Ideas from Les Confessions
437 ideas
Sample Ideas
- According to Porphyry (as reported by Augustine), the radical skepticism of the ancient Academy concealed an esoteric positive doctrine whose purpose was to protect Plato’s spiritual metaphysics against the materialism of Stoics and Epicureans.
- Augustine offers a stringent critique of ‘the torrent of human custom’ and pagan literary culture, arguing that mythological fictions like those of Homer and Terence, which attribute divine sanction to vice (e.g., Jupiter’s adulteries), normalize immorality and are publicly funded, while the neutral beauty of words is corrupted by being filled with the ‘wine of error’.
- The unruly license of Carthaginian students, socially tolerated but contrary to God’s eternal law, already contains its own punishment: in thinking themselves free to disrupt their teachers and act with impunity, they are in fact blinded by their behaviour and inflict worse damage on themselves than on others.
- Rejecting explicit animal sacrifice to demons does not amount to true purity if one still clings to superstitious and idolatrous conceptions of God; imagining God as a luminous physical object is spiritual fornication that effectively sacrifices oneself to demons (‘feeds the winds’).
- Augustine holds that God mercifully rewarded his friend Verecundus’ generous hospitality by granting him baptism and entry into ‘evergreen paradise’ before death, and likewise brought Nebridius from Manichaean error into Catholic faith and chastity, where he now lives in ‘Abraham’s bosom’ drinking divine wisdom and interceding without forgetting his friends.
- Confessing past sins and shame before God is itself a form of praise and sacrificial worship, a ‘victim of jubilation’ offered from memory of a misguided life.
- Formless matter is prior to formed things only in origin, not in time or value: like sound that is simultaneously produced with song yet receives the form of song from the singer’s soul, primordial matter was made ‘first’ as the material out of which heaven and earth were formed, though time itself arises only with formed things, and it is the lowest in worth and created ex nihilo.
- The fifth day’s reptiles and birds signify sacramental and symbolic ‘bodily works’—mystic actions and words in the realm of the senses—through which the Church’s mysteries creep amid the world’s temptations and fly under the firmament of Scripture, preaching the gospel to all nations, especially needed because of Adam’s fall.
- Augustine comes to prefer the Catholic Church’s epistemic modesty—inviting belief in undemonstrable matters—over the Manichees’ rash promise of scientific certainty, and he argues that belief in unverified testimonies is rational and practically unavoidable, since much of human life (including knowledge of one’s own parents) rests on trusting what one has not seen.
- Augustine now holds that evil has no positive existence but is a privation of good, and that God is an incorporeal Spirit whose image in us and true being he formerly failed to grasp because he equated ‘seeing’ with forming bodily images and entertained crude, anthropomorphic and moral objections to scripture.