Augustine: Earlier Writings (continued)
OF TRUE RELIGION 279 of these woes, and necessarily bring those who love them to this evil plight. Those, who love the journey rather than the return home or the journey's end, are to be sent into distant parts. They are flesh and spirit continually on the move and never reaching home.
106. But he who makes a good use even of his five bodily senses, to believe and praise the works of God, to cultivate love of God, to seek tranquillity of thought and action, and to know God, he enters into the joy of his Lord. The talent is taken from him who made a bad use of it, and is given to him who made a good use of his five talents. Not indeed that keenness of intellect can be transferred from one to another. What is meant is that clever people who neglect their minds and are impious can lose their gift, and that diligent and pious people who are of a slower understanding can nevertheless reach understanding. The talent was not given to him who had received two talents, for he who lives aright both in thought and action already has all he needs.
It was given to him who had received five. For he has not yet sufficient mental strength to contemplate eternal things who puts his trust in visible and temporal things. But he can acquire it who praises God, the maker of all sensible things; who trusts God by faith, waits on God in hope, and seeks him in love.
Iv, 107. This being so, my dearly beloved friends and brethren, I exhort you as I exhort myself to run with all possible speed after that to which God calls us by his wisdom. Let us not love the world since all that is in the world is lust of the flesh, lust of the eye, and the pride of the world. Do not let us love to corrupt or be corrupted by fleshly pleasure, lest we come to a yet more miserable corruption of grief and torment. Do not let us love strife, lest we be given over to the power of the angels who rejoice in strife, to be humbled, bound and beaten. Let us not love spectacles, lest we wander from the truth and love shadows and are cast into darkness.
108. Let not our religion consist in phantasms of our own imagining. Any kind of truth is better than any fiction we may choose to produce. And yet we must not worship the soul, though the soul remains true even when we entertain false imaginations about it. Stubble, which is nevertheless real, is better than light fabricated at will by the vain thought of him who imagines it; and yet it would be madness to hold stubble, which we can perceive and touch, to be worthy of our worship.
Let not our religion be the worship of human works. The workmen are better than their works, yet we must not worship them.