Sermons to the People

Sermones ad populum

Sermons 1–183 are published; Sermons 184–396 are not yet on the site.

Reading pages: 1.1–4.2 · 4.3–4.20 · 4.21–4.37 · 5.1–5.8 · 6.1–7.7 · 8.1–9.2 · 9.3–9.12 · 9.13–9.21 · 10.1–11.3 · 12.1–12.12 · 13.1–14.10 · 15.1–16.5 · 17.1–18.4 · 19.1–20.5 · 21.1–21.10 · 22.1–22.10 · 23.1–23.18 · 24.1–25.8 · 26.1–26.15 · 27.1–29.6 · 30.1–32.5 · 32.6–32.27 · 32.28–35.3 · 36.1–37.4 · 37.5–37.29 · 37.30–39.6 · 40.1–41.7 · 42.1–44.7 · 45.1–46.3 · 46.4–46.19 · 46.20–46.35 · 46.36–47.7 · 47.8–47.19 · 47.20–47.30 · 48.1–49.11 · 50.1–51.5 · 51.6–51.22 · 51.23–52.2 · 52.3–52.23 · 53.1–53.16 · 54.1–55.6 · 56.1–56.19 · 57.1–57.13 · 58.1–59.8 · 60.1–60.12 · 61.1–61.13 · 62.1–62.17 · 63.1–66.5 · 67.1–69.4 · 70.1–71.15 · 71.16–71.30 · 71.31–73.4 · 74.1–75.10 · 76.1–76.8 · 77.1–78.6 · 79.1–80.8 · 81.1–81.9 · 82.1–82.15 · 83.1–85.7 · 86.1–86.17 · 87.1–88.2 · 88.3–88.18 · 88.20–89.7 · 90.1–90.10 · 91.1–92.2 · 93.1–94.1 · 95.1–96.9 · 97.1–98.7 · 99.1–100.4 · 101.1–102.5 · 103.1–104.4 · 105.1–106.4 · 107.1–108.7 · 109.1–111.2 · 112.1–113.5 · 114.1–116.7 · 117.1–117.16 · 117.17–121.5 · 122.1–124.2 · 125.1–125.11 · 126.1–126.15 · 127.1–127.15 · 128.1–128.14 · 129.1–130.5 · 131.1–132.4 · 133.1–134.6 · 135.1–136.6 · 137.1–137.14 · 138.1–139.5 · 140.1–141.4 · 142.1–143.5 · 144.1–146.2 · 147.1–149.19 · 150.1–150.10 · 151.1–151.8 · 152.1–152.11 · 153.1–153.14 · 154.1–154.17 · 155.1–155.15 · 156.1–156.16 · 157.1–158.9 · 159.1–160.7 · 161.1–161.12 · 162.1–162.4 · 163.1–163.12 · 164.1–164.15 · 165.1–167.4 · 168.1–169.9 · 169.10–169.18 · 170.1–171.5 · 172.1–174.9 · 175.1–176.6 · 177.1–177.10 · 178.1–178.11 · 179.1–179.10 · 180.1–180.14 · 181.1–182.7 · 183.1–183.15

1.1Augustine pays a promised debt: a reply to the Manichees, who claim that the openings of Genesis and of John contradict each other.
1.2Augustine answers that the "beginning" in which God made heaven and earth is the Son, as Christ himself says.
1.3"In him" and "through him" mean the same thing, as Paul's usage shows, so Genesis and John agree.
1.4All Scripture is at peace with itself; the heretics see conflict because of the fog of their own error.
1.5Even if "beginning" means the beginning of time, the Trinity is present in Genesis, and Scripture often speaks of God without naming the Son.
2.1Abraham's faith did not waver when God, who had promised Isaac, commanded him to sacrifice him; and God who commanded is better than Abraham who obeyed.
2.2Against those who reject the Old Testament because God "tempted" Abraham, Augustine points out that Christ also "tempted" Philip, to bring out what was in him.
2.3God tempts not to learn but to reveal to a man what is hidden in him; the devil tempts to deceive, but has power only if given room.
2.4Abraham's test teaches us not to prefer God's gifts to God, who is to be loved for his own sake.
2.5"Now I know" means God made Abraham known to himself, just as what a prophet says by God's gift is said by God.
2.6Augustine prays that Christ will feed his hearers and introduces the great mystery of Isaac's sacrifice.
2.7Before the figurative sense is explained, the story must be believed as history; but Abraham's life is both event and prophecy of Christ.
2.8The story of Isaac and the ram foreshadows Christ, whose passion in Psalm 22 is followed by the nations' remembering and turning to the Lord.
2.9Abraham's faith and work both pleased God; Paul's "justified by faith without works" is shown by the dying believer and the thief, while true faith works through love in the heart.
3.1Hagar and Ishmael are figures of heretics and schismatics: Ishmael's "play" was persecution, and those who have baptism outside the Church will not inherit unless they return.
4.1The Holy Spirit enables believers to understand yesterday's reading spiritually and to walk by faith, hope and love toward what is not yet seen.
4.2Peter, carnally minded, denied Christ, but the Spirit made him ready to die; the same Spirit gave all the martyrs their courage.
4.3Esau stands for those who live or hope carnally; spiritual faith hopes for the life of the angels.
4.4The angels' joy is in seeing the Creator, not his creation.
4.5God is not any bodily thing, not a great man, nor gold, nor the sun, nor an endless expanse of light.
4.6Christ is the true light that enlightens all; the apostles and saints are lights only as enlightened, like eyes that receive light.
4.7Justice, truth and wisdom are a light present everywhere and diminished by no one; to see it the mind must be purified by faith.
4.8The Old Testament's land, Jerusalem, circumcision, sabbath and sacrifices were temporal promises with spiritual meanings; those who take them only carnally belong to Esau.
4.9The exodus is a figure of baptism: sins are drowned like the Egyptians, and the baptized walk through this world's desert in hope, resisting temptations, toward the homeland.
4.10Paul in 1 Corinthians 10 shows that the events of the exodus were figures for Christians, which the fathers experienced bodily without understanding.
4.11Isaac's old age and dim eyes signify the Old Testament not understood; Rebecca is the Church, which includes all the saints before Christ, such as Abraham and the prophets.
4.12Esau sold his birthright for lentils, the food of Egypt and a figure of idolatry; the Israelites who made the calf lost their primacy, and carnal Christians still belong to Esau.
4.13Rebecca, the Church, counsels Jacob to obtain the blessing meant for Esau: the blessing promised in Old Testament figures to the Jews comes spiritually to Christians.
4.14The Church bears two kinds of children: those who cling to their sins after baptism, like hairy Esau, and the clean, like Jacob, who must bear others' sins patiently.
4.15Scripture and Christ call Jacob (Israel) a man without deceit; so what does it mean that he took the blessing "with deceit"?
4.16Jacob's kidskins mean bearing others' sins patiently for the sake of unity, as Christ, who had no sin, bore ours.
4.17There is one blessing because the two peoples are one Church; Christ, rejected by many Jews, chose those who desired the spiritual city.
4.18The two kids, like the two folds, walls, blind men and boats, signify the Jewish and Gentile peoples joined in one Church by Christ the cornerstone.
4.19The kids are sinners whom Christ calls so that they do not remain sinners; killed and eaten, they pass into the one body of the Church.
4.20Bearing others' sins means rebuking sinners while patiently tolerating them, out of the love without which nothing profits.
4.21Isaac, a prophet, knew what was happening; instead of cursing Jacob he confirmed the blessing.
4.22"Deceit" here is a figure, as Christ is called rock, lion and lamb without being them literally.
4.23Jacob's "deceit" was a figure, not a lie: having bought the birthright, he truly was the firstborn, and Isaac confirmed the blessing.
4.24Jacob's blessing begins with a kiss of peace; the smell of his garment, like a blessed field, signifies Christ and his garment, the Church.
4.25One thing, the Church, is signified by both the kids and the garment, just as Christ is both lion and lamb in figure.
4.26The field whose smell is blessed is the Church, God's farm; Jacob receives the blessing of dew, fatness and lordship over the nations.
4.27Augustine turns to Esau's blessing, to show the difference between spiritual and carnal children of the Church.
4.28Jacob's "supplanting" is figurative: the carnal who envy the spiritual trip themselves up, as Christ's fragrance is life to some and death to others.
4.29Esau's blessing shares the dew and fatness of the earth with Jacob's, but only Jacob receives lordship over the nations; Esau lives by the sword, yet is free to shake off the yoke and belong to Jacob.
4.31Good and bad in the Church share the Scriptures (the dew) and the visible sacraments (the fatness of the earth), but the wicked turn the same rain into thorns.
4.32The nations serve only the spiritual: in the Church spread through the world the carnal are mixed with the spiritual, who profit from bearing with them until the final winnowing.
4.33Heresies and schisms, including the Donatists, arise from the carnal, who lack love; they are Esau, who lives by the sword of division.
4.34Schismatics live and die by the sword of division; those inside the Church who love honor are chaff, while the true grain bears with them until the end.
4.35Like Isaac, the Church under constraint tolerates the wicked and admits them to the sacraments for the sake of peace, though they eat judgment to themselves unless they change.
4.36On the feast of the martyr Vincent, Augustine urges that the devil still persecutes: the sick person who refuses magical remedies and amulets wins a martyr's hidden victory.
4.37Christians honor the martyrs by imitating them in daily struggle against the devil, relying on Christ, who has conquered the world.
5.1Christians must imitate Christ or his imitators, bearing with the wicked inside the Church until judgment; the word must be constantly repeated.
5.2Those about to be baptized are warned to forgive, like the forgiven servant in the parable; forgiveness lies in the heart, and loving correction, as God practises it, is not hatred.
5.3Christ, who forgave his crucifiers and laid down his life freely, is our model and our price; the Church bears with the wicked among her until judgment separates them.
5.4Esau signifies the Jewish people and Jacob the Christian people, who received the primacy; yet Esau's blessing shows that those he prefigures are free to be changed and joined to their brother.
5.5"The elder shall serve the younger" was fulfilled not in Esau and Jacob but in the Jews, who keep the Scriptures for Christians; yet any Jew who believes throws off the yoke and becomes a brother.
5.6Jacob, who wrestles with the angel and is both blessed and lamed, figures the Church; "Let me go, it is morning" means that Christ is to be held not carnally but as the Word equal to the Father.
5.8Jacob's withered thigh signifies wicked Christians, who make the Church lame until the judgment separates them from the good.
6.1God appeared to Moses not in his own substance but through a creature, an angel, as Acts 7:30 explains; God speaks through the angel as through a prophet.
6.3The fire that did not burn the thorn bush signifies the Law, which did not destroy the sins of the Jews.
6.4God's name "I am who I am" signifies his unchangeable being.
6.5God's second name, "the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob," points to his mercy, in which the unchangeable Word took mortal flesh.
6.6Augustine recounts the three signs given to Moses: the rod and serpent, the leprous hand, and the water turned to blood.
6.7The rod turned into a serpent signifies Christ, God's kingship, taking our mortality; like the bronze serpent, he heals sinners who look to him, and at the end he restores his body to life.
6.8The leprous hand restored in Moses' bosom signifies humanity, fallen in Adam and restored in Christ; the water turned to blood signifies Wisdom, the Word made flesh.
7.1Augustine notes three things in the burning-bush reading: the angel appears, Moses speaks with the Lord, and God names himself "I am who I am" and "the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."
7.2The thorn bush that the fire did not burn signifies the Jewish people, whose hardness resisted God's law and who crowned Christ with thorns.
7.3Two orthodox views exist on who spoke to Moses; the first is that it was Christ, called "Angel of great counsel" because he was sent with a message.
7.4Against heretics who argue that the Son is a visible creature, Augustine holds that the whole Trinity is invisible by nature and appears through creatures, as the soul appears through the voice.
7.5The second view: the speaker was a created angel called Lord because God spoke in him, as in prophets; this better fits the three visitors of Abraham, the two at Sodom, and the New Testament's statements that the Law came through angels.
7.7"I am who I am" names God's eternal, unchangeable being, far beyond human reach; "the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob" names his mercy toward us.
8.1The rod that becomes a serpent and swallows the magicians' serpents signifies God's people made mortal and the nations absorbed into Christ's body; the first plague, water to blood, opposes the first commandment, as idolatry changes God's glory into a human image.
8.2The second plague, the croaking frogs, opposes the second commandment: those who teach that Christ's death and wounds were feigned are frogs, while the Church speaks the truth to the perfect and to little ones alike.
8.3The third commandment, the sabbath, is the quiet of a good conscience; its opposite is the third plague, restless gnats, like the empty fancies of contentious people.
8.4The fourth commandment, to honor parents, is opposed by the fourth plague, the dog-fly, for it is doglike not to acknowledge one's parents.
8.5The fifth commandment against adultery is opposed by the plague on cattle: the adulterer lives like a beast, though reason and the image of God enable a human being to restrain desire.
8.6The sixth commandment against murder is opposed by the plague of boils: murderous souls burn with anger like festering sores.
8.7The seventh commandment against theft is opposed by the plague of hail: the thief gains outwardly but his heart is laid waste by God's providence.
8.8The eighth commandment against false witness is opposed by the plague of locusts, which harm by biting.
8.9The ninth commandment against coveting a neighbor's wife is opposed by the plague of darkness: to attempt another man's wife is the thickest darkness of madness.
8.10The tenth commandment against covetousness is opposed by the death of the firstborn: legacy hunters, coveting others' goods under a show of right, lose the firstborn of their heart, which is faith.
8.11Keeping God's commandments, Christians store up inner riches safe from all loss, and their exodus from Egypt goes on continually.
8.12Sanctification comes from the Holy Spirit, to whom the number seven belongs (seven gifts, Pentecost after seven weeks); those who break unity, like Pharaoh's magicians, do not have the Spirit.
8.13The first three commandments concern God (Father, Son, Holy Spirit); Pharaoh's magicians failed at the third plague and confessed "the finger of God," which is the Holy Spirit, who gave the Law fifty days after the Passover as he came fifty days after Christ's death.
9.1God is merciful and long-suffering but also "true": his present mercy must not breed presumption, for his judgment is coming.
9.2Settle your case with God before judgment, for whatever the time until the world's end, each person's own last day is uncertain and may come any day.
9.3The adversary with whom we must agree is God's word, which contradicts our sins against each commandment: superstition, belittling Christ, a carnal sabbath, dishonoring parents, hatred, and especially husbands' adultery.
9.4Augustine dwells on adultery because it is widespread: custom lets husbands sin with slave women while wives are prosecuted, but before God the sin is equal and husband and wife owe each other the same fidelity.
9.5Augustine plays the "ten-stringed psaltery" of the Decalogue instead of frivolous songs: three strings belong to God, the third being the sabbath, the everlasting rest promised in the Holy Spirit.
9.7The Decalogue is divided between the two great commandments: three strings for God, who is a Trinity, and seven for the neighbor, beginning with honor of parents, which Paul calls the first commandment.
9.8Those who keep the commandments only out of fear carry the psaltery without singing; only the new man, who keeps them with delight in love, sings the new song.
9.9God hates us as we are in order to make us what we are not yet: an image of him, not equal like the Son but like the emperor's image on a coin; agreement with God begins with hating ourselves as we are.
9.10As a patient who hates his fever agrees with his doctor, so sinners who hate their vices agree with God's word and come to delight in its commands.
9.11Augustine strikes the fifth string, adultery: husbands who go to their slave women sin as wives would; a chaste wife keeps faith for Christ's sake even when her husband does not.
9.12Men who say chastity is impossible are shamed by their chaste wives; custom laughs off husbands' sins with slave women while condemning other crimes, as though the man conquered by lust were the real man.
9.13In God's show the lyre-player is also the hunter: playing each of the ten strings kills a beast of vice, from superstition to greed.
9.14The unmarried man who goes to prostitutes breaks no single commandment by name, but he breaks the rule that contains all the commandments: do not do to another what you do not want done to you.
9.15The man who goes to prostitutes wrongs God himself, for he corrupts in himself God's image and temple, just as stoning a man's portrait insults the man.
9.16Masters who demand fidelity from their slaves but refuse service to God do to God what they would not suffer; the one rule contains all the commandments.
9.17Avoid magic and the shows; small daily sins, deadly by their number, are cleansed by almsgiving, fasting and prayer, and perfect almsgiving includes forgiving those who hurt us.
9.18Grave sins like adultery require a change of life, not almsgiving; daily almsgiving cleanses only small daily sins, such as harsh words, excess in food, or intercourse with one's wife beyond what procreation requires.
9.19Christians, redeemed by Christ's blood, give less than the Pharisee's tithe; they measure their giving against those who give less, though in wealth they always compare themselves with the richer.
9.20"I am keeping it for my children" is often a cloak for avarice: a parent who loses a child should send that child's share ahead to Christ by giving it to the poor.
9.21Avarice and lavish gifts to performers are both condemned; Christ in the poor asks for what we have, and by good works, prayer, fasting and alms, forgiving as we are forgiven, we walk safely on Christ the way to the eternal sabbath.
10.1Augustine reads the story of Solomon's judgment between the two harlots and asks what the two women signify.
10.2The two harlots are the Synagogue and the Church: the Synagogue killed Christ, and Judaizers tried to substitute the dead rite of circumcision for the Gentile Church's living faith, until Paul woke her up.
10.3Judaizing Christians claimed the Gospel as owed to their works, like the false mother claiming the child; but grace is given not to merits, as Paul says, and the Church holds it as a gift.
10.4Solomon's threat to divide the child teaches that we must contend for the truth against hypocrisy, but never to the point of dividing the Church's unity.
10.5The two women also signify love and pretence within the one Church; both were harlots, since all come to grace from sin, but the child is God's gift, as God brings good out of human sin.
10.6Love gave birth first in the Church, as the good apostles were chosen before Judas; pretence, smothering the grace it received, claims others' good works and imputes its own sins to them.
10.7When iniquity abounds and love grows cold, pretence claims the good and blames the innocent; Solomon's two sentences signify Christ's testing of the Church now and his crowning of her at the end.
10.8The greatest proof of love is to give up one's own honor rather than divide the Church; even hypocrites in the Church nourish believers with the milk of Scripture, and love will be rewarded at the last judgment.
11.1Works of mercy are possible only in this life, where there are hungry, naked, strangers and sick; God lets his saints be in need so that the rich may share with them and be received with them into eternal life.
11.2God, who could feed Elijah by ravens, made him need the widow of Zarephath so she might be tested and blessed; God "commanded" her not by a word but by inspiring her heart, and her two sticks prefigure the cross.
11.3The widow's unfailing flour and oil were a sign of the endless reward to come, not a payment; we should do good expecting our harvest in eternity, not here.
12.1Against the Manichee Adimantus, who argued from Job that the impure devil saw God, Augustine shows that Paul never said what Adimantus claims, and that "the princes of this world" are the proud or the devil, prince of sinners.
12.3Scripture does not say the devil saw God, only that he came into God's sight and heard him, as a blind man can speak with one he cannot see; God is present to every conscience, to the good as father, to the wicked as judge.
12.4God speaks in many ways, through Scripture, signs, lots, prophets, angels, voices, dreams, ecstasy, understanding and conscience; so he could speak to the devil without being seen by him.
12.5The devil cannot attain the vision of God to which faith in Christ leads, but he could hear God's voice, as unbelievers heard the voice from heaven.
12.6"Came into God's sight" means that these events took place in a hidden realm, known only by the Spirit's revelation, not that anyone can ever leave God's sight.
12.7Whether the angels were good or bad, the devil stood among them without seeing God, and God may have spoken to him through an angel, as a judge speaks through a herald.
12.8The Manichees falsely claim Scripture says the devil saw God, while they themselves hold that Christ, who is God, appeared to people without a real body.
12.9If the devil saw Christ when tempting him, either Christ had a real body or the devil saw the divine substance; and if the body was a mere appearance, God deceived the devil. Angels too appear in real bodies.
12.10Christ's visible body was either a deceitful phantom or the divine substance itself, both impossible; the Manichees would make the unchangeable Word changeable.
12.11The Manichees, who worship the sun though the devil and the wicked see it, are forced to admit that Christ took a body; yet they would rather derive it from the race of darkness than from the Virgin's womb.
12.12All bodies are from God, and Christ took flesh from a woman to restore both sexes; as the sun lights mud without being dirtied, the Word took mortal flesh without being changed or defiled; the Manichee myth itself has the race of darkness seeing God.
13.1"You who judge the earth" means those who master their bodies, as Paul did; whoever does not judge the earth becomes earth, the serpent's food.
13.2The righteous must serve God in fear, crediting their righteousness to him; whoever trusts in himself perishes from the just way, and to trust in another man is as ruinous as to trust in oneself.
13.3We work out our salvation with fear because God works in us both to will and to work; the good will itself is God's gift, and whoever was lost in himself is found only when his Maker seeks him.
13.4Rulers and judges too must remember that they are sinners judging sinners, as Christ showed with the woman taken in adultery, turning the Pharisees' trap back on them as he did over Caesar's coin.
13.5The accusers left, trembling, and only the sinless judge remained with the woman; but mercy moved him to say, "Neither will I condemn you."
13.6All who hold authority are ordained by God; whoever does good will have praise, either from a just authority or from God, as the martyr Cyprian did, who was condemned on this very spot.
13.7Whoever seeks judicial power, even by purchase, must first judge himself in the court of his conscience, punishing his sins by repentance, and then judge his neighbor in the same way.
13.8A judge must pursue the sin and not the sinner, stopping short of death so that the man may repent; penalties are allowed, but only in a spirit of love and correction.
13.9As a father who loves his son disciplines him, and would be cruel to spare him, so judges must combine love with discipline.
14.1The "poor man" left to God in Psalm 10 is not simply the beggar, of whom there are many, but the poor in spirit, among whom all Christians must be.
14.2The great danger of riches is pride; the humble rich man, like Zacchaeus, is the truly poor.
14.3A beggar objects that the kingdom belongs to the poor like Lazarus, not to the rich like the man who feasted and was tormented.
14.4Lazarus was carried into the bosom of Abraham, a rich man who was poor because he was humble, believing God and crediting all his good to God.
14.5The truly poor are rare; the proud beggar who despises the rich should remember that the rich Abraham received Lazarus.
14.6Riches are full of dangers and are only an inn on the road; the rich must use them as travellers, remembering that we go naked into the earth.
14.7Paul, another poor man, shows that the root of evil is the desire to be rich: a beggar who covets riches is worse than a rich man who has set a limit to his greed and makes friends with his wealth.
14.8The true poor man is a member of Christ, who, rich as the Creator of all things, became poor in his birth and passion for our sake.
14.10The orphan is the believer who calls no one on earth father and says, "My father and mother have forsaken me, but the Lord has taken me up."
15.1The beauty of God's house is not fine buildings but the Church of faithful people, living stones joined by love.
15.2In the Church there are those of the number, vessels for honor, and those beyond the number, vessels for dishonor; only those who are themselves vessels for honor find and love the beauty of God's house.
15.3As the wicked misuse good things, so God uses even the wicked well; the pagan soul is a fornicator, the bad Christian's soul an adulteress, yet God, whose ways are unsearchable, has a place for both in his house.
15.4The world is a furnace in which the wicked are chaff, the good are gold, and tribulation is the fire; trusting God's mercy, the righteous ask to be tested, for God gives a way out by enabling them to endure.
15.5The many wicked serve to purify the few good, as Paul was tested among false brothers; the good must bear with the bad, being good in the measure that God, who alone is good, makes them.
15.6The good must bear with the bad outside the Church and within it until the winnowing, answer the slanders of pagans by good lives, and pray for their enemies as the Lord commands.
15.8The command to love and pray for enemies is hard, but its promise is great, to be sons of the Most High; the willing heart is gold, and its struggle against the flesh is the dross God purifies.
15.9The many wicked test the few good; while the wicked, like the dregs of an olive press, flow openly through the streets, the converted, like oil, pass hiddenly into God's house.
16.1"Who is the man who wants life and to see good days?" refers to eternal life; the commands of the Psalm lead to the peace the world does not have, while this present life, however long, slips away even as it comes.
16.2People love their estates to be good more than their lives; a good life should be preferred to a long one, for eternal life follows, and here we must redeem the time, even at temporal cost.
16.3The Psalm cannot mean present life, since keeping its commands, such as refusing false witness under threat of death, may cost that life; it means eternal life, which those who obey even unto death obtain.
16.4The "good days" of the Psalm are not the feasting days for which flatterers lie, but the days of the land of the living, for which one keeps from deceit even under threat of death.
16.5Whoever wants eternal life and good days must do the work: seek peace with good works, in tribulation, before God.
17.1Christ, silent when he came to be judged, will come manifestly to judge and not keep silent; even now he speaks through Scripture, readers, preachers and singers, but must be heard with the ears of the heart.
17.2Ezekiel's warning to watchmen applies first to bishops: Augustine speaks to free his soul, but his whole desire is not to be saved without his people.
17.3Habitual sins such as drunkenness deaden the conscience; the Church is slow to excommunicate, but God, silent now while Christ is in heaven, will not keep silent when he comes to judge.
17.4God sees the adulterer and the would-be thief, though he keeps silent; those who say God does not care, because the wicked prosper, suspect that God is like themselves.
17.5God, now silent, will rebuke the sinner by setting him before his own face at the judgment; now is the time of mercy, when daily sins are washed by the Lord's Prayer before communion.
17.6People neither forgive nor ask forgiveness; Christ's rule of correction ends in treating the unrepentant as a heathen, who, however devout his outward signs, is dead.
17.7Even if the judgment is far off, one's own death is near and uncertain, for we are more fragile than glass; Augustine wants deeds, not applause.
18.1Christ came hidden to be judged and silent, and will come manifest to judge; meanwhile, because good and bad share the same fortunes, carnal people deny providence and mock God's commands.
18.2God judges some things now, so that his existence is not doubted, and reserves others for the judgment, patiently waiting for sinners to repent; those who despise his patience store up wrath.
18.3All our deeds are laid up in a treasury: the good know they are storing works of mercy with a faithful and powerful keeper; the wicked do not know that they are storing up wrath.
18.4At the judgment Christ will open each person's treasury: those who gave to his needy members will receive the kingdom, those who did not will find nothing; late repentance will be useless, but God counts a sincere will to do good as done.
19.1We ask God not to turn his face from us, his creation, but to turn it from our sins, our own work, so that the fault may be healed and the nature preserved.
19.2The penitent acknowledges his own sins instead of judging others'; sin must be punished either by God or by the sinner himself in repentance, which is anger against oneself.
19.3God no longer wants animal sacrifices, which all prefigured Christ (ram, lamb, bull, goat), the same faith being held by the fathers; the sacrifice he now wants is a contrite heart, crushed so that a clean one may be created.
19.4The psalmist of Psalm 73 nearly fell because he expected earthly happiness from God and saw the wicked prosper; but happiness has its own country, which even Christ did not find here, so earthly goods must be despised.
19.5Recovering, the psalmist asks what he has in heaven and what he wanted on earth: earthly riches are worthless beside heaven, whose reward is God himself, more beautiful than all creation.
19.6Augustine urges a good life without earthly reward, citing recent earthquakes in the East and at Sitifis, after which thousands were baptized; the world is an olive press, and all should be oil, not dregs, before death comes suddenly.
20.1The soul can wound itself by sin but cannot heal itself; it must pray, with the penitent of Psalm 51, for God to create a clean heart, and not despair.
20.2The sinner must accuse himself, not excuse himself by blaming fortune, fate or the devil; God turns his face from the sins of one who acknowledges them, for sin must be punished either by the penitent or by God.
20.3The penitent must guard against despair, which drives a sinner to indulge every lust as if already lost, and against presumption, which delays conversion because God promises pardon at any hour.
20.4Against presumption Scripture warns, "Do not delay to turn to the Lord": the one who postpones conversion, counting on tomorrow, wants all his goods to be good except his own life.
20.5Augustine asks the people to listen attentively to the presbyters who preach after him, for the truth is God's whoever speaks it.
21.1The righteous rejoice in the Lord even now in hope, before they see him; unlike earthly loves, which disappoint when obtained, God when seen will surpass all that hope imagined.
21.2God is not a body to be approached by climbing high, but spirit, near to the humble; he is love, and whoever loves has him near, for every good we enjoy, sin alone excepted, comes from him.
21.3Sin is not loving something bad, since every creature of God is good, but loving a good creature in a disordered way; love must be set in order, using lower goods and enjoying the highest.
21.4A merchant who preferred silver to gold would be called mad, yet people prefer gold to God and excuse it because they do not see God.
21.5People see and demand faithfulness from others, especially their slaves, whom they reward with freedom, yet refuse it to God, who created and redeemed them; the Gospel is the record of their purchase by Christ's blood.
21.6Masters who claim to have given their "blood" (money) for their slaves should remember that Christ bought them with his real blood and death, and owe him the faithfulness they demand.
21.8Rejoice in the inner goods God commands; if God does not grant earthly happiness when we pray, it is like a father refusing to put his little son on a horse out of love, while he keeps the whole estate for him.
21.9Job, losing everything, still rejoiced in the Lord, because he possessed his goods without being possessed by them and clung to the Giver, not the gifts.
21.10Gold is God's good gift; those who blame God for it should give distinction to gold by using it for the poor, as they claim they would if they had it.
22.1"Let sinners perish like smoke and wax" frightens every conscience; but the Psalms often foretell the future in the form of a wish or of a past event, as with Christ's passion and Judas.
22.2The prophet's "wish" expresses acceptance of God's certain decree, as the brothers said "The Lord's will be done" when Paul went to Jerusalem to suffer.
