"Come to Me," pleads our Blessed Saviour, "all you that labour and are burdened; I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon yourselves, and learn from Me; I am gentle and humble of Heart; and you shall find rest for your souls."
TRUST the past to the Mercy of God, the present to His Love, and the future to His Providence. - Saint Augustine of Hippo - ( 354 - 430 )
WHEN an evil thought is presented to the mind, we must immediately endeavour to turn our thoughts to God, or to something which is indifferent. But the best rule is, instantly to invoke the names of Christ Jesus and Mary, Mother of God, and to continue to invoke them until the temptation ceases. - Saint Alphonsus Liguori - ( 1696 - 1787 )
God is not a deceiver, that He should offer to support us, and then, when we lean upon Him, should slip away from us. - Saint Augustine of Hippo - ( 354 - 430 )
WHEN we have once placed ourselves entirely in the hands of God, we need fear no evil. If adversity comes, He knows how to turn it to our advantage, by means which will in time be made clear to us. - Saint Vincent of de Paul - ( 1580 - 1660 )
WAIT upon the Lord: wait upon HIM by avoiding all sin. He will come; doubt it not. To this firm hope, join the practice of virtue, and even in this life you will begin to taste the ineffable joys of Paradise. - Saint Bernard - ( 1090 - 1153 )
The greater and more persistent your confidence in God, the more abundantly you will receive all that you ask. - Saint Albert the Great - ( d. 1280 )
God is full of compassion, and never fails those who are afflicted and despised, if they trust in Him alone. - Saint Teresa of Avila - ( 1515 - 1582 )
HOPE not in thyself, but in thy God. For if thou hopest in thyself, thy soul is troubled within thee, since it hath not yet found that whereby it may be confident concerning thee. - Saint Augustine of Hippo - ( 354 - 430 )
THE virtue of Patience is so great a gift of God, that we even preach the patience of Him who bestows it upon us. - Saint Augustine of Hippo - ( 354 - 430 )
THE EXAMINED LIFE - The Confessions changes focus at this point and becomes more philosophical and theological. Here we begin to hear the self-examination of the Bishop of Hippo - Saint Augustine - and his interpretation of the nature of knowledge and of creation itself. -
- Page Ten - Yet these are not all that the immeasurable capacity of my memory retains. Here also is all that I have learned of the liberal sciences and have not yet forgotten - removed as it were to some inner place, which is yet no place. In this case, it is not the images which are retained, but rather, the things themselves. For whatever literature, whatever art of debating, however many kinds of questions I know, they exist in my memory as they are - I have not taken in their image and left out the thing itself. It is not as though it had sounded and passed away like a voice retained in the ear, which can be recalled as if it still sounded when it no longer sounded. Nor is it like an odour that evaporates into the air as it passed, affecting the sense of smell, and from it carries an image of itself into the memory which we renew when we recall it. Nor is it like food, which verily has no taste in the belly, but yet still tasted in some way in the memory; nor as anything which the body feels by touch and which the memory still conceives when removed from us. For those things themselves are not transmitted into the memory, but their images are caught up and stored, with an admirable swiftness, as it were, in wonderful cabinets, and from there wonderfully brought forth by the act of remembering.
But now when I hear that there are three kinds of questions - whether a thing is, what it is, of what kind it is - I do indeed hold the images of the sounds which make up these words, and I know that those sounds passed through the air with a noise and then ceased to be. But the questions themselves which are conveyed by these sounds, I never reached with any sense of my body, nor do I ever see them at all except by my mind. Yet I have not laid up their images in my memory, but these very questions themselves. How they entered into me, let them say if they can; for I have gone over all the avenues of my flesh, and cannot find how they entered. For the eyes say, "If those images were coloured, we reported about them." The ears say, "If they made a sound, we gave you knowledge of them." The nostrils say, "If they have any smell, they passed by us." The taste says, "Unless they have a flavour, do not ask for me." The touch says, "If it has no size, I did not handle it, and if did not handle it, I have no account of it."
