Philosophers From Rome

"It is to this law that our souls must adjust themselves, this they should follow, this they should obey. Whatever happens, assume that it was bound to happen, and do not be willing to rail at Nature. That which you cannot reform, it is best to endure, and to attend uncomplainingly upon the God under whose guidance everything progresses; for it is a bad soldier who grumbles when following his commander."

"We have seen that Augustine draws an ambiguous picture of childhood. On the one hand, he emphasizes that the child is from birth a sinner. Against the Pelagians, who asserted that the little ones are innocent with respect both to actual sins and to their nature, Augustine ascribed to infants an original sin inherited from Adam. In Augustine’s boyhood, this universal human condition is manifested in behavior and deeds that seek pleasures, renown, and truth in things that belong to the created world instead of in the Creator. In his adolescence, this was manifested by unrestrained sexual desire and by the committing of sin without the purpose of gain, illustrated by the theft of pears. Though the infant has not committed any personal sin, Augustine tends to take babies’ greed for the breast and their jealousy as manifestations of their sinful nature. It is hard for a modern reader to agree with his explanation and evaluation of children’s behavior. What we tend to regard as sign of development, Augustine takes as evidence of the sinful nature of the child. His view that assigns little ones who die unbaptized to eternal punishment also sounds harsh to modern readers, and might be invoked (as the Pelagaian did) as evidence of a hostile attitude towards children. On the other hand, Augustine’s apparently negative view is balanced by an attitude that acknowledges the value of children, in whom Augustine finds that “everything is wonderful and worthy of praise.” Although this appraisal is related to the fact God has provided children with the gifts that enable them to seek and find him, so that they thus realize the ultimate purpose of life, it also reflects a striking recognition of the value of children. Likewise, the description of infants and children in his ‘’Confessions’’ reflects warm sympathy with how they experience life. Perhaps more importantly, Augustine’s deep concern about the salvation of children, for which baptism was a precondition, indicates that he regarded children as full and worthy religious beings who need to same spiritual nourishment as adults. However, I can find no connection between this expression of concern for the well0being of the child’s soul and the status and role of children in social life. Furthermore Augustine considers children as subjects with responsibility for their moral behavior. He depicts an increasing accountability as they mature and their abilities to speak and to reason develop Because babies lack speech and the faculty of reason, there is no point for adults to rebuke them. But when they reach the age when they learn to speak and reason develops, the conditions for knowing and understanding what is right and wrong gradually emerge and children become increasingly responsible for their moral behavior. When children reach adolescence, their abilities to speak and reason are so developed that they are fully accountable for their deeds. Augustine assumes that children are capable of behaving according to his moral ideals, if they receive a proper Christian upbringing."

"Of all the church fathers, it is Augustine (354-430) who speaks most frequently of abortion and presents the most detailed discussions of the nature and status of the fetus. This is a fruit of his lifelong concern and theological wrestlings with the questions of the origin of the soul, and when and how the fetus received a soul. He discusses a variety of solutions: (1) the soul is pre-existent (2) the soul is created by god at the moment of conception; (3) like the body, the soul comes from the parents; (4) the soul is infused at a particular stage in the development of the fetus. As I have mentioned in an earlier chapter, he never found a satisfactory solution to this question. He frequently makes a distinction between the unformed and the formed fetus; the latter term refers to the fetus which has received a soul. We find one example of this distinction in the treatise ‘’De Nuptiis et Concupiscientia’’, when Augustine condemns sexual intercourse detached from reproduction: “At times this lust-filled cruelty or cruel lust goes far that it even procured drugs to cause sterility, and if they are not effective, it somehow extinguishes and destroys within the womb the fetus already conceived, desiring that its own offspring perish before it begins to live. Or, if it was living in the womb, it desires that it be killed before it is born. Naturally, this distinction presupposed that the fetus receives a soul at one particular stage in its development; the consequence of this idea, which he shares with Jerome, is that only the abortion of a formed fetus that has a soul can be classified as murder. This becomes clear in the ‘’Questiones in Heptateuchum’’ 2.80, where Augustine refers to the Septuagint version of Exodus 21:2 and following and argues that the abortion of an unformed fetus is not murder, since one cannot say whether it already has a soul at that stage. Although the abortion even of an unformed fetus is morally reprehensible, the punishment for this act is limited to a fine. On the question whether the embryo is to be define as a part of the mother’’s body, Augustine breaks with Stoic thinking and Roman law, which affirmed that this was not the case."