22.3God warns through Scripture and scourges through tribulation so that we may repent now; the repentance of the damned will be fruitless, but even the thief on the cross was allowed to change.
22.4Since everything foretold about the Church has come true, its worldwide spread, heresies, persecution, the martyrs' harvest, the fall of the idols, the foretold judgment will certainly come too.
22.5God is both merciful and just: he spares and pardons the repentant now and will judge by deserts; his "repentance" is a change of sentence when the sinner changes, so we should all seek pardon, not acquittal.
22.7"Let sinners perish" means that the sinner, man's own work, should perish so that the man, God's work, may live; melting in repentance like wax before the heat of God's word, we escape the fire.
22.8The proud, who defend their sins, vanish like rising smoke; the penitent, who confess them and struggle against them, are forgiven what remains, so long as the last day finds them still fighting.
22.9God's mercy, shown in redeeming us with his Son's blood, is abundant, but not for the obstinate who defend their sins; the saints who hold God as Father and the Church as mother receive the inheritance.
22.10Adam and Eve begot us to death, Christ and the Church beget us to eternal life; Christ has received the inheritance in his flesh as head, and the whole Christ, head and body, will receive it, as the ungodly will receive eternal fire.
23.1Augustine takes the psalm just sung as his text and reminds the people that the preacher is in more danger than the hearer, since Christ alone is master.
23.2Since all offend in speech, preacher and hearers are fellow disciples under one Master, and the people should pray for the preacher.
23.3Scripture is always spiritual, yet like a mother or nurse it speaks to the carnal as if carnally so that they may grow.
23.4Paul calls the Corinthians both carnal and little ones in Christ; there are perfect hearers, with whom the preacher has no trouble.
23.5A carnal hearer imagines God taking the psalmist’s right hand in a bodily way; to tell him God has a body would be a lie, and to lie about God is ruinous.
23.6God is not contained in a place; the believer becomes his temple, and when he comes to dwell he does not cramp the heart but enlarges it by love.
23.8Love poured out by the Spirit is God’s pledge in us; Augustine explains why “earnest” is a better word than “pledge.”
23.9An earnest is part of the price, completed rather than returned; love is God’s earnest, so we should desire a fullness of the same kind: God, who is love.
23.10Love in us is dew from the fountain of life; we should desire the fountain itself, not only the benefits God gives even to animals.
23.11The psalm distinguishes “men,” saved with the beasts in this life, from “sons of men,” who hope in God; the distinction points to Adam and Christ.
23.12The drunkenness the psalm promises is not carnal feasting but drinking love, which is present in the heart without place or footsteps; so we should learn to love God.
23.14God walked in Eden, appeared at Mamre, and spoke with Moses face to face, yet Moses still asked to see him: God appears in a form while his nature stays hidden.
23.15God does not change his nature when he appears; as he made all things by speaking, so he appears in whatever form he wills.
23.16We shall see God as he is, not in a passing appearance as at Mamre or Sinai, and this by grace, not merit.
23.17Since peacemakers are God’s children, hard questions about seeing God should be pursued peaceably, not by quarreling.
23.18Without peace no one will see God, so quarreling about how God is seen destroys the very eye that would see him; faith, love, and peace prepare the heart.
24.1Augustine gives thanks that the people, God’s living temple, have sung “O God, who is like you?”, and bids all creation join in confessing that no one is like God.
24.2Idolaters are “dead stones” like their idols; the Church, made of living stones, labors to free them, hoping that God can raise children to Abraham from stones.
24.3No creature, not even man made in God’s image, can be compared with God; how much less a stone Hercules, whose dedication “To Hercules, the god” shames its worshipers.
24.4Augustine raises the puzzle that the psalm asks God “not to be gentle” while Christ says he is gentle, and begins to resolve it from Christ’s call in Matt 11.
24.5The people have shown their zeal against idols by acclamation; the clergy must now act with order, and the people should obey their bishop and place their hope in God.
24.6Since the “Roman gods” have been removed at Rome, they should not remain at Carthage; Augustine mocks the gilded beard of a statue of Hercules, which has been shaved off.
24.7God is “not gentle” toward errors, striking in order to heal, as with Saul; the shaving of Hercules’ beard by Christian authorities was his doing.
25.1The psalm’s “law” is above all the Gospel, the New Testament promised by Jeremiah; the Old Testament’s land of milk and honey stands spiritually for the land of the living and the sweetness of grace.
25.2The old Law “gives birth to slavery” for those who serve God for earthly rewards; those of the New Testament hope for a new inheritance and lift up their hearts to the Lord in humility.
25.3The blessed man is the one God teaches inwardly; the “evil days” have lasted since paradise, though every generation imagines its own times the worst.
25.4Evil men make the days evil, but even the just find war within themselves, flesh against spirit, wherever they go.
25.5To be “made calm” is not to resent God’s judgment but to learn from humiliation; the good days are yet to come, and will be good only for the good.
25.6All want life and good days, but the psalm requires a tongue kept from evil; past sins may pass with the evil days if we hold fast to the word of the Lord.
25.7The peace we must pursue is Christ, who passed through the human race, prayed for his enemies on the cross, and ascended; we follow him by lifting up our hearts.
25.8Those who envied Zacchaeus for receiving Christ can receive him now in the poor, especially in winter.
26.1In the plain sense, “the Lord who made us” means that God creates every human being, and so will hear those he made when they weep before him.
26.2Against those who say that God made them men but they make themselves just, Augustine argues that Adam, made upright, broke himself by free choice and can be remade only by God.
26.4Creation is common to all and was itself an unmerited gift, but the psalm’s “he made us” means that God made us his people, having chosen us before the world existed.
26.5What God made us, in the psalm’s sense, is believers and just, his people and sheep: a greater grace than creation, given through Christ.
26.6All people, pagans included, were created through Christ the Word, and pagans are the more culpable for worshiping their own handiwork instead.
26.7The greater grace is that through the Word made flesh, the man Christ Jesus, the one Mediator, we were reconciled to God.
26.8The Pelagians, accused of arguing against grace, claimed that by defending free choice they honored grace, since God gave free choice; Augustine calls the argument glass.
26.9The grace that matters is not creation but the grace that makes Christians; the Law could not give life, but was given to expose pride and make sin known.
26.10Against those who ascribe the Law to an evil power, Paul calls the Law holy, just, and good; it exposed the sin that held us, and Christ, who alone is not bound, sets us free.
26.11Elisha’s staff, sent by a servant, could not raise the dead boy, as the Law cannot give life; Elisha himself, stretching himself on the child, prefigures Christ who emptied himself to raise us.
26.12The grace that saves sinners who deserved punishment is greater than the grace of creation; from the one lump of perdition God makes vessels of honor, and when one infant is baptized and another dies unbaptized we can only cry, “O the depth!”
26.14No one gave to God first, so that grace could be a repayment; all good comes from him, and salvation is by grace through faith, God’s gift.
26.15If it troubles us that one is baptized and another perishes, we must hear “O man, who are you?”; we should claim nothing for ourselves but give glory to God for what we have received.
27.1The title “when the house was being built after the captivity” refers to the Church, God’s house, built as the whole earth sings the new song.
27.2The captivity is humanity’s bondage to the devil since Adam’s sin; Christ, God from God, came in the likeness of sinful flesh to pay our price with his blood.
27.3Since the whole world is justly guilty, God is not unjust when he condemns and has mercy on whom he wills; his equity may be hidden, but there is no iniquity in him.
27.4Augustine does not claim to know why God hardens some; faithful ignorance is better than rash knowledge, and we must rise beyond being “mere men” by belonging to the Son of Man.
27.5Christ’s words “I have made known to you all that I heard from my Father” speak of the future as already done, as Scripture often does, just as we are “saved in hope.”
27.6We walk by faith in the crucified, “unsightly” Christ, whose sign we bear on our foreheads; only at the vision of his beauty will we see God’s equity in why one is baptized and another is not.
27.7Paul, after saying that God shut up all in unbelief to have mercy on all, ends not with an explanation but with wonder; we should do the same until the house of God is dedicated.
28.1The title of the sermon: on Ps 105:3 (104:3 in Augustine’s numbering).
28.2On a fast day Augustine takes the verse “Let the heart of those who seek the Lord rejoice”: as each bodily sense rejoices in its object, so the heart should rejoice in seeking God.
28.3God is light, sound, fragrance, and food to the heart; Christ, our righteousness, is food that never runs out, and must be “digested” by doing what we hear.
28.5Light feeds the eyes of all without being diminished or divided between rich and poor; how much more does God feed our minds.
28.6A spoken word reaches every hearer whole without being divided, as bread would be; so the Word of God is whole everywhere, with the Father, in the Virgin, in the underworld, and in paradise.
28.7A meaning passes to the hearer by means of sound without leaving the speaker; so the Word, remaining with the Father, came to us by taking flesh.
29.1God alone is good of himself and the source of all made goods; “confession” in Scripture means praise as well as confession of sin, as when the sinless Christ confesses to the Father.
29.3Confessing sin heals, while excusing it by blaming the devil, fortune, or fate lets the accuser triumph; we should say, “I have sinned against you.”
29.4Whether praising or confessing sin, it is safest to confess to God, who is good; our goodness comes from him, our badness from ourselves.
29.5The bad man wants everything good, horse, house, wife, and clothes, except his own soul; he should first become good himself.
29.6To hate one’s sins is to punish them oneself in repentance; sin must be punished either by the penitent or by God.
30.1The congregation’s response, “let no iniquity rule over me,” is a prayer against the tyranny of sin, from which the Law could not free us but Christ’s blood has redeemed us.
30.2Man sold himself to sin by free choice for the pleasure of the forbidden fruit; only the Redeemer’s blood can buy him back and straighten his steps.
30.3The man of Rom 7 who says “I do not do what I want” has lost by willing evil the power to do good; the opponent of grace who denies this is no judge of another’s conscience.
30.4Every honest person feels the war of flesh and spirit; Augustine wants not merely to resist but to be wholly healed, flesh included, since one Creator made both, and the conflict is the penalty of the soul’s desertion of God.
30.5The defender of a healthy nature shuts out the Savior; as ruin came through Adam and rebuilding through Christ, so the believer, who cannot be free of evil desire, must by grace refuse to let sin reign.
30.7Even one who refuses consent to temptation must thank God for it rather than claim it, since God resists the proud.
30.8Those who sang “let no iniquity rule over me” admit that they need God’s help; all who labor under sin should come to Christ, who alone can remake them.
30.9What Christ teaches us to learn from him is not creation but humility: God emptied himself to become man, so we should acknowledge that we are sinners and come to him.
30.10Christ’s yoke is easy because he breathes love into us; even our coming to him is his gift, since no one comes unless the Father draws him.
31.1The psalm about sowing in tears and reaping in joy suits the martyrs but applies to all Christians: the seeds are good works and the sheaves the eternal reward; but why tears, if God loves a cheerful giver?
31.2The martyrs spent themselves for Christ, as those who eat at his great table must give their lives for the brothers; secure of the resurrection, they sowed, and so must we by good works.
31.3Christ, who suffered by his own power, voiced sorrow before his death for the sake of his weaker members; the sowing in tears belongs especially to them, while Paul faced death exulting.
31.4All people go weeping on the road of life, from the newborn’s first cry onward; the just weep more, for they weep over those who weep and laugh at vain things.
31.5The just are cheerful in doing good but weep in prayer as pilgrims longing for the homeland, especially when unbelievers mock, “Where is your God?”
31.6The tears of the just belong to this road and end in the joy of harvest; the wicked go from weeping to eternal weeping in the outer darkness, which will hold no pleasures.
32.4The day’s readings are medicines for preacher and hearers alike; Augustine will take only a few points from the psalm, since its secrets are many.
32.5Regular, attentive hearers know who Goliath was; for the others Augustine will retell the story.
32.6Augustine retells how the shepherd boy David, trusting in God, accepted Goliath’s challenge to single combat.
32.7Goliath’s side trusted in one man’s strength, David’s in God; David threw off Saul’s old armor, as the apostle bids us put off the old man.
32.8David’s five stones signify the five books of the Law, the ten-stringed psaltery its ten commandments, and the one stone he threw the unity of love that fulfills the Law.
32.9A rule for allegory: a figure such as a mountain, stone, lion, or river does not always mean the same thing, just as the letter D begins both Deus and Diabolus; its sense depends on its place.
32.10Here the river signifies the old people that let the Law be passed over like stones in a stream; taking the stones into the milk vessel signifies the Law brought into grace by Christ.
32.11The same ten commandments that oppressed the old people through fear are fulfilled by grace through love; to sing on the ten-stringed psaltery is to keep the commandments gladly.
32.12God commands and also gives the strength to obey; man is nothing unless God makes himself known to him, and any eminence he has comes from mercy, not merit.
32.13What is properly man’s own is sin and falsehood; so “let no one seek his own” means: do not seek sin or lies, for truth is from God.
32.14The devil cannot force anyone; he enters only through the two doors of desire and fear, which we can close.
32.15Christ came first in mercy to sinners, all of whom deserved condemnation; Goliath, trusting himself, fell by a stone to the brazen forehead, while the forehead marked with the humble cross conquers.
32.16Those who bear the sign of the cross on their foreheads must imitate Christ’s humility; desire and fear give place to the devil when they are for temporal things, but to God’s word when they are for eternal things.
32.17To live well we must love God’s promises more than the world’s and fear his threats more than the world’s; sin is preferring what is seen and present to what God promises.
32.18When threats tempt us to sin, we should remember that God either averts the danger or permits it for our good, as with the three young men in the furnace and the Maccabean martyrs.
32.19A threatening man is a passing shadow: at most he can harm the temporal, old life; he cannot take away eternal life.
32.20The wicked man’s elaborate schemes are like a sharpened razor: all they can remove from the just is what is superfluous.
32.21To follow God’s will we must not count worldly prosperity as happiness; the end of the psalm plainly mocks the “happiness” of the foreigners.
32.22The prosperity of the wicked tempts the just, but God is kinder when he refuses superfluous requests, which would only feed luxury and the shows.
32.23Riches given to worldly men lead to oppression and spending on shows, so God’s refusal is mercy; earthly gain is always another’s loss, but righteousness can be shared without loss.
32.24A good father refuses what would harm; the “right hand of iniquity” is worldly happiness held as one’s chief good, whereas the good hold it in the left hand and eternal happiness in the right.
32.25No one may excuse himself by not listening, since God will demand both the preacher’s giving and the hearer’s receiving of his word, which is preached everywhere.
32.26The psalm describes even lawful, innocent prosperity as something to despise; how much worse are those who gain by crime.
32.27The psalm’s picture of many children, adorned daughters, full barns, and flocks is the “happiness” of the proud, Goliath-like man; like the rich fool in the Gospel, those who rest in it are rejected, however innocently they gained it.
32.28The truly blessed people is the one whose God is the Lord, who wants God himself instead of all prosperity and worships him freely, whether he gives or takes away.
33.1The ten-stringed psaltery is the Decalogue; those under the Law in fear carry it as a burden, while those under grace play it in love and sing the new song.
33.2Love fulfills the Law; as there are two commandments of love, so the Decalogue was given on two tablets, three commandments for love of God and seven for love of neighbor.
33.3The three commandments of the first tablet correspond to the Trinity: one God (the Father), not taking the Lord’s name “to vanity” (the Son is no creature), and the Sabbath (the Holy Spirit’s gift of rest), kept spiritually by avoiding sin.
33.4The seven commandments of the second tablet concern the neighbor, beginning with honoring parents, which is why Paul calls it “the first commandment.”
33.5The new song is the grace of the New Testament, sung by deeds of love; the Donatists, cut off from the Church spread through all the earth, cannot sing it.
34.1The new song belongs to the new man and new life; everyone loves, but we can love God rightly only because he first loved us and poured out his love by the Holy Spirit.
34.3Since the Spirit by whom we love is God, we love God from God; and since God is love, we must not imagine him with a bodily shape, as one would an idol.
34.4Even carnal love shows that what is loved most is the unseen love of the other; so we can love God, whom we do not see.
34.5Earthly things can be loved without being possessed, but God is had as soon as he is loved.
34.6The people must sing the new song with their lives as well as their voices; God’s praise is the holy Church itself, whose joy is God alone.
34.7Charity is the dearest thing of all, and its price is ourselves: Wisdom asks for the whole heart, and God, who made us, demands the whole of us.
34.8Loving God with the whole self is itself the right love of self, which is the measure of love of neighbor; whoever loves iniquity hates himself.
34.9Augustine’s closing prayer, given here in full.
35.1Augustine raises a difficulty in Prov 9:12 (Greek): how can the evil man suffer evil “alone,” when the members of Christ’s body share one another’s good and ill?
35.2No one is good or evil by another’s good or evil; but the good man, by his own goodness, loves his neighbor, while the evil man, loving iniquity, does not even love himself.
35.3The good neighbor rejoices in another’s goodness and grieves over his sin, and both are good for him; so the wise are wise for others too, while the wicked suffer evil alone.
36.1Augustine introduces Prov 13:7–8: the verse does not mean that earthly wealth is something to prize or fear, though a humble rich man is better than a poor man pretending to wealth.
36.2Scripture commends humble rich people, since pride is the disease of riches; the proud rich man is like a wineskin blown up with air, not filled.
36.3The truly rich are those of Christ, who became poor, that is, mortal, while remaining rich as the Creator Word, so that by his blood we might become rich in righteousness and immortality.
36.4Believers are rich within, as a living root in winter, and their riches will appear when Christ comes; the rich of this world too belong to Christ if they are humble and do not trust in uncertain wealth but store treasure in heaven.
36.6Paul counsels the rich to hope in God and be rich in good works, giving readily; the rich man and Lazarus show where the false life of riches ends.
36.7The proverb’s next verse shows that it speaks of inner riches: the hypocrite pretends to righteousness he lacks, while the truly rich are humble, the poor in spirit.
36.8Faith shines more than gold, as even a greedy master shows by prizing a faithful slave above all; we should render to God, our Lord and Redeemer, the faithfulness we demand from others.
36.9The rich fool stored his harvest in barns instead of redeeming his soul by alms; the bellies of the poor are a safer storehouse, keeping treasure in heaven.
36.10The one poor in inner riches gives way to threats and bears false witness; the one rich within, like the martyrs, can lose only outward things and fears the lie that kills the soul more than death.
36.11We should come as beggars to God, who alone makes us rich; the tax collector who confessed his poverty went home justified, while the Pharisee, who thought himself rich, asked for nothing.
37.1On a feast of martyrs Augustine announces that the “strong woman” of Prov 31, whom her husband found lost and adorned, is the Church, the mother of the martyrs.
37.2The Church was hard to find while she lay lost in her sins, but Christ, who went up on the cross and slept like a lion, found her, and now she is the city on a mountain, spread through the whole world.
37.3The Church’s precious stones are her learned teachers; Cyprian stayed in her setting, but Donatus fell out of it and, lacking charity, became a worthless stone.
37.4Christ, who foreknows that his Church will persevere, trusts in her, and she, spread through all nations, takes spoils from the devil everywhere.
37.5The Church works for Christ, not for herself; her wool and flax, the outward and the inward, must go together, so that neither showy almsgiving without God nor private worship without the Church will do.
37.7The Church rises out of the night of tribulation, feeding her household by example and Scripture and giving them work; though mistress of the house, she is the handmaid of the Lord who bought her.
37.8Looking ahead in faith and hope, the Church endures the night of tribulation to buy the eternal field, whose glory outweighs every trouble.
37.9The field is where the Church has put her treasure, in heaven; she buys it with the fruit of her hands, that is, good works.
37.10The Church girds herself with chastity for work, and once she has tasted how good it is to work, toil becomes sweet through a good conscience.
37.11The Church’s lamp is hope, which burns through the night of this life, fed with the oil of the daily word.
37.12The Church stretches out her hands to useful works across the whole world.
37.13The distaff holds the work still to be done, the spindle the work already done; in prayer we can appeal only to good works already accomplished, so all our effort should pass onto the spindle.
37.14What we have stored up must be passed to the “spindle” by giving to the poor; some poor need our hands, while Christ’s ministers seek the fruit of our faith.
37.15Christ, though now absent, need not be anxious for his household, since he knows those he has predestined; when he comes, he will separate the faithful ministers from the wicked who abuse his delay.
37.16All in the Church are clothed with Christ in baptism, but only the good have put him on in their lives as well; the rest will give account for the garment they received.
37.17The Church’s double cloak for Christ is praise of him as both God and man; the Photinians, who call him only man, and the Manichees, who call him only God, weave false single cloaks.
37.18The Church’s fine linen is her shining confession of faith, her purple the martyrs’ blood.
37.19The absent husband will appear openly “in the gates” at the judgment, sitting with the saints as judges; meanwhile the Church should keep working and await him without fear.
37.20The Church “sells” her spiritual goods, as Paul did, seeking not money but the hearers themselves; we buy the living bread by giving ourselves to God, as we might sell ourselves to lust.
37.21The girdles given to the Canaanites signify the Gentiles brought into God’s household to work, like the Canaanite woman of the Gospel, whose girdle was her great faith.
37.22The Church’s beauty and strength are her linen and her purple; her joy at the end follows long tribulation.
37.25The Church speaks carefully and keeps love in order, praising each thing according to its rank, as the martyr Donata did when she gave honor to Caesar and fear to God.
37.26The Church’s households live strictly and do not eat the bread of idleness.
37.27After the Church’s labors in this life of poverty, her children will rise and be made truly rich in the resurrection, beside which earthly riches are only props for weakness.
37.28Christ himself praises the Church when her children rise, and the following verses give his praise.
37.29The “many daughters” are the heresies, born of the Church and sharing her sacraments, Scriptures, and even baptism, and able to do mighty works; but they are thorns with flowers and no fruit, while the Church bears fruit.
37.30The Church surpasses the heresies by charity, the “more excellent way” without which tongues, miracles, alms, and even martyrdom profit nothing, and from which hangs the whole cluster of the Spirit’s fruit.
37.31The heresies keep only false graces; the Church, wise through the fear of the Lord, will receive the kingdom as the fruit of her works of mercy.
37.32When the Church’s labors are over, works of mercy will cease, for there will be no misery; her whole activity will be to see and praise God.
38.1Two laborious virtues are required in this life: continence, which refrains from the world’s goods, and endurance, which bears its evils, while we wait for the Lord.
38.2In this world goods and evils fall alike on good and bad; those who serve God for earthly reward lose heart when the wicked prosper, and so lose eternity.
38.3Since the true rewards and punishments appear only at the end, this is the time of faith, not of sight.
38.4The time of faith is laborious, but God, who forbids us to cheat a laborer, will not cheat us of the reward.
38.5Faith is the first commandment: with continence and endurance we look for the life that will “increase at the last,” since life here only decreases as we live it.
38.6People endure great hardships for avarice but refuse to labor for God’s promises; like the ant in summer, we should store up God’s words while things go well, for tribulation and death come to all.
38.7The rich young man, afraid of death amid his riches, asked about eternal life but would not move his treasure to heaven; by loving it wrongly he lost it.
38.8Treasure hidden in the ground is neither safe nor enjoyed, but what is given to the poor is lent to God, who forbids usury to men yet pays back eternal riches for temporal gifts.
38.9God bids us move our riches from earth to heaven and has made the poor our porters, citizens of heaven who will repay there what we give them here.
38.10We are troubled because faith, like Christ in the boat, is asleep; God has already fulfilled so much of what he promised and foretold that we should believe the rest will come.
38.11Even a world in turmoil is loved; we should leave it in heart and, with endurance and continence, long for the heavenly homeland.
39.1Sirach warns against putting off conversion, for God promises pardon to the penitent but not tomorrow’s life; the day of death is hidden so that every day may be watched.
39.2We brought nothing into the world and are guests at God’s table; Paul condemns not wealth but the desire to be rich, which plunges people into ruin.
39.4The rich must put away pride and trust in uncertain wealth and be rich in good works, for God feeds the poor through them.
39.5Money should not be loved but used for good works; those who hoard it live a false life, like a beggar dreaming of riches who wakes with nothing in his hands.
39.6God makes some poor to test the rich; each should give according to his means, even a cup of cold water, but alms avail only for those who change their life, not as a bribe to sin with impunity.
40.1As God waited patiently for us to change our bad life, so we must wait patiently for him to crown our good life.
40.2Those who refuse correction perish either by despair, forgetting that God does not want the sinner’s death, or by presumption, forgetting that his patience is meant to lead them to repentance.
40.3The hearer may answer that he neither despairs nor presumes, since prophet and apostle forbid both.
40.4Many say they will indulge themselves a little longer and turn to God later, relying on his promise of pardon.
40.5God’s promise of pardon is true, but those who put off conversion only add evil days to evil days, for a day cannot be good when the man is bad.
40.6No one has been promised tomorrow; Augustine, as a watchman who dares neither erase nor keep silent about Scripture’s warning, urges his hearers not to delay their conversion.
40.7As a son keeps his lethargic father awake against his will, so the preacher will not let sinners sleep, for the Lord calls them to wake and live with him forever.
40.8The preacher, as watchman, cannot promise safety where God threatens judgment; our only security is to heed God’s commands and pray for righteousness rather than worldly things.
41.1Augustine takes Sir 22:23 (“hold faith with your neighbor in his poverty”) and first explains its plain sense: a true friend stays loyal when his friend becomes poor.
41.2On the plain reading, the second half of the verse would mean staying loyal to a poor friend so as to share his wealth if he later becomes rich.
41.3Keeping faith with a poor friend in hope of his future wealth is not true friendship, and such hope may be disappointed; the verse must have a deeper sense.
41.4The rich man would not keep faith with Lazarus in his poverty, and so could not share his rest; his mocking of the prophets is answered by Abraham.
41.5The rich man received his good things in this life, which he took for his only life; Lazarus’s good things were deferred to the life hidden with Christ, which the rich man now sees but cannot share.
41.6Rightly understood, keeping faith with the poor means making them friends by alms, so that they may receive us into the eternal dwellings.
41.7The “neighbor” in his poverty is Christ, who became poor for us in his incarnation and passion; whoever keeps faith with him in this will share his riches.
42.1God wants not sacrifices but ourselves; the Christian’s sacrifice is alms, of two kinds: forgiving those who wrong us, which costs nothing, and giving to the needy, which seems costly.
42.2Each should give according to his means; what is given to the poor is lent at interest to God, who repays eternal things for perishable ones and receives on earth what he gives from heaven.
42.3When we pray to be delivered from the evil man, we must first ask to be delivered from ourselves, from avarice, lust, and anger; no one can harm a just Christian, as Stephen’s death shows.
43.1Right faith, believing what is not yet seen, is the beginning of a good life; as we needed a Creator to exist, we need a Savior to live again.
43.2Faith itself is a great gift received from God, for which we must give thanks rather than boast.
43.3Man shares existence with stones, life with plants, and sensation with beasts, but has reason, in which he is made in God’s image; reason precedes and seeks understanding.
43.4Only the Creator can restore the image we deformed; to the dispute whether we must understand in order to believe or believe in order to understand, Augustine proposes a prophet as judge.
43.5Peter calls the prophetic word “more certain” than the voice at the Transfiguration, not because it is truer, but because prophecies made before Christ’s birth refute those who call him a magician.
43.6Christ chose a fisherman first, not an orator, senator, or emperor, so that no one could boast of his own merit and all might learn humility.
43.7The prophet Isaiah settles the dispute: “Unless you believe, you will not understand.”
43.8Understanding also helps faith: preachers water the faith that has sprouted in their hearers, though only God gives the growth, as the father of the sick boy knew.
43.9The father who said “I believe; help my unbelief” had some faith and asked for more; both sayings are true: understand the preacher’s word in order to believe, and believe God’s word in order to understand.
44.1Isaiah’s “root in thirsty ground” is Christ in his humiliation, without form or comeliness, yet holding within him the beauty of the whole tree.
44.2The Church, now spread through the world and sheltering even rulers, is the tree grown from the despised root of Christ’s passion.
44.3Outwardly Christ had no comeliness and was taken for a carpenter’s son and a demoniac; inwardly he is the Word, God in the form of God.
44.4The unsightly “man under the blow” bore the weakness even of those who crucified him, praying for their pardon; the more unsightly he appears, the dearer he is to his bride, the Church.
44.5Isaiah 53 reads like the Gospel; as the Jews fail to see Christ in it, so the heretics fail to see the Church, the bride, in the prophecies about her.
44.6Isaiah foretells Christ’s silent suffering, his eternal and his virginal generation, his resurrection, and his death for his people’s sins, as Christ himself said the Scriptures foretold.
44.7The “rich” in Isaiah is Joseph of Arimathea, the “wicked” the guards who sold a lie about the resurrection; Augustine closes by urging thanks for Christ’s mercy and fear of his coming judgment.
45.1By God’s providence the reading from Isaiah ended with a promise and the reading from Paul began with “having these promises, let us cleanse ourselves,” so that the two readings form one.
45.2The promised land and mountain must not be understood as earthly estates, for restraining desire now in hope of greater earthly gain is still avarice, like children who serve rich parents for their inheritance; true piety serves for nothing, like Job.
45.3Obscure passages of Scripture must be read by clear ones; the promised land is the land of the living, sown here by alms to the poor, whose bread is Christ.
45.5The holy mountain is Christ with his body the Church, one man, head and members; the head rose first, as women first announced, so that the members might hope to rise and dwell on the mountain forever.
45.6Daniel’s stone cut from a mountain without hands, which grew into a mountain filling the earth, is Christ, born of the Jews and of a virgin, and the Church spread through the world.
45.7The mountain is not a place to climb for prayer but Christ and the Church spread through the whole world, against the Donatists, who are only a part.
