Confessiones
Confessiones
Saint, Bishop of Hippo Augustine
Before Augustine, no one had written a book quite like this: a mind turning its full analytical power on itself, cataloguing failures, lusts, and longings with a candor that still startles sixteen centuries later. Born in Roman North Africa in 354 AD, Augustine lived a life that generates great literature - brilliant, restless, sexually turbulent, intellectually ambitious. He took a mistress, fathered a child outside marriage, pursued Manichaeanism before rejecting it, and taught rhetoric in Milan until a voice like a child's told him to take and read. He opened Paul's Letters and was transformed. The Confessions is not a saint's lives book. It is catastrophe - a man mapping the wreckage of his own past and finding, in that mapping, something like grace. The famous opening line ("You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you") states both the book's thesis and its ache. We are creatures designed for the divine, and we will not stop reaching until we find what we're made for. For modern readers, Augustine remains indispensable because his questions haven't changed: Why do I do what I hate? What is time? How can a good God permit evil? These pages hold no easy answers - only the ache of a man who refused to look away from his own darkness and, in doing so, illuminated something true about being human.
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“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.””
— Saint, Bishop of Hippo Augustine
“And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.””
— Saint, Bishop of Hippo Augustine
“The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.””
— Saint, Bishop of Hippo Augustine
“The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.””
— Saint, Bishop of Hippo Augustine
“What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.””
— Saint, Bishop of Hippo Augustine
“Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.””
— Saint, Bishop of Hippo Augustine
“How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.””
— Saint, Bishop of Hippo Augustine
“You never go away from us, yet we have difficulty in returning to You. Come, Lord, stir us up and call us back. Kindle and seize us. Be our fire and our sweetness. Let us love. Let us run.””
— Saint, Bishop of Hippo Augustine
“The Bible was composed in such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them.””
— Saint, Bishop of Hippo Augustine
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Saint, Bishop of Hippo Augustine. Confessiones. Lex, lex-books.com/book/confessiones-124dd914-8a65-433d-8192-6521970c4ca5.Saint, B. O. H. A. (n.d.). Confessiones. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/confessiones-124dd914-8a65-433d-8192-6521970c4ca5Saint, Bishop of Hippo Augustine. Confessiones. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/confessiones-124dd914-8a65-433d-8192-6521970c4ca5.
