5. On Baptism 298
Contents
3. On the Trinity 138 4. On Faith in Things Unseen 143 5. On the Advantage of Believing 147 6. Letter 160 156
V. THE HUMAN CONDITION
AND ITS REMEDY
7. Sermon 37 161
2. Of the Morals of the Catholic Church 163 3. Enchiridion 169
4. The Free Choice of the Will Book II 179
VI. GRACE AND FREEDOM
7. On Nature and Grace 195
2. On the Spirit and the Letter 204 3. On Grace and Free Will 209 4. On Rebuke and Grace 212 5. Letter 217 216
VII. CHRIST— WORD OF GOD
AND LORD OF MAN
7. Letter 11 225
2. On the Gospel of St. John 228 3. Enchiridion 233 4. Sermons on New Testament Lessons 247
5. The Confessions 256 6. Letter 199 263
VIII. THE CHURCH
AND THE TWO CITIES
7. The City of God 269 2. Expositions on the Psalms 283 5. On Baptism 298
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 311
PREFACE
The selections included in this volume are intended to show the reader St. Augustine at his representative best. They have been drawn, therefore, from many kinds of writing — letters, sermons, dialogues, meditations in which the manner oi address is direct and personal, as well as scriptural expositions, doctrinal treatises, and larger works concerned with churchly or cultural issues. This wide variety might threaten the unity of the present volume were it not that Augustine keeps returning in his writings to several underlying themes which give a flexible consistency and an ordered development to his thought. I have made use of these major themes in arranging the materials that follow, as the section headings will indicate. Under each of them I have sought to give a fair, rather full sampling of Augustine's total body of work. On the principle that such a volume as this ought to make readily available materials that have long remained all but buried in older sets, I have drawn heavily upon The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. However, I have not hesitated to employ the newer translations where this seemed clearly preferable, in the belief that both beginning and more advanced readers will find this welcome.
Those for whom the present volume is not a first introduction to the writings of St. Augustine will undoubtedly miss some of their favorite passages; they may even wish to find fault with one or more of the excerpts chosen. I can only say in self-defense that in a very real sense the total bent of Augustine's faith and thought is manifest in , everything he wrote, and also that I have tried to keep in mind the needs and interests of as many readers as possible. Since my purpose has not been to cull gems from this voluminous body of writing, but to let the Bishop of Hippo speak for himself as he argues, defines, exhorts, confesses, or prays, it has sometimes been necessary to include material that by present standards may seem contentious, uninspired, or overluxuriant. There is a price that must be paid by every reader who would enter into an author's world; it is the author who must be allowed to set the pace, frame the design, and follow his own lead. In the case of the African bishop and "doctor of grace," the reward is plainly worth the cost.
The discipline of making this selection has brought home again, more forcibly than before, the far-ranging intelligence of St. Augustine, the ease with which he moves from one problem or style into another, the indubitably personal accent of his language, and the determination — one might almost say the stubbornness — of his pursuit of truth in every sphere. I do not doubt that the reader will find in each section of this book passages that treat the matter under consideration with lively dialectical skill, rare eloquence, and a wisdom at once ample and penetrating.
It remains my pleasant duty to thank the publishers who have given their permission to reprint material included in this volume. Selections I, 1, 2; V, 3; and VII, 3, 5 are from A ugustine: Earlier Writings and A ugustine: Confessions and Enchiridion. Published 1955, The Westminster Press. By permission. Selections III, 4; IV, 2, 4, 5, 6; VI, 5; and VII, 1, 6 are from The Fathers of the Church, Volumes 2, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13 (Writings of Saint Augustine) , for which permission has been granted by The Catholic University of America Press. Selections II, 2 and V, 4 are from The Free Choice of the Will (Peter Reilly Company). By permission of the Augustinian Fathers, Villanova University. All other selections are from The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers.
Roger Hazelton
INTRODUCTION
One hardly knows where to begin with St. Augustine. That is a tribute to his greatness, of course. The word "great" simply cannot be avoided where St. Augustine is concerned, because of the almost unparalleled largeness of his vision, the spaciousness of his style, and the radiant inclusiveness of his spirit. One may start anywhere in his writings, and before long one is involved with the author in great issues, walking, as it were, down long corridors of thought and looking into room after room of ardent, profound conviction.