45.8Defilement of the spirit is lust, defilement of the flesh is the act of adultery; perfect sanctification cleanses both, not only the deed out of fear of men.
45.9Only the fear of God perfects sanctification: fear of men may restrain the body from adultery, but the fear of God cleanses the heart, and a clean heart keeps the body clean.
45.10Our flesh, though it is grass, will be changed into gold, made like the angels; then there will be no more labor or groaning, only praise, which we now possess in hope.
46.1Introducing Ezekiel 34, Augustine distinguishes his being a Christian, for his own sake, from his being a bishop, for the people’s sake, and warns that shepherds who seek their own advantage feed themselves, not the sheep.
46.3Ezekiel lists what bad shepherds love, the milk and wool, and what they neglect; the milk is the support that the people give their clergy.
46.4Paul had the right to be supported by the flock but worked with his own hands; when he did accept gifts, he rejoiced not in his own relief but in the givers’ fruitfulness.
46.5Clergy may live from the people’s support, as a lamp needs oil, but must give the light of the Gospel; the Gospel is not for sale, and their reward comes from God, not the people.
46.6The wool is the honor the people give their clergy, which covers the weakness of men who are mortal like everyone else.
46.7Though the Galatians honored Paul as an angel, he did not spare their faults for fear of losing that honor, but rebuked them, seeking Christ’s interests, not his own.
46.8A bad shepherd might win crowds by promising that God forgives everything and allowing the shows and drunken feasts, even in church; but this would be feeding himself, not the sheep.
46.9Bad shepherds kill even the strong sheep by their bad example; even if a sheep does not follow them, they are guilty of its death, as a man who lusts after a chaste woman is an adulterer.
46.10The weak are strengthened by being warned that temptations will come, not by promises of worldly prosperity; their model is Christ’s sufferings.
46.11Bad shepherds promise worldly happiness and so build on sand; God scourges every son he receives, as he scourged his sinless Son; the weak must be told to expect trials, and the frightened that God will not let them be tempted beyond their strength.
46.13The weak are those who do good but cannot bear suffering; the sick are those held back from doing good by worldly desire, like the paralytic let down through the roof, whom the shepherd must bring to Christ by opening the hidden sense of Scripture.
46.14Bad shepherds do not call back the straying; Augustine, against Donatists who say “Why seek us?”, declares that he will be importunate in seeking them, since Christ, not Donatus, will judge.
46.15Neglecting the straying endangers the strong too, for if the shepherds keep silent, the faithful will conclude that it makes no difference to join the Donatists.
46.16Without a true shepherd the sheep stray onto the “mountains” of proud heresiarchs like Donatus and Parmenian, where they may find Scriptures and sacraments but lose unity; even the good mountains, the apostles and Scripture’s authors, point beyond themselves to the Lord.
46.17Heresies are scattered in different lands, all born of pride, while the one Catholic Church, born of love and spread everywhere like a vine, seeks the straying of every sect and can graft back the cut-off branches.
46.19God swears by his life that, though bad shepherds are dead to their office, the sheep are safe; for straying sheep there is no shepherd, as there is no light for the blind.
46.20God will require the sheep from bad shepherds; like Ezekiel’s watchman, the bishop who fails to warn is guilty of the sinner’s death, while the people must still heed the Shepherd’s words in Scripture.
46.21God takes his sheep from bad shepherds by bidding them do what the shepherds say, not what they do; sheep who follow bad leaders perish with them, and heretical bishops who drive sheep into error will answer for it.
46.22A bad shepherd still preaches God’s word, which is like a grape from the vine hanging in a thorn hedge: the faithful may pick it carefully without imitating the thorns.
46.23God says he himself will feed the sheep he rescues from bad shepherds, as Christ, the true Joseph sold by his own and now honored among the Gentiles, seeks his sheep through the fog of this world’s error.
46.24The mountains of Israel where God feeds his sheep are the authors of Scripture; from them flowed the streams of the Gospel into all the world, and in them the sheep find safe pasture and rest.
46.25Even the good mountains, the authors of Scripture, are not our hope; God himself says, “I will feed my sheep.”
46.26God promises to do himself all that the bad shepherds neglected, seeking, healing, and guarding his sheep, so that they need not fear.
46.27Only God feeds “with judgment,” since human judgments about others are uncertain; he gives each his due.
46.28The partridge of Jeremiah, which gathers chicks it did not hatch, is the devil, who gathers into any error whatever, idolatry, Judaism, or heresy; once wise in cunning, he is a fool at the end when the baptized renounce him.
46.29The heretic is like the contentious partridge, caught by its love of fighting: the Donatists, who once accused “traditors” and appealed to the emperor, now say they do not want to fight.
46.30God says “I will feed,” not because good shepherds are lacking, but because all good shepherds are one in Christ, as Peter, entrusted with the sheep after confessing his love, represented the unity of the Church.
46.31The Donatists show they lack the Shepherd’s voice by turning away Catholic Christians from their churches, as happened to some of Augustine’s people the day before, while Catholics welcome Donatists who come to listen.
46.32The Donatists cannot show from Scripture that the Church is the party of Donatus, while the Shepherd’s voice proclaims a Church spread to all nations.
46.33Accusations against particular bishops as “traditors” prove nothing; Scripture, from Genesis to the Psalms, everywhere speaks of the Church spread through the world and nowhere of the party of Donatus or of the Church perishing.
46.34Christ’s word that many will come from East and West shows the Church in every land, so no Donatist can plead ignorance at the judgment.
46.35The Donatists cite Song 1:7, “where you lie down at noon,” taking “noon” (the South) as Africa; Augustine replies that obscure riddles must be read in the light of plain texts about the worldwide Church.
46.36The Donatists misdivide Song 1:7–8: “at noon” belongs to the bride’s question, and the bridegroom’s answer, “Unless you know yourself, go out and feed your kids,” warns against the heretics, former table-companions who set up altar against altar.
46.37Even granting that the “South” is Africa, the verse fits a Catholic from overseas asking where Christ’s true flock is in divided Africa; the reply “know yourself” means know the Church in the whole world, and those who “go out” feed goats, not sheep.
46.38“Noon” can be read in many senses, but even taken as Africa it does not favor the Donatists; nor does Habakkuk’s “God will come from Africus,” since Christ came from Jerusalem and filled the world with the Gospel.
46.39The Donatist schism came from bare, treeless Numidia, through Secundus of Tigisis and Lucilla’s patronage, so it cannot be the “shady mountain” of Habakkuk.
46.40Habakkuk’s “from Africus” means from Jerusalem, which Joshua places to the south, and the “shady mountain” is the Mount of Olives, from which Christ ascended and sent the Gospel to all nations.
46.41The Donatists’ appeal to Simon of Cyrene as an “African” fails, since Cyrene lies in the East and has no Donatists; and if being compelled to carry the cross pleases them, the Catholic emperors rightly compel them to unity.
47.1Augustine opens from the psalm just sung: we are God’s sheep, made by him, and so we weep before him in this life, hoping for the land of the living.
47.2Augustine says that he, as a shepherd and also one of the sheep, must hear with trembling both what God says to shepherds and what he says to the sheep.
47.3To be God’s flock is a great happiness, for its shepherd never sleeps and also made the sheep he feeds.
47.4God speaks now in his commands and is silent in judgment; unlike a human judge who writes his sentence in secret, he has told us beforehand what his final sentence will be.
47.5God’s silence is his patience, meant to lead us to repentance; those who sin unpunished and think God is like them will hear his rebuke.
47.6The he-goats are mixed with the sheep and the weeds with the wheat until the judgment; the servants are not to separate them before the harvest, though discipline must still be exercised.
47.7Because God himself judges and cannot be deceived, the good may long for his judgment; the Lord’s Prayer is the medicine for sin, if we forgive others.
47.8Confess today and clean your heart, so that God may come into it, while he still warns instead of judging.
47.9The he-goats who trample the pasture and muddy the water are those who learn Scripture calmly but teach it angrily, so that others understand less.
47.10Rebuke of dullness is right when done in love; but teachers who keep knowledge from others out of envy trample the pasture and muddy the spring.
47.11A good conscience is not enough if careless conduct leads a weak brother, who cannot see into one’s conscience, to do wrong.
47.12Paul’s refusal to please men and his command to please all in all things agree: we seek not our own glory but others’ salvation, while relying on our conscience against slanderers.
47.13Christ’s commands to let good works shine and not to do righteousness before men agree: the works are seen so that God, not we, may be glorified.
47.14We must keep both a good conscience and good conduct, so that weak brothers are not misled.
47.15After naming the he-goats once, God speaks of all as sheep, since only he, by foreknowledge and predestination, knows who belongs to which.
47.16Those who scattered the flock with their horns are the Donatists, who called themselves righteous and separated before the harvest, which belongs to the angels.
47.17The Donatist who calls himself righteous is the “bad son” of Proverbs who cannot wash away his going out from the Church spread through the whole world; let him return and bear fruit in Catholic peace.
47.18A seeker who compares the Donatists, full of the sinners they claim to have fled, with God’s word about a Church in the whole world chooses the Catholic Church.
47.19God will save his sheep; the Church is to be sought from Christ’s own word, which sets him above the heavens and his glory, the Church, over all the earth.
47.20The “one shepherd, my servant David” is Christ, born of David’s line: one with the Father in the form of God, raised up as servant in the form of a servant, so that both “I will feed” and “He will feed” are true.
47.21“He will be their shepherd, and I will be their God” shows both the unity of the Godhead and the distinction of persons; Christ, God and man, is the prince in our midst and the mediator.
47.22Christ’s testament of peace cannot be divided; the Donatists, who grieve that imperial law voids their wills, should let God’s testament stand in their hearts and share the inheritance of peace.
47.23The evil beasts are the enemies of Scripture; the desert where the sheep dwell in hope is the good conscience, refreshed by streams of remembered Scripture.
47.24The hill is Christ, around whom the sheep live, and the rain he sends is the blessing of God’s word, not the rain of temptation.
47.25The trees in the plain are ordinary married believers, who bear their own fruit in works of mercy when the rain of God’s word falls on them.
47.26The forks of the yoke are the heretics’ demand to be heard instead of Christ; God breaks them, and his sheep should listen to the shepherd, not to the wolf.
47.27The sheep who hear the shepherd will not be devoured by the heretics who twist Scripture; God plants peace in a Church spread through the world, while the Donatists starve beside the food of Scripture.
47.29As Isaiah named Israel as the vineyard, Ezekiel names the sheep as men; but they are those whose hope and God is the Lord.
47.30God belongs whole to each who says “My God,” as a word or the light belongs whole to all; rich and poor reach him alike by loving him, and he possesses us as his field while we possess him as our God.
48.1Augustine begins by asking God, in whose hand are the preacher and his words, to do in the hearers’ hearts what the preacher can only begin in their ears.
48.2Micah teaches that God wants not sacrifices but ourselves: first judgment on ourselves, praising God for our good and blaming ourselves for our evil, then justice toward our neighbor.
48.3The psalmist of Psalm 73 almost fell when he saw the wicked prosper and the righteous afflicted, and began to think God did not care about human affairs.
48.5The psalmist was held back from teaching that God does not govern human affairs by the witness of the patriarchs and prophets, and set himself to understand how God’s justice allows the wicked to prosper.
48.7Faith enters God’s sanctuary and trusts that God is not unjust; at the end the good and the wicked will be separated, and what is hidden now will be made plain.
48.8Even now it goes badly with the wicked, because they suffer their own evil selves; riches are goods to do good with, but only judgment and justice make a person good.
49.1Augustine keeps his promise to speak about justice from Micah 6:8, and connects it with the Gospel of the laborers in the vineyard, whose work is justice.
49.2The work of the vineyard is justice, and justice is believing in Christ, for “the just lives by faith”; Augustine, a fellow laborer, cannot see hearts, but God who hired us can.
49.3Believers are day compared with unbelievers but still night compared with the day of resurrection; until then they walk by the lamp of Scripture and must not judge one another’s hearts.
49.4Since hearts are hidden until the Lord comes, we must not judge before the time; friends and enemies are easily mistaken, and the hidden heart is the field we were hired to cultivate.
49.5We judge ourselves by Scripture as by an honest mirror, and then judge our neighbor with love, hating the vice but loving the man, and leaving to God what we cannot see.
49.6When two of one’s friends fall out, one should remain the friend of both, betray neither, and gently show the angry friend that his real enemy is his own hatred.
49.7Anger nursed becomes hatred, as a speck becomes a beam; whoever hates his brother is a murderer, and justice means hating vices while loving people.
49.8Before the faithful pray “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive,” they must forgive from the heart; the hater should look on Christ on the cross, who prayed for his executioners.
49.10If imitating Christ seems too much, look at Stephen, a man like us, who spoke sharply to his hearers and yet loved them when they stoned him.
49.11Stephen prayed standing for himself but knelt to pray for those who stoned him, because their sin was hard to forgive; this is the great work of the vineyard, to root out hatred of enemies.
50.1The Manichees set Haggai’s “Mine is the gold and mine is the silver” against the Gospel’s “mammon of iniquity” and Paul’s warning against avarice, to make the two Testaments contradict each other.
50.2God says the gold and silver are his so that the rich will neither refuse to give to the poor nor grow proud when they give.
50.3God administers gold and silver as a just judge: they give the good occasions of kindness and torment the bad with fear of loss.
50.4Something truly belongs to the one who uses it well; all the more do gold and silver belong to God, who created them and justly distributes them.
50.5Gold is a lesser good given to good and bad alike; it is called “mammon of iniquity” because only iniquity calls it riches, while true riches adorn the inner man and end all want.
50.7Gold in a merciful man’s hands does great good; blaming gold for greed is like blaming the sun, which the Manichees worship, for quarrels over light.
50.8The Lord condemns avarice but teaches the right use of earthly wealth: use the “mammon of iniquity” to make friends, so as to receive the true riches that are one’s own.
50.9In context Haggai speaks not of earthly metal but of the gold and silver of which Paul speaks, the treasure of the Church foretold by the prophet.
50.10Haggai’s prophecy points to Christ’s comings and to the Church; the gold and silver are wisdom and God’s word, which belong to the Lord, so that no one in the Church may boast of them as his own.
50.12The peace promised “in this place” is the peace of the resurrected body, when flesh and spirit no longer war against each other.
50.13The old Scriptures everywhere condemn greed for gold; the Manichees deceive the unskilled by setting excerpts against each other, a method that could make any book seem to contradict itself.
51.1Augustine pays the debt deferred from Christmas morning, speaking to those who chose church over the games, and urges prayer for those who went to the amphitheatre.
51.2Christ himself was made a spectacle on the cross, as his martyrs were; those who chose church over the amphitheatre chose a better spectacle and conquered the devil.
51.3Christ was born of a woman, though he could have become man otherwise, so that neither sex should despair: through a woman came death, through a woman the Savior, and women first announced the resurrection.
51.4Christ’s birth of a woman is known from the Gospel preached to the whole world; the Church, once only Abraham, now holds every kind of authority, gathered by humble fishermen.
51.5When critics claim the Gospels contradict each other on Christ’s birth, believers hold firmly to the faith and honor what is hidden, for the veils are lifted for those who honor them.
51.6Augustine recalls how as a youth he came to Scripture with pride instead of reverence and fell, until the Lord put him back in the nest of faith.
51.7Augustine reads Matthew’s genealogy, which shows how Christ is son of David and son of Abraham.
51.8The critics’ first objection concerns Matthew’s three sets of fourteen generations; Augustine first restates the Church’s faith that Christ was born of the Father eternally and of the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary.
51.9Joseph, thinking Mary an adulteress, showed true justice: he would neither keep her out of carnal love nor punish or expose her, but planned to put her away quietly.
51.10The angel told Joseph that Mary’s child was of the Holy Spirit and was to be called Jesus, that is, Savior.
51.11Heretics, though they mean harm, are useful: by stirring up questions, as Judas served the passion, they drive the faithful to search out the mysteries of Scripture.
51.12The critics object that Matthew’s three sets of fourteen generations add up to only forty-one names; Augustine shows that Jechoniah ends the second set and also begins the third.
51.13Jechoniah is counted twice, like a boundary stone between two fields; he lost his throne through no fault of his own when the people, wicked and holy alike, were deported to Babylon.
51.14Jechoniah’s exile prefigures Christ, rejected by his own people, whose Gospel passed to the Gentiles through Jewish apostles; as Jeremiah told the exiles to pray for Babylon, the Church prayed for kings, who became Christian.
51.15Jechoniah, at the turning point of the exile, is like a cornerstone where two walls meet, and so is counted twice, prefiguring Christ the cornerstone between Jews and Gentiles.
51.16Joseph was truly Mary’s husband, as the angel says, and was given a father’s authority to name the child, though Jesus was not born of his seed; Mary herself calls him Christ’s father.
51.17When the twelve-year-old Jesus answered that he must be in his Father’s house, he did not deny Joseph as father but affirmed that he is also the eternal Son of God.
51.18Mary, though mother of the Son of the Most High, humbly named Joseph first, respecting the order of marriage; she is called “woman” by Hebrew usage, while remaining a virgin before, in, and after giving birth.
51.19Jesus was subject to both Mary and Joseph as his parents, an example of obedience for children.
51.20Christ is son of David according to the flesh and Lord of David as God, as his question about Psalm 110 showed; Mary and Joseph were his parents in time, God his Father eternally.
51.21Joseph was truly a father, because marriage is made by married love, not by intercourse; couples who abstain by mutual consent are still truly married.
51.22The patriarchs, even with several wives, sought intercourse only for children, as the marriage contract states; spouses who cannot keep to this should at least keep to each other, for intercourse beyond the need of procreation is a pardonable sin, conceded by Paul.
51.23Eating and marriage sustain the human race; the wise come down to both out of duty, as Elijah ate to live, while the lustful fall into them; a man who marries only for children would welcome children without intercourse.
51.25The patriarchs were allowed several wives only to multiply offspring; Christians should love their wives chastely and seek intercourse only for children, for the need of it is a punishment inherited from Adam.
51.26Israel had a duty to multiply until Christ; with Mary the dignity of virginity began; Joseph was all the more truly a father, as adoption and lawful marriage show that a father’s bond is not made by the flesh.
51.27Because a man can have both a natural and an adoptive father, Joseph could have two fathers, Jacob in Matthew and Heli in Luke, and so two different lines of ancestors.
51.28Adoption is found in Scripture: Sarah, Rachel, and Leah adopted their slave women’s sons, Pharaoh’s daughter adopted Moses, Jacob adopted Joseph’s sons, and Paul speaks of our adoption by grace.
51.29Levirate marriage was another way to have two fathers; Matthew says “begot” of Joseph’s natural father, while Luke says only “son of Heli,” fitting adoption or levirate descent.
51.30The generations run through Joseph, chastely husband and father, whom the Spirit gave a son; Matthew descends from Abraham to show Christ coming down to bear our sins, Luke ascends from his baptism to God to show sins cleansed.
51.31Matthew’s genealogy centers on forty, the number of our pilgrim life of fasting and continence; the one extra generation either does not matter or marks Christ, who alone is both man and God.
51.33Luke’s seventy-seven generations, counted from Christ’s baptism up to God, signify the forgiveness of all sins in baptism, consecrated by the appearing of the Trinity at the Jordan.
51.34Seventy-seven is eleven, the number of transgression beyond the ten of justice, multiplied by seven, the number of the creature, soul and body; so it signifies all sins.
51.35Luke’s seventy-seven generations show reconciliation with God through the forgiveness of all sins, as Christ told Peter to forgive seventy-seven times; Scripture not yet understood should be honored, and what is understood held with love.
52.1At Christ’s baptism the Trinity is shown distinctly: the Father in the voice, the Son in the man, the Holy Spirit in the dove.
52.2Though Father, Son, and Spirit seem separated at the baptism, the Catholic faith holds them to be one inseparable God, three distinct persons.
52.3Asking for prayer in so hard a question, Augustine sets out the problem whether the Father does anything the Son does not, and answers first that the Father does nothing without the Son, through whom all things were made.
52.5The Father not only created all things through the Son but also governs them through him, so neither acts without the other.
52.6If Father and Son act inseparably, must we say the Father was born and suffered? No: the Creed says the Son, not the Father, was born and suffered, and the Church excluded the Patripassians who taught otherwise.
52.7The objection is pressed: either the Son does something without the Father, or the Father was born and suffered; Augustine refuses both.
52.8Augustine’s solution: the birth, passion, and resurrection belong to the Son alone, but the Father and the Son together brought them about; he will prove it from Scripture.
52.9Paul shows that the Father brought about the Son’s birth: God sent his Son, born of a woman.
52.10Scripture calls Christ born both of a virgin and of a woman, since in Hebrew usage “woman” means any female.
52.11The Son’s birth was also brought about by the Son himself, since he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.
52.12Both the Father, who handed over his Son, and the Son, who handed himself over, brought about the passion; Judas contributed only his sin.
52.13The Father raised the Son, and the Son raised himself, for he had power to lay down his life and to take it up again.
52.14Summary: the birth, passion, and resurrection belong to the Son alone, but the Father and the Son brought them about together; the persons are distinct and their working inseparable.
52.15God is not in space but wholly present everywhere; to approach the mystery, Augustine looks in creation for three things presented separately that work inseparably.
52.16Like the psalmist who in ecstasy glimpsed God’s light and fell back, we cannot comprehend God: whatever is comprehended is not God.
52.17Since man alone was made in God’s image, the likeness of the Trinity should be sought in ourselves, though our image differs greatly from the Son, who is the Father’s perfect image.
52.18The likeness must be sought in the inner man who hears and sees through the body; and man is the image of the whole Trinity, as “Let us make man in our image” shows.
52.19In the human soul memory, understanding, and will can be counted as three but not separated, a distant likeness of the Trinity.
52.20Even to say the one word “memory” requires memory, understanding, and will working together, though the word names only memory.
52.21As memory, understanding, and will together produce each name that belongs to one of them, so the Trinity together made Christ’s flesh, the dove, and the voice, each belonging to one person.
52.22Augustine declines to say which of the three faculties corresponds to which divine person, leaving it to quiet reflection.
52.23The analogy shows how the three persons can be presented separately through creatures yet work inseparably; Augustine does not equate the faculties with the persons, and urges faith and prayer for further understanding.
53.1On a virgin martyr’s feast Augustine turns to the beatitudes: everyone wants happiness, but must do now the work that earns it; to be poor in spirit is to be humble.
53.2The meek, who do not resist God but are displeased with themselves, will truly possess the earth by clinging to its Maker.
53.3Earthly comforts bring new fears; true comfort will be given to those who now mourn their exile, a comfort that cannot be lost.
53.4Bodily food relieves hunger only for a time; those who hunger for justice will be filled by Christ, the bread from heaven and fountain of life.
53.5The merciful receive mercy: rich in temporal goods but beggars before God, we will be treated by God as we treat the poor.
53.6Only the clean of heart are promised the vision of God, the end that perfects all our desire; the heart’s eyes, enlightened now by faith, will then see God face to face.
53.7God has no bodily face, hands, or feet; these words mean his knowledge, power, and presence; God is to be sought with the heart, which is his temple and seat.
53.8Each beatitude’s reward fits its precept: the humble get a kingdom, the meek the land, mourners comfort, the hungry fullness, the merciful mercy, the clean of heart the sight of God.
53.9All the blessed are the same people and all will see God, but the vision belongs to the clean heart, as seeing belongs to the eyes among the body’s members.
53.10Faith cleans the heart to see God; but bare belief is not enough, for, as James says, the demons believe and tremble.
53.11Our faith differs from the demons’ faith because it works through love and hopes for God’s promises; faith, hope, and love together cleanse the heart.
53.12Faith now lets us see as in a mirror; in thinking of God we must reject every bodily image, for any bounded shape is not God.
53.13Augustine sets two Isaiah texts side by side: if heaven is God’s throne and he also measures heaven with his palm, the bodily picture of God collapses.
53.14God cannot both sit on heaven and measure it with his palm if he has a body; “heaven” means the saints, whose hearts are lifted up and who are God’s seat.
53.15The breadth, length, height, and depth of Ephesians are good works, perseverance, hope of heavenly reward, and the hidden grace of God.
53.16The four dimensions fit Christ’s cross: crossbeam, upright, top, and buried foot signify good works, perseverance, hope, and hidden grace; through these we come to know Christ’s love and be filled with God.
54.1Christ’s two commands, to let our light shine before men and not to do our justice before men, seem to contradict each other and trouble the weak.
54.2Paul fulfilled both commands: he commended himself before men and also sought glory only in his own conscience before God.
54.3The difference lies in intention: one who wants his own glory breaks both commands, while one who lets his works be seen so that God is glorified keeps both.
54.4Those who let their works be seen while counting their justice as God’s gift keep both commands; Paul pleased people not for himself but for their salvation.
55.1Christ’s warning that whoever calls his brother a fool is liable to hell frightens believers, especially since, as James says, no man can tame the tongue.
55.2Since no man can tame his own tongue, we must take refuge in God to tame us, as a man is needed to tame beasts.
55.3If man, made in God’s image, can tame lions by reason, God can surely tame his own image, if we give ourselves to him.
55.4We should bear God’s taming, even his whip, for unlike a man with his horse he rewards the tamed with himself as their inheritance, resurrection, and life with the angels.
55.5Earthly fathers discipline their sons for money that will pass away; God disciplines us so that we may inherit him, and it is better to be whipped and received than spared and abandoned.
55.6God is our refuge in birth and rebirth, gently encouraging and firmly correcting us on the way.
56.1Augustine explains to the candidates for baptism why they received the Creed before the Lord’s Prayer: one must believe before one can call on God.
56.2In prayer one must ask from the right one, God, and ask for the right things, never for harm to enemies, for such prayer becomes sin.
56.3The curses in the Psalms are prophecies, not wishes; we must pray for our enemies, as the Church prayed for the persecutor Saul until he became Paul.
56.4Prayer needs devotion, not many words; God knows our needs, but wants us to pray so that we may desire his gifts, and the Lord’s Prayer is the pattern of our desires.
56.5The candidates, already conceived in the Church’s womb, will be born of God the Father in baptism; asking that God’s name be hallowed means asking that it be held holy in us.
56.6Praying “Your kingdom come” is asking that we may live so as to be found in God’s coming kingdom on the right hand.
56.7God’s almighty will is done in everyone, in reward or condemnation; we pray that it may also be done by us, which he himself works in us.
56.8“As in heaven, so on earth” can mean the mind and the flesh, the spiritual and the carnal in the Church, or the Church and its enemies, for whom we pray.
56.9From the fourth petition on we plainly pray for ourselves; asking for daily bread makes everyone, even the rich, God’s beggar.
56.10Bodily bread God gives to good and bad alike; the children’s daily bread is the word of God, and also the eucharist the baptized receive, from whose altar we pray not to be separated.
56.11Even the baptized, bishops included, incur daily sins; the Lord’s Prayer and almsgiving are like pumping the bilge, so that small sins do not sink the ship.
56.12Besides grave sins that exclude from the altar, countless small sins of eye, ear, tongue, and thought accumulate like sand, so the daily cleansing of the Lord’s Prayer is needed by all.
56.13The petition is a pact with God; the candidates must forgive everyone from the heart before baptism, in which all their sins, original and personal, will be forgiven.
56.14We must love our enemies, who share our nature and are our brothers; pray, as the Church prayed for Saul, against their malice but for themselves, so that an enemy becomes a friend.
56.15Few love their enemies, yet all who receive the eucharist pray “as we forgive”; Augustine cannot tell them not to pray, so they must both say it and do it.
56.16At the very least, forgive an enemy who asks pardon; Christ on the cross and Stephen under the stones forgave even those who did not ask.
56.17Forgiving means letting go of hatred, not of discipline; whoever refuses pardon to one who asks harms himself, like the unforgiving servant of the Gospel.
56.18The petition for forgiveness covers past sins, which cannot be undone; the petitions against temptation and evil guard against future ones.
56.19The first three petitions concern eternal life; the last four the needs of this life, which will cease when we are equal to the angels.
57.1The candidates first learned the Creed, what to believe; now they learn the Prayer, how to call on him in whom they believe.
57.2The only Son of God willed to have countless brothers, so that we too call his Father “our Father”; with God as Father and the Church as Mother we are born to eternal life.
57.3If we pray so earnestly for rain to put off death a little, how much more should we pray to reach the life where there is no death.
57.4“Hallowed be your name” asks that God’s ever-holy name may make us holy.
57.5God’s kingdom has no beginning or end; in praying “Your kingdom come” we ask to be among his kingdom, the redeemed, when he comes to raise the dead and set the blessed on his right.
57.6“Your will be done” has many senses: angels and us, saints and sinners, Church and enemies, spirit and flesh; the first three petitions concern eternity. Daily bread is bodily food, and also the eucharist, the word preached, the readings, and the hymns, needed for this pilgrimage.
57.8Baptism blots out all sins, yet the Prayer teaches that sins follow in life; the candidates must forgive all their enemies, as God, who owes nothing, forgives them.
57.9God tempts no one to evil, though he tests; but by hidden judgment he abandons some to the tempter; after baptism concupiscence remains, and we must fight it within, asking God not to abandon us.
57.10“Lead us not into temptation” and “deliver us from evil,” joined by “but,” form one petition.
57.11Other sins can be healed through the petition for forgiveness; but the desire for revenge is a dreadful temptation, because it destroys the very means of being forgiven.
57.12Of all the petitions Christ singled out only the one about forgiving others for comment, because if it is lost there is no remedy for our many daily faults.
