Teaching Christianity
indulging in; I, though, suspect quite the contrary, that it was a way of speaking he made frequent use of—for example in Lk 7:43, in his answer to his host, the Pharisee Simon. If you take his words, "You have judged rightly" as ironic—because surely Jesus would not agree that love could be bought—the whole episode springs to life. On tropes, and in particular on enigma, see the Trinity, XV,15.
[63]. See Rv 1:11.20. Tychonius' Book of Rules was edited and published by Burkitt (Cambridge, 1894). See that edition, pages 1– 9. The text may also be found in PL 18, 15.
[64]. What he says literally is "… that none of these seven is to be looked for in them"—a rather careless form of expression.
[65]. A most peculiar sentence.
[66]. See Gn 25:13; 21:10; Gal 4:30.
[67]. I have rephrased what he says to make it clearer, because he does in fact phrase it very badly! What he says literally is: "He immediately says about the other sort, which has been mixed in badly, They however turned backward, although others are now being meant by these words."
[68]. An ingenious, but clearly inadmissible, way of interpreting a difficult text—the servant represents the whole Church, which is divided at the last judgment, in the next chapter of Matthew, into the wise and foolish virgins, the good and faithful servants as against the wicked and idle servant, and lastly into the sheep and the goats.
[69]. The original Pelagian statement, as criticized by Augustine, was that our good works proceed entirely from our own free will and not from God's grace. Later, under presssure from his arguments, they conceded that, in Paul's language, we are justified by faith and not by works, that good works without faith in Christ are valueless; but then they maintained that this faith is entirely our own act.
[70]. In addition to some fifteen anti-Pelagian treatises listed as such among Augustine's writings, there are innumerable references to this heresy in his later letters. It was the great pre-occupation, not to say obsession, of the last fifteen to twenty years of his life.
[71]. Though no city states survived in Augustine's time, he still inhabited a culture inherited from Greece and ancient Rome, in which "city" could as often as not mean "state." Indeed, at first I thought of so translating it, but what he goes on to say rather ruled that out.
Augustine does not spell out how this rule actually works; but one gathers that it is simply a matter of sometimes applying what is said about the part, or species, to the whole, or genus.
[72]. See Gn 17:15; Rom 4:16–17.
[73]. Novitate gratiae, non nobilitate patriae, et mente, non gente, distinguitur.
[74]. The CCL edition here suggests that he may be alluding to Mt 5:5, Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth—"earth" and "land" being of course both terra in Latin. But in his frequent quotations of the beatitudes, he never refers to the recipients of this blessing as the pii, which is the word he uses here, but always as either the mites or the mansueti. I think he is in fact referring in a more general way back to Ez 36, which he has been continually quoting.
[75]. Legitimis numeris in the Latin. Perhaps it was a recognized technical term in ancient arithmetic. See Book II, 56, and note 14. There he talks about intelligibiles numeri, which the context requires me to translate "odd numbers."
[76]. See Rv 7:4; 14:3.
[77]. Faithfully translating the Greek Septuagint, which mysteriously inserts these islands here. I have kept the whole translation of the biblical text here absolutely literal. But it must have sounded as peculiar in the Latin as it does in the English.
[78]. Augustine was unable to explain this incoherence, and others like it, in the way modern commentators will, by observing that Gn 10 and 11 each comes from a different original source or narrative, which a final editor stitched together without worrying about such little inconsistencies: in this case, Gn 10 from the priestly narrative, P; Gn 11 from the earlier Yahwist narrative, J.
[79]. See Rom 2:5; 13:11.
[80]. See Book II, 10.