Digital Logos Edition
This volume contains multiple short works of Augustine’s, exploring the theology, philosophy, and aescetics throughout his life.
“A knowledge of languages is an efficacious cure for an ignorance of literal signs.” (Page 73)
“Just so, wanderers from God1 on the road of this mortal life, if we wish to return to our native country where we can be happy,2 we must use this world,3 and not enjoy it, so that the ‘invisible attributes’ of God may be clearly seen, ‘being understood through the things that are made,’4 that is, that through what is corporeal and temporal we may comprehend the eternal and spiritual.” (Page 30)
“To enjoy anything means to cling to it with affection for its own sake. To use a thing is to employ what we have received for our use to obtain what we want, provided that it is right for us to want it. An unlawfully applied use ought rather to be termed an abuse.” (Page 29)
“Everyone must be loved equally; but, when you cannot be of assistance to all, you must above all have regard for those who are bound to you more closely by some accident, as it were, of location, circumstances, or occasions of any kind.” (Page 48)
“There are, then, some things which are to be enjoyed, others which are to be used, others which are enjoyed and used. Those which are to be enjoyed make us happy. Those which are to be used help us as we strive for happiness and, in a certain sense, sustain us, so that we are able to arrive at and cling to those things which make us happy. But, if we who enjoy and use things, living as we do in the midst of both classes of things, strive to enjoy the things which we are supposed to use, we find our progress impeded and even now and then turned aside. As a result, fettered by affection for lesser goods, we are either retarded from gaining those things which we are to enjoy or we are even drawn away entirely from them.” (Page 29)