Resultados25 letters/passages
augustine_hippo · c. 404 · score 0.02
Your letter filled our heart with great sorrow, in which you asked that I reply at some length; yet for such evils, more lengthy groaning and weeping are owed than lengthy books. For the whole world is afflicted by such calamities that almost no part of the earth exists where such things as you described are not commit …
augustine_hippo · c. 404 · score 0.02
It was in the hidden judgment and mercy of God to provide for the salvation of those kings in that way. Against King Antiochus, who killed the Maccabees with cruel torments, God chose not to provide in the same way but punished the hard king's heart with more severe judgment through their most glorious suffering. What …
augustine_hippo · c. 404 · score 0.02
We should not be so contrary to ourselves as to believe when we read and then complain when they are fulfilled. Rather, even those who were unbelieving when they read or heard these things written in the holy Books should now at least believe when they see them being fulfilled — so that from these great pressures, as i …
augustine_hippo · c. 413 · score 0.02
I have asked and I ask our God, who called us into his kingdom and glory, that what I write to you, holy brother Jerome, consulting you about things I do not know, may by his will be fruitful for us. Although you are much older than I, I too am now an old man who consults you; yet for learning what is needed, no age se …
augustine_hippo · c. 404 · score 0.02
For you are just in all that you have done to us, and all your works are true, and your ways are right, and all your judgments are truth. You have executed true judgments in all that you have brought upon us and upon the holy city of our fathers, Jerusalem; for in truth and justice you have brought all these things upo …
augustine_hippo · c. 394 · score 0.02
The most notorious crime of your savagery, and your unheard-of cruelty, shakes the earth and strikes heaven, so that in your streets and shrines blood gleams and murder resounds. Among you the Roman laws lie buried, the dread of righteous courts is trampled underfoot. Among you there is certainly no reverence or fear f …
augustine_hippo · c. 422 · score 0.01
Farewell, dear friend. I pray for you daily. [Context: Count Boniface was the Roman military governor of Africa and one of the most powerful men in the Western Empire. Augustine had known him for years and had once hoped he would enter the religious life. Instead, Boniface became entangled in the deadly politics of the …
augustine_hippo · c. 393 · score 0.01
The case was examined, judged, and completed. Peace was offered, but pride refused it. Now regarding the violence that the Donatists inflicted through the Circumcellions — those roving bands who, under the pretense of religion, committed every sort of outrage — they attacked Catholic churches, they beat our clergy, the …
augustine_hippo · c. 419 · score 0.01
The Emperors Honorius and Theodosius, Augusti, to Bishop Aurelius — greetings. An imperial decree against the Pelagians. 1. Pelagius and Caelestius [the two chief proponents of the heresy denying original sin and the necessity of divine grace], authors of a wicked and execrable doctrine, have been condemned by the judg …
augustine_hippo · c. 413 · score 0.01
This is what I ask you to resolve, if you can. For the Pelagians, who deny original sin, find comfort in our inability to explain how the soul becomes sinful. If we cannot demonstrate this, they say, then perhaps the soul is not sinful at birth, and infants do not need the redemption of Christ. We cannot allow this con …
augustine_hippo · c. 396 · score 0.01
For my part, brother Severus, I leave my case to your judgment. I am certain that Christ dwells in your heart, and through Him I implore you to consult Him who presides over your mind submitted to Him — whether a man who had already begun to read in the church entrusted to my care, and who had read not once but a secon …
augustine_hippo · c. 403 · score 0.01
We sought that the violence would stop and that those who did such things would recognize their error. For what profit is there in a dead body to the Church? What we desire is living souls, repentant and reformed. Let not the name of one's homeland, or the memory of civil honors, or the bonds of old friendship prevent …
augustine_hippo · c. 411 · score 0.01
