Through the Church Fathers

To take a sign for the thing it signifies is a kind of slavery, and a world can be shaped only out of what is almost nothing. Augustine warns that the letter kills when a figurative word is read as if it were proper. Sabbath and sacrifice then stay on the day and the victim, and the mind never lifts. The bondage of Israel was not the bondage of the nations. Their signs, however misunderstood, stil...

A question can be asked so that the answer is already No, and a world can be made only if it is not made out of God. Augustine takes the ambiguities of pronunciation next. The rule of faith will not let “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect?” be read as if God and Christ were the accusers. Inquiry and interrogative are not the same. A short syllable and a long one can hide bone unde...

A mark in the wrong place can make the Word something other than God, and a mind full of pictures can fail to think what has no picture. Augustine opens the third book of On Christian Doctrine by sending the prepared reader to the ambiguities of Scripture. Where the words themselves are unclear, punctuation and pronunciation are tested first by the rule of faith, then by the context, and, if both...

What the heathen said truly was never theirs to keep, and what has no form cannot be pictured by a mind that wants a picture. Augustine tells the Christian to take the gold and silver of pagan learning, the true things and the useful precepts, and turn them to the preaching of the gospel, as Israel took the vessels of Egypt. The same learning will puff a man up unless charity builds him. Christ is...

A man can learn the rules of argument and still miss the truth they serve, and a word can name what has no shape of its own. Augustine warns the studious not to mistake dialectic, rhetoric, or the science of number for the secret of a happy life. The rules are true, and number was discovered rather than invented, but the man who will not trace that truth back to God may be learned and still not wi...

A valid argument can still land on a false conclusion, and a true opinion can be joined by a bad one. Augustine draws that line in On Christian Doctrine, then turns it on definition and eloquence: the rules stay true even when poets, heretics, or a clever speaker put them to a false use. In the Confessions he looks further back, at the earth that was invisible and formless, and at the darkness on...

Today we move from reasoning, to creation, to disciplined Christian life . In On Christian Doctrine , Augustine explains why Christians should know something of the mechanical arts and especially logic: reasoning can help us understand Scripture, but it must never become an exercise in sophistry, and the laws of logic are not human inventions but realities we discover in the order God has made. In...

Olympiads and consuls are not baptism, but they can keep a reader from making Christ forty-six years old because the temple took forty-six years to build. Augustine will use profane history that way, and he will let Ambrose use it to unmask the slander that Jesus learned His words from Plato. Herbs that heal when drunk are one thing; herbs that heal when hung on the neck are another. The stars may...

Letters, coins, and the names of months are not pacts with demons. They are agreements men make so they can live together. Augustine will take what is necessary for intercourse and reading, and leave the theatre’s private code and the luxury that feeds on lies. What men have found by investigating the past and the order of providence is another class again. The Confessions then shuts the vain ques...

A true omen would still be a bad friendship. Augustine will not spare divination because Samuel’s ghost spoke truly, or because a spirit in Acts said the apostles’ names. If it happens, do not hearken. Signs like that mean what a prior pact has taught them to mean—like X to a Greek and to a Latin—and the observer’s own hunger writes the lexicon. The Confessions then turns from scattered signs to a...

The stars keep their courses. They do not keep our lives. Augustine will let a man chart a birthday and still refuse to sell him to Mars. Jacob’s hand was on Esau’s heel. The chart could not tell them apart. The Scriptures could. The Confessions then names what time does to a soul: life is a distraction ( distentio ), scattered among many things, until the Mediator gathers it toward the One—not to...

Truth is not pagan property. Augustine will take music, letters, even a heathen report about the Muses, and then refuse the idols, the amulets, and the fear that mice in the boots mean tomorrow’s ruin. Cato already knew the difference. The Confessions then recites a psalm. Before the first line, attention holds the whole. As the lines are said, memory lengthens and expectation shortens, until the...

Forty days, ten strings, a hundred and fifty-three fish: Augustine will not let a reader shrug at numbers as decoration. They are one of the keys that open figures—and music is another, even if the nine Muses were only three artists and three kinds of sound. The Confessions then names the three acts by which the mind handles what is not there: it expects, it considers, it remembers. A long future...