Whence and how did these things enter my memory? I do not know. For when I learned them, I gave no credit to another man's mind, but recognised them in mine; and approving them as true, I commended them to my mind, laying them up as it were, where I could get at them again whenever I wished. There they were then [in my mind] before I stored them in my memory. Where then, or why, when they were spoken, did I acknowledge them and say, "So it is! It is true," unless they were already in the memory, But so thrown back and buried as it were in deeper recesses, that if the suggestion of another had not drawn them forth, I may have been unable to conceive of them? [Augustine here is very near the Platonic teaching, that learning is remembering. In his Retractions (1, 8:2) he gave up this opinion, saying rather that the mind has a natural affinity for the things of the intelligible world.]
Thus we find that to learn those things whose images do not come to us by the way of the senses, but which we know by themselves as they are, without images, is nothing more than taking the things the memory already has - scattered and unarranged. By marking and careful attention we gather them, as it were in that same memory where they lay unknown before scattered and ignored, so that they can readily occur to the mind now familiarized with them. And how many things of this kind does my memory hold which have already been discovered and as I said, placed as it were handily, which we are said to have learned and come to know? And if I for some short space should cease to call them back to mind, they would again be so buried, and glide back, as it were, into the deeper recesses, that they would have to be drawn out again as if new from the same place. For there is nowhere else for them to go, but they must be drawn together again that they may be known. That is to say, they must be collected together from their scattering. From this the word to cogitate comes. For cogo [I collect] and cogito [I recollect] have the same relation to each other as ago [I do] and agito [I do frequently], facio [I make] and facito [I make frequently]. But the mind is appropriated to itself this word, cogito, so that, not what is collected anywhere, but only what is recollected, that is, brought together in the mind, is properly said to be cogitated or thought upon.
The memory also contains innumerable principles and laws of numbers and dimensions, none of which have been impressed upon it by any bodily sense, since they have neither colour, sound, taste, smell nor touch. I have heard the sound of the words by which they are signified, but the sounds are other than the things themselves. Fir the sounds are different in Greek than in Latin, but the things are neither Greek nor Latin, nor other language. I have seen the lines of architects, the very finest, like a spider's thread; but the truths they express are not the images of those lines, which my physical eye saw. The architect knows them without any use whatsoever of a body, by recognizing them within himself. I have perceived, also, with all the senses of my body the numbers of the things which we count, but those numbers themselves by which we count are different. They are not the images of the things we count, and therefore they simply are. Let him who does not see these truths laugh at me for saying them. While he derides me, I will pity him.
The same memory contains the feelings of my mind - not in the same way that my mind contains them when it feels them, but in quite a different way, according to a power peculiar to memory. For without rejoicing, I remember that I have rejoiced. Without sorrow, I recollect my past sorrow. And what I once feared, I review without fear; without desire, I call to mind past desire. Sometimes, on the other hand, I remember my past sorrow with joy, and my past joy with sorrow.
This is not to be wondered at as regards the body, for the mind is one thing, the body another. If I therefore remember some past pain of the body with joy, it is not so strange. But this very memory itself is mind - for when we want something remembered, we say "See that you keep this in mind." And when we forget, we say, "it did not come to my mind," or "It slipped my mind," calling the memory itself the mind.
Since this is so, how is it, that when I remember my past sorrow with joy, the mind has joy while the memory has sorrow? The mind rejoices over the joyfulness which is in it, while the memory is not sad while retaining the sadness in it. Does the memory perchance not belong to the mind? Who will say so? The memory then is, as it were, the belly of the mind, and joy and sadness are like sweet and bitter food. When these are committed to the memory, they are, as it were, passed into the belly, where they may be stowed but not tasted. It is ridiculous to consider this comparison, but yet they are not totally unalike.
