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Spotlight - St. Augustine

              by Artur Wielgus

        St. Augustine (354 - 430)

St. Augustine was a pagan intellectual and a sinner, but through the intercessions of his holy mother, St. Monica who constantly prayed for him that he may believe in true God, he converted and became born again in the spirit. Augustine became notable philosopher and theologian.

The City of God by St. Augustine, published by Random House, Inc., 1950.
Book XIII, 2. Of that death which can affect an  immortal soul, and of that to which the body is subject.
Page 412, "But I see I must speak a little more carefully of the nature of death.
For although the human soul is truly affirmed to be immortal, yet it also has a certain death of its own… And this death of the whole man is followed by that which, on the authority of the divine oracles, we call the second death. This the Saviour referred to when He said, 'Fear Him which is able to destroy both  soul and body in hell.’ (Matt. X.28.)
Page 414, "And if infants are delivered from this bondage of sin by the Redeemer’s grace, they can suffer only this death which separates soul and body; but being redeemed from the obligation of sin, they do not pass to that second endless and penal death."
Page 417, "For if we look at the matter a little more carefully, we shall see that even when a man dies faithfully and laudably for the truth’s sake, it is still death he is avoiding. For he submits to some part of death, for the very purpose of avoiding the whole, and the second and eternal death over and above. He submits to the  separation of soul and body, lest the soul be separated both from God and from the body, and so the whole first death be completed, and the second death receive him everlastingly. Wherefore death is indeed, as I said, good to none while it is being actually suffered, and while it is subduing the dying to its power; but it is meritoriously endured for the sake of retaining or winning what is good. And regarding what happens after death, it is no absurdity to say that death is good to the good, and evil to the evil. For the disembodied spirits of the just are at rest; but those of the wicked suffer punishment till their bodies rise again – those of the just to life everlasting, and of the others to death eternal, which is called the second death."
Page 421, "Yet, by the aid of our Redeemer’s grace, we may manage at least to decline the second (death). For that is more grievous still, and, indeed, of evils the worst, since it consists not in the separation of soul and body, but in the uniting of both in death eternal. 
And there, in striking contrast to our present conditions, men will not be before or after death, but always in death; and thus never living, never dead, but endlessly dying. And never can a man be more disastrously in death than when death itself shall be deathless."
P.423, "…we should understand only that death which occurs when the soul is deserted by God, who is its life; for it was not deserted by God, and so deserted Him, but deserted Him, and so was deserted by Him."
P. 480, "Now citizens are begotten to the earthly city by nature vitiated by sin, but to the heavenly city by grace freeing nature from sin; whence the former are called ‘vessels of wrath’, the latter ‘vessels of mercy’.
P. 685, "But not even the saints and faithful worshippers of the one true and most high God are safe from
the manifold temptations and deceits of the demons. For in this abode of weakness, and in these wicked days, this state of anxiety has also its use, stimulating us to seek with keener longing for that security where peace is complete and unassailable."
P. 710, "And when we speak of the day of God’s judgment, we add the word last or final for this reason, because even now God judges, and has judged from the beginning of human history, banishing them from paradise, and excluding from the tree of life, those first men who perpetrated so great a sin. Yea, He was certainly exercising judgment also when He did not spare the angels who sinned, whose prince, overcome by envy, seduced men after being himself seduced."
P. 747, "For those who shall be in torment shall not know what is going on within in the joy of the Lord; but they who shall enter into that joy shall know what is going on outside in the outer darkness."
P. 765, "And so, although it be true that in this world there is no flesh which can suffer pain and yet cannot die, yet in the world to come there shall be flesh such as now there is not, as there also be death such as now there is not. For death will not be abolished, but will be eternal, since the soul will neither be able to enjoy God and live, nor to die and escape the pains of the body. The first death drives the soul from the body against her will: the second death holds the soul in the body against her will."
P. 766, "As the soul, too, is a proof that not everything which can suffer pain can also die, why then do they yet demand that we produce real examples to prove that it is not incredible that the bodies of men condemned to everlasting punishment may retain their soul in the fire, may burn without being consumed, and may suffer without perishing?"
P 779, "Now they who would refer both the fire and the worm to the spirit and not to the body, affirm that the wicked, who are separated from the kingdom of God, shall be burned, as it were, by the anguish of the spirit repenting too late and fruitlessly." For there is no repentance for men after death.
"…it is necessarily understood that in a body thus tormented the soul also is tortured with a fruitless repentance."
P. 780 #10. Whether the fire of hell, if it be material fire, can burn the wicked spirits, that is to say, devils, who are immaterial.
"Here arises the question: If the fire is not to be immaterial, analogous to the pain of the soul, but material, burning by contact, so that bodies may be tormented in it, how can  evil spirits be punished in it? For it is undoubtedly the same fire which is to serve for the punishment of men and of devils, according to the words of Christ: ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels..’"
P 866, "There shall we be still, and know that He is God; that He is that which we ourselves aspired to be when we fell away from Him, and listened to the voice of the seducer, ‘Ye shall be as gods’, and so abandoned God, who would have made us gods, not by deserting Him, but by participating in Him.

His other noteworthy book, The Confessions, relate the touching story of his life as heretic and his conversion. Augustine tells us that he was enticed by the promises of a free philosophy unbridled by faith;
and, above all, by the hope of finding in their doctrine a scientific explanation of nature and its most mysterious phenomena.

© A. R. Wielgus 2009
 

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