The Essential Augustine (continued)
est place, yet is within the range of existence, and which occupies the middle place, greater than the lowest, but coming short of the highest. That highest is essential blessedness; the lowest, that which cannot be either blessed or wretched; and the intermediate nature lives in wretchedness when it stoops towards that which is lowest, and in blessedness when it turns towards that which is highest. He who believes in Christ does not sink his affections in that which is lowest, is not proudly self-sufficient in that which is intermediate, and thus he is qualified for union and fellowship with that which is highest; and this is the sum of the active life to which we are commanded, admonished, and by holy zeal impelled to aspire.
SOUL, RULED BY GOD, RULES ITS BODY*
These operations are either used with the preced12. ing passions of the body—such as when forms break in upon the light of our eyes, or sound flows into our ears, or fumes to the nose, tastes to the palate and to the rest of the body whatever solid and corporeal things are moved toward it from the outside. Or these operations occur when in the body itself something migrates or moves from one spot to another spot, or the whole body itself is moved by its own or another's weight.
These are the operations which the soul uses in 13. the preceding feelings of the body, which please the soul agreeing with them, offend the soul resisting them. When, however, the soul suffers anything from these feelings, its own operations, it suffers from itself, not from the body. Plainly this happens when it adjusts itself to the body. Therefore, it is less with itself because the body is always less than the soul itself,
And therefore the soul, being turned from its Lord to its slave, necessarily weakens; and again, being turned from its slave to its Lord, necessarily progresses and gives to this same slave a most easy life and therefore a life very little toilsome and troublesome, to which no attention is forced on account of its great quiet. Thus there exists that disposition of
On Music, VI, 5, 12-13; trans. Tafford P. Maher, S.J:, The De Musica VI of St. Augustine, Translated and Philosophically
Annotated (St. Louis University Master's Thesis, 1939), pp. 87-89. Used with permission,