Philosophers From Rome

"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)."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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?"

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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.”"

"All truth is God's truth."

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

"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."

"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."

"Inter faeces et urinas nascimur."

"Qui cantat, bis orat"

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

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

"In necessariis unitas, In dubiis libertas, In omnibus autem caritas."

"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!""

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

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

"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."

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

"Woman, compared to other creatures, is the image of God, for she bears dominion over them. But compared unto man, she may not be called the image of God, for she bears not rule and lordship over man, but ought to obey him. The woman shall be subject to man as unto Christ. For woman, has not her example from the body and from the flesh, that so she shall be subject to man, as the flesh is unto the Spirit, because that the flesh in the weakness and mortality of this life lusts and strives against the Spirit, and therefore would not the Holy Ghost give example of subjection to the woman of any such thing."

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

"What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like."

"Charity is no substitute for justice withheld."

"Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are."

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

"Quando hic sum, non iuieno Sabbato; quando Romae sum, iuieno Sabbato."

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

"What is the use of believing, if the dost blaspheme? Thou adorest Him as Head, and dost blaspheme Him in His body. He loves His body. Thou canst cut thyself off from the body, but the Head does not detach itself from its body. "Thou dost honor me in vain," He cries from heaven, "thou dost honor Me in vain!" If someone wished to kiss thy cheek, but insisted at the same time on trampling thy feet; if with his hailed boots he were to crush thy feet as he tries to hold thy head and kiss thee, wouldst thou not interrupt his expression of respect and cry out: "What are thou doing, man? Thou art trampling upon me!" … It is for this reason that before He ascended into heaven our Lord Jesus Christ recommended to us His body, by which He was to remain upon earth. For He foresaw that many would pay Him homage because of His glory in heaven, but that their homage would be vain, so long as they despise His members on earth. (pp. 436-437)"

"Love all men, even your enemies; love them, not because they are your brothers, but that they may become your brothers. Thus you will ever burn with fraternal love, both for him who is already your brother and for your enemy, that he may by loving become your brother. … Even he that does not as yet believe in Christ … love him, and love him with fraternal love. He is not yet thy brother, but love him precisely that he may be thy brother."

"Choose to love whomsoever thou wilt: all else will follow. Thou mayest say, "I love only God, God the Father." Wrong! If Thou lovest Him, thou dost not love Him alone; but if thou lovest the Father, thou lovest also the Son. Or thou mayest say, "I love the Father and I love the Son, but these alone; God the Father and God the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ who ascended into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of the Father, the Word by whom all things were made, the Word who was made flesh and dwelt amongst us; only these do I love." Wrong again! If thou lovest the Head, thou lovest also the members; if thou lovest not the members, neither dost thou love the Head."

"In this one man, the whole Church has been assumed by the Word."