Sublime

Cambridge historian Henry Chadwick argued that Augustine “marks an epoch in the history of human moral consciousness.”47 For the first time the supreme goal of life was not self-control and rationality but love. Love was required to redirect the human person away from self-centeredness toward serving God and others. Augustine’s Confessions laid the

For Augustine, psychology is cartography: to understand oneself is a matter of mapping our penchant to look for love in all the wrong places.

The City of God contains little that is fundamentally original. The eschatology is Jewish in origin, and came into Christianity mainly through the Book of Revelation. The doctrine of predestination and election is Pauline, though Saint Augustine gave it a much fuller and more logical development than is to be found in the Epistles. The distinction

“In your gift we find our rest,” Augustine concludes. “There are you our joy. Our rest is our peace.”

If Augustine spent half his life battling the heresy of Pelagianism—the pretension that the human will was sufficient to choose its good—it’s because he saw it as the great lie that left people enchained to their dissolute wills. And no one is more Pelagian than we moderns.

We long to praise you, though we are burdened by our mortality. Though we are conscious of sin, we long to praise you.

To St. Leo and his contemporaries the Roman Empire was an instrument in the hands of providence to bring the nations together to receive the Gospel of Christ. St. Peter and St. Paul had taken the place of Romulus and Remus as the founders of the second Rome, the Urbs sacerdotalis et regalis, which was the centre of the Christian world:

ST. LYDWINE OF SCHIEDAM (d. 1433), a victim soul who endured numerous afflictions that kept her perpetually bedridden, was once visited by the prior of the monastery of St. Elizabeth, which is situated near Brielle on the Island of Doorne. The Saint gave him a description so detailed of the cells, the chapel, the chapter house, the refectory and th