Unknown words stop a reader. Augustine’s remedy is not guesswork: ask a speaker of the tongue, learn the tongue, compare translators, and correct the copies before you interpret them. He prefers the Itala among Latin versions and the Septuagint among the Greek, and he will use Hebrew names—Siloam, Zion, Jordan—because things as well as words unlock figures. The Confessions then finds where the mea...

True eloquence in teaching consists in making clear what was obscure, and a wooden key that opens the lock is better than a golden one that does not. Augustine recalls Cicero’s three aims of the orator—to teach, to delight, and to persuade—and insists that teaching is the necessity. The hearer must be moved as well as instructed, for practical truth is useless unless the will is subdued to practic...

The reading posted for October 12 has been corrected. Please go back and read the updated version now. Explore the Project: Through the Church Fathers – https://www.throughthechurchfathers.com Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/cmichaelpatton Credo Courses – https://www.credocourses.com Credo Ministries – https://www.credoministries.org

A translator can turn “swift” into “sharp” and never notice he has left the writer behind. Augustine says that is not an obscure reading. It is a false one—and false texts are to be corrected, not interpreted. Greek and Hebrew, or a tighter Latin, exist so the sense can be recovered; a solecism that still tells the truth may be endured, but an idiom that makes God’s folly sound wiser as men must b...

First read the plain places. Then let them light the dark ones. Augustine will not let a man hunt figures before he knows the books, or treat an ox as only an ox when the apostle has already said what the ox means. Hebrew and Greek are not ornaments. They are the remedy when Latin translators multiply. Two renderings of Isaiah can both tell the truth: without faith you will not understand; without...

Fear of God is the first step; wisdom is the last. Between them Augustine sets a climb that ends in a single eye—one that will not put neighbor, or self, before the truth. Then he comes back down to the third step and names the books: the canon judged by the churches, forty-four of the Old, and the New from the four Gospels to John’s Revelation. The Confessions still cannot say what time is, only...

Today’s Readings Podcast Description Scripture left one language so that it could enter every language. Readers hunt the mind of the writers only to find the will of God. Then the dark places arrive. Augustine will not call them accidents. Pride is worn down by toil; the mind that finds too easily grows dull. The plain texts feed hunger. The obscure ones wake appetite. Almost nothing buried in fig...

Smoke means fire whether anyone meant it to. A word means fire only because someone meant to say so. Augustine opens Book 2 of On Christian Doctrine by turning from things to signs: natural and conventional, nod and trumpet, sacrament and speech—and then writing, born because sound dies on the air, divided at Babel because men would not share the chief place. The Confessions will not let the sun o...

If the reading builds up love of God and neighbor, Augustine will not call the mistake a lie—but he still wants the man back on the road. Love of one’s own opinion can turn the reader against Scripture; and if faith totters, love grows cold. Faith and hope will one day give way to sight. Love will not. The Confessions then prays over the ordinary mystery we all speak without understanding: how lon...

God does not use us the way we use a road. He uses us for our good, because He is good—and the holy man, like the holy angel, will not let us make camp in him. On Christian Doctrine sums the whole discussion of things: Scripture ends in love of the Good to be enjoyed, and love of the neighbor who can enjoy that Good with us. Christ is the way; He will not detain us on the way. The Confessions then...

Who is my neighbor? Augustine will not let the word shrink. Enemy, stranger, even the holy angels who have shown us mercy—and Christ Himself under the figure of the man who stopped on the road. God does not enjoy us as if He needed our glitter. He uses us for our good, that we may enjoy Him, and one another in Him. The Confessions then corrects our speech about time: there are not past and future...

The two great commandments do not forget the self. Augustine says we already love our own life the way the beasts do; what had to be commanded is God above us and the neighbor beside us—and then the whole current of that love, even love of enemies, is to run toward the one Good no one who finds Him will regret. The Confessions leaves the prophets in God’s hand: He to whom nothing is future somehow...