Augustine: Earlier Writings (continued)
The Usefulness of Belief
St. Augustines Review of the ^^De Utilitate Credendi,^'
Retractations, I, xiv
I. After I had become a presbyter at Hippo-regius I wrote a book entitled On the Utility of Believing, addressed to a friend of mine who I knew had been deceived by the Manichees, and was still a victim of that error, and mocked the discipline of the Catholic Faith because it bade men believe, and did not teach them the truth by means of indubitable reason. In that book
(iii, 9) I said, "In these precepts and commandments of the Law which Christians may not now lawfully obey, such as the Sabbath, circumcision, sacrifice and the like, there are contained such mysteries that every pious man may understand that there is nothing more pernicious than to take them literally, and nothing more wholesome than to let the truth be revealed by the spirit. Hence, the letter killeth but the spirit quickeneth." I have expounded these words of the apostle Paul differently, and, as it seems to me or rather as it is apparent from the facts, much more suitably in my book entitled. On the Spirit and the Letter, But the meaning I have given to them here need not be rejected.
2. Again I said (xi, 25), "In religion two kinds of people are praiseworthy—those who have already found the truth, whom we must judge to be entirely blessed; and those who seek it rightly and earnestly. Of these the former are already in possession. The latter are on the way that leads most certainly to possession." These words of mine are not erroneous if it be understood that those who have found the truth and whom I have described as being in possession are not entirely blessed in this life but in the life for which we hope and towards which we tend by the way of faith. Those are to be judged to have attained the final goal who have arrived where we desire to arrive with all our believing and seeking, that is, with our hold-