Resultados25 letters/passages
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. 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. 402 · score 0.02
To the distinguished lord, most deservedly excellent, and greatly honored son in the love of Christ, Olympius: Augustine sends greetings in the Lord. Although as soon as we heard you had been deservedly elevated — when the very report was not yet certain to us — we believed nothing else about your disposition toward th …
augustine_hippo · c. 402 · score 0.02
What I urge upon your Excellency by petition and suggestion, I have no doubt is the wish of all my colleagues throughout Africa. I judge that at the first opportunity it can and should easily be expedited, so that, as I said, these vain people — whose salvation we seek even as they oppose us — may know that the laws se …
augustine_hippo · c. 422 · score 0.02
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. 409 · score 0.01
Concerning the dissension itself that arose among men (who, whatever they were, surely do not prejudice the promises of God, who said to Abraham: In your seed shall all nations be blessed—which was believed when heard as a prophecy and is denied when seen fulfilled), let them consider for now only this briefest and, un …
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. 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. 397 · score 0.01
Letter 65 — To the Aged Xantippus: The Case of Abundantius (A.D. 402) To the aged Xantippus, my most blessed lord, worthy of all veneration, my father and colleague in the priestly office — Augustine sends greetings in the Lord. With the respect your worth demands, and earnestly asking for a place in your prayers, I br …
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. 402 · score 0.01
For the Lord has offered no small consolation in these troubles by willing that you should have far greater power than you had when we were already rejoicing in your many great good works. We rejoice greatly in the firm and steadfast faith of many — not a few — who have been converted to the Christian religion or Catho …
augustine_hippo · c. 394 · score 0.01
Augustine to Publicola, greetings. I have read your letter carefully, my son, and I see in your questions not an overanxious mind but a conscience genuinely striving to live well in a complicated world. That is exactly the kind of struggle God honors. Let me take your questions in order. First, about the barbarian's oa …
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. 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. 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. 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. 397 · score 0.01
When he begged me to give him a letter explaining his case to the presbyter of Armema in the district of Bulla, the area he had come from, so as to prevent any exaggerated suspicion following him there and to give him the chance to live more uprightly — since he would have no priestly duties — I was moved by compassion …
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 …