57.13Pray for victory over your own anger, which God wants more than you want rain; seek first his kingdom, and trust the God who loves us so much that he gave his Son for creatures of dust.
58.1Having recited the Creed, the candidates receive the Lord’s Prayer, dictated by Christ, their advocate and judge; they will recite it in eight days and the Creed again on the Saturday of their baptism.
58.2Emperor and beggar, slave and master all say “Our Father,” and so are brothers; masters should not disdain slaves whom Christ calls brothers.
58.3God’s name is hallowed when we are made holy; praying for his kingdom to come is asking to be made good, so that it comes to us and not only to others.
58.4“Your will be done” asks that we obey as the angels do, that our flesh agree with our spirit, and that unbelievers, the earth, become heaven like the Church.
58.5Daily bread means all bodily necessities, the eucharist received by the faithful, from whose altar we pray not to be separated, and the word of God broken daily.
58.6No one lives without sin; even the apostles, the rams of the flock, were taught to ask forgiveness; sins are forgiven once in baptism and daily through the Lord’s Prayer.
58.7The petition is a binding pact; candidates and faithful alike must forgive from the heart in these holy days, lest Christ, the Sun of justice, set on their anger.
58.8Anger is the lust for revenge; nursed, it becomes hatred, the beam in the eye, and whoever hates is a murderer; we must cleanse our hearts and forgive, as God, whom we daily offend, forgives us.
58.9Temptation conceives sin only by our consent; we must refuse concupiscence its embrace, for we leave behind what we sin for and carry the sin itself into death.
58.10Small daily sins must be pumped out like bilge water by prayer with two wings, forgiving and giving; deliverance from evil comes by turning from evil and doing good.
58.12The first three petitions concern eternity, the last four this life; the Lord’s Prayer is said daily at the altar, so the newly baptized will learn it by hearing it.
58.13At the Easter Vigil the candidates will recite the Creed; they should say it daily as a mirror of their faith and a garment for the soul, until faith gives way to the vision of God.
59.1After the Creed, short in words and great in meaning, the candidates receive the Lord’s Prayer, given by Christ to the apostles and handed on to us.
59.2Under one heavenly Father all Christians, master and slave, rich and poor, are brothers, heirs of a Father who does not die but remains for us to come to him.
59.3Asking that God’s ever-holy name be hallowed means asking to be made holy by it, as in baptism, and to remain so.
59.4We pray for the kingdom to come so that we may be among the saints to whom it comes.
59.5“Your will be done” asks that we obey God in love as the angels do, and that our flesh agree with our soul in keeping his commands.
59.6Daily bread is bodily food, the eucharist, and the word preached, all needed only in this life; daily sins are washed away by the Lord’s Prayer, provided we forgive those who ask our pardon.
59.8Of the seven petitions, three concern eternal life and four the present life, where temptation and evil require us to pray.
60.1The world in its troubles should take counsel from Christ; present evils pass, but we should take more care to escape the evils that last for ever.
60.2Man, made in God’s image, is troubled in vain, heaping up treasure without knowing for whom; life is toil, and the miser’s soul burns with anxiety.
60.3Even if wealth flows in, the miser is troubled in vain, for he will die, and his sons too will die or squander it or repeat his vanity.
60.4The hoard may fall to thieves or invaders, as many have recently suffered; since the miser can only say “perhaps,” he does not know for whom he gathers, and is troubled in vain.
60.5Augustine turns for counsel to Christ, the Power and Wisdom of God, whose words in the Gospel just read give the answer.
60.6Christ’s counsel is to store treasure in heaven, for where our treasure is, there our heart is; but greed keeps treasure and heart in the earth.
60.7As the world is falling, God counsels us to move our treasure to heaven by giving to the poor, as a friend would counsel moving grain from damp ground to higher ground.
60.8Those who lost their wealth to invaders regret not having sent it ahead; the poor are our porters, carrying what we give to heaven, for Christ receives it.
60.9At the judgment Christ names only works of mercy as the reason for reward or punishment, passing over all other virtues and crimes.
60.10Christ names alms alone at the judgment because alms redeem sins: the saved are not sinless but have redeemed their sins by mercy, while the condemned failed to.
60.11God, who needs nothing, chose to hunger in his poor, so that feeding the poor is feeding Christ, and despising them is despising him.
60.12Repentance without works of mercy is barren; John the Baptist’s “fruits worthy of repentance” are sharing clothing and food, and only one who forgives and gives will be heard.
61.1Christ urges prayer: we are evil, yet we have a good Father who gives good things to those who ask.
61.2Only God, always good, makes evil men good; earthly goods like money cannot make us good, but we can do good with them, giving to the poor and so increasing justice.
61.4Giving money to gain justice is good trading; since justice comes only from God, become his beggar, for he who urges us to ask will not refuse.
61.5The unjust judge and the friend at midnight show by contrast how much more God, who urges us to pray, will give; he delays to enlarge our desire; we ask of him justice, and must hunger for it to be filled.
61.6Since we are God’s beggars, we must recognize our own beggars, who are men, mortal, frail, and wretched like us, as we all were at birth.
61.9Rich and poor are equal at birth and in death; newborns and old bones cannot be told apart, for we bring nothing in and take nothing away.
61.10Scripture condemns not riches but the greed to become rich; the rich are charged above all not to be proud, for pride is the worm of riches.
61.11Paul charges the rich not to be proud or trust uncertain riches, but to be rich in good works and share, storing up a foundation for the true life; giving is not loss but moving one’s goods.
61.12Rich and poor need only food and covering; the rich may keep their habitual luxuries, but should give their superfluities to the poor, their companions on the same road.
61.13Augustine preached this because the poor begged him to plead for them; he is their ambassador, and the congregation’s applause is only leaves, while fruit is what is sought.
62.1The centurion, calling himself unworthy to receive Christ under his roof, showed himself worthy to receive him in his heart, unlike Simon the Pharisee.
62.2Christ turned away a proud volunteer but called a reluctant man away from burying his father, for unbelievers are the dead who bury the dead; God is the soul’s life as the soul is the body’s.
62.3Christ entered the Pharisee’s house but not his heart, the centurion’s heart but not his house, and Zacchaeus’s both; he praised the Gentile centurion’s humble faith above any in Israel.
62.4The centurion, a Gentile, prefigures the nations who believe in Christ without seeing him; the woman who touched his fringe shows that the Church, his body, is pressed by many but touched in faith by few.
62.6Christ’s prophecy that many will come from east and west while the sons of the kingdom are cast out is now fulfilled, as the nations are called to the heavenly banquet.
62.7Christians called to the heavenly banquet must not recline at feasts in idol temples, for this leads the weak to idolatry; Paul, the least apostle, is the fringe of Christ’s garment that heals those who touch it.
62.8Fear of offending the powerful is no excuse: parents, country, and all superiors must be obeyed only within obedience to God, who is greater; the Church, healed and beautified by Christ’s blood, must forget her former people.
62.9Christians who feast in idol temples become stumbling stones to pagans and wound the weak, sinning against Christ, who is God; at such tables they learn to doubt his divinity.
62.10Excusing attendance at feasts before the Genius of Carthage as “not a god” fails, for its altar shows that pagans treat it as divine, and Paul forbids partnership with demons.
62.11Christians must not press on Christ’s body as pagans do; the best way to win pagans is to abandon their festivals, leaving them ashamed of their small numbers.
62.12A good superior nourishes, a bad one tests; the world is a furnace where chaff burns and gold is refined; Christians must stand firm against threats and be filled from God’s banquet, not the idols’.
62.13Christians obey authorities, but when the emperor commands what God forbids, such as attending in an idol temple, the greater Authority must be obeyed.
62.14A powerful enemy’s scheming is a razor that can shave off only superfluities, wealth and even bodily life, as the martyrs knew, not the riches of the heart.
62.15God, who numbers our hairs, lets enemies harm the faithful only for their testing; the powerful can only take what a thief, a fever, or a poisonous mushroom could take, so we must not cling to life at the cost of our souls.
62.16Like Christ, who suffered before his glory, we must labor for eternal life, which is far more worth labor than money we must lose.
62.17Christians must not destroy pagan idols without lawful authority, as the Circumcellions do, but may and should remove them where an owner, now Christian, gives the property or asks for it; pagans, heretics, and Jews unite in complaint against the Church.
63.1Christ’s sleep in the boat signifies faith asleep in the heart; the boat is the Church and each heart, crossing the world on the wood of the cross.
63.2An insult is the wind and anger the wave; we must wake Christ, who forgave his crucifiers, so that he may calm the storm of revenge in the heart.
63.3In every temptation we should wake Christ, whom wind and sea obey, and obey him ourselves, so as to sail in calm to our homeland.
64.1Christ sent a few sheep among many wolves; when the wolves killed the sheep, the wolves themselves were converted into sheep.
64.2Christ, who promised crowns and helps those who struggle, commanded the shrewdness of serpents and the simplicity of doves, by which death dies in the martyr.
64.3The serpent’s shrewdness is to be imitated in shedding its old skin through a narrow hole, as we put off the old man, and in guarding its head, as we guard Christ, our life.
64.4Doves live in fellowship and quarrel peacefully, as Paul’s discipline corrects a brother without enmity; martyrs’ feasts should be kept soberly, in praise of the God who crowns them.
65.1Christ commands us not to fear those who kill only the body but to fear God; by fearing God the martyrs ceased to fear men.
65.2A persecutor is a mortal man threatening a mortal man, and can touch only the body; the martyr, fearing God, does not fear, for the soul is untouched and the body will rise immortal.
65.4The soul is immortal in its own way, since it gives life to the body and never ceases to live; but only God has true immortality, unchangeableness, and the soul can be killed, as Christ says.
65.5As the body dies when the soul leaves it, the soul dies when God, its life, leaves it; mourners speak in vain to a corpse whose dweller has gone.
65.6A living body may carry a dead soul: the feet that walk to adultery and the tongue that lies show that the soul is dead, because God, its life, has left it.
65.7The death of the soul is to be mourned more than that of the body; the martyr should fear not the sword but his own tongue, lest by denying Christ he kill his soul.
65.8In Gehenna the body suffers everlasting punishment and the soul the absence of God; the soul should fear its own death, and the martyrs, fearing it, won their crowns.
66.1John the Baptist, though greater than any born of women, humbly confessed that Christ was far greater than he.
66.2Christ’s testimony to John is explained in two ways: Christ, less in time, is greater in majesty, or the least of the angels is greater than John.
66.3John did not doubt Christ; he sent his disciples so that they might be confirmed by Christ himself.
66.5Augustine closes by urging his hearers to give generously for the poor.
67.1Christ’s “I confess to you, Father” shows that confession can be praise of God as well as accusation of oneself.
67.2Confessing sin is a sign that the sinner has been raised from death by Christ, as Lazarus was, so self-accusation is praise of God.
67.3The Church’s power to loose is like the disciples’ unbinding of Lazarus after Christ had raised him.
67.4Accusing ourselves and praising God both glorify God and protect us against the invisible enemy, to whom we must give no place.
67.5Our real enemies are the devil and his angels, rulers of the unbelieving world, and they are conquered invisibly by faith.
67.6Safety from the invisible enemies lies in praising the Lord, not oneself.
67.7The incarnation is pure grace, by which the Word made one person with the man he took up; the confessing thief shows the same grace.
67.8The “wise and prudent” are the proud and the “little ones” the humble; we must confess that we are no light to ourselves.
67.9John was not the light but a lamp lit by Christ, the true light; those who confess their darkness are enlightened.
67.10The sermon ends with Augustine’s customary prayer turning to the Lord.
68.1The “wise and prudent” are the philosophers who studied creation but mistook parts of it for God and did not find the Creator.
68.2The astronomers who could predict eclipses are rightly blamed for not seeking the Creator; it is enough to see the world’s beauty and love its Maker.
68.3Some pagan philosophers did come to know the Creator through creation, as Paul acknowledged at Athens.
68.4God made himself known to the pagans through creation so that they would be without excuse, since they did not glorify him as God.
68.5To glorify God is to give him thanks; the philosophers grew vain through pride, like smoke that rises and vanishes.
68.6God hid himself from the proud philosophers and revealed himself to the humble; Peter the fisherman holds what Plato lost.
69.1Christ calls all who labor under the weakness of mortal flesh to come to him for rest.
69.2Christ teaches humility, which is the foundation of the spiritual building: the higher the building, the deeper the foundation.
69.3The summit of the building is the vision of God, who sees everything; those who do evil thinking God does not see them labor in vain.
69.4No one can flee from God, so we must flee to him; Christ, born of a virgin without lust, saw us under the fig tree of Adam’s sin and calls us to humility.
70.1The question: how can Christ’s yoke be easy when those who bear it, like Paul, suffer so much?
70.2The Spirit made Paul’s sufferings light; people of the world endure far worse for passing goods.
70.3Love makes every hardship light, so Christ’s yoke is easy to all who love it.
71.1Augustine introduces the hard question raised by the Gospel reading and shows that the Pharisees’ charge turns against themselves.
71.2Christ’s disciples, who learned no evil arts from him, will judge the Pharisees, for Christ casts out demons by the Spirit of God.
71.3Those who cast out demons do so by grace, not merit: Christ binds the strong man and turns vessels of wrath into vessels of mercy, as he did with Paul.
71.4Heresies and schisms do not divide Christ’s kingdom; the devil’s kingdom is divided, but only those who depart from iniquity belong to Christ.
71.5The hard saying about blasphemy against the Spirit seems to leave no hope for pagans, Jews, and heretics, all of whom in some way speak against the Holy Spirit.
71.6If no one who has spoken against the Spirit could be forgiven, the Church’s preaching of forgiveness to converts would be in vain.
71.7Augustine rejects the view that the unforgivable sin is a grave sin after baptism, since the Church grants repentance for every crime.
71.8Augustine confesses that he has always avoided this hardest of questions, but believes God now wants him to address it.
71.9The Lord did not say that every blasphemy or every word against the Spirit is unforgivable.
71.10The saying is indefinite, neither universal nor particular, so it refers to a certain blasphemy, which the Lord left unstated so that we would seek it.
71.11A parallel: “they would not have sin” means not every sin but a certain sin, so the unforgivable blasphemy is a certain blasphemy.
71.12As “the Spirit” means the Holy Spirit, not every spirit, so the saying does not mean every blasphemy.
71.13Mark and Luke express the same saying in other words; the evangelists differ in wording so that we may seek the speaker’s intention, not the words.
71.14Even Mark’s general “whoever blasphemes” must refer to a particular kind of blasphemy, or converts would have no hope.
71.15As “God tempts no one” refers only to temptation to sin, so the saying refers only to a certain kind of blasphemy.
71.16As “whoever believes and is baptized” does not include those with dead faith like Simon Magus, so the saying on blasphemy means a certain kind.
71.17As eating Christ’s flesh does not make everyone abide in him, but only those who eat in a certain way, so only a certain kind of blasphemy is unforgivable.
71.18Augustine sets out the doctrine of the Trinity: the Holy Spirit is the communion of the Father and the Son, the gift by which we are gathered into one and our sins are covered.
71.19The first gift of the Holy Spirit is the forgiveness of sins, given in baptism and in the Church, which is why John and Jesus began by preaching repentance.
71.20The unforgivable blasphemy against the Spirit is impenitence: the hard heart that refuses the forgiveness given by the Spirit in the Church.
71.21No one can be judged guilty of final impenitence while still alive, so no one is to be despaired of.
71.22A whole lifetime of impenitent contradiction can be called a single “word,” as Scripture often calls many words “the word.”
71.23Every other sin is forgiven where impenitence is absent; the word against the Son is forgivable not because the Spirit is greater, but because repentance obtains forgiveness of it.
71.24The difference is not that the Spirit is greater than the incarnate Son; all three persons forgive sins and work inseparably.
71.26The Spirit acts by his own will, yet the working of the Trinity is inseparable; the Father is the source, from whom the Son is born and the Spirit principally proceeds.
71.27Works proper to one person, such as the voice from heaven, the incarnation, or Pentecost, are still worked by the whole Trinity; so Christ casts out the divided spirit by the Spirit common to Father and Son.
71.28Sins are forgiven only in the Church by the Holy Spirit who unites it; one who remains estranged from the Church speaks against the Spirit.
71.29The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of both the Father and the Son, and so the fellowship of the Church belongs properly to him.
71.30Those separated from the Church do not have the Spirit; quarrelsome Christians within the Church have him, though as carnal little ones they do not yet understand.
71.31Immature believers within the Church have the Spirit without understanding it, as Paul’s words to the Corinthians show.
71.32Those baptized in schism are not rebaptized when they enter the Catholic Church, but only within it do they receive the Spirit’s unity; outside, the sacraments have the form without the power.
71.33The forgiveness of sins is given only in the Church that has the Spirit; it is the proper work of the Spirit, who is the fellowship of the Father and the Son.
71.34In Luke the saying follows the warning about denying Christ, so that Peter, who repented of his denial, shows that only impenitence is unforgivable.
71.35In Mark the saying arises from the charge of an unclean spirit, contrasted with the undivided Holy Spirit, who unites those whose sins he forgives.
71.36In Matthew the saying follows “he who does not gather with me scatters,” showing that the unforgivable blasphemy is impenitent resistance to the unity of the Church.
71.37Every sin is forgiven in the one Church gathered by the Spirit; the only unforgivable sin is impenitent refusal of that forgiveness, which is guarded against by repentance within the Church.
71.38Augustine closes by attributing any failure to his own weakness and any success to God.
72.1A person must first become a good tree before bearing good fruit.
72.3Christ found all people bad trees and made believers good by forgiving their sins, delaying judgment.
72.4The barren fig tree visited for three years stands for the three ages of the human race; repentance, humble and lowly, is the digging and dung that make it fruitful.
72.5Charity is the root of all goods; outward goods like health, wealth, and honor are good only for those who are good.
72.6People want everything they own to be good except their own lives; their very possessions accuse them before God.
72.7The true good is the one you cannot lose against your will; now that Christ has been glorified, people should stop loving vanity.
72.8The world, now knowing God’s will through Christ, is rightly chastised more severely when it does not do it.
73.1The parable of the weeds teaches that bad Christians are mixed with the good in the Church until the harvest at the end of the age.
73.2In Scripture’s figures one thing can have many names: the poor soils of the sower parable are the weeds, bad Christians, who are urged to repent while there is time.
73.4Good Christians must bear with the bad until the angels separate them at the harvest, remembering that there are weeds among the clergy as well as the people.
74.1In Scripture “scribes” are those who professed knowledge of the law, not clerks of courts or cities.
74.2The scribes and Pharisees rebuked by Christ taught the law but did not keep it, and so were not scribes instructed in the kingdom.
74.3Bad teachers can speak good things not from their own hearts but from the chair of Moses, like a herald proclaiming the judge’s sentence.
74.4Grapes can hang on a thorn hedge from a vine rooted elsewhere: so good teaching from bad teachers comes from Moses’ chair.
74.5The old things of Scripture are not discarded but understood through the new when one turns to Christ and the veil is removed.
75.1The account of the disciples’ boat in the storm and Christ walking on the sea has a meaning for us.
75.2We are pilgrims crossing the sea of this world and must stay in the boat, carried by the wood of the cross.
75.3Christ’s praying alone on the mountain signifies his ascension and intercession for us in heaven.
75.4The boat is the Church, tossed by the devil’s temptations; we must stay in it and pray, for Christ will bring it to rest.
75.5The worst storms come when Christ is absent from the heart because some desire, such as anger or greed, has overcome it.
75.6The greater danger is to turn back toward visible things and to say that God does not see one’s sin.
75.7The fourth watch signifies the end of the age, when Christ, once overwhelmed in his passion, is seen walking in honor over the world’s powers.
75.8Heretics who deny Christ’s true birth and body are like the disciples who thought he was a phantom; Christ answers, “It is I.”
75.9Those who think Christ’s threats of punishment are not real also treat him as a phantom; his promises and his threats are equally true.
75.10Peter walking on the water figures the Church honored in the world; tempted by human praise, she must cry out to the Lord to be saved.
76.1Peter is a type of the Church: the Church is built not on Peter but on Christ the rock whom he confessed; Peter is blessed when speaking from God and called Satan when speaking from himself.
76.4Peter, now firm and now wavering, represents both the strong and the weak in the Church.
76.5Peter could walk on the water not in himself but in the Lord at his command.
76.6No one is made strong by God except one who knows his own weakness; God’s “voluntary rain” is grace, not a reward for merit.
76.7Paul, unworthy in himself, was made great by grace; Peter could walk on the water by the Lord’s command and was rescued when he cried out in weakness.
76.8Each one’s desire is his storm, in prosperity even more than adversity; whoever begins to sink should cry, “Lord, I perish, save me.”
77.1The Canaanite woman teaches humility; Christ was sent in bodily presence to Israel, a people winnowed, not condemned, from whom came the apostles.
77.3Saul the proud persecutor became Paul, “the least,” struck down and healed by Christ; he and the first witnesses came from the Jewish people.
77.4The Jews converted at Pentecost were the lost sheep to whom Christ was sent; even the killing of Christ was forgiven those who repented.
77.5Christ reached the Gentiles through his disciples, especially Paul; the healing of the woman with a flow of blood on the way to Jairus’s daughter figures this, since Christ’s deeds are visible words.
77.6Jairus’s daughter figures the Jews and the woman with the flow of blood the Gentile Church, healed by touching the fringe, which is Paul.
77.9The Canaanite woman, one of the Gentile “other sheep,” persevered in asking and knocking.
77.10The Canaanite woman accepted being called a dog and was praised for great faith; humility grafts the Gentiles into the olive tree, while pride broke off the natural branches.
77.13The banquet of the kingdom is not fleshly feasting; true riches are needing nothing, and true health is immortality.
77.14Mortality is an incurable disease; in the kingdom the mind, not the belly, will be filled.
77.15The Gentiles are grafted in by humility and the unbelieving cut off by pride; we must learn and keep humility.
78.1The transfiguration fulfills Christ’s promise that some would see the Son of Man in his kingdom, which is the kingdom of the saints.
78.2Christ shining like the sun is the light of hearts; his white garments are the Church, and Moses and Elijah are the law and the prophets bearing witness to him.
78.3Peter wanted to stay on the mountain and make three tents, but the cloud showed that Christ, the law, and the prophets are one.
78.4The voice from the cloud singles out the only Son, whom the law and the prophets serve as vessels filled from him.
78.5Seeing Jesus alone after rising from the ground signifies the resurrection, when the law and prophecy will cease and God himself will be our reward.
78.6Peter must come down from the mountain to labor in charity, which seeks not its own, as Christ came down to suffer.
79.1A brief sermon on the transfiguration: the law and the prophets testify to Christ, and the voice from the cloud bids us hear him.
80.1Christ rebuked even the apostles for unbelief, yet they knew to ask him, “Lord, increase our faith.”
80.2God knows what we need, yet he bids us ask, seek, and knock, and pray always; we must trust him, like a patient with a doctor, when he does not give what we ask.
80.3If we pray to cast out another’s demon, much more should we pray to be freed from our own vices, as the sick beg a doctor for healing.
80.4Christ the physician found all sick; those who knew their sickness came to him, while those who thought themselves healthy killed him, yet by his death he healed them.
80.5Christ prayed for those who killed him, and his prayer was answered at Pentecost; he died in the flesh he took from us, so that we might live from what is his.
80.6Like the apostles and Peter on the water, we must rely on God and call on him when we totter.
80.7Eternal goods are to be sought with constant desire, which is itself prayer; temporal goods should be asked for with moderation, trusting the Father’s judgment.
80.8Bad times are made by bad people; God lets evils abound so that the world may not be loved, and the good must bear with the bad until the harvest.
81.1Against the foretold stumbling blocks of the world, Scripture promises great peace to the meek who love God’s law.
81.2Pressure is not a stumbling block but can yield oil like an olive press; Job’s wife, urging blasphemy, was the stumbling block, which Job, being meek, overcame.
81.3The meek are those who take pleasure in nothing but God in their good deeds and are not displeased with God in their sufferings; the “world” of the woe is the bad within the world.
81.4A stumbling block is a dear one who urges evil, as Peter urged Christ not to suffer; such a member must be “cut off” by refusing consent.
81.5To the friend who says “every man is a liar,” the meek answer that a lying mouth kills the soul, and they fear God rather than those who kill the body.
81.6Every man is a liar as a son of men, but those made sons of God by grace are no longer bound to lying; Christ the God-man is the mediator through whom we ascend to God.
81.7The calamities of the age are not stumbling blocks; the stumbling block is the voice that blames “Christian times” so as to make us blaspheme Christ.
81.8Christ foretold the troubles of the world, which is growing old; faith must be woken like Christ asleep in the boat, for he came to make us new in the world’s old age.
81.9Rome is the Romans, not its buildings; the city may be chastised but cities and the world pass away, and Rome’s gods had already failed Troy; Christians should answer by hospitality to the refugees.
82.1The speck in the eye is anger and the beam is hatred, which grows from anger fed by suspicion.
82.2Anger, as in a parent’s discipline, can coexist with love; hatred is far worse, for it puts out the eye.
82.3Whoever hates another harms himself first, losing innocence and light, while the other loses only outward goods.
82.4Rebuke must come from love for the sinner, whom it gains; sinning against a brother is sinning against Christ.
82.5Sin against a brother is deadly but quickly remedied by reconciliation, which God seeks before any gift at the altar.
82.6The one who did the injury must humble himself and ask pardon.
82.7The one wronged must not neglect the wrongdoer’s wound but rebuke him privately, then before witnesses and the Church, binding and loosing justly for his salvation.
82.8Proverbs and Paul command open rebuke while Christ commands private rebuke; there is no contradiction between the Testaments, for Christ speaks in both.
82.9Both commands are true; we must discern when each applies.
82.10Sins known only to you are to be rebuked privately, as Joseph meant to deal privately with Mary; sins committed publicly are to be rebuked publicly.
82.11A bishop rebukes secret sins, such as hidden murder or adultery, in secret, without betraying the sinner, yet warns that adultery is a deadly wound.
82.12Augustine rebukes adultery publicly without naming anyone, so that the correction may be secret.
82.13The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, so sins of the flesh such as adultery profane God’s temple.
82.14Many perish by saying “tomorrow, tomorrow” like the raven; God promises pardon to the penitent but not a tomorrow, so we must correct ourselves today.
82.15Augustine wants his hearers not to praise but to obey, so that their pastors may give account for them with joy.
83.1Augustine retells the parable of the unforgiving servant, which follows Christ’s teaching on rebuke and his answer to Peter about forgiving seventy times seven.
83.2Everyone is God’s debtor and has others as debtors; the two works of mercy, forgiving and giving, are the rule God will apply to us.
83.3Forgiveness has no numerical limit; Christ forgave us thousands of sins, and the servant’s debtor owed more than “seventy-seven” and yet had to be forgiven.
83.4In the Lord’s Prayer we ask God to forgive all our debts as we forgive our debtors, binding ourselves to forgive all.
83.5Luke’s genealogy of Christ, begun at his baptism, counts seventy-seven generations back to Adam, signifying that all sins are forgiven.
83.6Both debts, ten thousand talents and a hundred denarii, are built on ten, the number of the Decalogue, and so signify all sins against the law.
83.7Eleven, the transgression of the ten, multiplied by seven, the number of totality, gives seventy-seven, signifying all sins; God will demand back forgiven debts from those who do not forgive from the heart.
83.8Forgiving from the heart does not abolish discipline; like a surgeon, one must sometimes correct firmly, privately or publicly as the sin requires.
84.1If this miserable life is loved so much, eternal life should be loved far more; people who ask for death in trouble flee it when it comes.
84.2The days of this life are evil and shrinking, yet loved; true life is the eternal, blessed day of the resurrection, the reward of good work.
85.1Christ’s word to the rich young man is plain: whoever wants life must keep the commandments, if not the greater counsels then at least the lesser ones.
85.2Christ said it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom than for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye; but the poor must not boast of poverty, for the godly rich may outdo them.
85.3Paul commands the rich of this world not to be proud nor to hope in uncertain riches, but in the living God.
85.4The rich must be rich in good works, giving and sharing their bread here to receive Christ, the living bread, hereafter.
85.5The rich need not give everything, but their giving should exceed the Pharisees’ tithe, for Christians must surpass the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees.
85.6The poor must be content with what suffices, for godliness with sufficiency is great gain, and the desire to become rich is avarice, the root of all evils.
85.7Rich and poor meet on the road of this life, both made by God: the rich must help, the poor must not defraud, so that all may reach the kingdom.
86.1Christ does not want us to lose our goods but to store them in heaven, so that our hearts may go before us where Christ our head has gone.
86.2The rich young man went away sad, though Christ did not tell him to lose his wealth but to keep it safe in heaven by giving it to the poor.
86.3Christ himself receives what is given to the poor and repays more, so almsgiving is lending to the one creditworthy debtor.
86.4Unlike earthly debtors who hide, Christ will himself summon those who gave to the poor and repay them with the kingdom.
86.5Christ repays earthly gifts with heavenly ones, above all with himself, the living bread; a holy “avarice” for this reward should replace the greed for money.
86.6Avarice and luxury, two contrary mistresses, pull a man in opposite directions, one urging him to hoard and the other to spend on himself.
86.7Christ the Redeemer frees us from these masters and uses their very words, “keep” and “do well by your soul,” in a righteous sense.
86.8Avarice cannot show a safe place to keep treasure, since thieves, rust, and moth reach everything on earth.
86.9Avarice cannot promise a future, and saving for children is no excuse: children often lose inherited wealth, and they can acquire it as their parents did.