"At one point Augustine wrote a letter to Jerome asking for advice on the possibility of combining belief in original sin with the creationist position he imputed to Jerome. Though what Augustine says is related to this particular position regarding the origin of the soul, the offense he felt at the view that little ones were condemned by God is apparent. “”What kind of justice is it that so many thousands of souls should be damned because they departed from their bodies by death in infancy, without the grace of the Christian sacrament … when He [God] certainly knew that each one of them by no fault of its own would leave the body without the baptism of Christ?” Jerome never answered. Augustine explicitly states his uneasiness about his view in “Sermon 294’’. He admits that the question is profoundly difficult and recognized that his powers are not sufficient to get to the bottom of it . . . . I cannot find a satisfactory and worthy explanation; because I cannot find one.”” His interpretation of scripture led him to the conclusion that unbaptized babies go to damnation, and he felt obliged to maintain this. He could not “condemn divine authority” and quotes Romans 11:33-36 as he often does when he faces a question that goes beyond the limit of his reason: “Oh the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of Go! How inscrutable are his judgments, and untraceable his ways!” Ultimately, the damnation of unbaptized children is a mystery, and therefore cannot be given a logical explanation. However, because Augustine was convinced that his view on this matter was in agreement with God’s revelation in the Holy Scriptures, he maintained it. Although he apparently felt that this doctrine was harsh, he never wavered from his view that little ones who died unbaptized were punished by god."

"In addition to theological arguments, Augustine refers to the practice of the church. Infants, like adults, underwent the exsufflatio, a rite of exorcism conducted before the baptism took place. This implies that little ones, like adults, needed exorcism to be rescued from the darkness of the devil. “What does my exorcism work in that babe, if he be not held in the devil’s family?” Augustine asks rhetorically. His point is, of course, that infants are afflicted with original sin and need remission of sins through baptism in order to be reconciled with God. He also takes the crying and struggling of babies when they are baptized as an expression of their original sin. Due to their condition, they resist grace. He even takes the hurrying of mothers to church with their babies to baptize them as an argument that children need to be redeemed from the power of the devil."

"Augustine’s importance to the subsequent history of Europe is impossible to exaggerate. His political theory, which is all we focus on here, was a very small part of what he wrote in some 113 books and innumerable letters and sermons. Nonetheless, it is pregnant with arguments that racked not only Christian Europe but the modern world: how seriously should a Christian with his eyes on eternity take the politics of this earthly life; is it the duty of the state to protect the church, repress heresy, and ensure that its citizens adhere to the one true faith; absent a Christian ruler, are we absolved of the duty to obey our rulers, or must we follow Saint Paul’s injunction to “obey the powers that be”? More generally, Augustine articulated distinctive and long-lived thoughts on matters that remain controversial: the nature of just war, the illegitimacy of the death penalty, the limits of earthly justice. The fact that his views on all these matters were embedded in a theology of some bleakness does not mean that they do not survive on their own merits. One needs only the barest sympathy with the thought that we are fallen creatures to find many of his views deeply appealing, far from cheerful as they may be."

"Augustine saw a noble purpose in rape; while promising women that “savage lust perpetuated against them will be punished,” he also praises rape for keeping women humble, letting them know “whether previously they were arrogant with regard to their virginity or over-fond of praise, or whether they would have become proud had they not suffered violation.”"