The important thing, to be sure, is to get him read, which is the sole excuse for a book like this. St. Augustine is perfectly capable of introducing himself in the selection from his writings which is offered to the reader. And yet, things being what they are today, with so many pressures and demands upon our time and attention, people have to be beckoned and enticed into reading him. It is not enough to assert that he is a "classic" who ought to be read by any educated person, true as that is. He must be introduced as a man and a thinker who is strangely our contemporary and is capable of speaking pertinently about matters that mightily and ultimately concern us.
And fortunately that is exactly what St. Augustine is and does. His image of the world and man and God has an amazing, almost breath-taking relevance to our own questionings and strivings. As the questions with which he is grappling are perennial, so the answers he proposes to them have an ever-present force and fascination for us. Indeed, it is just because he does not share many of our modern preoccupations and presuppositions that he can bring us all the more readily and quickly to the essentials of this matter of being human in a baffling world. His very distance in time from us is not so much a barrier in communication as it is a blessing in disguise, since it makes possible a sharing of Augustine's search for truth and God at a far deeper level than that provided by common vocabulary, opinions, or factual information. For truth about man's relationship to God does not rise and set with the cultural sun; it cannot be packaged as a period piece; it has an insistent way of bursting out of its historic envelope and making itself heard over and over again. Quite plainly it is this sort of truth with which we are confronted as we take up St. Augustine and read him.
And yet it is difficult to know where to start in making the acquaintance of this man and thinker whose writings stand out among the most commanding peaks in the entire range of human, and especially Christian, understanding. This is in part because Augustine's experience and reflection are so many-faceted and far-reaching; but the difficulty is also due to the fact that the Augustinian writings display a remarkable fluidity and wholeness, both of outlook and intention, which makes it impossible to arrange them in neat logical order. One may trace themes and chart emphases and pick out dominant chords, but that is really about all, unless one is willing to do violence to the quite unsystematic consistency of St. Augustine's mind itself. A happy consequence is that wherever the reader casts his net he is sure to be rewarded with perceptive insight and searching wisdom. If you do not believe this, simply try opening this book at random and see for yourself. Only let Augustine speak for himself and he will very soon be speaking to you and for you as well.
Nevertheless we must begin somewhere, and perhaps the best place is where he begins all his thinking, that is, with
Introduction H
God. In one of his earliest writings, the Soliloquies, he declares that there are only two things he desires to know — God and the soul, nothing more. The order is important. In one of the indexes to his works an English editor has made the following entry: "Knowledge — see God." This is just as Augustine would have wished to have it. For all his anguished absorption with the human problem, and as a matter of fact because of it, he soon discovered that he had to begin with God, who had made his own beginning with man. Very early in his life Augustine discovered that he could not explain himself on his own terms. "Man," he wrote in the Confessions, "is a great deep, and the hairs of his head are more easily numbered than the motions and affections of his heart." Just so; and this truth about man means that he can only be understood in terms of his mysterious inwardness, which is his openness toward God, "higher than my topmost part and deeper than my deepest." Man is precisely the sort of being who must find and give reasons for his own existence, but that existence is not capable of explaining itself without reference to its ground and goal in God.
For a long time, St. Augustine tried to escape this conclusion. He put himself under the tutelage of the Manichees, who "explained" man as the battleground of eternally warring principles of good and evil. He listened eagerly to the Skeptics, who simply denied the very possibility of reaching any kind of truth concerning man. And he consorted with the Neoplatonists, whose philosophy of Being never ceased to appeal to him and even to influence his own formulation of the Christian faith following his definitive conversion, but which could not win his whole and undivided assent. After his long, arduous pilgrimage through the intellectual alternatives which were open to him he came up with the discovery that "God is the meaning of human existence," to quote a twentieth-century Christian philosopher, Nicholas Berdyaev. And that discovery, made only after he had fully explored other possible and available answers to his search for genuine selfhood, became thenceforth the anchorage and axiom of all his thinking. From this time forward God and Truth were synonymous in thought and life alike. As he himself put it, after he had entered his inward being through reflective knowledge, and had passed in thought from bodies to the soul and again to reason, he arrived "in the flash of one trembling glance" at THAT WHICH IS. Call this, if you like, either mysticism of metaphysics; what is certain, however, is that it touches and embraces both. That fusion of love and knowledge, together with the tension it provokes, is one of the most characteristic features of Augustine's intellectual pilgrimage. Thus we begin, in this arrangement of selections from his writings, with his view of God, first as eternal Creator, then as Orderer and Disposer of good and evil, and finally as self-revealing Trinity. In the passages chosen, two emphases stand out with unmistakable clarity. The first is that God the Truth is polar to the soul of man. Our search for selfhood is not a mere self-searching, even if this is where it has to start. For man is plainly the sort of being who implies and requires God. If he were living today, St. Augustine would undoubtedly find considerable support for his viewpoint in the very efforts that are made to comprehend the meaning of human existence by denying God. In the agonized obsession of some writers with the absence and silence of God, he would surely see not a mere vacuum but an aching void which pays its own odd, backhanded tribute to the very reality which it so strenuously denies.
