I’m trying to change various parts of my life around: unimportant things like which day I go to the grocery store, and important parts like which days I visit my grandchildren. However, the first result of such changes is to confuse myself about what day it is. This is Friday. Blog post.

Today I have quotes from my favorite translation of Confessions by Saint Augustine, Trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin, Penguin Books, 1961.

I read Confessions at a moment when I didn’t understand how to pray, and as far as I was concerned the book was a master class in such a thing. The guy meditated on his life and then offered his thoughts to God. Then he chose another topic and did it again. Over and over he thought about his life and how it had brought him to the present and offered up his thoughts on it to the Almighty. This was a kind of prayer that I thought I could do.

In that first reading through the book, I didn’t register other aspects. For example, Augustine has a lot to say about whether reading the Aeneid was a waste, but (I think) it’s like the pope in 1924 saying that reading Dante was foolish if it is only literature, and not a great lesson in how to live a good and true life. 

There’s also quite a bit of useful commentary on the Bible and science. Even back then Augustine was saying, the Bible tells us how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go. In his time some of the fighting was between Babylonian ideas and the Ptolemaic view.

Anyway, quotes …

O God, you are the Light of my heart, the Bread of my inmost soul, and the Power that weds my mind and the thoughts of my heart. But I did not love you.  p. 34

We were tickled to laughter by the prank we had played (stealing pears) … My God, I lay all this before you, for it is still Alive in my memory. By myself I would not have committed that robbery. It was not the takings that attracted me but the raid itself, and yet to do it by myself would have been no fun and I should not have done it. This was friendship of a most unfriendly sort, bewitching my mind in an inexplicable way. For the sake of a laugh, a little sport, I was glad to do harm and anxious to damage another; and that without thought of profit for myself or retaliation for injuries received! And all because we are ashamed to hold back when others say ‘Come on! Let’s do it!’  p. 51

[The pages of the books of the Platonists] have not the mien of the true love of God. … In them no one sings No rest has my soul but in God’s hands. …

It is one thing to descry the land of peace from a wooded hilltop. And unable to find the way to it, struggle on through trackless wastes where traitors and runaways, captained by their prince, who is lion and serpent in one, lie in wait to attack. It is another thing to follow the high road to that land of peace, the way that is defended by the care of the heavenly Commander. Here there are no deserters from heaven’s army to prey upon the traveller, because they shun this road as a torment. (End, Book VII, p. 156)

Beginning Book VIII

My God, let me be thankful as I remember and acknowledge all your mercies. Let my whole self be steeped in love of you and all my being cry Lord, there is none like you! You have broken the chains that bound me; I will sacrifice in your honour. I shall tell how it was that you broke them and, when they hear what I have to tell, all who adore you will exclaim, ‘Blessed by the Lord in heaven and on earth. Great and wonderful is his name.’ p. 157