86.10Christ bids us keep and provide for an eternal future; a dead Christian child is alive with Christ, so his share of the inheritance should be sent to him by giving it to the poor.
86.13Parents should count Christ as one more child and give his share to the poor.
86.14Giving one child’s share to Christ is easy counsel; luxury’s “do well by your soul” is answered by the parable of the rich fool.
86.16The rich man and Lazarus show the reversal that awaits the luxurious rich after death.
86.17Christ, risen from the dead, counsels us to do well by our souls by giving alms generously before it is too late.
87.1God cultivates us as a farmer cultivates his field, while we worship him; the fruit he seeks is our godliness, which benefits us, not him.
87.2Christ’s saying “my Father is the farmer” proves that God cultivates us.
87.3The parable of the wicked tenants shows God planting his vineyard in Israel and sending the prophets and finally his Son.
87.4Augustine retells the parable of the workers in the vineyard: the householder paid the agreed wage to the first and gave the same as a gift to the last.
87.5All the righteous, from Abel to the Christians at the end of the age, receive the resurrection together, but the last receive it after a shorter wait.
87.6The denarius is eternal life, equal for all, though the saints will shine with different degrees of glory.
87.7The hours of the parable can also be read as the stages of a human life at which people become Christians.
87.8No one should delay conversion because the wage is the same, for no one is promised another hour; Christ, now known throughout the world through the Church, has gone out to call workers.
87.10All sins are forgiven to those who turn to Christ; despair kills souls, but God calls back the despairing through Ezekiel’s promise.
87.11The opposite danger is perverse hope that delays conversion; God promises pardon but not tomorrow, and Scripture warns against delay.
87.12Christ chose fishermen rather than the powerful, so that we might despise the friendship of the great when it stands in the way of salvation.
87.13The human race is a great sick man whom Christ the physician came to heal; one should heed him despite powerful friends who belittle him.
87.14Some rage against Christ like the frenzied, but he heals them, as he did the Jews converted after Pentecost.
87.15Christ healed the frenzied persecutor Saul; others are lethargic, and must be roused by friends out of charity, as a son rouses his dying father.
88.1Christ the physician took our weakness; his bodily miracles were temporary signs that built faith in invisible, eternal things.
88.2Faith without miracles is more praiseworthy: Christ kept his scars to heal doubting hearts and called blessed those who believe without seeing.
88.3Christ now works greater healings in the soul, giving sight to blind hearts, hearing to deaf ears, and life to dead souls.
88.4Philip could not yet see the Father in the Son because the eye of his heart was not healed; faith must come first, for we walk by faith until we come to sight.
88.5The whole purpose of the sacraments, preaching, and Scripture is to heal the eye of the heart, which, when troubled by sin, turns away from the light of righteousness.
88.6Sin wounds the inner eye, as it did Adam’s; Christ the physician came to us and drank first the bitter cup of insult, pain, and the cross, so that we would drink it and be healed.
88.8Christ has so honored the cross that Christian rulers abolished crucifixion and even kings bear the cross on their foreheads; his miracles and patience call us to faith.
88.9The two blind men cried out as Jesus passed by; his “passing by” means the temporal deeds of his earthly life, which are read and believed.
88.10The two blind men signify the Jewish and the Gentile peoples, whom Christ, the cornerstone, joins into one.
88.11Christ’s humbling of himself in time made it possible for the blind to perceive him and cry out to the Son of David.
88.12To cry out to Christ is to live by his commands; the crowd that tries to silence the blind men stands for lukewarm Christians who discourage the zealous, who must persevere until Jesus stands still and heals them.
88.14Christ “passes by” in his humanity and temporal deeds but “stands still” in his unchangeable divinity; faith in the one heals the eye to see the other.
88.15Blind Tobit, who would not keep a stolen kid, saw by the inner light of righteousness better than his sighted wife.
88.16Tobit, though blind, taught his son that almsgiving keeps one from darkness, meaning the inner light.
88.17Good Christians must cry out to Christ amid bad Christians, for example by refusing the theater, and must not leave the Church for the heretics.
88.18Persevering Christians win over their critics; within the Church good and bad are mixed until the harvest, and the good are not stained by the bad if they neither consent nor fail to rebuke.
88.20Rebuke must be given without pride, firm outwardly but gentle within.
88.21Whoever leaves the unity of the Church violates charity; the parable of the weeds shows that the field is the whole world, not Africa, and that the Church must bear the bad until the harvest.
88.22Against the Donatist claim that the true Church has shrunk to Africa, the parable says both wheat and weeds grow throughout the world until the harvest.
88.23The command to “go out” from the unclean means refusing consent and rebuking sin, not bodily separation from the Church, as the usage of the phrase and the example of the saints show.
88.24The prophets and Moses did not separate themselves from a sinful people but rebuked them and, like Moses after the golden calf, interceded for them.
88.25Departing from the bad means departing in heart, not leaving the Church as the Donatists did; the prophet who gave the command stayed among his people and rebuked them.
89.1The withered fig tree with leaves but no fruit figures the unbelieving part of Israel, while many Jews believed; whoever lacks charity has leaves without fruit.
89.2The mountain cast into the sea is Christ preached to the Gentiles by the apostles, and the withered tree is the unbelieving Jewish nation.
89.3Since it was not the season for figs and a tree cannot sin, the cursing of the fig tree must be a prophetic sign, not merely a miracle.
89.4Christ’s seeking fruit was a figurative pretense like his “pretending to go farther” at Emmaus; in Scripture words and deeds may be proper, figurative, or both.
89.5Jacob’s anointing of the stone is a figurative deed signifying Christ; Christ’s words to Nathanael recall Jacob’s ladder, for the Son of Man is both above as head and below in his members.
89.6Some events are both real and figurative, like Abraham’s two sons; figurative fiction, like the parable of the sower or Christ seeking fruit, signifies truth and is not a lie.
89.7Christ’s pretending to go farther signifies that he is found in the breaking of bread by those who hold him fast.
90.1Augustine distinguishes the Lord’s two banquets, one here for good and bad alike, one in heaven for the good alone, and urges the good to bear with the bad within the church.
90.2All are in some sense evil, as Christ called even the apostles evil while naming God their Father, so the question is in what sense the wedding has good and bad.
90.3The same people may be both evil and good in different respects, but the man without the wedding garment shows that the parable’s bad guests are truly condemned.
90.4The one guest without a wedding garment stands for the many bad, as Christ’s words “many are called, but few are chosen” show, while the good are many in themselves but few beside the bad.
90.5The wedding garment cannot be baptism, the eucharist, fasting, churchgoing, or miracles, since the bad share all of these.
90.6The wedding garment is love from a pure heart, a good conscience, and unfeigned faith, without which tongues, prophecy, alms, and even martyrdom profit nothing.
90.7Every human being is our neighbor, since all descend from one father, Adam, just as all who believe are made alive in the one Christ.
90.8The faith that marks the wedding garment is not the bare belief demons share but faith working through love, since love cannot exist without faith though faith can exist without love.
90.9Following Christ and Stephen, who prayed for their killers, Christians should pray not for their enemies’ death but for the death of their enmity, since God hates the fault, not the nature he made.
90.10Love must reach beyond family to God and to all, even enemies, so that God’s image in us, worn down by earthly desire, is re-engraved and rendered to God as Caesar’s coin is to Caesar.
91.1The Jews could not explain how the Christ is both David’s son and David’s Lord because they saw only his humanity; they have stumbled on the stone and will be crushed at his coming unless they believe.
91.2Christ asked how, not whether, he was David’s son; the church’s faith answers that as the Word he is David’s Lord and as the Word made flesh his son.
91.3The mystery of Christ as God and man is opened only to a purified heart, one that loves God freely and seeks no reward but God himself.
91.4The devil slanders even the good to make the weak despair of virtue, but in Job’s case his charge failed, for Job proved that he loved God freely.
91.5Because the mystery requires a cleansed heart, Christ turned at once to the scribes’ pride; church leaders may rightly take the first seat but must not love it, which God alone can judge.
91.6God delays fulfilling his promises so that the soul may stretch toward them and grow, as Paul strained forward toward the prize of the upward call.
91.7No one ascends to heaven except Christ, so believers ascend only as members of his body, Christ and the church being two in one flesh as in marriage.
91.8Christ is bridegroom and bride as one man, head and body, according to his flesh, as Isaiah’s words about the bridegroom and the bride show.
91.9Until we see face to face we walk by faith and do good works, each giving another what he has, money, counsel, learning, or simple service, bearing one another’s burdens.
92.1The Jews, who read in the prophets both that the Christ would come and that they would kill him, could not answer how he is David’s son and Lord; Christians, taught by Christ, can.
92.2Christ did not deny being David’s son; through Paul he explains that as God equal to the Father he is David’s Lord and by emptying himself in the flesh David’s son, and the Catholic faith confesses both.
93.1The parable of the ten virgins does not concern consecrated virgins alone but the whole church.
93.2The ten virgins are the souls of Catholic Christians who seem to do good works; they are five because of the five senses, and virgins because they abstain from unlawful use of them.
93.3The virgins’ lamps are good works, and the girded loins are virginity, yet five of them are still turned away.
93.4The whole church, married and unmarried, is called a virgin because of the integrity of faith, as Paul says he betrothed the church as a chaste virgin to Christ.
93.5What distinguishes the wise virgins from the foolish is the oil, which Augustine tentatively takes as love, the more excellent way that rises above all, as oil rises above other liquids.
93.6The virgins’ sleep is not the cooling of love, since the wise persevered to the end, but the sleep of death, which all undergo.
93.7Those who expect the judgment soon go out to meet the bridegroom in thought, but he delays and they die first; they must persevere in love until that sleep.
93.8Midnight means the time no one expects; calculations of six thousand years since Adam come and go, but the Lord will come when it is not known.
93.9The midnight cry is the last trumpet at which all the dead will rise; the oil carried in the vessels is the testimony of a good conscience within the heart, a gift of God.
93.10The foolish virgins’ oil was human praise; it kept their lamps lit in this life, but at the resurrection, when everyone is taken up with his own case, there is no one to praise them and their lamps go out.
93.11The wise virgins’ answer, “go and buy,” is mockery, the laughter of divine Wisdom at those who despised her.
93.12The sellers of oil are flatterers who sell praise; better to be corrected by the righteous than anointed with the sinner’s oil of flattery.
93.13The wise virgins’ “perhaps there will not be enough” expresses humility: even a good conscience, still needing daily forgiveness, trembles before God’s judgment.
93.14The wise humbly ask not to be judged and pray for forgiveness, and did their works before God for his glory, while the foolish did theirs to be seen by men and so received human praise as their only reward.
93.15While the foolish look for praise and find none, the bridegroom comes with his glorified church, the door is shut, and they knock too late.
93.16Knocking is answered now, in the time of mercy, not at the judgment; the bridegroom’s “I do not know you” means that he disowns those whose vices his art does not commit but condemns.
93.17Augustine urges the congregation to be among the wise, keeping watch with faith, hope, love, and works, so that after death they rise with lamps that never go out.
94.1Too tired to preach at length, Augustine applies the parable of the talents: bishops pay out God’s word, and every head of a household must act as a bishop at home, guarding the faith of wife, children, and slaves.
95.1Explaining Scripture is breaking bread for the people, from a storeroom in heaven that preacher and hearers share.
95.2The seven loaves signify the sevenfold work of the Spirit, the four thousand the church of the four Gospels, and the seven baskets the church’s perfection, seven standing for all time.
95.3The miracle’s deeds speak as words: the hearers are the four thousand under the fourfold Gospel, and the uncounted children and women stand for the foolish and effeminate, who are still fed in the hope that they will change.
95.4Christ is the bridegroom both fairest in the form of God and disfigured in the form of a servant, as the two prophets agree; the guest without a wedding garment shows that lacking it is a grave fault.
95.6The one guest thrown out signifies the many, the single body of the wicked, as Christ’s words “many are called, but few are chosen” show.
95.7The wedding garment is not any gift shared by good and bad, such as baptism, the eucharist, prophecy, or faith, but love, which is put on by clothing Christ in the naked.
96.1Christ’s command to deny oneself is not hard, because love makes every burden light, as even sinful loves show; one who loves Christ finds himself by denying himself.
96.2Self-love was man’s first ruin and drives him out to love external things, like the prodigal son; to return he must come back to himself and go on to the Father, denying himself and trusting God, not man.
96.3Christ is to be followed into heaven, where he ascended, but by the road of his cross; humility is the step, as he told the sons of Zebedee who wanted the highest seats.
96.4Taking up the cross means bearing all opposition, even from fellow Christians, and preferring the Creator to the world; Augustine then raises the question how the world is evil if its maker is good.
96.5The world is evil only in its lovers who prefer it to God; God made their nature, not their fault.
96.6Mankind, the world made evil by Adam’s sin and our own, was remade good by Christ’s grace into another world, which the evil world persecutes.
96.7The persecuting world is the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and worldly ambition; the persecuted world is those who do God’s will and abide forever.
96.8Scripture also calls the persecuted church “the world,” the world God reconciled to himself in Christ, while the condemned world outside the church persecutes it.
96.9Christ’s call to self-denial is for the whole church, virgins, widows, and married alike, each in its place; to turn from a chosen continence back to marriage, though lawful, is looking back like Lot’s wife.
97.1Rather than asking when the world will end, each should prepare for his own last day, since as he dies so he will be found at the judgment; the Son’s not knowing the day does not mean the Father knows what the Son does not.
97.2Mortality, the punishment of sin, should humble us rather than leave us proud like the devil; death is certain and its hour uncertain.
97.3Everything in life is uncertain except death, which begins at birth; what follows death depends on what we choose and sow here, as the rich man and Lazarus show.
97.4Christ overcame the world for us by becoming man and rising again, so the Christian need not fear men’s threats but should cling to God and trust in him.
98.1Christ’s bodily miracles point to the greater miracle of raising dead souls, which only those already risen in heart can see.
98.2As the widow rejoiced over her son, the church rejoices over those raised daily from spiritual death; the dead are only asleep to Christ, who raises them with a word.
98.3Christ’s miracles were done to signify spiritual truths, like letters to be read and not only admired; the cursing of the fig tree, out of season, signified the Jews who had the words of the law without its deeds.
98.4Christ raised three dead: the synagogue ruler’s daughter at home, the widow’s son on his way to burial, and Lazarus from the tomb.
98.5The three dead signify three kinds of sinners: sin consented to in the heart, sin carried out in the deed, and sin buried under habit; Christ raises all three.
98.6Sin advances in four steps, pleasure, consent, deed, and habit, like Lazarus four days dead; God alone gives life inwardly, while the disciples, the church’s ministers, unbind the one revived.
98.7Augustine urges every kind of sinner, even those buried in habit, to repent quickly, for Christ can raise all three kinds of dead.
99.1Augustine introduces a sermon on the forgiveness of sins from the story of the sinful woman who washed Christ’s feet in the Pharisee’s house.
99.2The Pharisee, like the proud whom Isaiah describes as saying “do not touch me, for I am clean,” thought Christ did not know the woman because he let her touch him.
99.3Christ, who heard the Pharisee’s thoughts, told the parable of the two debtors to heal his host and assure the woman, contrasting Simon’s cold hospitality with her love.
99.4The parable raises the question whether one should sin much in order to be forgiven much and so love more, a danger like the slander Paul rejected, “let us do evil that good may come.”
99.5Augustine sharpens the problem with two baptized men, one a great sinner and one a lesser, for Christ’s words imply that the one forgiven less loves less.
99.6The one who sinned little must love much too, because he owes to God’s guidance and grace the sins he did not commit, just as the great sinner owes God the forgiveness of those he did.
99.7All present knew that a man cannot forgive sins; the woman who sought forgiveness from Christ thereby believed him to be God, and he answered the others by telling her that her faith had saved her.
99.8Christ foresaw the Donatists, who claim that they themselves forgive and sanctify and who, like the Pharisee, refused at the Conference of Carthage even to sit with Catholics, saying “do not touch me, for I am clean.”
99.9Christ’s gift of loosing sins does not mean that men forgive by their own merit: the Holy Spirit, who is God, forgives through the faithful, who are his temple.
99.10God forgives and gives the Spirit both through men and without them; at Samaria he gave the Spirit through the apostles’ hands, and Simon Magus wrongly thought the gift belonged to men and could be bought.
99.11God showed that the Spirit is his gift, not men’s, by sending him without human hands on the eunuch and on Cornelius; so any penitent soul, whoever baptizes her, is cleansed by the Lord’s grace and her faith.
100.1Christ rejected the man who offered to follow him anywhere, because he saw in his heart the foxes’ holes of deceit and the birds’ nests of pride.
100.2Christ called the silent man whose heart he saw to be faithful and would not let him delay even to bury his father, since love must be set in order and God put before parents, as the mother of the Maccabees taught her sons.
100.3The man who wanted to say farewell first was unfit to look back; Christ chose whom he willed, by the election of grace, as God kept seven thousand in Elijah’s day.
100.4Whatever good we have is God’s free grace, not our merit: sinners receive forgiveness freely, and the righteous owe their righteousness to God while ascribing their sins to themselves.
101.1The harvest to which Christ sent the apostles was among the Jews, where the prophets had sown; Paul, “the least,” was sent to sow among the Gentiles, as even the Athenians unwittingly called him a “sower of words.”
101.2The Samaritan woman’s expectation of the Messiah shows that the patriarchs and prophets had sown, so that the apostles reaped a ripe harvest among the Jews.
101.3After the harvest among the Jews, Christ sows among the Gentiles; the hearers must be good soil, not the road, the rock, or the thorns of worldly cares.
101.4Preachers must sow and water faithfully, hearers receive faithfully, and God gives growth; Augustine explains the duties of stewards because many of his hearers will one day be clergy and bishops.
101.5Christ’s instructions to the seventy, carrying no purse, bag, or sandals and greeting no one on the way, are not to be taken literally.
101.6Christ, our example and help, himself carried a money bag, so the command not to carry a purse means not to hoard wisdom for oneself but to be a spring that pours it out.
101.7Sandals, made of dead skins, signify dead works to be renounced in the holy ground of the church, not literal shoes, since Christ himself wore sandals; those who go barefoot should not despise others.
101.8“Greet no one on the way” cannot mean refusing greetings; one sense is an exaggeration urging haste, like “Capernaum, exalted to heaven.”
101.9To greet (salutare) is to announce salvation (salus), and to greet “on the way” is to preach the Gospel incidentally, while seeking one’s own interests rather than Christ’s.
101.10Hearers should hold the salvation preached even by self-seeking preachers, like grapes picked from a hedge of thorns, doing what they say but not what they do, as Paul rejoiced that Christ was preached even in pretense.
101.11True preachers, full of peace, offer it to every house; if it is refused they lose nothing, for their peace returns to them as the reward of their love.
102.1Christ’s words “he who rejects you rejects me” apply to the church’s pastors too, whose only consolation is the good lives of their people.
102.2A good or bad death is not judged by funerals or by the manner of dying, as fleshly people think; Christ teaching within the heart shows what it means.
102.3The rich man and Lazarus show that a splendid funeral can be a very bad death, while the beggar’s miserable end was a good one.
102.4Only what follows death shows whether a death was bad; seen with the heart, the poor man carried by angels died well, while the rich man lost everything and remained in torment.
102.5Augustine urges all to do good works for the poor, sowing now in trust like a farmer, to reap with joy at the harvest.
103.1The Gospel of Martha and Mary reminds us that amid the many things of this world we strive toward one thing, as pilgrims on the way to the homeland.
103.2Martha received the Lord in the flesh while Mary chose to be fed by him; Christ still receives hospitality in the least of his own, and he judged that of the two good offices Mary chose the one thing needful.
103.4Unity makes a multitude a people rather than a crowd; Scripture commends it, and the one thing needful is the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to whom only a united heart can come.
103.5Serving the poor and God’s servants is good, but Mary’s part is better, because Martha’s service is a busy, temporal necessity, while the sweetness of truth that Mary chose will never be taken away.
103.6In the homeland there will be no one to serve, only the feast Mary chose, where Christ, having passed over through his Passion, will make his servants recline and will serve them.
104.1Martha, busy serving, complained of Mary, who sat feeding on Christ’s word; the Lord, appealed to as judge, became Mary’s advocate.
104.2If Martha’s service were blamed, all works of mercy should cease in favor of study alone, which Augustine raises as a difficulty to be answered.
104.3Christ did not blame Martha’s work but distinguished the offices: works of mercy answer needs that will cease in the world to come, while Mary chose the one thing, God himself, which remains forever.
104.4Martha and Mary figure two lives, the present laborious one and the future restful one, both innocent; hearers who leave their cares to listen to Christ’s word are already like Mary.
105.1Through the parable of the friend at midnight, Christ urges us to ask persistently, for he wants to give more than we want to receive.
105.2The friend arriving from a journey is a seeker from the life of this world who asks a Christian to explain the faith, so that the believer, finding he lacks an answer, must himself seek.
105.3When Scripture is obscure, the believer must knock in prayer to God, who delays so that we may desire more; the three loaves are the understanding of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, food that never runs out.
105.5Faith, hope, and love, all three gifts of God, are needed to make the gift sweet, love being the greatest.
105.6In the second triad, bread, fish, and egg, the bread is love, opposed by the stone of hardness, and the fish is faith, which lives unbroken among the world’s storms and is opposed by the serpent, the devil.
105.7The egg is hope, which looks ahead to what is not yet seen and must not look back like Lot’s wife; the scorpion, which strikes from behind, is the world that tries to turn hope back to passing things.
105.8God mixes bitterness into earthly happiness so that we seek true happiness; those who complain that everything is perishing in Christian times look back, while the hopeful bless the Lord at all times, like Job.
105.9Even if Rome, the city of our birth, should fall, the heavenly city remains, built and guarded by God; earthly kingdoms were foretold to perish, but Christ’s kingdom will have no end.
105.10Virgil’s promise of “empire without end” for Rome was flattery put in Jupiter’s mouth; speaking in his own person he called kingdoms “doomed to perish.”
105.11All earthly kingdoms will end; Christians should set their hearts above and shelter their hope, the egg, under the wings of Christ, the hen of the Gospel, against the scorpion of blasphemers.
105.12Augustine prays for the blasphemers rather than mocking them, grieves for the Christians of Rome, and answers that the idols could not protect Rome, since they could not protect themselves, while Christian Constantinople and Carthage stand.
105.13Rome’s fall was not caused by the loss of the idols: the pagan Radagaisus, who sacrificed daily, was defeated after the images were removed, and it was the idol-hating Goths who took the city; Christians who suffered there lost nothing eternal.
106.1Christ, who heard the Pharisee’s thoughts, rebuked outward washing; even baptism cleanses through faith, which is within, as Acts and 1 Peter show.
106.2Augustine asks how almsgiving could make the unbelieving Pharisees clean, if cleansing comes only by faith in Christ.
106.3The Pharisees thought they gave alms because they tithed even their herbs, but Christ said they neglected judgment and love, the weightier things of the law.
106.4True almsgiving begins with mercy to one’s own soul, by judging oneself and loving God and neighbor, and by feeding the soul with Christ, the living bread; without this, even the largest gifts are nothing.
107.1Augustine introduces Christ’s command to beware of all greed, asking why he said “all.”
107.2The occasion of the saying was a man with a just claim asking Christ to make his brother share their inheritance; Christ offered him more, the whole inheritance in heaven.
107.3Christ called the petitioner “man” because he wanted to raise him above greed to be among the “gods,” and refused to be a divider, as Paul refused to let Christ be divided by factions.
107.4“All greed” includes keeping one’s own greedily, not only seizing what belongs to others, for life does not consist in possessions; the rich fool, whose land prospered, planned only to store his surplus.
107.6God called the rich man a fool because he wanted many good things but did not want his soul to be good; his soul was required of him that very night.
107.7Christians bear Christ’s sign on the forehead, but it must also be in the heart, like those marked by Ezekiel’s angel who grieved over the sins done among them and were spared.
107.8“All greed” includes lust beyond one’s wife, idolatry, and even honest attachment to one’s own property, which can lead a judge to give an unjust verdict for fear of losing what he has.
107.9Even a poor man faces the test of greed if a powerful man threatens to take his savings unless he bears false witness; Christ tells him to let his goods go, for no one can take Christ from him.
107.10Beyond greed for money there is greed for life: one who is threatened with death unless he lies should let his body be killed rather than kill his soul by false witness, perhaps becoming a martyr.
108.1Christ, who came, departed, and will come again, warns us to wait for the end with girded loins, abstaining from unlawful desires, and with lamps burning in good works, for we became Christians in hope of another world.
108.2The girded loins, burning lamps, and waiting servants correspond to the psalm’s “turn from evil, do good, seek peace” and to Paul’s self-control, righteousness, and hope of eternal life.
108.3People seek good days and long life on earth, where they cannot be found; but a long life is only a drop beside eternity, and to live long is only to run to the end.
108.4If people labor so hard to die later, how much more should they labor never to die; Scripture asks who wants life and good days, and everyone answers “I.”
108.5Like a guide who shows treasure-seekers where the gold really is, Augustine does not curb the desire for life and good days but directs it beyond this passing world, where days do not stand still.
108.6The psalm that promises life and good days demands in return that we keep our tongues from evil and our lips from deceit; the wage of life without end is given only to those who work.
108.7God’s command for so great a reward is light: to restrain the tongue from lies and slander, to speak as one thinks, to turn from evil and do good, and to seek peace.
109.1Christ rebukes those who read the sky but not the time of faith; now is the time of mercy to repent, for each person’s end is near, human life being more fragile than glass.
109.2The adversary with whom we must settle on the way cannot be the devil, from whom we have been redeemed, since Matthew’s parallel says we must agree with him.
109.3The adversary is the word of God, which opposes our sinful will by saying “do not,” but only for our good; agreeing with it by keeping the commandments loses nothing and finds oneself.
109.4Life is the way, which ends at each one’s hour; years are subtracted, not added; so we must agree with God’s word now, and then the judge becomes a father, the officer an angel, and the prison paradise.
110.1The barren fig tree is the human race through three ages, before the law, under the law, and under grace; the saints intercede for it, and the trench and dung of repentance are applied before the judgment.
110.2The woman bent for eighteen years signifies the same as the fig tree’s three years; she could not lift up her heart until Christ raised her, for man is good only by God’s grace, since of himself every man is a liar.
110.3The psalm’s “arise, Lord, let not man prevail” is fulfilled in Christ: human falsehood prevailed from the flood to the crucifixion, but Christ rose from the tomb and will come to judge the nations.
110.4The judgment will surely come, since God has already fulfilled so many prophecies, of Christ, the church, the fall of idols, and even heretics; God is our debtor only by his promises.
110.5God has paid most of what he promised, so we can trust him for the kingdom; the barren should repent and the bent, looking only at earthly happiness, should call on God to raise them as Christ raised the woman.
111.1The three measures of meal are the human race descended from Noah’s three sons; the saved are few compared with the lost, but many in themselves, a heap of grain that will fill the barn of heaven, a multitude no one can number.
111.2Augustine urges hospitality, since every Christian is a stranger and guest even in his own house, passing on to the homeland above; he closes by announcing the anniversary of Bishop Aurelius’s ordination.
112.1In the parable of the great supper, the invited are Israel, called through the prophets, who read the prophets but killed Christ and so unknowingly prepared the supper, the eucharist, for the Gentiles, who were brought and compelled.
112.2The three excuses hinder all who refuse the supper; the first, the bought farm, signifies the pride of lordship, the first vice, by which Adam wanted to be lord and have no lord.
112.3The five yoke of oxen are the five senses, paired like yokes, by which earthly people refuse to believe what they cannot perceive, like Thomas; Christians believe without seeing, and eat by faith the same supper Christ consecrated.
112.5The supper arose from a guest’s saying about eating bread in God’s kingdom, while the bread himself reclined before him; the oxen to be “tested” signify a curiosity of the senses that, like Thomas, refuses to believe without touching.
112.6The third excuse, marriage, signifies the pleasure of the flesh; John’s “lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and ambition of the age” correspond in reverse order to the three excuses.
112.7The lust of the eyes stands for all five senses, since we speak of “seeing” by every sense; Christ invited his doubting disciples to touch and see, but we believe by hearing the preachers, without touching.
112.8Putting away pride, curiosity, and fleshly pleasure, let the poor, weak, lame, and blind come to the supper; the Gentiles came from the streets, and heretics are to be compelled to come in from the hedges of division, for will is born within once necessity is applied outside.
113.1Christ’s “least ones” are those who have left everything to follow him; “mammon of iniquity” means riches, and alms must be given from honest labor, not from plunder or usury, since God cannot be bribed like a corrupt judge.
113.3Those who already hold ill-gotten money should, like Zacchaeus, give it to the poor and restore what they took, but must not remain evil themselves.
113.4In another sense the mammon of iniquity is any worldly wealth, even honestly gained, which iniquity calls “riches”; true riches are those Job had when he had lost everything.
113.5True riches are treasures in heaven; the psalm shows that only “foreign sons” call those happy who have earthly wealth, while the truly happy people are those whose God is the Lord, who is our inheritance and the farmer who cultivates us.
114.1Christ commands us to forgive a brother who repents “seven times a day,” meaning always, as seven stands for all time.
114.2Christ promises eternal life and commands us to forgive; whoever wants God’s pardon must give pardon, and should forgive even if he had nothing to be forgiven.
114.3Christ, who had no sin, took on death for us and so set an example; Paul tells us to forgive as God in Christ forgave us, imitating God as his children.
114.4Every human being, even an apostle, is a sinner, as John included himself in “if we say we have no sin”; so we who need forgiveness must forgive those who ask and keep no enmity in our hearts.