A second emphasis in these passages is put upon the fact that God can never be conceived out of all relationship to human knowing, loving, or willing. One cannot define God first in abstract terms and then look around to see whether anything in human experience happens to fit that definition. St. Augustine would gladly accept the charge so often hurled at religious thinkers today, that they are "anthropomorphic" in their statements about God. And he might ask what else they could possibly be, or their critics either. Surely God cannot be described or comprehended except in some perspective growing out of human experience and interpretation. He cannot be known as if he were not known by us, or described coolly, objectively, as if he did
Introduction
not matter to us. Again, what is remarkable in St. Augustine is his fusion of inquiry and involvement, of rational and deeply personal elements, of clarity and concern. He does precisely what we have been told hundreds of times by skeptical rationalists and dogmatic believers cannot be done. He really thinks, and thinks hard, about God while insisting that it is about God that his thinking shall be done. And he achieves this by virtue of his unshaken, steady conviction that as it takes God to account for man, so man cannot know God without being truly committed to God. As he writes in the most famous sentence of the Confessions, God has made us for himself so that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in him. That is to say that God has, as it were, defined himself by making possible our very seeking after him.
Much of the material in our first three sections is devoted to the age-old problems of eternity and time and of good and evil. St. Augustine's treatment of these topics, although it bears the signature of his own age upon its surface, is nevertheless decidedly pertinent to present-day viewpoints and forms of human experience. Here as always we find the great Christian thinker determined to understand the lesser in terms of the greater, the finite in terms of the infinite — and not the other way around. In these sections there is what may be called an existential confidence that truth may be found because it is by its very nature that which is assumed in all inquiry and interpretation. Even error and ignorance can be accounted for only if it is granted that there is a reality which they fail to reach or grasp. And for Augustine this is no mere assumption, either, but the axiom on which all his mature thought is founded and proceeds. We know that there is a reality beyond and yet within all our knowing, otherwise we should not even know that we do not know.
Such is St. Augustine's reason for repudiating skepticism, and it also provides him with a built-in defense against dogmatism. I must never suppose that I can get my mind clean around the ultimate truth which is God. If I did, it would simply not be God but merely my idea of God. Now while I must of course go on speaking and thinking about God even in order to understand myself, I have no right to claim either certainty or finality for my experiences or formulations. Although I may be confident that I am in real touch with truth, this must not be permitted to become self-confidence without destroying the whole fabric and motive of my search for truth.
Against this background, strengthened by the Platonism that never altogether left him, Augustine approaches the problems of these first three sections. For example, eternity is by no means thought of as an indefinite prolonging of time; it is rather that which alone gives meaning to time. It is true that time, in common with all creation, retains a certain stubborn character of its own over against the eternal God. More than anything else, eternity is for Augustine
God's own way of viewing the world, to which our human modes of time can offer only the feeblest and most halting analogies. While we must perforce understand eternity in light of our experience of temporal successiveness, since the creature has to see his world differently than does his Creator, we can be led by analyzing memory to see that there is unity as well as multiplicity, spontaneity as well as duration, in time; and it is this realization which provides us with a valid take-off point for understanding eternity as nothing more or less than God's own time.
A similar approach marks Augustine's treatment of good and evil in the world. In knowing something to be evil 1 already know that there is good, for evil is invariably the absence or corruption of the good. Hence my idea of the good is not some kind of compensation or wishful thinking, but is given in and with the knowledge of evil itself. I do not merely find goodness alongside of evil, but I cannot even manage to conceive evil except as the lack or need of the good. And goodness, whenever and wherever it is met, has something basically to do with God. St. Augustine's conception of cosmic order or Providence represents his thoroughgoing attempt to work out a viable philosophical alternative to a monistic view which would theoretically absorb all evil into good, and on the other hand, to a dualistic view which would leave good and evil staring at and struggling with each other on the metaphysical stage.
