Tag: Augustine

Augustine of Hippo – A Prayer

Lord, you are great and infinitely worthy of praise.
Great is your power and inscrutable your widsom.
Man (sic) is a puny part of your creation, and his desire is to praise you. He bears everywhere his mortality, the sign of his sin, to remind him that you resist the proud.
And yet this man desires to praise you, since he is a puny part of your creation.
It is you who bring him to seek joy in praising you, because you have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it finds rest in you.’

(Augustine of Hippo)

From The Confessions, Book 1

St Augustine on The self-interpreting nature of Scripture

‘It is a wondrous and beneficial thing that the Holy Spirit organised the Holy Scriptures so as to satisfy hunger by means of its plainer passages, and remove boredom by means of its obscurer ones … If you cannot yet understand [a passage of Scripture], you should leave the matter for the consideration of those who can; and since Scripture does not abandon you in your infirmity, but with a mother’s love accompanies your slower steps, you will make progress. Holy Scripture, indeed, speaks in such a way as to mock the proud readers with its heights, terrify the attentive with its depths, feed great souls with its truth and nourish little ones with sweetness’.

– Augustine

(Cited in Katherine Green-McCreight, Ad Litteram: How Augustine, Calvin, and Barth Read the ‘Plain Sense’ of Genesis 1-3 (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1998), 164, 167)