But, consider this. It is out of my memory that I say there are four basic emotions of the mind - desire, joy, fear and sorrow. Whatever I may discuss about them, by dividing each into its own particular kind, and by defining what it is, it is from my memory that I find what to say and bring it out from there. Yet I am not disturbed by these emotions when I call them to mind and remember them. Yes, and before I recalled and brought them back, they were there, and so could be brought forth by recollection. Perhaps as meat is brought up out of the stomach by chewing the cud, these things are brought out of the memory by recollection. Why, then, does the man who is thinking of them not taste in his mouth the sweetness of joy or the bitterness of sorrow? Does the comparison fail in this because it is not alike in all respects? For who would ever willingly speak of it, if every time we named grief or fear we should be compelled to feel sad or fearful? And yet we could not speak of them if we did not find in our memory, not only the sounds of their names according to images impressed on it by our bodily senses, but also the notions of the things themselves, which we never received by any avenue of the flesh. But the mind itself recognized them through the experience of its own passions, committed them to the memory; or else the memory itself retained them without having them actually assigned to it [by the conscious mind].
But whether this is done by images or not, who can readily say? Thus, I name a stone, I name the sun, and the things themselves are not present to my senses, but their images are present to my memory. I name a bodily pain, yet it is not present with me when nothing aches. Yet, unless its image was present in my memory, I would not know what to say of it, nor how to tell pain from pleasure. I name bodily health. When I am sound in body, the thing itself is present with me; yet unless its image were also present in my memory, I could not recall what the sound of this name signified. Nor would the sick, when health was named, recognize what was being spoken of, unless the same image were retained by the power of memory, although the thing itself was absent from the body. I name numbers by which we count; and it is not their images but the numbers themselves that are present in my memory. I name the image of the sun, and that are present in my memory. For I do not recall the image of its image, but the image itself is present to me when I call it to mind. I name memory, and I recognize what I name. But where do I recognize it but in the memory itself? It is also present to itself by its image, and not by itself?
When I name forgetfulness and recognize what I name, how could I recognize it if I did not remember it? I do not speak of the sound of the name, but the thing which it signifies. If I had forgotten, I could not recognize what that sound meant. When I remember memory, memory itself is, by means of itself, present with itself; but when I remember forgetfulness, there are present both memory and forgetfulness: memory by which I remember, and forgetfulness which I remember....... - Page Ten -
BY SAINT AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
Wishing you, 'Happy Reading', and may God, the Father, the Son of the living God, Jesus Christ, fills your heart, mind, thoughts, and grants you: The Holy Spirit, that is, Wisdom, Knowledge, Understanding, Counsel, Piety, Fortitude, Fear of the Lord, and also His fruits of the Holy Spirit, that is, Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Trustfulness, Gentleness and Self-Control. Amen! God blessing be upon you!
Why do you call Me, "Lord, Lord" and not do what I say?' "Everyone who comes to Me and listens to My words and acts on them - I will show you what he/she is like. He/She is like a man/woman who when he/she built his/her house dug, deep, and laid the foundations on rock; when the river was in flood it bore down on that house but could not shake it, it was so well built. But the one who listens and does nothing is like the man/woman who built his/her house on soil, with no foundations: as soon as the river bore down on it, it collapsed; and what a ruin that house became!" - Luke 6:46-49 -
If we live by the truth and in love, we shall grow in all ways into Christ Jesus, who is the head by whom the whole body is fitted and joined together, every joint adding its own strength, for each separate part to work according to it function. So the body grows until it has built itself up, in love." - Ephesians 4:15-16 -
I still have many things to say to you but they would be too much for you now. But when the spirit of truth comes, he will lead you to the complete truth, since he will not be speaking as from himself, but will say only what he has learnt; and he will tell you of the things to come. He/She will glorify me, since all he/she tells you will be taken from what is mine. Everything the Father has is mine; that is why I said: all he/she tells you will be taken from what is mine." - John 16:12-15 -
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