Goodness, he holds, is logically prior to evil but it is not the explanatory source of evil. Since evil is a form of beingnot rather than of being, it can scarcely be laid at the door of God, who in Augustine's view is goodness itself. On the doctrine of the Trinity St. Augustine has been most influential in the history of Christian thought. The selections which have been chosen to reveal his Trinitarian viewpoint deserve careful study, if only for that reason. But the reader will also find that they have considerable intrinsic worth. In them we find the Bishop of Hippo trying, as he says, to pick his way through a hard and obscure subject. The Trinity fascinated Augustine because it provided him with mysteries and problems which were worthy of his intellectual caliber. Although he wrote at a time when the main outlines of the doctrine had already been determined, he rethought the whole matter with a freshness and a penetration quite unparalleled in the history of the Church.
For Augustine, Trinity always means tri-unity, the threefold operation of the one true God. This is why he finds psychological models so revealing. The human self is the same yet different, one yet many, in its functioning. It is the self as a whole that remembers, understands, and decides, but these activities are distinct expressions of its selfhood. By analogy, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are God's ways of being God. They are not parts of God, or chronological segments of the history of his dealing with the world and man, but God himself. It is important for the reader to realize that the doctrine which Augustine is expounding is designed to guard the unity of God within the thought of faith, not to compartmentalize or to serialize the divine being and acting. "All the works of the Trinity are indivisible," he writes. At the same time we must be aware that personal analogies are always breaking down in our thought of God, and need to be supplemented by interpersonal ones. Here Augustine's treatment of the Trinity in terms of love becomes excitingly relevant. Love is between persons, yet is personally creative. Thus Augustine attempts to correct his own tendency to think of God as a single Mind. But when all is said and done, he would insist that no analogy, or combination of analogies, can possibly do theological justice to nature and action of God. We see the things of faith in a glass darkly. And yet, we really do see. We cannot know what it is like to be God, but we must employ such hints and intimations as our experience of God can give us.
Turning now to the section of writings on the theme of faith and reason, we find Augustine at his theological best. From first to last he remains a Christian intellectual for whom the use of rational methods and conclusions is expected and required. Yet he is also a man of deep faith for whom God is not so much the end as the beginning of his reasoning search. Faith precedes reason because unless you believe you will not understand. Yet faith is "in order to knowledge"; and he believes not for the sake of believing but for the very purpose of understanding. One might say it in this way: faith is fully reasonable, but only when reason remains faithful.
Here once more we have Augustine trying to think together those dimensions of experience which are usually thought apart. He wishes to avoid the pitfalls of unreasoning dogmatism and uncommitted rationalism. This he achieves by virtue of his principle of faith seeking understanding, or, to put it just a bit differently, of the primacy of the will in all our knowing. According to him, all knowledge rests back on acknowledgment, and all our understanding is a veritable "standing-under." But the same truth can be put the other way around. Understanding, he tells us, is the reward of faith, even as faith is the condition sine qua non of true understanding. If you want to know, then believe; and the whole point of believing, or having faith, is to attain that wisdom which is always more but never less than reasoning.
Our next group of selections deals with the situation of man before God. In his diagnosis of the human condition St. Augustine speaks more clearly and persuasively to us today than at any other point in his writing. He knows, as we do, that man is in a very bad way, that he is his own worst enemy, and that the human picture is a dark and troubled one. It has taken the work of men like Freud and Marx to bring home to us the essential accuracy of Augustine's diagnosis, and to provide us with a wealth of deeply disturbing details in documentation of it. People sometimes draw back in a kind of horror from the Augustinian view of human nature, but they do not thereby disqualify Augustine as a penetrating analyst; they only express their own myopic and sentimental optimism. There is no question that Augustine's verdict on man is predominantly negative; what needs to be remembered, however, is that it is put forward in profound self-knowledge and in Christian compassion for the true dignity and salvability of men. Here is neither a doctrinaire pessimism nor a stubborn evasion of man's self-deceiving and self-destroying capacities, but what we might term both a tragic realism and an unrelenting idealism about man.
