Saint Augustine: The Immortality of the Soul; The Magnitude of the Soul; On Music; The Advantage of Believing; On Faith in Things Unseen (Fathers of the Church)
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
This volume contains multiple short works of Augustine’s, exploring the theology, philosophy, and aescetics throughout his life.
- Quality translation of Augustine's thought and teaching modern scholarship
- Explains important Christian doctrines
- One of 127 published volumes in a well-respected series on the Church Fathers
Top Highlights
“There are likewise three things bordering on each other, as it were, in the minds of men which are worthy of distinction: understanding, belief, and opinion. And if these are considered separately, the first is always without fault; the second is at times faulty; and the third is never without fault. For the understanding of deep and honorable, nay even divine, matters is a most blessed thing.2 The understanding of superfluous things, however, is not harmful, but perhaps the learning was harmful in that it took up the time of necessary matters. And as to harmful matters themselves, the misery is not in the failure to understand them, but in the doing or suffering them.” (Page 424)
“The soul, however, is present at the same time and entire, not only in the entire mass of its body, but also in each of its individual parts.1 For, it is the entire soul that feels the pain of a part of the body, yet it does not feel it in the entire body. When, for instance, there is an ache in the foot, the eye looks at it, the mouth speaks of it, and the hand reaches for it.” (Page 46)
“And so many of these things seem to us disordered and perturbed, because we have been sewn into their order according to our merits, not knowing what beautiful thing Divine Providence purposes for us. For, if someone should be put as a statue in an angle of the most spacious and beautiful building, he could not perceive the beauty of the building he himself is a part of. Nor can the soldier in the front line of battle get the order of the whole army. And in a poem, if syllables should live and perceive only so long as they sound, the harmony and beauty of the connected work would in no way please them.” (Pages 355–356)
Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) is often simply referred to as St. Augustine or Augustine Bishop of Hippo (the ancient name of the modern city of Annaba in Algeria). He is the preeminent Doctor of the Church according to Roman Catholicism, and is considered by Evangelical Protestants to be in the tradition of the Apostle Paul as the theological fountainhead of the Reformation teaching on salvation and grace.