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. 423 · score 0.02
Augustine to Bishop Honoratus, greetings. You have asked me the most difficult practical question a bishop can face: when the barbarians approach, should the bishop flee? I have thought about this for a long time — longer than you might expect, because the question is not hypothetical for us in Africa. The barbarians a …
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. 423 · score 0.02
Their advance is relentless. The cities that stand in their path will face siege, destruction, and massacre. The bishops in those cities will face the question you have asked me. My answer, for myself, is this: I will not flee. I cannot. My people cannot flee, and I will not leave them. If the Lord takes me, he takes m …
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 0.01
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. 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. 393 · score 0.01
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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
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. 386 · score 0.01
Letter 1 (386 AD) To Hermogenianus — Augustine sends greetings. 1. I would never presume, even in a playful debate, to go after the philosophers of the Academy [the "New Academy" — skeptical philosophers who argued that certain knowledge was impossible]. The authority of such brilliant thinkers would always carry weigh …
augustine_hippo · c. 413 · score 0.01
And so the ark was made three hundred cubits long, fifty broad, and thirty high. And the door it received in its side was surely the wound made when the side of the Crucified was pierced by the lance; for by this door those who come to him enter, because from that opening flowed the sacraments by which believers are in …
augustine_hippo · c. 388 · score 0.01
For if we manage temporal blessings justly, kindly, and with the sobriety that befits their passing nature — if they are held by us without holding us, multiplied without entangling us, and serve us without enslaving us — then we earn the reward of blessings that are eternal. As the Truth himself said: "If you have not …
augustine_hippo · c. 390 · score 0.01
Go, learn with what richness of mind he offers to God the sacrifice of praise, returning to Him all the good he has received from Him -- knowing that if he failed to store everything in the One from whom he received it, he would lose it all. 6. Why are you so agitated? Why so wavering? Why do you turn your ear away fro …
augustine_hippo · c. 401 · score 0.01
Why then should not the Church compel her lost sons to return, since the lost sons themselves compel others to perish? But I insist that the terror of temporal power is useful only as a preparation for instruction. The rod alone does not heal; neither does teaching alone always reach the hardened. But when the fear of …
augustine_hippo · c. 413 · score 0.01
The question you proposed to me from the Epistle of the Apostle Peter — as I think you are aware — has always troubled us greatly: how those words are to be understood as spoken concerning the underworld. I therefore lay the same question back before you, so that either you yourself, or someone you may find who is able …
augustine_hippo · c. 395 · score 0.01
And those who have done this most ably have found that the waxing and waning of the moon are due to the turning of its globe, and not to any such actual addition to or diminution of its substance as is supposed by the foolish Manichæans, who say that as a ship is filled, so the moon is filled with a fugitive portion of …