Augustine traces the predicament of man to sin, which is a set or bent of the will toward self-centeredness, distorting his God-given nature and poisoning even the best and highest of human achievements. This sin is original, that is my own, and it is what I have in common with my fellow men. In terms of the Christian myth of the Fall, every man is his own Adam. Yet not even the pervasive presence of sin in Everyman can keep God from acting for his true and final good. God takes sin very seriously, and judges us precisely in forgiving us. The doctrine of predestination, so often misunderstood, is Augustine's way of expressing the fact that when God might in full justice condemn men to their own self-made hell, he chooses out of sheer goodness to save some instead. Not all, to be sure; but this again is not to say that God plays favorites, but rather that he wills to redeem men from the mess they have gotten themselves into and in mercy offers all mankind a way, a truth, and a life of blessed reunion and renewal
The following section is made up of writing penned in the heat of the controversy with Pelagius on the relation of divine grace to human freedom — a controversy which absorbed St. Augustine for many years of his life as bishop. One of the most influential teachers of our generation has said that if you would really understand what a man believes you must know what he is fighting against. Although we know the thought of Pelagius chiefly through the hostile eyes of Augustine, it is quite clear that what he objected to was the Pelagian view that there is a possibility of human perfection inherent in the very freedom of the will of man, since "we have implanted in us by God a possibility for acting in both directions," that is, for doing either good or evil. Augustine sees no reason to quarrel with Pelagius' contention that God has created man free to choose, but he emphatically denies that man is now free in this same sense of having the power of moral choice. We may think ourselves free, or act as if we were still free, but the truth of the matter is that what we term our freedom is actually a bondage to self-interest and self-determination. Man the creature has become in his sinful freedom less than free; he has in fact become not the ally but the enemy of God.
We should be wide of the mark if we supposed that the argument was concerned with a denial on the part of Pelagius of the grace of God acting upon and within our human freedom. The point is not that of deciding between the free will of man and the gracious action of God. Both men believe somehow in both, and what they are in conflict about is just how freedom in man is related to divine grace. Pelagius is a highly moral man; he wants to justify man's responsibility before God theologically; and he does this by insisting that man has it in himself, that is, in his free will, to do either what God commands or God forbids. God, according to Pelagius, is the author of man's freedom and must not be held accountable for the evil use man makes of it; it is up to man to decide for or against God by the power with which God has endowed him. If he fails to live up to his "potential" he can always try harder the next time, thanks to his God-given freedom.
All this has a strangely modern ring, doesn't it? How can Augustine deny what seems to most of us today so obviously true? But let us look more closely at the matter. The real point, says Augustine, is not power of choice itself (which he does not deny), but the power to do what is chosen. Freedom means not simply choosing but doing what is good. The question is not what is theoretically possible to man but what he actually does with his so-called freedom. For Augustine, the power to choose lies with man — in this he agrees fully with Pelagius — but the power to do the good that is chosen lies with God, and is God's gracious gift to man. The freedom of the will lies deeper down than the power of choice; it is the power to fulfill the good, and this is always a gift of God's grace to our sin-ridden freedom. Without God, we can do no good thing. Augustine holds that God is not only the creator but the enabler and perfecter of our freedom. Hence it is not we who by virtue of free will co-operate with the divine grace, but the divine grace which co-operates with us in doing the good that we will. As Augustine puts it, "the first liberty of the will was to be able not to sin; the last was much greater — not to be able to sin"; and both are given by the grace of God. True freedom, therefore, is to will what God wills and to do what God wants done.
Section VII brings us to a group of writings on the nature and work of Jesus Christ. The first and fifth selections are brief letters on the incarnation and the second coming, respectively. The second and fourth excerpts are examples of Augustine's biblical exposition, meditative in form, upon the mystery of Christ's person in relation to God. Selections 3 and 6 are taken from two of Augustine's most "popular" treatises intended for the edification and instruction of church members.
All through these passages we see St. Augustine's profound stress upon the unity of Christ's own person and the unity of God revealed to him. It is made emphatically plain that the doctrine of the Trinity, as understood by Augustine, is not the statement of a divine plurality but of oneness and ultimate indivisibility in the being of God. The illustrations or analogies of divine action which are given are all indicative of this fundamental unity persisting throughout differences of function or action. Although we must acknowledge the twofold character of Christ, he cannot be distinguished into a human and a divine self, any more than a man can be divided into a soul and a body. So true is this that even Christ's weakness is the token of God's strength acting in him through the form of a servant; "even his infirmity," he writes, "was the consequence of his power." In this way Augustine holds firmly together the fully human and fully divine in the person of the Christ, and such is probably the dominant impression to be gained from these passages.
