadwick's St Augustine Confessions
Contents Insights from Chapter 1
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

To praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. Yet, to praise you is the desire of man because you have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

#2

I ask who I am. I am God who is Lord. I am most high, utterly good, utterly powerful, most omnipotent, most merciful and just. I am deeply hidden yet most intimately present. I am the perfection of both beauty and strength, and I am always active, always in repose.

#3

I do not know where I came from, and I do not remember how I lived before I was born. I was welcomed by the consolations of human milk, and I did not wish for more than they were giving me.

#4

I was like an infant, crying and throwing my limbs about. I was not understood, and when I did not get my way, I was angry with my seniors for their disobedience and with free people who were not slaves to my interests.

#5

God, you are the source of my existence. You created me and did not create sin in me. I remember the sin of my infancy, which was wrong that in tears I greedily opened my mouth to suck the breasts. But as I grew up, I eliminated and set aside such ways.

#6

The fact that we can remember our infancy is proof that it was not innocent. We can remember how we behaved as infants because we are able to compare ourselves to other infants, and we realize that we were not alone in our behavior.

#7

I was a boy who learned to talk through prayer. I was not able to express all that I wanted, but I was able to communicate my desires to those around me. I was dependent on the authority of my parents and the direction of adult people.

#8

I was a boy who loved to play sports, and I was punished for it. But I was at fault, Lord God, orderer and creator of all things in nature, but of sinners only the orderer.

#9

When I was a boy, I had heard about eternal life being promised to us through the humility of our Lord God, coming down to our pride. I was already signed with the sign of the cross and seasoned with salt from the time I came from my mother’s womb.

#10

I had no love for reading when I was a boy, and I was forced to study Greek literature. I was not interested in the objective my teachers had in mind, which was simply to satisfy the appetite for wealth and glory.

#11

I had a love of literature, but I gave that love to books that were empty and meaningless. I preferred to read and write about the adventures of Aeneas rather than learn how to read and write.

#12

The difficulty of learning a foreign language is that it sprinkles gall, as it were, over all the charm of the stories the Greeks tell. I did not know any of the words, and I was forced to learn them through sheer cruelty.

#13

The river of custom is a powerful force that carries the sons of men into the great and fearful ocean which can be crossed only by those who have embarked on the Wood of the cross.

#14

When I considered the men I was supposed to be imitating, it was no surprise that I was swept along by vanities and traveled right away from God. To live in lustful passion is to live in darkness and to be far from your face.

#15

I, as a wretched boy, was taught the moral conventions of the world. I was praised for my elo-quence, but I did not see the whirlpool of shame into which I was cast out of your sight. I was the lowest of the low, shocking even the worldly set by the innumerable lies with which I deceived the slave who took me to school.

#16

The young boy Jesus is a symbol of humility for Augustine. He was able to exist because God had created him, and he took great pleasure in the truth. He was not able to see the face of God, but he was able to see the face of his own humanity, which was also a gift from God.

#17

The story of Augustine and his school is a reflection of the resentment felt by secular professors of literature against him because of his conversion and renunciation.

#18

Augustine believed that it was better to suffer than to do wrong, and he often stated the Platonic axiom that existence is good and every being’s instinct for self-preservation reflects the mystery of divine Being and Unity.

#19

I was once a young man who was consumed by the desire to love and be loved. However, I was not content with just loving, I wanted to be loved in return. I was not restrained by the exchange of mind with mind, which is the bright path of friendship. I was consumed by the desire for pleasure, and I traveled far from you, Lord.

#20

During my sixteenth year, I was sent away from Madauros, the town where I had lived, to Carthage to study rhetoric. I did not care what character I developed or how chaste I was as long as I had a cultured tongue. You are the true and good lord of your land, which is my heart.

#21

I was a teenager when I began traveling farther from God. I was not baptized, but my mother was a devout Catholic and was afraid that I would fall into fornication or adultery. She warned me not to listen to my peers who were bragging about their sexual exploits.

#22

I was seduced by the enemy because I was in the mood to be seduced. I wanted to carry out an act of theft, but I was driven by no kind of need other than my inner lack of any sense of or feeling for justice. I stole something which I had in plenty and of much better quality.

#23

The beauty of physical objects, like gold and silver, is derived from their connection to the five senses. When the body touches such objects, much significance is attached to the rapport of the object with the touch. The life we live in this world has its attractiveness because of its beauty and harmony with inferior objects.

#24

My thieving was not a beautiful act. It was a crime which I committed at night in the sixteenth year of my life. I had a quantity of better pears. My feasting was only on the wickedness which I took pleasure in enjoying. If any of those pears entered my mouth, my criminality was the piquant sauce.

#25

I was a runaway slave, fleeing my master and pursuing a shadow. I took pleasure in what was illicit for no reason other than that it was not allowed. I will love you, Lord, and I will give thanks and confession to your name because you have forgiven me such great evils and my nefarious deeds.

#26

I was a thief when I was alone, but I would not have done it if someone else were with me. I stole for the sake of a giggle, as if our hearts were tickled to think we were deceiving those who would not think us capable of such behavior.

#27

The theme of this paragraph is found in Ambrose, Noah 22, 81. It is a portrait of his wild years, during which he spent his time drinking, gambling, and prostitution. But he also says that the cycle of birth and death is beautiful.

#28

I was in love with love, and I hated safety and a path free of snares. I was without any desire for incorruptible nourishment, not because I was replete with it, but the emptier I was, the more unappetizing such food became.

#29

We must be on our guard against uncleanness. Even today, I am not unmoved to pity. But at that time, I shared the joy of lovers who wickedly found delight in each other, even though their actions in the spectacle on the stage were imaginary.

#30

I was a student who wanted to become an advocate in the law courts. I was top of my class in the rhetor’s school, and was pleased with myself for my success. I was inflated with conceit. Yet I was far quieter than the other students.

#31

I burned with desire to leave my earthly things and fly back to God. I did not know what he was doing with me. I had a love of wisdom, which is the meaning of the Greek word philosophia. I did not know that the name of Christ was not included in the book.

#32

I fell in with men proud of their slick talk, very earthly-minded and loquacious. In their mouths were the devil’s traps and a birdlime compounded of a mixture of the syllables of your name, and that of the Lord Jesus Christ, and that of the Paraclete, the Comforter, the Holy Spirit.

#33

I was a Manichee, and I believed the myths about the Five Elements. I had stumbled on that bold-faced woman, lacking in prudence, who in Solomon’s allegory sits on a chair outside her door and says Enjoy a meal of secret bread and drink sweet stolen water. She seduced me.

#34

I did not know that evil has no existence except as a privation of good. I did not know that God is a Spirit, not a figure with limbs and hair and nails. I did not know that true inward justice exists, and that the moral customs of different regions and periods were adapted to their places and times while unaltered everywhere and always.

#35

The style of those who are irate when they hear that something was allowed to the just in ancient times is to claim that justice is liable to variation and change. But the fact is that justice is not subject to variation at all. It is the same for all times and places.