Tidbits Of Wisdom From St. Augustine

Tidbits of Wisdom From St. Augustine

1. What is called evil in the universe is but the absence of good.

2. What are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good.

3. All beings were made good, but not being made perfectly good, are liable to corruption.

4. There can be no evil where there is no good.

5. A good which is wholly without evil is a perfect good. A good, on the other hand, which contains evil is a faulty or imperfect good.

6. If a man is a good thing because he is a being, what is an evil man but an evil good?

7. Evil springs up in what is good, and cannot exist except in what is good.

8. Evil cannot exist without good, or in anything that is not good. Good, however, can exist without evil.

9. Nothing can be corrupted except what is good, for corruption is nothing else but the destruction of good.

10. The essence of error is this: man accepting what is false as if it were true.

11. To use speech for the purpose of deception, and not for its appointed end, is a sin.

12. So far as Christ is God, He and the Father are one; so far as He is man, the Father is greater than He.

13. From the very moment Christ began to be man, He was nothing else than the Son of God, the Word who was made flesh, and therefore He was God; so that just as each individual man unites in one person a body and a rational soul, so Christ in one person unites the Word and man.

14. Christ being made sin, not His own, but ours, not in Himself, but in us, showed, by the likeness of sinful flesh in which he was crucified, that though sin was not in Him, yet that in a certain sense He died to sin, by dying in the flesh which was the likeness of sin; and that although He Himself had never lived the old life of sin, yet by His resurrection He typified our new life springing up out of the old death in sin.

15. In Adam's first sin, many kinds of sin were involved. For there is in it pride, because man chose to be under his own dominion, rather than under the dominion of God; and blasphemy, because he did not believe God; and murder, for he brought death upon himself; and spiritual fornication, for the purity of the human soul was corrupted by the seducing blandishments of the serpent; and theft, for man turned to his own use the food he had been forbidden to touch; and avarice, for he had a craving for more than should have been sufficient for him; and whatever other sin can be discovered on careful reflection to be involved in this one admitted sin.

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