"There would be no end to quotations that bring out the unequalled influence of Augustine’s thought and work on the Latin West. « No work by a Christian author in the Latin tongue was to stir such great admiration and inquietude and enjoy such glory » (Dominique de Courcelles, Augustin ou le génie de l’Europe). To the point that the author of this passage, while aware that he is speaking, as he says, « of a Christian Berber », nevertheless gives his book the title Augustine or the Genius of Europe. And the genius was a Numidian of the Roman Empire. What a decanting of wisdom from the south to the north of the Mediterranean!"

"Augustine of Hippo (350–430 C.E.), an influential bishop of the early Christian church, taught that masturbation and other alternatives to penile-vaginal intercourse —outercourse —were worse sins than fornication, rape, incest, and adultery. He argued that masturbation and other non reproductive sexual activities were “unnatural” sins because they were contraceptive. Since fornication, rape, incest, and adultery could lead to pregnancy, they were “natural” sins and much less serious than “unnatural” sins (Ranke-Heinemann, 1990)."

"The whole of North Africa was a glory of Christendom with St. Augustine, himself a Berber, its chief ornament."

"No one, it seems to me, can hope to equal Augustine. Who, nowadays, could hope to equal one who, in my judgment, was the greatest in an age fertile in great minds?"

"And how wisely this has been decreed St. Augustine thus shows: "This indeed is fitting, that the lower be subject to the higher, so that he who would have subject to himself whatever is below him, should himself submit to whatever is above him. Acknowledge order, seek peace. Be thou subject to God, and thy flesh subject to thee. What more fitting! What more fair! Thou art subject to the higher and the lower is subject to thee. Do thou serve Him who made thee, so that that which was made for thee may serve thee. For we do not commend this order, namely, "The flesh to thee and thou to God," but "Thou to God, and the flesh to thee." If, however, thou dost despise the subjection of thyself to God, thou shalt never bring about the subjection of the flesh to thyself. If thou dost not obey the Lord, thou shalt be tormented by thy servant." This right ordering on the part of God's wisdom is mentioned by the holy Doctor of the Gentiles, inspired by the Holy Ghost, for in speaking of those ancient philosophers who refused to adore and reverence Him Whom they knew to be the creator of the universe, he says: "Wherefore God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness, to dishonor their own bodies among themselves;" and again: "For this same God delivered them up to shameful affections.""

"As the dynamics of trade relations began to change during the African Middle Ages, the continent became the source of endless speculation. The visions of monstrous men and anthropophagi that had filled St. Augustine's descriptions of sub-Saharan Africa were not expelled until other Europeans such as Scotsman Mungo Park "penetrated the interior of Africa.""

"I would inquire of reasonable persons whether this principle: Matter is naturally wholly incapable of thought, and this other: I think, therefore I am, are in fact the same in the mind of Descartes, and in that of St. Augustine, who said the same thing twelve hundred years before. ...I am far from affirming that Descartes is not the real author of it, even if he may have learned it only in reading this distinguished saint; for I know how much difference there is between writing a word by chance without making a longer and more extended reflection on it, and perceiving in this word an admirable series of conclusions, which prove the distinction between material and spiritual natures, and making of it a firm and sustained principle of a complete metaphysical system, as Descartes has pretended to do. ...it is on this supposition that I say that this expression is as different in his writings from the saying in others who have said it by chance, as in a man full of life and strength, from a corpse."

"Augustine thus condemned three kinds of act: contraception, the killing of the fetus before it is formed or "lives," and the killing of the live fetus. The analysis was a new approach in treating each of these acts as a sin against marriage. Elsewhere Augustine treated abortion as a form of homicide."

"If the orthodoxy of Augustine had remained the teaching of the Church, the final establishment of Evolution would have come far earlier than it did, certainly during the eighteenth instead of the nineteenth century, and the bitter controversy over this truth of Nature would never have arisen."

"Augustine distinctly rejected Special Creation in favor of a doctrine which, without any violence to language, we may call a theory of Evolution."