For after that impious and cruel treachery — against which we earnestly but vainly struggled, through the anxiety you shared with us, that the perpetrator might not strike our hearts with such pain and butcher his own conscience with so great a crime — I immediately left Carthage, concealing my departure, lest all thos …
augustine_hippo · c. 395 · score 0.01
1 Corinthians 13:4, 8 Knowledge, if applied as a means to charity, is most useful; but apart from this high end, it has been proved not only superfluous, but even pernicious. I know, however, how holy meditation keeps you safe under the shadow of the wings of our God. These things I have stated, though briefly, because …
augustine_hippo · c. 401 · score 0.01
I respect your honesty. But I must tell you that the gods you serve — or the customs you follow, if "gods" is too strong a word — are dying. Not because Christians are killing them, but because they have nothing to offer. They could not protect your city from its own worst impulses. They could not teach your citizens t …
augustine_hippo · c. 396 · score 0.01
Letter 59 — To Victorinus: A Badly-Organized Council Summons (A.D. 401) To my most blessed lord and venerable father Victorinus, my brother in the priesthood — Augustine sends greetings in the Lord. Your summons to the Council reached me late on the evening of the fifth day before the Ides of November, and I was unwell …
augustine_hippo · c. 402 · score 0.01
Some object: if the infant has no sin of its own, why does it need baptism? Because the infant, though personally innocent, is born into a fallen race. Original sin is not a personal crime but a condition — like being born into a besieged city. The infant did nothing to start the siege, but the siege is real, and rescu …
augustine_hippo · c. 389 · score 0.01
If you have a taste for ridicule, you have ample material among your own gods: Stercutius the dung god, Cloacina the sewer goddess, the Bald Venus, the gods Fear and Pallor, the goddess Fever, and countless others of the same caliber, to whom the ancient Roman idolaters built temples and offered worship. If you neglect …
augustine_hippo · c. 396 · score 0.01
That was not the case. They left of their own accord; they deserted us of their own accord, in spite of all my efforts to dissuade them out of concern for their own wellbeing. As for Donatus: since he has now been ordained before any decision was reached in Council about his case, I leave the matter to your wisdom — pe …
augustine_hippo · c. 396 · score 0.01
Letter 62 — Alypius, Augustine, and Samsucius to Severus: The Case of Timotheus (A.D. 401) Alypius, Augustine, and Samsucius, and the brothers with us, send greetings in the Lord to Severus, our most blessed lord and brother dearly beloved, partner in the priestly office, and to all the brothers with him. When we arriv …
augustine_hippo · c. 406 · score 0.01
And if the pleasures of this world, brief and sordid as they are, are so loved, how much more ardently should the pure and infinite joys of the world to come be sought! Thinking on these things, do not be sluggish in good works, so that in due season you may come to the harvest of what you have sown. 2. For it has been …
augustine_hippo · c. 391 · score 0.01
And I wept myself — it would have been impossible not to, given the flood of tears around me. When I had finished, with God's help I was able to persuade the great majority of them to give it up. 4. The following morning — the day itself — some of the more obdurate members of the congregation came to me complaining, an …
augustine_hippo · c. 413 · score 0.01
I mean also those who said these things not in verse or oratory but in philosophy. I mean also many whose writings we do not have but whose praiseworthy lives we have learned of through others' writings — men who, apart from the worship of God in which they erred by worshiping vain things publicly established for worsh …
augustine_hippo · c. 403 · score 0.01
QUESTION THREE: ON THE DISTINCTION OF SACRIFICES They ask why God rejected the sacrifices of the Jews, since he himself had commanded them, and why he distinguished between the sacrifices of Christians and those of the Jews. We respond that God never desired those sacrifices for their own sake, but as signs of the thin …
augustine_hippo · c. 403 · score 0.01
Then, showing how great an evil this is, you add — unless your opinion deceives you — that you believe being stripped of possessions to be worse than being killed. And to make clearer what possessions you meant, you go on to say that I know from literature that death brings an end to the sense of all evils, while a lif …