114.5In the Lord’s Prayer we bind ourselves to forgive as we ask to be forgiven, a condition set by the heavenly lawyer who will judge us; to pray it without forgiving is to lie to God.
115.1The parable of the unjust judge teaches persistent prayer, which springs from faith and in turn strengthens faith; the faith Christ asked whether he would find on earth is perfect faith, which even the apostles lacked.
115.2The Pharisee in the temple asked God for nothing but praised himself and despised the tax collector, who stood far off, beat his breast, and asked for mercy, and so went home justified, for the humble are exalted.
115.3Those who claim to make themselves righteous are worse than the Pharisee, who at least thanked God; if he was rebuked for proudly giving thanks, how much more those who attack grace.
115.4Infants brought to Christ need the Savior because they inherited Adam’s sin, though they committed none themselves; adults must plead for them and bring them to the grace that wipes out both inherited and added sin.
116.1The risen Christ, our salvation, greeted his disciples with peace and kept his scars to heal the wound of their unbelief, for they thought they saw a spirit, an error that became a heresy in those who persisted in it.
116.2The disciples, troubled by earthly thoughts, would not believe Christ had raised his body until he showed them his hands and feet; we believe their preaching without seeing.
116.3The disciples’ joyful trembling shows how incredible the resurrection then was; Christ convinced their eyes and hands, and even ate, though not hungry, so that the faith they preached would reach a world that cannot see or touch.
116.4Heretics like the Manichees, who deny that Christ had a real body, make him a liar; but he showed his hands and feet and said that a spirit has no flesh and bones.
116.5Christ showed the disciples himself, the head, and promised the body, the church; no longer mortal with them, he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures about him, as he can open the minds of doubters now.
116.6The disciples saw Christ the head and believed in the church, his body, which was foretold to spread through all nations; we see the church and believe in the head; the persecution after Stephen’s death scattered the burning logs and set the world on fire.
116.7Saul the persecutor, struck down by Christ’s voice from heaven, became Paul the preacher; through the apostles and martyrs the church grows like a house built of living stones, singing a new song until it is dedicated at the resurrection.
117.1The Word of God, preached by John, cannot be bought for any price except oneself, and one who gives himself to the Word does not lose himself.
117.2Whoever gives himself for the Word gains both the Word and himself, giving back to the Word the human being made through it in God’s image, so as to be remade.
117.3The Word is the unformed form of all things, beyond time and place, unchanged whether we approach or depart; unlike bodies, which are less in their parts than in the whole, the Word is not less in a part than in the whole.
117.5Devout ignorance is better than presumptuous knowledge, for God cannot be comprehended, any more than the eye grasps a whole body at once; the pure heart can only touch him and is made blessed thereby, while God gains nothing, and those who turn from him are already punished with blindness.
117.6Against the Arians, who argue that a born Son must be later and lesser than his Father, the Catholic faith holds that the Word was born of God without a temporal birth, and Augustine asks for prayer as he undertakes to explain how a Son can be born and yet coeternal.
117.7Fleshly people transfer the order of human generation to God; it would be better to keep silent about the ineffable, but silence would let weak brothers think the Arians unanswerable.
117.8Without claiming to grasp the ineffable, Augustine will offer likenesses to refute the Arians, who argue from creatures that every parent exists before its offspring.
117.9Augustine notes that the Creator’s birth may have no likeness in creation, just as his substance and majesty have none, so failing to find one would not defeat his case.
117.10The Arians’ examples show only temporal sons later than temporal fathers; a likeness can be found instead in things coeval, begotten and begetter beginning together, which point to the Son coeternal with the eternal Father.
117.11Scripture calls Wisdom the brightness of eternal light; just as the brightness of a lamp comes from the fire yet exists together with it, the begotten need not be later than the begetter.
117.12The Son is also called the Father’s image; as the reflection of a shrub growing over water is born with the shrub and yet comes from it, so the Son is always born from the Father, coeternal with him.
117.13The likenesses fail because light shines less than its fire and a reflection is less than its object, but the Son is fully equal to the Father, as Paul says he did not count equality with God robbery.
117.14Combining the two kinds of likeness, human generation (same nature, different time) and light from fire (same time, unequal nature), and attributing to God what is praiseworthy in each, gives a Son coeternal and equal in substance with the Father, one God with him.
117.15The Creator transcends every likeness and can be seen only by a cleansed heart; for those not yet cleansed, the Word became what we are, and John promises that we shall see him as he is.
117.16Those who cannot yet see the Word as God should hear the Word made flesh, given like milk to infants, as a mother turns food into milk; but the Word took flesh without being changed.
117.17Christ, the Wisdom of God, teaches first not the secrets of creation but humility; as a tree roots downward to grow upward, believers must humbly keep God’s commandments in love to grow in understanding.
118.1The Word who was in the beginning was not made, since all things were made through him, but begotten of the Father; Father and Son are one God, and the Arian claim that there was a time when the Word was not is false.
118.2The Son is the Father’s brightness, as Scripture calls Wisdom the brightness of eternal light; as fire is never without its splendor, the Father is never without the Son, who is always born and coeternal.
119.1The incarnate Christ is eternally God with the Father; John, who drank from the Lord’s breast, proclaimed that in the beginning the Word was, not was made, and was God.
119.3Human words and human flesh pass like a river from a hidden source to the sea; only the Word of God abides, and only those who abide in it can grasp it.
119.4The Word became flesh as gold might become grass, and, though the grass was burned, it raised it to the Father’s right hand; those who believe receive power to become children of God, born of God in the womb of baptism, as the newly baptized infants show.
119.5No one should doubt that the Word became flesh or that believers can become children of God: he who descended to share our death and evils will raise us to his life and goods.
119.6The almighty Word could both remain with the Father and come to us in a virgin’s womb, since he existed before his flesh and created his own mother.
119.7As a spoken word reaches the hearer without leaving the speaker’s heart, the Word came forth in flesh without leaving the Father; unlike our fleeting voice, he raised his flesh, his garment, vehicle, beast of burden, and temple, to the Father’s right hand, as our hope.
120.1John, transcending all creation and drinking from the Lord’s breast, saw the Word in the beginning; happy are those who understand, and next happiest those who believe without understanding.
120.2The Word of God is not like the sun, which cannot pass through walls and is in one place at a time, but is whole everywhere and penetrates everything; the preacher sees this dimly but lacks words to convey it.
120.3A human word reaches every hearer whole without leaving the speaker, a small likeness of the Word of God; Augustine prays for the newly baptized in white, that they may not fall back into darkness after the Easter days.
121.1The world that did not know Christ is not heaven and earth, which recognized him at his passion, but wicked and unbelieving people, named the world from what they love.
121.2Christ came to his own, the Jewish people, from whom he took flesh and to whom he had given the law and the prophets, and they did not receive him; he existed before Abraham.
121.3Some of Christ’s own did receive him; the stones that cry out when the children are silent are the Gentiles, formerly worshippers of stones, from whom God has raised up children of Abraham, as the newly baptized show.
121.4The children of God are born not of blood, as in the first, wretched birth from man and woman, but of God; the second birth is from God and the church.
121.5The Word became flesh so that those born of men might be born of God, a great exchange in which the Son of God became son of man; born of a virgin, not of lust, he is the Mediator, neither above us as flesh nor below us as sinner, yet always above as God.
122.1Christ’s seeing Nathanael under the fig tree signifies that he saw the whole human race under sin, as the fig leaves of Adam and Eve show; Nathanael recognized his divinity.
122.2Christ’s promise that Nathanael would see angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man recalls Jacob’s ladder; the stone Jacob anointed signifies Christ, the rejected stone on which unbelievers stumble.
122.3Jacob’s wrestling with the angel, who willingly let himself be overcome and then blessed him, figures Christ; Jacob, blessed and lamed, stands for the Jewish people, blessed in those who believed and lame in those who did not.
122.4Abraham kept only his new name, since its meaning was fulfilled in this age, but Jacob kept both names: the Christian people is Jacob, the supplanter, in this age, and Israel, seeing God, in hope; the Jews’ blindness, which led to Christ’s saving death, profited the Gentiles.
122.5At the end all Israel, the children of the present Jews, will believe, and both peoples, made one, will see God face to face as Israel; Nathanael, the true Israelite, was promised the fulfillment of Jacob’s dream in Christ.
122.6The angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man show that Christ is both above in heaven and below in his members, as his words to Saul, “why do you persecute me?”, proved.
123.1Christ’s humility is the medicine for human pride; he who changed water into wine at the wedding refused to turn stones into bread at the devil’s suggestion, because his disciples would believe but the devil would not.
123.3Christ, who could work such miracles, hungered, suffered, and died, showing the way of humility; as God he is the homeland, as man the way, and now he is both in heaven and here in need in his poor.
123.4The angels ascend and descend to Christ because he is both above with the Father and below in his members, as his words to Saul show; he is rich as God and poor as man, hungry and naked in the poor.
123.5Every rich person is God’s beggar, asking daily for bread; Christ asks the rich to give him, in the poor, from what he gave them, promising to repay heavenly and eternal things.
124.1The healing at the pool of Bethesda gave only temporary health, since human life is a vapor and flesh is grass; its real meaning concerns eternal salvation through the abiding word of the Lord, which gives immortality even to flesh.
124.2This life is a tribulation between fear and pain, and only the Word who became flesh without change gives hope; the pool signifies the Jewish people within the five porches of the law, its stirring Christ’s passion, which the proud refuse; Christ took our birth and death to give us resurrection, so we should live as strangers in a short and passing life.
125.1Augustine explains why he repeats a known exposition of the Gospel passage: repetition renews affection, reminds the forgetful, and safeguards memory.
125.2The five porches are the five books of Moses, the law, which exposed but could not heal the sick, so that the proud might recognize their sin and seek the grace of Christ, which alone frees from the law of sin.
125.3Only the first to enter the stirred water was healed; the water signifies the Jewish people within the law, and its troubling is Christ’s passion, provoked when he called himself Son of God and equal to God, the Angel of great counsel who is Lord of the angels.
125.4The Jews took God’s sabbath rest literally, as if he had tired, but he who created by a word does not labor; his rest signifies the future rest of the saints after the six ages of the world, and he still works by governing creation without effort.
125.5Though human affairs seem disordered, God governs them, placing even sinners in his order as a painter uses black or a law sends a burglar to the mines; Judas did what he willed and suffered what he did not will.
125.6The Father works by governing creation, and the Son claimed equality by saying “I work”; the Jews’ trouble led to the passion that redeems sinners; one must go down into the pool humbly, and only one was healed because salvation is in the unity of the one church.
125.7The number forty signifies the fulfillment of righteousness, which is fasting from love of the world; love is like the soul’s hand, which cannot grasp God while it clings to the world, so those who possess must hold their goods without being held by them.
125.8Temptation tests whether one possesses innocently, as recent troubles showed when some who had listened gladly turned to abuse; Augustine must pay out God’s word or be condemned as the lazy servant, and God, not the preacher, will question each heart.
125.9Forty signifies the fulfillment of the law, the ten commandments spread to the four corners of the world, which is restraint from love of the world, taught alike by Moses, Elijah, and Christ in their forty-day fasts; Lent figures this life of labor, and the fifty days after Easter, forty plus the denarius of reward, figure the eternal praise of the resurrection.
125.10The law is fulfilled only by love of God and neighbor; the sick man of thirty-eight years lacked two of forty, the two commandments of love, without which all else is worthless; Christ, who came to give love and fulfill the law, healed him and told him to carry his bed, that is, to master the flesh.
125.11One should test one’s love of the world while things go well, letting go in the heart before possessions are lost; friendship with the world makes one God’s enemy and always disappoints, while God alone, who made the soul in his likeness, satisfies it without ever growing cheap.
126.1Faith comes before understanding, as Isaiah says; the Scriptures read in church are lamps in a dark place until the day dawns.
126.2Those who refuse to believe until they see are like those who want to climb without steps.
126.3Faith concerns things unseen, but the visible creation leads to its unseen maker; because people had stopped wondering at God’s daily works, Christ came to do unusual miracles.
126.5In Christ there is what can be seen, a man born of a virgin, and what must be believed, the eternal Word; his temporal miracle is medicine for the sick so that they may come to the vision the angels enjoy.
126.7Augustine prepares to speak about John 5:19, speaking what he believes and leaving his hearers to see it for themselves.
126.8The Arians take John 5:19 to show the Son is lesser, but the next words, “the Son does the same,” must also be heard; Augustine asks for quiet attention to a hard question.
126.9If the Son made things by copying the Father as a carpenter’s son copies a chest, then the Father would have made something without the Word, against John 1:3; there is only one Son by nature, the others adopted through him.
126.10The Father does nothing except through the Son, as the raising of Lazarus and the healing of the blind man show; the Trinity has one operation, as “Let us make” and “God made” together teach.
126.12Believers turn to the Word himself: all that the Father does he does through the Son, so they are equal and one; why then does the Son say he can do nothing of himself?
126.13To understand the Son’s “seeing,” one must set aside the form of a servant, in which he saw with bodily eyes, and look at the form of God, in which he is equal to the Father.
126.14Christ shows himself as man and keeps his divinity for those who love him and keep his commandments, as his words to Philip show.
126.15The Word’s seeing is the Word himself, since he is simple; to grasp it, our powers must grow through the commandment of love; “the Son can do nothing of himself” means that he is the Son because he is born of the Father.
127.1Christians are not made for present goods but for what eye has not seen; like an infant who cannot believe he will grow up, we must believe what we do not yet see.
127.2Since people labor so hard to postpone death for a few days, how much more should they labor for eternal life, which is not merely to live always but to live blessedly.
127.3Even life without sickness and pain would be worth buying with oneself, but eternal life is more than can be said; Christ, through whom all times were made, is the Son always begotten and always with the Father.
127.5The eternal begetting of the Son cannot be seen or spoken; it must be believed and worshiped until we pass from faith to sight.
127.6God will be food that nourishes without being diminished, as light feeds many eyes without growing less.
127.7The hour that “now is” is the resurrection of souls: unbelievers, dead though they walk about, are raised by the word to live by faith.
127.8All will rise in the body, but only those who have first risen in the soul by faith will rise to life; the others rise to punishment.
127.9Christ, Son of God with life in himself, became son of man by taking our nature without losing his own; he died by what he took from us, and we live by what is his.
127.10Christ will judge in the form of a servant, which both good and bad will see; the form of God is kept for the pure in heart.
127.11The supreme happiness of the good is not health or deathlessness but the sight of God, granted to those who rose in heart by obedience.
127.12The wicked will see Christ’s human form but not the glory of God, which he promised to show to those who love him.
127.13Eternal life is to know and see God after the resurrection, as Christ says in John 17:3.
127.14The hour of the bodily resurrection lies at the end of the world, when all in the tombs, good and bad, will hear Christ’s voice and come forth.
127.15The God who made us from nothing can surely raise our dust and bones; whoever believes this rises now in soul and will rise in the flesh to life.
128.1Christ’s words “my witness is not true” mean “not true in your opinion”; the sun sought lamps for eyes too weak to bear its light.
128.2John was the lamp prepared to confound Christ’s enemies; Christ bears witness to himself in the martyrs, and gives the Holy Spirit, a gift equal to himself, who pours God’s love into our hearts.
128.5Life is a wrestling between flesh and spirit; the right order is the soul subject to God and the flesh to the soul; Paul tells us not to “fulfill” the desires of the flesh, a phrase Augustine undertakes to explain.
128.7Many excuse their sins with Gal 5:17, so the shepherd must open the meaning of the text to his flock.
128.8The fight within is between the delight of adultery and the delight of chastity; the flesh’s desire against the spirit, unknown in paradise, came from the first sin and is felt only where the spirit is.
128.9The spirit that puts the deeds of the flesh to death is not man’s own spirit but the Spirit of God, as Rom 8:14 shows; God does not merely watch our fight but helps.
128.10“So that you do not do what you will” means that the saints, who want no evil desire at all, cannot yet be rid of such desires; full victory comes only in the resurrection.
128.12Since desires cannot yet be removed, sin must not be allowed to reign: by the Spirit we hold back our members from serving lust, which, finding no consent, learns not to rise.
128.13To “fulfill” the desires of the flesh is to consent to them: one who has decided to commit adultery is already an adulterer, even if he lacks the opportunity.
128.14The three dead whom Christ raised, the girl in the house, the young man carried out, and Lazarus in the tomb, stand for sin decided in the heart, sin committed, and sin become habit; none is beyond Christ’s power to raise.
129.1Augustine recalls the Gospel reading, John 5:39–47, and promises a few words on it.
129.2Christ’s words to the Jews apply to us too: the leaven of the Pharisees is seeking glory from one another and establishing one’s own righteousness instead of God’s.
129.3Augustine sets aside the Jews, who repeat the story of the stolen body that their leaders paid for.
129.4Since Christ and the Church are one flesh and one voice, the Church may say to the Donatists what Christ said to the Jews: search the Scriptures, which bear witness of me.
129.5Old Testament texts bear witness to both head and body: the seed of Abraham is Christ, and in him all nations are blessed; the psalms speak of Christ’s passion and of the Church spread through the whole world.
129.6The risen Christ himself foretold both his resurrection and the preaching of repentance to all nations; the Donatists, who say “I sanctify, I justify,” establish their own righteousness instead of God’s.
129.7The Donatist who says “I justify” imitates Antichrist, who honors his own name; a believer baptized anywhere in the Catholic Church is clean, because Christ, who is everywhere, is the one who baptizes.
129.8Catholic ministers tell the people not to place their hope in them, good or bad; the Donatists make salvation hang on the minister, as if he, and not Christ, were the rock.
129.9Moses wrote of the Church as well as of Christ; the Donatists, who believe what Christ said of the head but not what he said of the body spread through all nations, would behead the Church; Augustine asks prayer for them.
130.1The feeding of the five thousand is a sign: the five barley loaves are the five books of Moses, in which Christ is hidden, and they grow when they are broken open in explanation.
130.2Christ is the bread from heaven and the Merchant who took our birth, toil, and death and gave rebirth, resurrection, and eternal reign; his cross was the mousetrap and his blood the bait by which the devil lost his captives.
130.3Christ is one person in two substances, God and man; since God has already fulfilled his promise to Abraham by blessing all nations in Christ, we must believe he will give his eternal promises.
130.4God becoming man and dying is more incredible than man living forever; since the greater has been done, we must believe the lesser, and rejoice that we are Christians, belonging to Christ.
130.5Christians boast in their patron Christ, who is their head; in the heavenly Jerusalem, with its gates barred, they will be secure forever.
131.1Christ’s words about eating his flesh scandalized many, but his ascension shows that his body is not consumed; his body and blood give life when what is received visibly in the sacrament is eaten and drunk spiritually.
131.2Faith is God’s gift: the Father draws people to Christ, not by compulsion but by the sweetness of desire, and faith in the Crucified carries them over the waves of this world like a ship’s timber.
131.3Whoever believes must not claim it for himself, since God works in us to will and to work; grace, like rain, fills the low places and leaves the proud heights dry.
131.4Whoever trusts in his free choice to keep him on the right way is like the psalmist who said “I shall not be moved” and was troubled when God turned his face away; strength must be kept by God.
131.5Psalm 2 warns those already on the right way to rejoice with trembling, lest pride make them perish from it; blessed are those who trust in God, not in themselves.
131.6Against those who exalt human nature, Augustine says that free choice was lost by sin; baptism forgives all sins, like the Samaritan’s oil and wine, but weakness is healed only gradually in the inn, the Church.
131.7Psalm 103 lists God’s benefits in order: forgiveness in baptism, the healing of weakness now, redemption from corruption at the resurrection, and finally the crown, which is given in mercy, since even our merits are God’s gifts.
131.9The righteousness of God is the grace by which he justifies the ungodly; once hidden like the dew in Gideon’s fleece, it is now manifest throughout the world, so that those who exalt nature against it make Christ’s death vain.
131.10The Pelagians, like the Jews, have zeal without knowledge; two African councils have referred the case to the Apostolic See and received its replies, so the case is closed, though the error persists.
132.1The faithful know what Christ meant by eating his flesh; Augustine urges the catechumens to give in their names for baptism at Easter so that they too may understand and share the Lord’s table.
132.2The faithful who receive the Eucharist must live chastely: husbands must keep the fidelity they demand of their wives, and unmarried young men must keep themselves as pure as they want their brides to be, out of fear of God who sees everything.
132.3Those vowed to continence live the life of angels on earth; in the resurrection virginity, married chastity, and widowhood will shine differently, but all will share heaven.
132.4Those who do not keep chastity should not come to the Lord’s table; Augustine must speak the truth like a servant paying out his master’s money, and he prays that the unchaste be converted.
133.1Augustine sets out the question of John 7:2–10: Jesus said he was not going up to the feast of Tabernacles, and then went up.
133.2The danger is that Christ, the Truth, be thought to have lied; but one who promises in good faith and is prevented by circumstances does not lie.
133.3Being mistaken comes from weakness, lying from iniquity; a man lies when he says as true what he thinks false, with a double heart. Whether lying is ever necessary is left for another time.
133.5Christ can neither be mistaken nor lie; anyone who claims to teach the truth while calling Christ a liar destroys his own credibility.
133.6Whoever says Christ lied relies on the Gospel to prove it, yet the Gospel is only the stream from the fountain, Christ; John, who drank truth from the Lord’s breast, calls him the true light, full of grace and truth.
133.7Jesus said he was not going up “to this feast,” meaning the day his brothers expected; he went later, as it were in secret, to give his weak disciples an example of caution, as when he fled to Egypt.
133.8A second solution: speaking for his body, the Church, Christ foresaw that Christians would not keep the Jewish feasts; neither Christ nor the evangelist lied.
134.1Christ is the one Teacher of preacher and people alike; to be his disciple is not only to come to his word but to abide in it.
134.2To abide in Christ’s word is to build on the rock; its reward is the truth that makes us free, “freed” here meaning “made free,” as the Greek and the Jews’ reply show.
134.3Everyone who sins is a slave of sin, whatever his rank; a human ransomer frees a captive from barbarians but not from sin, from which only the true Deliverer frees.
134.4Only Christ, free among the dead and sinless among sinners, can free from sin and death; the devil found mortal flesh in him, but only the likeness of sinful flesh.
134.5Christ was “made sin” in that he became a sacrifice for sin, for in the Old Testament the sin offering itself is called “sin”; his blood blotted out the debtor’s bond.
134.6The devil found nothing of his own in Christ’s flesh and was caught in the trap of killing the innocent; Christ, the Truth, frees his disciples from the devil and from sin.
135.1The healing of the man born blind signifies the enlightening of a human race blinded by the devil: the clay is the Word made flesh, and washing in Siloam, “Sent,” is baptism in Christ.
135.2Against the Arian claim that the Son does another’s works, Augustine replies that by the same reasoning the Father would have another’s things, since the Son says, “All that the Father has is mine.”
135.3Father and Son hold all things in common, and the Son does the Father’s works “likewise,” not as a servant obeying a command.
135.4Even if the Father commands and the Son obeys, as between a human father and son, they share one nature; the Son, begotten “from the womb before the morning star,” was begotten from the Father’s substance before all time.
135.5If the Son does the Father’s works, the Father also does the Son’s, as “Father, I will” shows; the Son gives life to whom he will, since Father and Son have one power and one will.
135.6The healed man’s saying “God does not hear sinners” was mistaken, as the justified tax collector shows; the man still needed his heart’s eyes opened, which happened when he believed in the Son of God.
135.7No one is without sin: the Old Testament priests offered first for their own sins, Augustine himself is a sinner, and even the apostles were taught to pray daily, “Forgive us our debts.”
135.8Even after the resurrection and Pentecost the apostles were not without sin, as John, the greatest of them, confesses in 1 John 1:8–9; so all must keep praying.
136.1Christ left the man’s eyes unformed so as to heal them as a miracle; the man, like everyone, had original sin, though that was not the cause of his blindness; all are born blind in heart.
136.2The healed man erred in thinking Christ only a prophet and in saying that God does not hear sinners, as the tax collector shows; his heart was washed when he believed in the Son of God.
136.3Healing by a word was no breach of the Sabbath, but making clay was work: the Lord set aside the Sabbath, a shadow of things to come, because he himself, the Light, had come; the Jews who kept it carnally remained blind.
136.4“Those who see” are those who claimed to see by the Law and so crucified its author; blindness came on Israel in part so that the Gentiles might come in, and the crucified Light enlightened the blind world.
136.5The Law without grace only makes sinners into transgressors, like Elisha’s staff laid on the dead boy; it shut all under sin so that the promise might be given through faith in Christ, whose Spirit gives life.
136.6As Gehazi’s staff could not raise the dead boy but Elisha, stretching himself on him, did, so the Law could not give life, but Christ came in the likeness of sinful flesh and gave it.
137.1Christ is the head and the Church his body, held together by love as by health; members cold in love are sick but can be healed while they cling to the body; the risen head intercedes for us.
137.2Christ in heaven suffers in his members on earth, as the tongue cries “You are treading on me” when the foot is trodden on; so he says “I was hungry” of the needy.
137.3Christ is both door and shepherd; he questioned Peter three times after the resurrection, not because he doubted his love, but so that a threefold confession of love might undo the threefold denial he had foretold like a physician.
137.4To enter by the door is to enter through Christ in humility, as the tax collector did; the Gospel names three persons, the shepherd to be loved, the hireling to be tolerated, and the thief to be guarded against.
137.6“They sit on Moses’ seat” refers also to bad pastors in the Church, which is one Church from two peoples, Jews and Gentiles, figured by the two walls, two boats, Leah and Rachel, and the two blind men.
137.7Bad clerics try to twist “What they say, do”; the saying tells good laypeople to follow God’s word and not bad clergy’s example, while bad laypeople use bad clergy as an excuse and will share their punishment.
137.8Bad clerics claim that “what we do, do not do” refers to offering the sacrifice, which laymen may not do; but the following verse shows that it refers to burdens they lay on others and do not carry.
137.9Christ’s warning about those who say “Lord, Lord” shows that the Church contains bad ministers too; they preach not rightly because they seek from God something other than God, like a wife who loves her husband’s gold rather than her husband.
137.10God promises nothing but himself; those who preach God for God’s sake are shepherds, and this chaste love is what Christ asked of Peter.
137.11Paul tolerated hirelings who preached Christ for their own ends, since they are useful in some things; but for setting an example he sent Timothy, a true shepherd, hard to find among many hirelings.
137.12The robbers who climb in another way are the Donatists, who exalt themselves as those who sanctify; the hireling flees in spirit when he fails to rebuke an influential sinner for fear of losing his advantages.
137.13Bad pastors teaching from the seat of Moses are like thorn hedges into which a vine has grown: one may pluck the grapes, their good words, without being caught in the thorns of their deeds.
137.14Augustine refuses requests for dishonest counsel and leaves judgment of his conscience to God; like Ezekiel’s watchman and the servant entrusted with money, the preacher must warn and give, and God will exact the return.
138.1Christ calls himself the good shepherd, yet Peter, Paul, the apostles, the martyr bishops, and Cyprian were good shepherds too, because they shed their blood for the sheep out of love.
138.2Heretics who suffer for their errors falsely claim the name of martyrs; Paul shows that even giving one’s body to be burned profits nothing without love.
138.3The wicked may have gifts of God, but without love Christ will say “I do not know you”; he speaks of one good shepherd to commend unity to all good shepherds.
138.4Peter was made a shepherd when Christ entrusted his sheep to him, and a good one because he truly loved Christ, as his threefold confession shows.
138.5Christ commends one shepherd because all good shepherds are his members, and he must gather his other sheep from the Gentiles into one flock; the bride of the Song, the Church, loves him, beautiful though he seemed without beauty to the blind who crucified him.
138.7The bride asks where her bridegroom feeds at noon, that is, who are his wise and fervent ones, so that she may not fall in with the flocks of his “companions,” those who share his sacraments but have gone out in schism.
138.8The bridegroom answers sternly: unless the Church knows that she is one, spread through all nations, and chaste, she must go out after the flocks of the schismatic “shepherds”; so warned, she is strengthened.
138.9The Donatists read “where you lie down at noon (in the south)” as Christ’s answer that the Church is in Africa; but even on their reading the Church who asks the question is outside Africa.
138.10Even granting that “noon” means Africa, the words are the bride’s, not the bridegroom’s: the Church overseas asks where in divided Africa Christ’s true flock is, so as not to fall among the Donatists and their rebaptism.
139.1Christ alone is Son by nature, others by grace and adoption; therefore he alone can say, “I and the Father are one,” that is, of one nature and substance.
139.2“Of one substance” can be illustrated by earthly comparisons: if the Father is gold, so is the Son, as a human son is of the same substance as his father.
139.3Against the Arian objection that a father is greater than his son, Augustine replies that this difference is one of age, not nature, and has no place in eternity; a Son of another substance than the Father would be a monster.
139.4God, who gave creatures the power to beget their own kind, did not beget a Son of another substance; to call the Son degenerate by nature is a greater insult than calling a coward his brave father’s degenerate son.
139.5Augustine urges prayer for the Arians, many of them Arian by upbringing; by claiming to honor the Father at the Son’s expense they insult both, as a son and father are both insulted when the son is called degenerate.
140.1Faith in Christ is a great good; but since the Son is from the Father, he commends faith in himself while referring the honor to the Father.
140.2Christ has two births, from the Father without time and from the virgin in time; the Son receives all he is from the Father, including his equality, given not to one in need but in his very begetting.
140.3Christ says the Father’s commandment is eternal life; John’s Epistle calls Christ, the true Son, true God and eternal life, distinguishing him from those who are sons by grace.