"Augustine in his anti-Pelagian work, Marriage and Concupiscence, analyzed abortion with his usual attention to psychology. Using terms that seem to anticipate modern analyses of sadism, he described it as the work of minds characterized by "lustful cruelty" or "cruel lust." Speaking of the married who avoided offspring, he declared, Sometimes [Aliquando] this lustful cruelty or cruel lust comes to this that they even procure poisons of sterility, and if these do not work, they extinguish and destroy the fetus in some way in the womb, preferring that their offspring die before it lives, or if it was already alive in the womb, to kill it before it was born. Assuredly if both husband and wife are like this, they are not married, and if they were like this from the beginning, they come together not joined in matrimony but seduction. If both are not like this, I dare to say that either the wife is in a fashion the harlot of her husband, or he is an adulter with his own wife."

"Plainly as the direct or instantaneous Creation of animals and plants appeared to be taught in Genesis, Augustine read this in the light of primary causation and the gradual development from the imperfect to the perfect of Aristotle. This most influential teacher thus handed down to his followers opinions which closely conform to the progressive views of those theologians of the present day who have accepted the Evolution theory."

"He used to say, half in jest, that his great ambition was to complete St. Augustine's Confessions, but that St. Augustine, like a great artist, had worked from multiplicity to unity, while he, like a small one, had to reverse the method and work back from unity to multiplicity."

"As a Theologian, I learned from my master, St. Augustine, a Berber, that all nations are necessarily a mixture, which it is not impossible for us to disentangle, of the City of Good and the City of Evil."

"Augustine thus sought a naturalistic interpretation of the Mosaic record, or potential rather than special creation, and taught that in the institution of Nature we should not look for miracles but for the laws of Nature."

"There was a Christian redaction of the historical vision of reality, associated especially with the thought of St. Augustine of Hippo."

"This idea of these great fathers of the Eastern Church took even stronger hold on the great father of the Western Church. For St. Augustine, so fettered usually by the letter of the sacred text, broke from his own famous doctrine as to the acceptance of Scripture and spurned the generally received belief of a creative process... In his great treatise [De Cenesi contra Manichæos] on Genesis he says: "To suppose that God formed man from the dust with bodily hands is very childish. ...God neither formed man with bodily hands nor did he breathe upon him with throat and lips.""

"He was himself a true African. Indeed, we may say he was an African first and a Roman afterwards, since, in spite his genuine loyalty towards the Empire, he shows none of the specifically Roman patriotism which marks Ambrose or Prudentius."

"In the history of thought and civilization, Saint Augustine appears to me to be the first thinker who brought into prominence and undertook an analysis of the philosophical and psychological concepts of person and personality. These ideas, so vital to contemporary man, shape not only Augustine's own doctrine on God but also his philosophy of man: man as an individual, man as a member of societies and institutions — the family, the city, the state and the church."

"The paper emphasizes that ideas about masturbation are crucial to understanding any societal attitudes toward sex. It examines attitudes to masturbation in ancient Egypt, Tigris Euphrates Valley, India, and China. It looks at Biblical views and their misinterpretations and at the Greek and Roman descriptions of masturbatory practices. Key to the development of western attitudes was the Augustinian version of sex which was influenced by Augustine's personal background in Manichaeanism, a religion which was based on ancient Persian beliefs. The Augustinian view of all non-procreative sex as a sin was carried over into medicine in the eighteenth century which changed sins into pathologies."

"His considered answer to what God was doing before creating the universe was "the world was made with time and not in time." Augustine's God is a being who transcends time, a being located outside time altogether and responsible for creating time as well as space and matter. Thus Augustine skillfully avoided the problem of why the creation happened at that moment rather than some earlier moment. There were no earlier moments. Identical reasoning applies to the scientific problem. If the universe originated in time, then it cannot have been caused by any physical process that has a finite probability, because if it did, then the event would already have happened, an infinite time ago. ...He wasn't even the first person to hit on the idea of time coming into being with the universe. Plato said much the same thing hundreds of years earlier. The history of philosophy is so rich and diverse that it would be astonishing if theories emerging from science hadn't been foreshadowed in some vague way by somebody."

"Monica his mother was almost certainly a Berber and his father was probably a mixture of Berber and Roman ancestry."

