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“... it no implications of obligation.’ These examples are not unfairly chosen. A chapter on Saint Augustine suggests that freedom by itself may not meet our needs ‘unless choosing is accompanied by a sense of certainty’. It goes on to ask: ‘how can we create a world in which most people will not only be free to choose but will know how to ...”

“... with the two women wandering from the mountains of North Carolina to the Florida coast at St Augustine. Throughout her life Woolson was a walker and a rower, and her method of exploring new terrain was to take off by herself, as she apparently did, like a pacific version of her great-uncle’s deerslayer, soon after arriving in Florida: I walk miles ...”

“... the same sort of danger to moral and intellectual virtue as Arians had posed, in the days of St Augustine, by arguing that although Christ was certainly of a similar substance to the Father, he could hardly be the same substance. Nietzsche said that ‘we simply lack any organ for knowledge, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe or imagine) just as ...”

“... a similar record. What, for instance would his judgment be on either China or Romania? Like St Augustine, Kiernan is too ready to label all but the ideal government as latrocinia, and this weakens his punch in dealing with one that really does come under that heading. I would have liked to see him use his historical expertise, which is great, to show ...”

“... in the capacity of the modern American city ‘to revive the reality of the outside’. It was Augustine, Sennett proposes, who laid the ‘theological foundation’ for the ‘corrosive dualism between inside and outside’ detectable today in American cities, in which public and private realms are separated by ‘neutral space’. ...”

“... one knows where they are, still less how to get there. The characters quote Yeats or Blake or St Augustine, but these glimpses of the moon are relics from college days. They don’t make any difference now, and we are a great deal nearer to the supermarket and the television commercials. The only note strong or poignant enough to cut through this defeated ...”

“... own diary Like it was, Malcolm Muggeridge makes a comment which is relevant here. He speaks of St Augustine, ‘living at a time rather like ours, barbarians sacking Rome etc, and taking little or no account of these events’. Toynbee does not take much explicit account of barbarians sacking Rome etc either, the sinking of the Cambridge boat and the possible ...”

“... marginal one, precisely because it contradicted the fundamental Christian doctrine (reiterated by Augustine and other Church Fathers) of the unity of mankind. Indeed, some polygenists – like Voltaire, who opposed New World slavery – were motivated not so much by hostility to the Negro as by religious scepticism. The argument that European racial ...”

“... on Othello the external correlative, or stimulus, is the opinion in moral theology, going back to Augustine, that sexual relations between husband and wife, if pursued enthusiastically and for pleasure only, amount to adultery. Since we are not told much about Othello and Desdemona’s sex-life, the connection may seem gratuitous. Greenblatt linked the two by ...”

“... a very wide audience. Or one can see the long shadows cast by the powerful minds of the Fathers: Augustine’s musings on the first half of a cryptic Biblical verse (Isaiah 65: 20) reappear in Aelfric, John Mirk, perhaps Pearl; Gregory’s interpretation of the second half of the verse influences not only Bede and Aelfric but Petrarch and various Middle ...”

“... obscuring it in a host of details), there are some notable absences, among them the names of St Augustine and St Benedict. Yet the moral of Dunn’s distinguished book is surely that new Dark Ages are at hand, and that we shall have to learn to construct communities which have some hope of surviving them. Dunn’s own doubts are far more measured in their ...”

“... The best thing therefore is love, the disposition, Scheler said, which Plato and Augustine and Pascal had been talking about, the aspiration to Einsfühling, a feeling-at-one-with, not the thin ‘sympathy’, reasoned ‘altruism’, and formal ‘obligation’ of the Enlightenment. This love fixes itself on ideals or models of ...”

“... of boyhood, and putting on the toga virilis, the plain white toga of manhood. In his Confessions Augustine tells the excruciating story of how his father noticed that his little boy was growing up when he saw him naked in the public baths, and rushed off excitedly to tell his mother. Young men traditionally dedicated their first beard to the household ...”

“... is transported above all else by two paintings that detain few today: a small painting of Saint Augustine in a landscape of ‘unearthly glory’ by Garofalo, and the exceptionally finely executed and expensive Luini, then attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and generally believed to represent Christ with the Doctors (as it is labelled today) which the prince ...”

“... point of pure consciousness. Nor had it much in common with the human soul as imagined, say, by St Augustine. It was not really a matter of being, either. In the case of Montaigne, grovelling on the earth, we might legitimately ask what else he had left. The answer is a certain sort of sensation: a feeling that has always been present but mostly unacknowledged ...”