6. Sermones, CXXV, 5.
X INTRODUCTION disturb the painter; he knows how to make use of black. With black he makes the hair, the beard, the eyebrows—though he makes the face of white only. "Look then," St. Augustine concludes, "to that which thou wouldest wish to be; take no care where He may place thee Who cannot err."
The second, more expUcit illustration is drawn from the sphere of criminal law. St. Augustine says:
So we see it happen by the common laws of the world. Some man, for instance, has chosen to be a house-breaker: the law of the judge knows that he has acted contrary to the law: the law of the judge knows where to place him; and orders him most properly. He indeed has lived evilly; but not evilly has the law ordered him. From a house-breaker he will be sentenced to the mines; from the labour of such how great works are constructed? The condemned man's punishment is the city's ornament. So then God knoweth where to place thee. Do not think that thou art disturbing the counsel of God, if thou art minded to be disorderly.^ Among the selections presented in this volume there are undoubtedly many in which the grand
Augustinian vision of a heteronomy of divine ends realized through the autonomy of men receives a much more sophisticated expression; yet the humble words of this popular sermon precisely define the fundamental idea. Not by constraint of human will, which ever remains subject to a hierarchy of normative laws, but by an artful granting or withholding of power to accomplish what has been willed, God's providential design is inexorably realized in human history. The grand pattern of poUtical and historical development delineated by St. Augustine is
6. Sermones, CXXV, 5.
INTRODUCTION XI rivalled in comprehensiveness and profundity only by the vast developmental systems of thought of Aristotle and Hegel. His description of the operation of eternal law in the rise and fall of nations is as awe-inspiring as the grandest visions of Hegel on the cunning of reason in history; while his conception of the all-pervading power of erotic love, or cupiditas (the love that builds the earthly city) is elaborated no less impressively than the AristoteUan system of nature, in which a single principle, itself unmoved, sustains and moves all things by "being loved." As used by St. Augustine, the term cupiditas has not the restricted meaning of its EngUsh derivative. On the contrary, like the AristoteUan eros, it comprehends the entire range of erotic desire. In addition to economic greed and sexual appetite, it includes also lust for poUtical rule and that desire to know which the Platonists spoke of as eros philosophicos. Comparing and contrasting the erotic inclinations of man with similar tendencies in animals, plants, compounds, and elements, St. Augustine reveals how profoundly impressed he was by the AristoteHan and Neo-
Platonic doctrine. "If we were sheep of some kind," he writes in The City of God, we would love the carnal life of the senses which would be our sufficient good. . . . Likewise, if we were trees, we could not love by any sensuous tendency; nevertheless, there would be a kind of striving for whatever would make us more abundant in our fruitfulness. Again, if we were stones or waves, winds or flames, or anything of this sort which is without sensation or life, we would nevertheless be endowed with a kind of attraction for our proper place in the order of nature. The specific gravity of a body is, as it were, its love, whether it tends upward by its lightness or downward by its weight. For a body is borne by