Yet there can be little doubt that despite what St. Augustine says on this whole matter, his tendency is to magnify the divine element. Not only is Christ, according to this interpretation, in unmistakable ways subordinate to God and Father; he is also, as the object of Christian worship, a being who must be mediated to men, although he is confessed as fully human. This is not to accuse Augustine of the heresy of subordinationism; very often throughout these writings he condemns explicitly the various heresies that point in this direction. But it simply must be said that his thought is so fluid and so responsive to the promptings of deep personal devotion with respect to this whole problem that any rigid, propositional position is excluded. His authority, therefore, can be claimed, and it has been claimed, for a variety of opinions and dogmatic postures. While it is certainly clear that he intends to affirm both the completely human and the inescapably divine character of God's deed in Christ, it is also evident that St. Augustine belongs to no special party or particular group in defining it.
In regard to Christ's work, St. Augustine exhibits a similar flexibility. The scholastic, categorizing mind is hard put to it to locate his view among the historic alternatives. No tags or labels are readily available. What we have in these passages is certainly a viewpoint which is "orthodox" by intention, but which it is impossible to confine within any one traditional mode of statement. There are definite hints of the "ransom theory" of Christ's suffering on the cross, but equally hints of the so-called "moral theory" of the atonement. Perhaps the most characteristic of all Augustine's figures for understanding the redemption wrought by Christ is that of the physician or restorer who heals and renews the image of God in man, lost through sin, thus overcoming man's alienation from God. In Section VIII we come to what may properly be called Augustine's theology of history. It is not surprising that the Church should be at the center of his interest. But Augustine is too sophisticated and realistic a thinker to suppose that the Church is identical with the Kingdom of God, and too deeply versed in Scripture to regard the Church as anything less that the people of God's own covenant with man. Hence his thought moves, as always, between the poles of heaven and earth, between the Church as divinely purposed and as humanly conditioned. This may explain much of the tension we find in his writing, as he seeks to do justice both to the actual social organization and its ideal, God-ordained character, without either separating or confusing the two aspects. Yet the Church for St. Augustine must be seen within the total perspective of human history; it is only the crucial instance of that mysterious and constant interaction between God and man which is the substance of which everything historical is made. The "two cities" of which Augustine speaks do not represent two different worlds, but two orderings of life within the one world. To be sure, there is the sharpest possible conflict between them. Mankind is viewed in the pages of The City of God as standing on a field of battle, torn between two loyalties, "heavenly and earthly, the self-denying love of God and the God-denying love of self" (E. R. Hardy). Even within the Christian Church this same conflict goes on inevitably, incessantly. It assumes not simply individual but also corporate form.
In St. Augustine's time a controversy was raging in North Africa over the purity of the Church. It is known in history as the Donatist controversy, getting its name from a schismatic bishop of Carthage who for forty years led the churches of Carthage. The movement named for him developed around the issue of rebaptism for those who under pressure of imperial persecution had fallen away from the faith but later sought to resume their fellowship within the Christian community. Should such persons be required to undergo a second baptism? If so, what does this mean regarding the validity of the first baptism? And can this sacrament be administered by ministers who are themselves suspected of disloyalty? The Donatists were rigorists who insisted upon the necessity of rebaptism and were opposed to recognizing the validity of any sacraments performed by those called traditores. In their effort to restore purity to the Church, the Donatists separated themselves from the majority of Christians, whom they regarded as lax and overtolerant.
As might be expected, Augustine entered the fray against the Donatists, stressing again the mixed character of the actual Church, the difficulty of knowing just who is inside it, and the unquestioned validity of all sacraments properly performed. His work On Baptism is therefore a most signif- . icant expression of his view concerning the nature of the Church itself. He spends much time discussing the general respected viewpoint of Cyprian, denying the force of his opinion that baptism should be repeated in doubtful cases but commending Cyprian's dominant desire for preserving unity in the Church at whatever cost. Let both the grain and the weeds grow together until the harvest, he contends, since only God knows finally who belongs to Him in faith and who does not. Let charity and unity, then, be the rule in dealing with all issues; and let the Church be seen as truly catholic, that is, all-embracing in its outreach and concern, since it is the very work of God's love wrought of human stuff for a divine end.
In all the representative writings chosen for this selection, amidst the great variety of occasions and purposes that call them forth, it is to be hoped that the assertion made at the beginning of this Introduction will be justified. The greatness of St. Augustine consists above all in an unparalleled charity of mind and spirit which knows where man's true help is to be found and eagerly, profoundly leads us in that direction. No one ever realized more clearly that the Christian faith is a rejoicing in the truth, and that we enter into this truth only by the way of love.
GOD—