140.4Against the claim that Father and Son are one only in will, as the apostles are one with God by obedience, Augustine replies that no apostle or prophet ever dared to say “I and God are one.”
140.5The Son is from the Father yet equal to him, born equal and eternal; a lesser Son would either grow, making the Father age, or remain forever deficient; the Son’s honoring of the Father does not lessen his divinity.
140.6Since the Father’s commandment is eternal life and the Son is eternal life, the commandment is the Son himself, the Father’s Word; this must be believed in order to be understood.
141.1Some philosophers saw God, the unchanging truth, through creation but did not find the way to him; Paul says they hold the truth in unrighteousness.
141.2God manifested himself to the philosophers through creation, which answers all who question it, “God made us”; but they did not glorify him, and in their pride became fools.
141.3The philosophers’ folly was idolatry: knowing God from his works, they worshiped images made by craftsmen, which, if they had hearts, would worship their makers.
141.4Christ, who is truth and life with the Father, became the way by taking human nature; those who live well outside him run fast but off the road, and it is better to limp on the way than to stride beside it.
142.1Christ is the way between despair and presumption; the enemy cannot set snares in the way, only beside it, so whoever keeps to the way is safe.
142.2Christ’s humility, the way back to the exalted Christ, was made necessary by our pride and weakness; the soul that left God for many pleasures is like an unfaithful wife, rebuked by the prophets but not given up.
142.3God rebukes the soul to heal her shame: the soul that left God for self and the world must be shown her sins, forget herself by loving God rather than the world, and return.
142.4The psalmist’s prayer that sinners be put to shame is a prayer for their good: God hates the sins we have made but loves us whom he made, and bids us turn to him so that he may turn to us.
142.5Pride’s swelling cannot pass the narrow gate until the cup of humility reduces it; Christ, the way and the door, loved us while we were ungodly, and in him the humble will possess all things.
142.6God gives all things with Christ; Christ the physician drank the bitter cup first though he needed no healing, and he invites the burdened to come and learn from him.
142.7The Creator does not ask us to learn from him how to create or to work miracles, gifts given only to some, as different members have different powers; what all must learn from him is meekness and humility of heart.
142.8Humility implants love, since love “does not envy” because it “is not puffed up.”
142.9Without love even tongues, prophecy, faith, and giving all to the poor are nothing; Christ told the rich man to sell all and then follow him, that is, imitate his humility, which Peter, though he had left everything, had not yet learned when he denied him.
142.10Peter became perfect only after the ascension; we follow Christ by imitating his meekness through the Gospel in which he is with us, and all, Augustine included, must confess imperfection and grow in love.
143.1Faith in Christ is the only cleansing from original and personal sin, since it joins us to the sinless one; therefore unbelief is the sin of which the Spirit convicts the world.
143.2Unbelief is singled out because it holds all other sins fast, while faith looses them; so Paul speaks of the Jews’ unbelief rather than their sin, since all have sinned.
143.3The Spirit brought the blessedness of believing without seeing: with Christ’s bodily presence removed, believers direct their minds to his divinity and know even his flesh spiritually, by faith.
143.4Christ had to depart bodily so that we might believe spiritually; this faith in the unseen, risen mediator is the righteousness by which the world, which believes only what it sees, is convicted.
143.5The world cannot blame the devil for its unbelief: cast out and judged, he attacks only from outside, and martyrs of every age and sex have overcome him by faith in Christ.
144.1Unbelief is named as the one sin because by it all other sins are held fast, the proud refusing to believe in a humble God; the Holy Spirit, God’s greatest gift, is grace, given freely after pardon, not as wages.
144.2To believe in Christ is more than believing that he is the Christ, which the demons do; it includes hope and love, by which one becomes a member of his body.
144.3The world is convicted of its own sin and of Christ’s righteousness; Augustine asks why only Christ’s going to the Father is called righteousness, and suggests that his coming was mercy.
144.4Christ’s coming in humility to the cross was mercy, his exaltation and return to the Father righteousness, as Phil 2:3–11 shows; so righteousness is fulfilled in us only through showing mercy.
144.5Christ alone ascends to the Father, yet we ascend in him because head and members are one Christ; he is one with the Father by nature and one with us as the seed of Abraham.
144.6Believers share Christ’s righteousness in going to the Father, now by faith and hope and fully at the resurrection; as Christ and his members are one, so the devil and the ungodly are one body under judgment.
145.1Augustine sets out the question how Christ could say “Until now you have asked nothing in my name” to disciples who had cast out demons in his name.
145.2The mind made in God’s image is satisfied only by God; Psalm 31 says his sweetness is hidden for those who fear and completed for those who hope, which raises the question of how fear and hope differ.
145.3The Law, especially “You shall not desire,” terrifies the self-reliant and shows the law of sin in their members; one who refrains from adultery only for fear of hell has not yet the love of righteousness that grace gives, by which God’s sweetness is tasted.
145.4Love, which surpasses every gift, cannot come from ourselves; whoever claims it from himself shows that he lacks it, for God has poured it into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
145.5The Law shows the captive his enemy but cannot free him; once he stops presuming on himself and cries, “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me?”, grace delivers him and he tastes the Lord’s sweetness.
145.6The disciples, still prone to desire, asked for small things like power over demons, which is “nothing” compared with God’s promise; we must ask in Christ’s name for what makes joy full, the vision of the Father in Christ.
146.1Christ entrusted his sheep to Peter as the proof of his love; pastors feed in fear and the people should obey in humility, knowing that their inheritance is the undying Father himself.
146.2The newly baptized must not imitate bad Christians; the sheep are Christ’s, not the pastors’; schismatics who baptize outside the Church put Christ’s mark on stolen sheep, and the Song of Songs bids them go out with their own kids.
147.1Peter presumed that he would die for Christ and instead denied him, showing that God is true and every man a liar.
147.2Peter, in whom the unity of all good shepherds was figured, answered truly that he loved Christ, judging only his present heart, and did not dare to claim that he loved more than the others.
147.3Christ, the Rock, made Peter truthful; after his threefold confession of love Christ foretold Peter’s crucifixion and called him to follow him now to a crown, since the resurrection had taken away the fear of death.
148.1Ananias and Sapphira died for their lie, not for keeping their own money; their temporal death taught discipline, and Augustine believes that God may have spared them afterwards, as Paul speaks of those corrected by death so as not to be condemned.
148.2If God punished Ananias and Sapphira for withholding vowed money, he is far more angry when vowed virginity or chastity is broken, since these are vowed for his own temple.
149.1Augustine pays his debt of questions from the previous Sunday, beginning with Peter’s vision of the sheet in Acts 10.
149.2The command “Kill and eat” did not command gluttony; sin lies only in immoderate use of God’s gifts.
149.3The Jewish food laws were shadows of things to come; for Christians cleanness lies in the conscience, as Paul’s rules about meat sacrificed to idols show.
149.4The clean animals with divided hoof and cud-chewing signify sound conduct and meditation on God’s word; those lacking either do not belong to the fellowship of the saints.
149.5Since Christ came, the food laws are to be understood, not kept; “Kill and eat” freed Peter from Jewish observances without commanding gluttony.
149.6The vessel let down by four cords is the Church spread through the four quarters of the world, and the animals are the Gentiles, made clean by forgiveness and to be received into Christ’s body.
149.7Peter bore the person of the Church, so the keys given to him were given to the Church; the vision overcame his fear, under pressure from Jewish believers, of admitting Gentiles like Cornelius.
149.8To “kill and eat” meant that the Gentiles’ old life should die and they should pass into Christ’s body; Peter himself understood the vision so, as Acts 10 and 11 show.
149.9The sheet was linen because moths do not eat linen: members of the Church must keep their hearts free of corrupting desires.
149.10The threefold descent signifies baptism in the name of the Trinity of the nations from the four quarters, and four times three makes the twelve apostles.
149.11The second question: how to reconcile “Let your works shine before men” with “Let your alms be in secret.”
149.12One who hides his alms entirely sets no example; one who flaunts them seeks praise and is like the foolish virgins without oil; the oil is a conscience that seeks to please God.
149.13Both commands are kept when good works are done openly for the sake of example and God’s glory, while the intention, known only to God, remains in secret.
149.14The Lord forbids acting with the goal of being seen, but bids good works be seen so that God may be glorified; Paul likewise rejoiced that God was glorified in him, pleasing men only for their salvation.
149.15The left hand is carnal desire, the right hand spiritual love: the left hand knows what the right does when alms are mixed with desire for temporal advantage.
149.16Christ and Stephen loved their enemies; the old command to hate one’s enemy may be read as hatred of the devil, while human enemies, who may yet be converted, are to be loved and prayed for.
149.17Stephen’s prayer may have won Saul’s conversion; Paul commanded prayer for persecuting kings, and those prayers have been answered now that rulers defend the Church.
149.18Every human being is a neighbor, enemies included, since we do not know whom God will bring to repentance; we love all men and hate only the devil.
149.19The “coals of fire” heaped on an enemy by kindness are the repentance that burns away his enmity.
150.1Paul, mocked at Athens as a “sower of words,” truly sowed words and reaped conduct; Augustine asks attention for an explanation of the reading.
150.2At Athens Paul’s hearers divided into mockers, doubters, and believers; like the sower of the parable he did not let fear of bad soil stop him from sowing.
150.3Augustine turns to the Epicureans and Stoics who debated with Paul, asking the educated in his Carthage congregation to vouch for what he will say of them.
150.4All people, philosophers, Christians, good and bad alike, want the happy life; the bad seek it by evil, which runs in the opposite direction from the good they seek.
150.5Providence brought only Epicureans and Stoics to debate with Paul because, man being body and soul, those who seek happiness in man must place it either in bodily pleasure, as the Epicureans did, or in virtue of mind, as the Stoics did.
150.6Paul could not place happiness in the body, as the Epicureans did, who held the soul mortal; he grieved over Christians who lived like Epicureans, saying “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”
150.7Since life or punishment follows death, as the rich man in purple learned, Christians should say not “Let us eat and drink” but “Let us fast, pray, and give alms, for tomorrow we die”; giving matters more than fasting.
150.8The Stoics placed happiness in virtue, but trusted in themselves; the Christian says that happiness is God’s gift, and virtue itself flows from Christ, the rock struck by the rod of the cross, so that we say, “I will love you, O Lord, my strength.”
150.10The happy life means truth without deception and life without death or pain, which alone deserves the name of life; the philosophers missed the way to it, but Christ, the way, the truth, and the life, has come to us.
151.1Romans 7:15–19 is dangerous when misread as an excuse for sin, so Augustine sets out to explain it.
151.2The righteous man’s life is still a war, as Rom 7 shows, and its triumph will come with the resurrection; meanwhile Gal 5 tells the baptized not to “fulfil” the desires of the flesh but to follow the Spirit.
151.3It would be better to have no evil desire at all, as the Law commands, and in the resurrection it will be healed away, since it is our own sickness, not another nature as the Manichees claim; for now we must not follow it.
151.4A baptized drunkard has his past sins forgiven but must still fight the habit; refusing consent weakens it daily, and so long as it is not obeyed the desire of the flesh is not “fulfilled.”
151.5Concupiscence, with which we are born and because of which infants are baptized, arose when Adam and Eve broke the first law and felt the shameful motion of their bodies; Christ, conceived without it, frees us from it.
151.6Paul did not do what he wanted in that he felt desire he did not want, never in that he consented to sin; he described his fight so that we would not despair when we feel the same motions.
151.7The saint does good in not consenting, but does not accomplish good, which would be not to desire; the enemy does evil in stirring desire, but does not accomplish it; this war lasts until the resurrection removes sin, death’s sting, which the Law only made more guilty.
151.8Paul, a veteran of this war, cried out for deliverance and was answered by the grace of God through Christ; until the resurrection we serve God’s law with the mind and feel the law of sin in the flesh without consenting to it.
152.1Continuing the previous sermon on Romans 7, Augustine takes up Rom 7:25–8:4 and asks for prayer, since only God gives understanding from within.
152.2Serving the law of sin with the flesh means only feeling desires without consenting; we pray to be free even of the desires, but in this life we can only refuse consent.
152.3Baptism removes the guilt of original sin and of all past sins, so there is no condemnation for those in Christ even though desire remains; they must fight it as free men.
152.4The conflict of spirit and flesh does not prove two natures from two principles, as the Manichees claim; both are from God, and the conflict is a sickness deserved by sin, to be healed into concord.
152.5Romans 8:2–3 names three laws: the law of the Spirit of life (grace and faith), the law of sin and death in our members, and the Law of Moses, a law of works that commands but cannot help and so makes sinners into transgressors.
152.6Against the Manichees, Paul calls the Law holy, just, and good; it worked death only by making sin appear and exceed measure through transgression, so that the sinner might turn to grace.
152.7The law of the Spirit is the law of grace that takes sin away; the Law of Moses shows sin but cannot remove it; the two correspond to the two Testaments, Hagar and the free Jerusalem above.
152.8Christ’s flesh, conceived by grace rather than desire, was not flesh of sin, but had its likeness, so that he could hunger, tire, and die.
152.9Christ, who takes away the sin of the world, had no sin of origin or of his own, and went to death freely, not by necessity; so the question remains by what sin he condemned sin.
152.10Some say Christ condemned sin by the sin of Judas and the Jews who killed him, a true but insufficient answer; 2 Cor 5:21 says that God made Christ himself “sin” for us.
152.11Christ was made “sin” in that he became the sacrifice for sin, since the Law calls sin offerings “sins”; by this sacrifice he condemned sin, and the law of grace takes away the sin that the law of the letter only shows.
153.1Augustine introduces the difficult passage Rom 7:5–13, reminding his hearers that God teaches within, and asks for their prayers.
153.2The Manichees use Rom 7:5 to claim that the Law of Moses is evil and not from God; anyone who reads the context will find the apostle praising the Law.
153.3The Manichee charges that Rom 7:5–6 condemns the Law; Augustine asks him to read on, since Paul foresaw the objection and answered it himself.
153.4Paul himself raised the Manichee’s objection, “Is the Law sin?”, and answered “Far from it,” so whoever appeals to his authority must accept that answer.
153.5No one, not even a debauched man, would call “You shall not desire” evil; a Manichee who does so wants to desire with impunity.
153.6Society praises the drunkard and lets a married man use harlots or his slave-girl without legal penalty, but God’s Law says “You shall not desire”; hearing it, the sinner recognizes his sin, tries to resist, fails, and becomes a transgressor.
153.7The commandment checked desire like a dam, but desire, growing stronger, burst it and overwhelmed the sinner, who failed because he relied on himself.
153.8“In the flesh” means trusting in oneself, as “flesh” often means man in Scripture; for those who so trust, the Law only increased sin and made them transgressors bound for death.
153.9To leave the flesh is to stop trusting in oneself and to put one’s hope in God, the only refuge against desire made stronger by the Law; without the Law sin lay hidden, with it sin revived.
153.10The commandment not to desire was meant for life, a sweeter life than the pleasures of desire; but only God gives the delight that makes his law sweet, so the sick soul must pray to be healed.
153.11As the serpent used God’s commandment to deceive Eve, sin uses the commandment to kill; the commandment is a weapon against the enemy only for one who, like David against Goliath, trusts in the Lord’s name.
153.12After defending the Law in a word, Paul goes on to praise it openly as holy, just, and good, against the Manichees.
153.13The good Law did not cause death; it made existing sin appear and, through transgression, made it sin beyond measure.
153.14Sin and death passed from Adam to all, so that even infants are guilty; Christ, conceived by the Spirit and not from sexual desire, frees us from inherited and added sin, for where sin abounded grace abounded more.
154.1Continuing yesterday's sermon on Romans 7, Augustine recalls that the Law is not sin but was given so that man might find himself and his weakness.
154.2Augustine asks whether Paul speaks of himself in Romans 7:14–15 and rules out reading it as if Paul committed the sins he did not want.
154.3Augustine asks whether Paul had desires he resisted and notes that Paul himself confesses he had not yet reached the righteousness of the angels promised in the resurrection.
154.4From Philippians 3 Augustine shows that Paul confessed he was not yet perfect, and states the opponents' reply that Paul lacked only immortality, not perfect righteousness.
154.5Against the claim that Paul's weakness was only bodily, Augustine points to 2 Corinthians 12, where Paul fears being lifted up by his revelations and receives a remedy.
154.6Paul's thorn in the flesh, given lest he be proud, shows he was not equal to the angels, so he may well be speaking of himself in Romans 7:14.
154.7Even those Paul calls spiritual can be tempted through the flesh, so the same person in this life is both spiritual in mind and carnal in flesh.
154.8Augustine distinguishes the wholly carnal man who consents to desire from the fighter who desires but does not follow his desires, whose victory comes only in the resurrection.
154.9The one man, made by one God, is the same self in mind and flesh, hating the desire he still feels.
154.10Paul agrees with the Law because his will rejects the desire the Law forbids, even though he still feels it; the “doing” is desiring, not consenting.
154.11Since a person is chiefly in the ruling mind, the redeemed Paul can say it is not he but sin in the flesh that acts; “I do not know” means “I do not approve,” as Christ “did not know sin.”
154.12Paul can will and resist but not yet accomplish the good, for desire still riots in the flesh until death's contention ends; resisting is much, but not perfection.
154.13The evil present to Paul is not a second substance, as the Manichees hold, but a sickness of his own flesh being healed like the half-dead man by the road.
154.14Paul is captive only in the flesh and in part, since his mind delights in God's law; yet the dead part still belongs to him and the contest goes on.
154.15Augustine asks why Paul groans to be delivered from the body of death, if he meant only the bodily death that comes to everyone soon enough.
154.16Deliverance by grace is not mere bodily death, which pagans also undergo, but the resurrection to life, while the wicked rise again to the body of death forever.
154.17The Christian is delivered from the body of this death not by losing the body but by receiving it raised and immortal, through Christ, the second man who undoes Adam's death.
155.1Augustine explains that Paul calls carnal desire “sin” because all sins spring from it; it loses its reign now when we refuse consent and perishes in the resurrection.
155.2“No condemnation now” means that while desire remains until the resurrection, the mind helped by grace can refuse it and keep the body's members from serving sin.
155.3No condemnation remains because the law of the Spirit of life in Christ sets free; Augustine then asks why the Sinai law, also written by God's finger (the Spirit), did not.
155.4The Sinai law is holy; it was given so that weakness might be revealed and increased and the Physician sought, but written on stone it did not give the help of grace.
155.5As the Law came fifty days after the first Passover, so the Holy Spirit, God's finger, came fifty days after Christ's Passover.
155.6Augustine contrasts Sinai, where God wrote on stone and terrified a people standing far off, with Pentecost, where the Spirit came gently and wrote the law on hearts, as Jeremiah foretold.
155.7What the Law could not do, God did by sending his Son in true flesh without sin, who, like the temple tax he paid without owing it, paid a death he did not owe to free us from ours.
155.8Christ had no sin but was made “sin,” that is, a sacrifice for sin, so that we might become God's righteousness in him; why some do not share it lies in God's unsearchable judgments.
155.9The Law's righteousness is fulfilled now in those who, helped by grace, refuse the flesh's desires; Baptism blotted out past sins, and daily slips are forgiven through the Lord's Prayer.
155.10The “prudence of the flesh” that cannot submit to God is a vice like limping, not a nature; remove the vice and the nature can obey, which is why the great Physician came.
155.11Against the Manichees, Augustine insists that “cannot” refers to a vice, the prudence of the flesh, not to a second evil nature; the same man is healed and becomes light in the Lord.
155.12“Those in the flesh cannot please God” means those who live by fleshly desires, not those living in the body, since patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs pleased God.
155.13Believers are “not in the flesh” only because God's Spirit dwells in them; free choice must implore help, for human nature fell even when healthy and cannot rise by its own strength.
155.14Those who have Christ's Spirit still have a body dead because of sin, but they should not despair of it, as the next verse will show.
155.15The Spirit who raised Jesus will give life to our mortal bodies; deliverance is from the body of death, not from the body, which the spirit loves as a husband his wife.
156.1Introducing Romans 8:12–17, Augustine recalls the hard passages already explained and their two conclusions: Paul is not guilty of all sins, and the Law is a help, but not like grace.
156.2The Law was given to reveal the disease so that the Physician would be sought; fallen nature cannot heal itself, and Christ heals freely and gives himself as reward; the Law is a tutor leading to Christ.
156.4Against Jews who thought the Law sufficient for free choice, Paul teaches that the Law was added for the sake of transgression, to humble the proud until Christ came; free choice in paradise showed only its power to fall.
156.5Christ is the one Mediator, God's arm stretched to fallen man; grace is medicine, not license to sin, and the faith that saves works through love, which itself is God's gift.
156.6The flesh is a small good created by God, the soul a great good, God the supreme good, Father, Son, and Spirit, one God; the flesh should live by the soul and the soul by God.
156.7Augustine contrasts the Epicureans, who lived by the flesh, and the Stoics, who lived by their own soul's virtue, with Paul at Athens, who lived according to God and placed happiness in hope in the Lord.
156.8Even a soul living by itself is carnal and cannot rise without God's outstretched arm; living by the flesh leads to the second death, not merely bodily death.
156.9Our work in this life is to put to death, by the Spirit and with God's help, the delights of the flesh one after another by refusing consent.
156.10Lest anyone trust his own spirit to mortify the flesh, Paul adds that those led by the Spirit of God are God's sons; self-reliance makes one a Stoic, not a son of God.
156.11Being led by the Spirit does not mean we do nothing: God is a helper and co-worker, which implies that we also act.
156.12God's help is not like a wind that only makes rowing easier: without it we can do nothing good, and the will that acts without it is not free but enslaved to sin.
156.13Against those who say grace only makes good works easier, Augustine cites Christ's “Without me you can do nothing,” while insisting that believers, as living stones, must also run and follow.
156.14The same Spirit who gave the Law in fear on Sinai now writes it in love on hearts; fear of punishment is a servant that keeps the place for love, which casts out fear.
156.15The cry “Abba, Father” comes from the heart, and its two words, Hebrew and Greek, show Christ the cornerstone joining Jews and Gentiles in one.
156.16The Spirit is an earnest, part of the promised whole, who bears witness that we are God's sons; our inheritance is God himself, shared with Christ.
157.1Augustine exhorts his hearers to hope for the unseen eternal things God promises, not the deceiving world's present pleasures, and to ignore those who mock them with “Let us eat and drink.”
157.2Patience in hope requires meekness that accepts God's discipline; Christ, handed over by the Father and handing himself over in one will, is the way and the example.
157.3Christ's passion teaches patience and his resurrection grounds hope, since what we hope for is already accomplished in our head; being scourged is a mark of sonship.
157.4Christians already have joy in hope; the pleasures of those who mock them are not even present now, since time itself slips away moment by moment.
157.5Temporal goods inflame, corrupt, and torment those who hope in them; Christians use them on pilgrimage without fixing their joy there, hoping for the eternal things that remain.
157.6Christ, who raised Lazarus, rose himself, and told of Lazarus and the rich man, answers those who ask who has returned from the dead; the fulfilled promise to Abraham guarantees the rest.
158.1Since God predestines, calls, justifies, and glorifies, no one can harm those for whom he is, unless he defeats God; whoever resists only harms himself.
158.2Of predestination, calling, justification, and glorification, some we have and some we await; God is our debtor only by his own promise, since we have given him nothing.
158.3God's calling is not a reward for prior worship: we did not exist when predestined, were turned away when called, and were sinners when justified, so all is grace.
158.4We are already predestined and called; justification we have in part, through baptism and faith, yet the struggle with sin remains, so no one may say he is without sin.
158.5We who believe without seeing are called blessed and so already have some righteousness, received in baptism and the Spirit; it is to grow until it is made perfect.
158.6Justifying faith differs from the demons' faith, which also confesses Christ, by hope and above all love: it is “faith working through love.”
158.7Good works should seek only God himself as reward, who alone satisfies; faith working through love belongs to this life and will give way to sight.
158.8Hope sustains the pilgrim on the way and will cease when the reality comes; in this hope the martyrs endured for Christ, who now dwells in hearts by faith.
158.9In the end God will be all in all, replacing every good sought here; faith and hope will give way to sight and reality, but love will remain and be perfected.
159.1Our justification in this life is imperfect, but the martyrs attained perfection; so at the altar the Church prays for the other departed but not for the martyrs, whose prayers we seek.
159.2The first degree of loving righteousness is to let it delight us more than everything else, even lawful pleasures of the senses, which Augustine distinguishes from unlawful ones sense by sense.
159.3Love requires delight; just as a master prefers an ugly faithful slave to a handsome unfaithful one, we already love invisible goods like faith more than visible ones.
159.4Righteousness is to be loved above all pleasures, and each inner sense, sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, finds its delight in it.
159.5Tempted to bear false witness for gold, a person must choose truth, just as he values a faithful slave; he should be faithful to the Lord who promises eternity.
159.6We should avoid sin from love of righteousness, not fear of punishment; as sin's sweetness once drew us, so righteousness should draw us by its greater sweetness, as Paul says “in human terms.”
159.7What Paul held back is that righteousness deserves more than sin received: for it one must endure pain, despising not only delights but prisons, torture, and death, as an adulterer's love does not.
159.8The martyrs are the perfect lovers of righteousness who trample both delights and terrors; so believers must climb the roof of their flesh and proclaim openly what they hear in secret.
159.9Every good we have toward righteousness comes from God, the Father of lights; we should thank him for what we have and ask him for the rest, for his giving is never exhausted.
160.1To boast in the Lord is to boast in his righteousness, not one's own; the Jews who refused the New Testament sought their own righteousness, and boasting in oneself is boasting in a fool.
160.2The Jews had zeal without knowledge because they sought their own righteousness; the believer must recognize that his righteousness is received, as the river of the Spirit flows only in one who first thirsted.
160.3Knowing Christ crucified is to hold a wrapped treasure of all wisdom; proud philosophers despise the humble wrapping and miss what eye has not seen, ear not heard, nor heart conceived.
160.4Paul boasted in the cross rather than in Christ's wisdom or majesty, because humility is the way to the heights: where there is weakness and death, there is power and life.
160.5Christ called the sons of Zebedee from the seats of glory to the cup of his passion; Christians boast in the cross and bear its sign on the forehead, the seat of shame.
160.6Circumcision, a hidden sign foreshadowing Christ (the stone knife, the eighth day), gives way to the open sign of the cross on the forehead, as the veil over the Old Testament is removed in Christ.
160.7The Jews sought their own righteousness by their own strength; Christ justifies the ungodly by faith, and even self-restraint is God's gift, since a sick soul cannot heal itself.
161.1Because Christ took a body and is our head, our bodies are his members; anyone who commits sexual immorality or adultery despises Christ in himself.
161.2Our bodies are Christ's members and the Spirit's temple; the adulterer honors his wife's bedroom but not God's temple, and though he outlives the chaste, he will be cut off from the land of the living.
161.4There are only two dwellings, eternal fire and the eternal kingdom; people who run to the bishop in terror of prison or death should fear hell's fire far more.
161.5No enemy can kill the soul, but a man can kill his own soul by lying; from what people fear on earth they should learn to fear hell and eternal death.
161.6As the soul is the life of the body, God is the life of the soul; an enemy can only drive the soul from the body, but sin drives God from the soul, a death far more to be feared.
161.7Fear of death only postpones it, but love of God, who is life, leads to never dying; the sinner should groan to God to rebuild the ruined temple within.
161.8One who refrains from adultery only for fear of hell is not yet to be praised, though Christ commands that fear; such fear is a guard and tutor that keeps the place for love, which makes one not want to sin.
161.9As love enters, slavish fear of punishment departs, but love brings chaste fear, the fear of displeasing a loving Father, which keeps one from sin even without witnesses.
161.10A lustful lover fears only that his beloved will not see him; if we loved God, the thought of not seeing his face would terrify us, and if not, let us at least fear hell.
161.11Marriage is lawful and suffices, but consecrated virgins, out of greater love, take Paul's counsel and give up even marriage, adorning the inner person rather than the outer.
161.12Consecrated virgins, overcoming even their parents' opposition, seek to please Christ by inner beauty; their example should teach married people at least to avoid adultery.
162.1Augustine poses the difficulty of 1 Corinthians 6:18: how can every other sin be “outside the body” when all the sins Paul lists, even those of the mind, are done in or through the body?
162.2First solution: Paul magnifies sexual immorality above other sins because in it alone lust so absorbs the mind into the body that it becomes the body's slave and can think of nothing else.
162.3Second solution: Scripture also speaks of a general fornication, the soul's cleaving to the world instead of God; in this sense whoever loves the world sins against his own body, while other sins of frailty are outside it.
162.4Augustine sums up the two possible readings of 1 Corinthians 6:18: sexual immorality as the sin that most enslaves a person to the body, or the soul's general fornication, love of the world that turns away from God.
163.1Preaching where idols once stood, Augustine compares the dedication of a former pagan place to God with the conversion of people into God's temple, enlarged by love so that God may walk in them.
163.2As a converted pagan site has its idols destroyed and other parts put to better use, so the works of the flesh must be destroyed in us; the temple, dedicated in Christ's resurrection, is being built throughout the whole earth.
163.4The new song belongs to the new man and the New Testament; Christ is God's salvation, longed for by the righteous of old and seen by Simeon, and the apostles, the heavens, proclaimed him to all the earth.
163.6Paul as architect builds the new (walking by the Spirit) and pulls down the old; since fleshly desires cannot be removed in this life, the believer must refuse to carry them out.
163.7Victory over desire will come at the resurrection; meanwhile God delays his help so that we feel the struggle and are not proud, yet he is present even in delaying.
