quoting. Augustine is getting his infancy narratives mixed up.
30 SAINT A UGUSTINE - SERMONS
NOTES
1. Considering the style, elaborate if slightly laboriously so, I myself would put the date consid¬ erably before 411; really in the early days of his episcopate, even before 400. And considering the somewhat indigestible nature of the theological content (all perfectly orthodox, of course), though he employs an analogy or comparison that was always a favorite of his, I would guess at a somewhat select audience, more likely to be found in Carthage than in Hippo Regius.
2. Meaning the eternal daylight which shines on the angels, the eternal truth on which angelic intelligences feed.
3. An echo of Eccl 1:3. 9 etc. 4. An echo of Ps 19:5; the virgin's womb is being compared to this bridal chamber, from which the sun, Christ, comes forth.
5. Echoing Phil 2:6-7.
6. As the divine Wisdom, Wis 8:1. 7. See Ps 34:8.
8. Like the syllables of words in all languages. In some languages (like Greek and Latin in particular) more attention is paid to quantity, the length of time devoted to each syllable, in others to the stress or accentuation placed on the syllable, in others to the tone. But all exhibit variations of quantity—as also of stress and tone.
9. See Ps 104:2.
10. It is not clear what he means by this; he goes on to illustrate "unchangeable," but not "dis¬ similar." He sometimes seems to use the word as expressing some absolute quality (of a negative kind), not as referring to something else in the way the word normally requires: dissimilar, or similar, to what? He will talk, for instance, of the prodigal son departing to "a region of dissimilarity," the far country of Lk 15:13. It seems thus simply to signify our fallen condition, in which the divine image, by which we are intended to be similar to God, has been defaced and distorted; so, dissimilar, by remote implication, to God. But this hardly seems to fit this context. So perhaps he means, what he doesn't quite say, that the spoken word never perfectly represents, with complete similarity, the thought word, but that there is always some dissimilarity between the two.
11. See Mt 1:23, quoting Is 7:14; and it is not Gabriel, but Matthew himself who is doing the quoting. Augustine is getting his infancy narratives mixed up.
12. See Is 60:3.