Resultados23 letters/passages
augustine_hippo · c. 416 · score 0.02
… why, reluctantly and after much internal struggle, I came to support the use of imperial authority to break the social power of the Donatist leadership — not to force belief (which is impossible) but to create conditions in which people could hear the truth without fear. The scriptural basis for this position is the pa …
augustine_hippo · c. 416 · score 0.02
… ica, it lays out the historical, theological, and practical arguments for using imperial force against the Donatists. The letter is simultaneously one of Augustine's most influential and most controversial works. It was cited by medieval inquisitors and by early modern persecutors of heresy. It was also cited by August …
augustine_hippo · c. 401 · score 0.02
Augustine to Nectarius, my noble and justly honored brother, greetings. I have read your letter, and I want you to know that its tone moved me. You wrote with sincerity and with a genuine concern for the welfare of your fellow citizens. That you would write to a bishop — a man whose faith you do not share — on behalf o …
augustine_hippo · c. 403 · score 0.02
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. 393 · score 0.02
Publicola to my beloved and venerable Father Augustine, greetings. I write to you, Father, burdened with questions that may seem trivial to a man of your learning but that weigh on me because I do not know the answers and cannot find peace until I do. Here is my first question. When our people travel through regions wh …
augustine_hippo · c. 406 · score 0.02
To his most beloved brethren, his fellow clergy and the whole congregation, Augustine sends greeting in the Lord. 1. First, I ask your charity, and I beseech you through Christ, not to be saddened by my bodily absence. For in spirit and in the affection of my heart, I trust you do not doubt that I can in no way depart …
augustine_hippo · c. 403 · score 0.01
I read the letter of your Kindness, to which you responded far later than I had sent mine. For I had written back while our holy brother and fellow bishop Possidius was still with us, before he had sailed. But your letter, which you kindly returned on my behalf, I received on the sixth day before the kalends of April — …
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. 392 · score 0.01
Augustine to Simplicius, greetings. Your letter filled me with joy, dearest brother — because in it I recognized a mind in love with the truth and eager for understanding. You are right to press me on these questions, and I will do my best to answer them, though I freely admit that there is more here than I can fully g …
augustine_hippo · c. 411 · score 0.01
The complaint about me contained in your letter is all the more welcome to me for being more full of charity. If I should try to excuse my silence, what would I be trying to show except that you had no reason to be upset with me? But since what I love more in you is the very fact that you were offended by my silence — …
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. 407 · score 0.01
Augustine to Albina, greetings in the Lord. You have asked me about a matter that requires more care than a short letter can provide, but I will do my best. The question is this: how should we understand those passages in the Old Testament where God appears to command violence — the destruction of cities, the slaughter …
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 …
augustine_hippo · c. 407 · score 0.01
I recall both that you asked and that I promised to write you something about praying to God. Now that the very God to whom we pray has granted the time and means, I must at last pay my debt and serve your pious desire in the charity of Christ. How greatly your request itself gladdened me — in which I recognized how mu …
augustine_hippo · c. 404 · score 0.01
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. 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. 407 · score 0.01
You ought therefore, out of love for that true life, to consider yourself desolate in this world, however great its happiness may seem. For just as there is a true life in comparison with which this life — however pleasant and prolonged — is not even to be called life, so there is also a true consolation which the Lord …
augustine_hippo · c. 404 · score 0.01
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. 404 · score 0.01
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 0.01
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. 407 · score 0.01
So in all human affairs, nothing is friendly to a person without a friendly person. But how rare is such a friend found, about whose soul and character one can be secure in this life! In these shadows of this present life, then, in which we are pilgrims from the Lord and walk by faith, not by sight, the Christian soul …
augustine_hippo · c. 407 · score 0.01
"Give us this day our daily bread" — this is either the sustenance needed for the body, or the sacrament of the faithful. "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors" — this reminds us both what to ask and what to do in order to be worthy of receiving. "Lead us not into temptation" — not that we may have no temptat …
augustine_hippo · c. 407 · score 0.01
Third, and most importantly: the Old Testament must be read in light of the New. Christ is the key that unlocks every passage. What seems dark and violent in isolation is illuminated by the love revealed on the cross. The God who commanded the destruction of Jericho is the same God who wept over Jerusalem. The arc of r …