163.8Paul, fearing pride, received the angel of Satan as a remedy, like theriac made from the serpent; God was present even in refusing his prayer, as a physician is present when he cuts.
163.9The triumphant cry over death belongs to the resurrection; until then the humble fighter must pray “Forgive us our debts” and confess truthfully that he is not without sin.
163.10The Law alone, commanding without the Spirit's help, increases desire and becomes sin's power; Christ forgave all sin, teaches prayer, and helps and crowns the one who fights.
163.11The Law shuts all under sin like railings so that we flee to grace; the promise is God's own act, given to believers, and victory over death is his gift through Christ.
163.12In the struggle against the flesh the believer must call on God continually and confess “Wretched man that I am,” and will be answered that deliverance comes by God's grace through Christ.
164.1Augustine announces his theme from Galatians 6:2: what the burdens are that we must bear for one another and how, so as to fulfill the law of Christ.
164.2Galatians 6 says both “bear one another's burdens” and “each will bear his own burden,” so the burdens must be distinguished.
164.3“Each will bear his own burden” answers those who fear contamination by others' sins; “bear one another's burdens” answers those who would therefore neglect to correct anyone.
164.4The burdens each bears himself are sins; Christ calls the burdened to be refreshed, while avarice and sloth pull a man in opposite directions and avarice drives him across the seas instead of giving to the poor at his door.
164.6The hearers who acclaim the sermon should lay down the packs of avarice; Christ takes away the bad burdens and replaces them with his own yoke of love.
164.7Christ asks us to learn from him not his divine works or miracles but gentleness and humility; his burden is light as feathers are to a bird, not a weight but wings.
164.8The merciful should persevere in doing good even to the ungrateful; and if an avaricious man approaches the altar beside them, they need not fear, for each bears his own burden, provided they do not share his sin.
164.9Poverty is the poor man's burden and wealth the rich man's; by giving, the rich man lightens both burdens, as two fellow travelers on God's road share provisions.
164.10The Donatists, who refuse communion with Catholics in order to stay holy, carry heavier burdens of schism, slander, and animosity, and refuse to put them down.
164.11Others' sins do not justify leaving the Church, a flock and threshing floor mixed of good and bad; sharing Christ's table with a sinner does not share his sin, though church judges must still discipline the convicted.
164.12Caecilian's condemnation by seventy bishops in his absence was later overturned three times, and the Donatists themselves do not accept the Maximianists' condemnation of their own absent bishop Primian; imperial laws are tools to bring back the wheat.
164.13At the Conference of Carthage the Donatist advocate himself said “neither case prejudges case, nor person person,” which, like Caiaphas's prophecy, confirms that each bears his own burden and that Caecilian's guilt could not defile the world-wide Church.
164.14Augustine hopes the Donatist leaders will admit their error to their people and lead them back into the Church as they once led them away.
164.15Catholics must treat the Donatists patiently and gently, without gloating over their victory, since no one is wholly healthy and all must bear one another's burdens.
165.1Paul both asks the Ephesians not to lose heart, appealing to their will, and kneels to pray that God give it, showing that free choice is real but insufficient without God's help.
165.2What Paul asks of the Ephesians, not to lose heart, he asks of God for them, to be strengthened by the Spirit; God gives, but the will must open to receive.
165.3The four dimensions of Ephesians 3:18 are found in the cross: the crossbeam for the hands, the upright, the top above the head, and the hidden part in the ground from which all the rest rises.
165.4The cross's breadth is love that gives cheerfully, its length is perseverance to the end, and its height is the lifted heart that loves God freely and seeks him alone as reward.
165.5Why grace is given to one and not another is the hidden depth of the cross, God's unsearchable judgment, before which Augustine can only cry out in wonder.
165.6Some explained God's hidden choices by saying souls sinned in heaven before birth, but Paul's words about Jacob and Esau refute this, and even the new opponents do not dare to say it.
165.7Against the claim that God creates everyone immortal and each dies for his own sins, Augustine points to dying infants, who have no personal sin and so must die from Adam's sin and need Christ's grace.
165.8Infants dying in the womb have done no good or evil, so death comes from Adam's sin; Christ's grace alone saves young and old, and why one rather than another is unsearchable, so we should simply trust God's mercy.
166.1Augustine sets out to reconcile “Putting away lying, speak the truth” with “Every man is a liar”: God commands that we not be merely men.
166.2Paul rebuked the Corinthians for being “men,” and the Psalm calls believers “gods”; lying belongs to the old man, Adam, and truth to the new man, Christ, so putting off Adam reconciles the two texts.
166.3One who remains a mere man speaks lies from his own; one who puts on Christ speaks truth received from God, which becomes his own when he loves it and gives thanks.
166.4Believers are called not to be mere men but sons of God, made gods by grace and adoption, not by nature; truthfulness is God's gift, and the whole person, deified, will cling to unchanging truth in the resurrection.
167.1Days are made evil by human misery and malice; since Adam's fall all days have been evil, and the newborn's first cry prophesies the toil and fear of life.
167.2Because the days are evil, the righteous suffer persecution simply by living among the wicked, as Lot did in Sodom, and danger from false brothers lasts until the end of the world.
167.3To redeem the time means to give up some money or property rather than be drawn into lawsuits, buying quiet for God as one buys goods in the market.
167.4A Punic proverb and Christ's command to give up one's cloak teach that it is better to lose money than peace; but the bishop as judge warns the slanderer who exploits this that he will face judgment.
168.1God promised the Gentiles to Abraham and himself fulfils the promise, so believers are children of Abraham's faith by God's doing; even their faith is God's gift.
168.2Paul's “peace, love with faith” runs from end to beginning: faith that works through love, unlike the demons' faith born of fear, leads to the true and secure peace that is the goal of all good desire.
168.3Peace, love, and faith are from God, as Paul's greeting says; his own conversion shows it, for Saul, raging and merciless, obtained mercy so that he might become faithful.
168.5Against the Pelagian objection that our faith and prayer come first and earn the rest, Augustine answers that no one gives God anything first: faith itself is received, and we give God only from his own gifts.
168.6Faith is given even to unbelievers through the prayers of the faithful, as Stephen prayed for those stoning him; the churches glorified God, not Paul, for Saul's conversion.
168.7Paul's name means “little,” and he called himself least of the apostles; he owed all he was to grace, and when he said he labored more than all, he at once added “not I, but the grace of God with me.”
168.8Believers pray for unbelieving friends and spouses to be given faith, which shows that faith is God's gift and no one may boast except in the Lord.
169.1Introducing Philippians 3:3, Augustine compares the Latin “serve God in spirit” with the Greek manuscripts' “serve the Spirit of God,” and finds both true: the spirit rules the flesh well only when ruled by God.
169.2“We are the circumcision” means “we are righteousness,” not our own but God's, given to us in Christ, who did not grasp at equality with God but emptied himself to make us rich.
169.3True circumcision is done by Christ the rock, risen on the eighth day, the Lord's day; justification is from grace, which goes before all merit, as God saves “for nothing.”
169.4Paul could have trusted in the flesh more than anyone, so his contempt for it is not the contempt of one who lacks it.
169.5Paul lists his fleshly grounds for confidence: eighth-day circumcision, the tribe of Benjamin, Pharisaism, and zeal in persecuting the Church; his name changed from Saul the tall to Paul the little.
169.6Paul counted his blameless righteousness under the Law as loss and even dung for Christ, though the Law is holy, which raises the question how a good thing could be loss.
169.7Augustine states the difficulty: the Law is holy and from God, yet Paul counted his righteousness under it as dung and called it “my own righteousness from the Law” in contrast to righteousness from God through faith.
169.8“My own righteousness from the Law” is keeping the commandments from fear of punishment, which restrains desire like a frightened lion or wolf without changing it; God's righteousness is the delight in good that he alone gives.
169.9Saul persecuted the Church because he sought his own righteousness from the Law by his own strength, stumbling over Christ the humble stone, until Christ called to him in mercy from heaven.
169.10Struck down and healed, Paul rejected his own righteousness for God's; Israel stumbled over Christ, and Paul prays for their conversion, which itself needs God's help, since they had zeal without knowledge.
169.11One must not build one's own righteousness, even from the Law, but receive it from God as a garment; Christians who disparage grace stumble over Christ more gravely than those who crucified him.
169.12The “power of Christ's resurrection” is not only the raising of his flesh, which ours will even surpass by rising from ashes, but our justification, the true circumcision by Christ the rock.
169.13Justification is wholly from God, yet not without our will: God made us without our consent, but he does not justify us without it; still the righteousness is his, not ours.
169.14Even robbers endure torture out of some fleshly love; so sharing in Christ's sufferings requires love, but love of God, which only God gives.
169.15Only love makes suffering profitable and makes a true martyr; that love is poured into hearts by the Holy Spirit, a rich guest who enlarges rather than crowds the soul.
169.16Paul, conformed to Christ's death by baptism, confessed that he was not yet perfect: the one thing he lacked was to dwell in the Lord's house and contemplate his delight.
169.17Martha's good service of the saints will pass away, but Mary chose the better part, contemplation of the Word, the one thing that will not be taken away and that Paul had not yet attained.
169.18Paul calls himself and others “perfect” as travelers, not as possessors; Christians must always press on, never stopping, turning back, or straying, for a lame man on the way is better than a runner off it.
170.1Augustine asks how Paul could count as dung his blameless life under the Law, given by God, while elsewhere confessing he was a blasphemer and persecutor saved by mercy.
170.2Paul's words must not be taken in the Manichaean sense that the Law came from an evil god; the Law is good, given to reveal the sickness of those who thought themselves healthy, while all inherit Adam's sin, even day-old infants.
170.3Psalm 51:4 is said by fallen humanity to Christ, who alone, born of a virgin without sin, was judged though innocent and so prevailed over the devil.
170.4“The world” means those who love the world, whose prince is the devil; in Christ alone the devil found nothing, while David, though lawfully born, confesses that he was conceived in iniquity, the inheritance of all born of man and woman.
170.5Paul's being “without complaint” refers to human judgment: one can refrain from seizing others' goods while still desiring them, and so be guilty before God; the Jews credited even their outward righteousness to themselves.
170.6Since no one alive can fulfil “You shall not desire,” the Psalmist asks to be heard in God's righteousness, not his own, and not to be judged, for no one living is justified in God's sight, though one may be in men's.
170.7Compared with the angels' righteousness in the resurrection, where there will be no desire, present righteousness is loss and dung; whoever thinks he has fulfilled it stops on the way, and a humble sinner is better than a proud righteous man.
170.8Paul calls himself both imperfect and perfect because human perfection is to know one is not perfect; reading Scripture should show us our guilt and turn our desire toward the future righteousness.
170.9Perfect righteousness comes only when we see God's face, whose sweetness overcomes all desire; until then believers must wait patiently, for little time remains compared with the ages that have passed.
170.10Christ rose on the first day, we on the last; each person's last day is near, so desire should be only for eternal life, of which the Spirit is now a pledge, not for self-satisfied comparison with others.
170.11Christ is a way that cannot be cut off; walking in him without stopping, looking back, or straying, we arrive, but must boast in God, not ourselves, and neither envy nor mock others.
171.1Christians must rejoice in the Lord, not in the world, and they can do so even while in the world, since God, in whom we live and move, is everywhere and has become our neighbor.
171.2The Good Samaritan is Christ, near to us by mercy though far by nature; the name means “guardian,” and when called a Samaritan and demon-possessed he denied only the demon.
171.3God was far from us by unlikeness, not place; he became our neighbor by taking our mortality without our guilt, destroying both; the world's joy is wickedness unpunished, while God mercifully chastises now to spare us hell.
171.5Impunity is the worst punishment, for God in great anger leaves the sinner unpunished, while he chastises his sons in mercy; Christ, the only Son, made many sons by his blood, so rejoice in the Lord.
172.1Grief at the death of loved ones is natural, since death is a punishment from which nature recoils, but Christians grieve with the hope of resurrection, not as those without hope.
172.2Funerals and monuments console the living, but the Church's prayers, the eucharistic sacrifice, and alms help the faithful dead, though only those who lived so as to be helped; no new merit is gained after death.
172.3Mourners may weep with healable grief and should be comforted by others; burial is a good work praised in Scripture, but offerings, prayers, and alms that help the dead matter much more.
173.1At commemorations of the dead we should hope and fear: the righteous will hear “Come, blessed,” the wicked “Go into the fire”; Christ's promise means that believers who die in body live in spirit and will not die forever.
173.2Faith in the resurrection distinguishes Christians from pagans; grief is human and Christ himself wept, not for Lazarus but for death, the penalty of the soul's desertion of God; death is so bitter that martyrs' courage is great.
173.3Christians must grieve, but not as those without hope: the departed soul leaves the body lifeless, yet Paul's promise of resurrection and of being always with the Lord consoles, for Christ too passed through death.
174.1Paul calls the saying that Christ came to save sinners “human” because Christ, always present as God, came by his humanity; and he who took man into himself is supremely humane.
174.2Adam shows what free will does without help, Christ what grace does; Christ's humanity, one nature with ours but sinless, was united to the Word with no prior merit, so we too must seek his gifts, not our merits, and be small like Zacchaeus.
174.3Zacchaeus, small and hindered by the proud crowd, climbed the sycamore, the “foolish fig,” as the humble climb the cross that seems foolish to the world's wise, and so see Jesus.
174.4Zacchaeus saw because he was first seen, as Christ saw Nathanael under the fig tree, the tree of Adam's shame: grace goes before, for we see and love because we were first seen and loved.
174.5Christ, already received into Zacchaeus's heart, entered his house; Zacchaeus gave half to the poor and kept the rest to make restitution, showing that to receive Jesus is to receive him into the heart.
174.6The crowd that thought itself healthy blamed Jesus for entering a sinner's house, as if blaming a physician for visiting the sick; Christ made his own blood a medicine even for those who killed him.
174.7To deny that infants have anything for Jesus to save is to deny that he is Jesus, Savior, to baptized infants, who become his members, receive his sacraments, and share his table.
174.8Christ came only to save sinners, and his name Jesus means he saves his people from their sins; infants belong to that people, so those who answer for them at baptism must bring them with this faith.
174.9Augustine pleads for infants, who cannot speak for themselves: all inherit Adam's sin and pass to Christ only by baptism; baptized parents beget by the flesh, so their children too must be reborn, as the ancient rule of faith holds.
175.1Christ came only to save sinners, as a physician to a sick human race; the proud who thought themselves righteous were left like the ninety-nine on the mountains, sick while believing themselves healthy.
175.2Those who thought themselves healthy were delirious like fevered men who laugh while the sane weep; in their madness they beat and killed the Physician, who went on healing them as they did.
175.3Christ prayed for his killers and was heard, making his blood their medicine; at Pentecost the apostles' speech in all languages, a sign of the Church's unity, humbled the hearers from mountains into valleys that receive grace.
175.4Pierced by Peter's preaching, Christ's killers asked what to do and were told to repent and be baptized in the name of the one they had killed; they were healed, the answer to Christ's prayer for them.
175.5Christ came for sinners, but not so that they remain sinners: as a physician loves the health he wants to produce, not the disease he finds, Christ loves the healed more than the sick.
175.6Augustine asks how Paul can call himself the first of sinners when Adam, many Jews, and even Peter, who denied Christ, sinned before him.
175.7Paul is “first” of sinners as a craftsman is first in skill: the worst, for Saul was the fiercest persecutor, at Stephen's stoning and on the road to Damascus.
175.8Ananias, whose name means “sheep,” feared to go to Saul the wolf, but Christ, who as David was persecuted by Saul, had turned the wolf into a sheep and would make him a shepherd.
175.9Paul, the worst of sinners, was healed as a sign that no one should despair; but sinners must not stay in sin's bed, rising instead to health and crediting it to God, since self-praise makes one sicker.
176.1Augustine announces the three readings of the day, 1 Timothy 1:15–16, Psalm 95, and the ten lepers of Luke 17, and proposes to treat each briefly.
176.2No one descended from Adam is healthy without Christ's grace, including infants, whom the Church brings to baptism on others' feet, hearts, and tongues; to deny their need is to keep them from the Physician.
176.3Paul is first of sinners not in time but in the greatness of his sin, as an advocate is “first” in skill; none was fiercer as a persecutor.
176.4Christ healed Paul, his fiercest enemy, first, as a new physician first cures the hopeless, so that no one would despair; Paul now tells the sick what was healed in him.
176.5God made us and also saves us, for no one re-creates but the Creator; his grace goes before even our good will, so we should go before his anger by confessing that all good is from him and all evil from ourselves.
176.6Inconstant doctrine, many-colored like leprosy, is cleansed by Christ; like the one grateful leper, a foreigner, believers must thank God for all they are and have, since only sin is their own.
177.1Taking 1 Timothy 6:7–10 as his text, Augustine notes that almost everyone condemns avarice in words but keeps it in deeds; not having it is far greater than denouncing it.
177.2Pagan philosophers also condemned avarice, but only Christ's school adds “flee these things and pursue righteousness, faith, love”; Christians, adopted sons, should use goods like an inn on a journey, not an estate.
177.3On life's short journey, one needs only food and clothing; one should flee the love of money, master gold by giving it, and pursue the inner riches of righteousness and faith that no thief or shipwreck can take, as Job did.
177.5Enough for the present suffices; hoarding treasure binds the heart to the earth and makes the response “Lift up your heart” a lie, though Augustine grants a distinction between being rich and wanting to be rich.
177.6Paul condemns wanting to become rich, for desire always seeks what it lacks; avarice is like dropsy, in which the more one drinks, the more one thirsts.
177.7One who is already rich must not want to be rich nor be proud: the rich and poor are equal before birth, death, fever, and decay; the rich should possess without love and not be possessed.
177.8The rich should not hope in uncertain riches but in the living God, who gives temporal things to use and himself to enjoy, and who will be all in all.
177.9God alone, who made all things and holds their patterns in himself, suffices; the soul that leaves him to have more, like the prodigal son, loses everything, and Adam's first sin was avarice, for God did not suffice him.
177.10The rich should prove their freedom from love of money by giving readily, an exchange in which they give earthly things and receive heaven and God himself; against anxious fears for the future, God's promise “I will not leave you” is a written bond.
178.1Prompted by the reading on the qualities of bishops, Augustine takes up the duty to be able to refute those who contradict, a heavy burden made harder by fear of harsh words.
178.2Most “contradict” not by words but by bad lives; if the rich fool who only hoarded his own crops was condemned, how much worse those who seize other people's property.
178.3God's “Fool” is a sentence of damnation; and the rich man of Luke 16 was condemned not for robbery but only for his lack of mercy to Lazarus, so robbers can expect worse.
178.4Alms given from robbery are not accepted by God: the robber feeds one Christian by despoiling another, and if those who failed to clothe Christ go into eternal fire, what of those who stripped him?
178.5Robbing pagans to give to Christians is also forbidden, for it hinders their conversion; the claim that it is discipline would be believable only if the goods were returned once they became Christians.
178.6No one contradicts the sermon against robbery in words, but many do in deeds; Augustine urges both robbers and their victims, who may only lack the power, to give up the desire to seize.
178.7The blessed are those who could do wrong unseen and did not: returning a deposit made without witnesses or a purse found on the road, as God's Law commands found things to be returned.
178.8A poor Christian schoolmaster's assistant at Milan returned a purse of nearly two hundred solidi and refused any reward until compelled, then gave it all to the poor; whoever keeps what he finds has stolen it.
178.10Refraining from evil only out of fear does not change the heart, as a wolf scared from the fold remains a wolf; one must do good from love of righteousness, not only from fear of hell.
178.11Chaste love desires to see God himself: whoever would be terrified if God, removing every threat of punishment, said only “I will deny you my face” loves freely, and that spark should be nourished until it burns up carnal desires.
179.1Taking James 1:22, Augustine notes that preachers too must be hearers, and that hearers stand in a safer place than preachers, who are told to be slow to speak.
179.2Augustine, preaching at his bishop's command, confesses that he rejoices more securely in hearing than in preaching, since hearing humbles and preaching risks pride, like John the Baptist who stood and heard the Bridegroom.
179.3Mary, sitting at Jesus' feet, chose the better part of hearing, as John stood and heard the Bridegroom; Martha's hospitality to Christ and the apostles was a great good, still possible through serving the least.
179.4Martha's service of bodily needs will cease when mortality ends, though its reward remains; Christ deigned to hunger so that those who fed him might be rewarded, while Mary's part will never be taken away.
179.5Mary's part does not pass, for she was fed on truth, receiving crumbs of the full feast to come; indeed she was eating Christ himself, the truth and the bread from heaven.
179.6Bodily service will pass, but the food of truth grows into the full banquet of the kingdom, where Christ will serve his saints; the hearers' present delight in truth, though they see no bodily form, foreshadows that sweeter joy.
179.7Hearers already do now what all will do in heaven, where the Word himself teaches; all must be doers of the word both inwardly, as against lustful looks, and outwardly, as in feeding the hungry, before God who sees the heart.
179.8As Christ's parable teaches, to hear and do is to build on rock, to hear and not do is to build on sand, and the house on sand falls in ruin.
179.9Not hearing is no refuge, for the storms of this world come regardless and the one who builds nothing is swept away naked; the only good is to hear and do.
179.10To hearers who question whether the preacher practices what he preaches, Augustine answers that if he does they should imitate him, and if not they should follow Christ's rule: do what they say, not what they do.
180.1James 5:12, echoing Christ's command not to swear at all, raises a hard question, since it forbids not only perjury but swearing, and does so “above all.”
180.2Swearing is not itself sin, since God swore and the saints swore; perjury lies in the mind, as when one swears to what one thinks false, even if it proves true; because men are easily deceived and swear constantly, Scripture's shortcut is: do not swear.
180.3Swearing truthfully is not sin, but it walks on the edge of the precipice of perjury, since human minds are easily deceived; only God swears securely, so the safe course is not to swear.
180.4The Law commands rendering oaths, so swearing truly is not condemned, but perjury is deadly and true oaths dangerous; Augustine, who always avoided this question, believes God led him to it today.
180.5Paul swore, as the Greek of 1 Corinthians 15:31 shows (νή, “by,” as in νὴ τὸν θεόν, “by God”), and elsewhere called God as witness, so truthful swearing is not sin.
180.6Calling God as witness (“God knows,” “God is witness”) is an oath just as much as “by God,” and those who deny it only want to lie with God as witness.
180.7To swear is to render right to what one swears by, pledging it to God; perjuring oneself by God is worse than by one's child, for although God cannot be harmed, the perjurer harms himself and deceives his neighbor.
180.8The perjurer who seems to prosper is already dead in soul, for as the soul is the body's life, God is the soul's life and departs at perjury; his luxuries are the worms of a dead soul.
180.9James says “above all, do not swear,” not because swearing is worse than murder or adultery, but to put us on guard against the habit of constant oaths, which most leads to perjury.
180.10Augustine confesses he once swore habitually and overcame it by fear; he now swears only when necessary for the good of an unbelieving hearer, and the “evil” beyond yes and no is then the hearer's unbelief, as with Paul's oath to the Galatians.
180.11One who demands an oath from someone he knows will swear falsely is a murderer; some thieves refuse to swear when accused, claiming Christian scruple, yet swear constantly in idle talk; the daily habit of needless oaths must be cut off.
180.12The habit of swearing requires extra vigilance because the tongue slips easily; even pagans fear to swear falsely by their stone idols, and a Christian who swears falsely by an idol is still a perjurer, since he deceives his neighbor before God.
180.14Augustine asks his hearers to admonish one another at home, assuring them from experience that if they avoid swearing for three days the habit will die.
181.1John's “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves” means that no one in this life is without sin, not even a day-old infant, nor the baptized believer, who lies if he says he is righteous.
181.2The Pelagians, swollen with pride, claim the righteous, indeed the whole Church, are without sin, citing Ephesians 5:27, a Church “without spot or wrinkle.”
181.3The Pelagians admit they themselves are sinners, though baptized members of the Church; so the Church on earth is not without spot, and by their own claim they have put themselves outside it.
181.4If the Pelagians call themselves sinners only out of humility while believing themselves righteous, they lie, and John condemns not a lack of humility but a lack of truth.
181.5To call oneself a sinner while believing oneself righteous is a lie, and so makes one a sinner after all; there is no humility where falsehood reigns.
181.6The whole Church, apostles included, prays daily “Forgive us our debts,” and Christ explains the debts as sins; whoever will not say it is outside the Church even if present in body.
181.7The Lord's Prayer belongs to baptized sons, and the whole Church prays it; the Church is made without spot or wrinkle by confession and forgiveness here, stretched like cloth on the fuller's frame of the cross, and is presented spotless in heaven.
181.8Confession, humility, prayer, and tears heal the daily sins we cannot avoid, though a good Christian does not commit the deadly sins; God forgives our debts on the fixed condition that we forgive others.
182.1John commands believers to test the spirits because of false prophets, and gives the test: every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ come in the flesh is from God; so the Manichees, who deny it, must be rejected.
182.3Against the Manichaean argument that a spirit not from God proves a second nature, Augustine answers that the error is not from God but the man is: the spirit's vice must be healed, not its nature separated, since only the Trinity is immutable and creatures are good but changeable.
182.4Against the Manichaean claim that the soul is part of God, Augustine argues that the soul errs and sins, which the divine nature cannot do; so we pray “Deliver us from evil,” that is, from our evil selves.
182.5Only Christ is the true light; we are lamps to be lit, and our evils are vices, not natures, to be healed until we become wholly light in the resurrection, when death and sin will be no more.
182.6Human evil is error and weakness, healed by God as light and salvation; Christ took flesh without ceasing to be God, and those who believe pass from darkness to being light in the Lord.
182.7Augustine defers to the next sermon the further question how many heresies, Donatists, Arians, Eunomians, Photinians, can confess Christ come in the flesh and yet not be from God.
183.1Augustine takes up the question deferred from Sermon 182: how “every spirit that confesses Christ come in the flesh is from God,” when Arians, Donatists, Pelagians, and others confess it.
183.2Since John's statement is true, the heretics must be shown not truly to confess Christ come in the flesh.
183.3The Arian, though preaching the virgin birth, does not confess Christ come in the flesh, for Christ is the Son of the living God, as Peter confessed, not merely more than a man.
183.4The full confession joins Christ's “Son of Man” with Peter's “Son of the living God”; the Arian, who says “in the beginning God made the Word,” denies John's “in the beginning was the Word” and so denies the Son.
183.5The true Son is Son by nature, equal to the Father in the form of God, who emptied himself by taking the form of a servant without losing the form of God; the Arian who denies his equality denies the Son and so Christ come in the flesh.
183.6The Eunomians, who deny the Son is even like the Father, deny Christ, and so deny that Christ has come in the flesh.
183.7The Sabellian, who makes the Son the same as the Father, describes someone who is not Christ and so denies that Christ has come in the flesh.
183.8Photinus, who calls Christ only a man, denies the form of God and so denies that Christ has come in the flesh.
183.9Donatists who deny the Son's equality with the Father deny Christ; most Donatists, however, confess the same faith in the Son as Catholics.
183.10Donatists who confess the orthodox doctrine of the Son still deny Christ by their deeds, by pride and schism, for Christ loves unity; the Bridegroom himself must tell who his bride is.
183.11Christ, the Bridegroom, defined his bride in Luke 24: repentance preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem; so his bride is the worldwide Church, not the party of Donatus, and to claim otherwise is to deny Christ.
183.12The Pelagian, by making every infant's flesh equal to Christ's sinless flesh, denies that only Christ came in the likeness of sinful flesh; mothers who bring infants to baptism to be saved testify against him, so he too denies Christ come in the flesh.
183.13All heretics, and bad Catholics too by their deeds, deny Christ come in the flesh; faith without works is like the demons' faith, which confessed Christ from fear, unlike Peter's confession from love.
183.14Peter's loving confession came from the Father's revelation, not from himself; when he spoke from his own, recoiling from Christ's passion, he was called “Satan,” showing that both right faith and good life are God's gifts.
183.15Believers should confess Christ come in the flesh by faith and good life, both received from and to be perfected by him, and the sermon closes with the full prayer of thanksgiving.

About this work

Author: Augustine of Hippo
Attribution: authentic
Standing: Honoured by the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions. Honoured as a saint or in a church calendar by: Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant.
Older English translation: NPNF 1/6: Sermons on Selected Lessons of the New Testament (R. G. MacMullen, ed., 1888) (public domain, at CCEL; for comparison: our translation is made from the original first and checked against it afterwards) · Public-domain English translation, for comparison. It covers only sermons 51-147 of this collection (and a few others), not the whole.
Date: ca. 391-430 (approximate) · Preached at Hippo Regius, Carthage, and elsewhere in North Africa during Augustine's priesthood and episcopate; the individual sermons are dated only in part, and many dates are disputed.
Written at: Hippo Regius, Africa Proconsularis (North Africa) (probable)
Language: Latin
Genre: homily
Reference system: sermon.paragraph: the sermon's number in the Maurist edition (the numbering of Migne, PL 38-39), then Migne's paragraph number. This work holds class I of the Maurist arrangement, the sermons on Scripture (nos. 1-183, PL 38). Classes II-IV (nos. 184-396, PL 38-39) can be added later under the same work without changing any address.
SBL abbreviation: Serm.Not yet checked
Text from: Sancti Aurelii Augustini Hipponensis episcopi opera omnia, vol. 5, Sermones ad populum, class I (Maurist text), in J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus, series Latina, vol. 38 (Paris: Garnier, 1863) (Printed edition in the public domain; digital text CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sermons to the People

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About this work