Sublime

“Receive without pride, let go without attachment.” —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 8.33

The city of God as tent city, as refugee camp, speaks to the vulnerability and risk of the life of faith, bringing out an essential aspect of Augustine’s understanding of our journey.

Augustine framed this as the paradox of our unhappiness: “How does anyone suffer an unhappy life by his will, since absolutely no one wills to live unhappily?”

As Augustine says, “such is the strength of love, that the mind draws in with itself those things which it has long thought of with love, and has grown into them by the close adherence.”

“If anyone can prove and show to me that I think and act in error, I will gladly change it—for I seek the truth, by which no one has ever been harmed. The one who is harmed is the one who abides in deceit and ignorance.” —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS

Much of the most influential part of Saint Augustine’s theology was concerned in combating the Pelagian heresy.

I can see the counsel of wisdom embedded in Augustine’s point: part of a healthy sexuality will be refusing to let it consume me.

The frantic pursuit of the next place is symptomatic of his self-alienation. “I had left myself and couldn’t find me,” Augustine recalls. “I turned myself into a famished land I had to live in.”

John Wycliffe (c.1330–84) argued that the Church should surrender its riches, serve rather than profit from the poor and acknowledge scripture as its sole source of doctrinal authority.