"A Berber, born in 354 at Thagaste (now Souk-Ahras) in Africa... The exceptional brilliance of his works (The City of God, The Confessions), his contradictory nature, his desire to bring together faith and intelligence, classical and Christian civilization, the old wine and the new — these deliberate efforts made him in some ways a rationalist. For him, faith came first: but he nevertheless declared 'Credo ut intelligam' — 'I believe in order to understand.' He also said 'Si fallor, sum' — 'If I am mistaken, I exist' — and 'Si dubitat, vivit' — 'If he doubts, he is alive'... Posterity undoubtedly concentrated its attention on St Augustine as a theologian, and on what he wrote about predestination. But Augustinianism gave Western Christianity some of its colour and its ability to adapt and debate — if only by insisting on the vital need to embrace the faith in full awareness, after deep personnal reflection, and with the will to act accordingly."

"Of all the fathers of the church, St. Augustine was the most admired and the most influential during the Middle Ages. He was well suited by background and experience to conduct a fundamental examination of the relationship of the Christian experience to classical culture. Augustine was an outsider — a native North African whose family was not Roman but Berber (today regarded as "Arabs"). … Not born to the imperial power elite, he could disassociate himself from the empire and its destiny. Augustine was enormously learned. He was a genius — an intellectual giant — and he received a thorough classical education. He was not much of a linguist (his Greek was poor, and he never learned Hebrew) but he was a master of Latin rhetoric; certain passages in The City of God equal the writings of Cicero in complexity and eloquence."

"The greatest influence during the dark ages was Augustine, who was influenced by Plotinus, who was influenced by Indian mysticism. Long before Aldous Huxley found Yoga a remedy for our Brave New World, Schopenhauer called the Upanishads the consolation of his life."

"St. Augustine occupied himself with several religious works, and among others, a Treatise on the Trinity. One day, as he was walking up and down the shore, meditating on this mystery with his mother, they saw a little child, who, having dug a tiny hole in the sand, was filling it with sea-water out of a cockle-shell. Augustine, smiling, asked him whether he thought to empty the whole ocean into it? The child replied, "Why not? It would be easier than to get into your head the incomprehensible ocean of the Holy Trinity!""

"There is no greater freedom than the freedom to obey."

"All truth is God's truth."

"I know, but it is no longer I."

"Our bodies are shaped to bear children, and our lives are a working out of the processes of creation. All our ambitions and intelligence are beside that great elemental point."

"The truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend it. Let it loose and it will defend itself."

"Augustine, the North African of Berber descent, is today the spiritual father of multitudes who are remote indeed from him racially, politically, and culturally."

"Inter faeces et urinas nascimur."

"The world is a great book, of which they that never stir from home read only a page."

"Many centuries ago, Saint Augustine, a saint of my church, wrote that a people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love—defined by the common objects of their love. What are the common objects we as Americans love? That define us as Americans? I think we know: opportunity, security, liberty, dignity, respect, honor, and yes, the truth."

"There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future."

"In the Middle Ages society was far more static and was essentially hierarchical in nature. As a result the causal or genetic attitude was far less important in medieval thought that it is in ours and the concept of evolution had little influence compared with the role of symbolism in the general world-view... Moreover, even the concept of time itself was of less significance to historians... For St Augustine the date of an event was of far less importance than its theological significance. His tendency to see everything in a theological rather than in a historical perspective was a powerful influence in the Middle Ages... It was not until the nineteenth century that the fundamental significance of the historical perspective came to be generally recognized. This was several hundred years after the theory and practice of perspective had been developed by painters and others. In each case a new way of looking at the world resulted."

"Without God, we cannot. Without us, God will not."

"If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don't like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself."

"To my God a heart of flame; To my fellow man a heart of love; To myself a heart of steel."

"Do not despair: one thief was saved. Do not presume: one thief was damned."

"To wisdom belongs the intellectual apprehension of things eternal; to knowledge, the rational apprehension of things temporal."

"By faithfulness we are collected and wound up into unity within ourselves, whereas we had been scattered abroad in multiplicity."