Category: Augustine
-
A Test for the Religious Sensibility
You have it if these two books speak to you. Substack latest. With a bit of discussion of a recent book by Peter Kreeft on Augustine.
-
Mysticism with Monica
Top o' the Stack.
-
Augustine was Right
It is our love of the Unchanging Light, a love unconscious of itself and grotesquely diffracted into creatures, that animates our inordinate love of them.
-
Another Advantage of Old Age
The abandoning of your vices becomes easier as they abandon you. The mechanism of flight of the vices of the flesh is powered by the mortal coil's decline, which is why the old man out for spiritual gain should rejoice, not rue, his libido on the wane. The old man, unlike the young, has a…
-
Food: Medicine, Drug, or Fuel?
In an excess of the ascetic, the author of The Confessions in Book Ten, Chapter 31 recommends taking food as medicine. At the opposite extreme we find those for whom it is a soporific, a sedative, an escape from reality, a drug. The wise tread the middle path: food is fuel. Eat in quantity and…
-
Alypius and the Gladiators
Substack latest. A note on the soul and its toxins on the feast of St. Augustine.
-
To Know for Sure; To Be Forever
Objective certainty is to knowledge what absolute immutability is to being. We want to know for sure; we want to be forever. The spiritually awake cannot be content to stumble along in the twilight and then just fall off a cliff. This message will not get through to the sleepwalkers of the sublunary. Perhaps a…
-
Augustine Against the Stoics
Today, August 28th, is the Feast of St. Augustine on the Catholic calendar. In honor of the Bishop of Hippo I pull a quotation from his magisterial City of God, Book XIX, Chapter 4: And I am at a loss to understand how the Stoic philosophers can presume to say that these are no ills,…
-
Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation
There is a certain minimal metaphysics one needs to assume if one is to pursue meditation as a spiritual practice, as opposed to, say, a relaxation technique. You have to assume that mind is not exhausted by 'surface mind,' that there are depths below the surface and that they are accessible here and now. You…
-
Real Enough to Debase, but not to Satisfy
Today is the Feast of St. Augustine. At Confessions, Bk. VI, Ch. 11, Augustine speaks of "a greed for enjoying present things that both fled me and debased me." A paradox of pleasure. Certain pleasures madly striven after prove fleeting and unreal, yet not so fleeting and unreal that they cannot degrade and debase their…
-
Mysticism with Monica
St. Monica's feast day is today; her son's is tomorrow. Of the various mystical vouchsafings, glimpses, and intimations recorded by St. Augustine in his Confessions, the vision at Ostia (Book 9, Chapter 10) is unique in that it is a sort of mystical duet. Mother and son achieve the vision together. Peter Kreeft does a good job of…
-
What is Time?
Si nemo a me querat, scio, si quarenti explicare velim, nescio. Augustinus (354-430), Confessiones, lib. XI, cap. 14. Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere. Augustinus, Contra Academicos, 1. 2. 6 Time is a tangle of the most elusive and difficult topics in philosophy. For a mere mortal to grapple with any of…
-
Desert Light Draws Us into the Mystical
Today, the feast of St. Augustine, is a clear and dry day in the Valley of the Sun. A meditation, then, on light and the ascent to the Light. Just as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like…
-
Mysticism with Monica
St. Monica's feast day is today; her son's is tomorrow. Of the various mystical vouchsafings, glimpses, and intimations recorded by St. Augustine in his Confessions, the vision at Ostia (Book 9, Chapter 10) is unique in that it is a sort of mystical duet. Mother and son achieve the vision together. Peter Kreeft does a…