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“... relatively virtuous in heaven, and to condemn all sinners to everlasting punishment. Some people, Augustine claimed, falsely believed that God would listen to the pleas of interceding saints, and would be merciful to sinners after due punishment. Augustine knew better: God’s punishment is eternal; these people were merely ...”

“... they remained linked to one of the earliest and most influential analyses of wonder: that of St Augustine. For Augustine wonder (or at least proper wonder) and curiosity are opposites. Curiosity is a particularly heinous vice: vainglorious astronomers cannot find God, he writes, echoing Seneca, ‘even though with curious ...”

“... better known, though still difficult fully to understand. In a famous anecdote in the Confessions, Augustine describes seeing Ambrose of Milan reading on his own without making a sound. Ambrose was not the first person in history to read silently, but his quiet, private reading was unusual enough to make an impression. ...”

“... two hundred years after Martin’s time and is best-known to English readers as the man who sent Augustine and some monks to convert the heathen English – Gregory the Great. The third book, William Kapelle’s The Norman Conquest of the North considers a wider period than its short title indicates, for it establishes the history of what became northern ...”

“... who taught in Rome in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, is another. Pelagius did not like Augustine’s Pauline emphasis on our helplessness before God’s gift of salvation. Faith, Augustine said, is crucial for salvation, but faith itself is God’s free gift. ‘The choice of believing does not lie in the human ...”

“... is a rich source of migratory imagery, from the Exodus onward, but the locus classicus is probably Augustine’s vision of the people of God as guest-workers in Babylon and pilgrims to the New Jerusalem. Small wonder, therefore, that the City of God seems to have become the Left’s new paradigm of social change. In Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s ...”

“... comments almost as sharp as Hobhouse’s. ‘When the Almighty wants anything really done,’ Augustine Birrell commented in the Nation, ‘he creates a man or woman foolish enough to believe that, if the thing were done, all would be right with the world.’ ‘Mr Trevelyan,’ said H.W.C. Davis, ‘sees this great whig through a golden haze which ...”

“... Foster is in an unrivalled position to elucidate the debate between ‘Augustinus’ (St Augustine, supposedly, but in fact Petrarch’s conscience) and ‘Franciscus’ (Petrarch himself, in all his vulnerability, persistence, rationalisation, and perverse pleasure in his condition). In Freudian terms this is a debate between super-ego and ego, two ...”

“... Minor and Italy were given great prominence. But the fact that Jesus Christ was a Jew or that St Augustine might well have looked like Colonel Gaddafi was carefully concealed. The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985 is planned to be the first volume of a trilogy, but the contents of the two later volumes are summarised at pp. 38-73 of the present work. A ...”

“... is a strange cultural ideal but a persistent one, and it tells us a lot about what we want to be. Augustine and Montaigne agree that what are called in this book ‘the workings of the penis’ are unpredictable. In Augustine’s De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione, McLaren tells us, it is the ‘autonomy of the ...”

“... of creatures like ourselves, whose existence is haunted by an awareness of our mortality. As St Augustine puts it, existence is shot through by nothingness from end to end. As such, the world is like a work of art, since God created it out of love rather than need. More specifically, it is like a Modernist work of art, which in order to avoid bad faith must ...”

“... evening his father’s horse Clementia wins her maiden race, netting him a small fortune. Jean and Augustine aren’t yet married: a Protestant, she still has to finish her catechism and be baptised into the Catholic Church. The sex takes place in the grass by a horse trough behind her family’s ‘untidy’ house. It’s the first time ‘they committed that ...”

“... anathemas,Bristling with intelligence not my intelligence,Black-hearted but indefatigable –Augustine! You know who you areAnd I know who you are and we shall dieCoeval as we came to life coeval.We are old. The dark is not far off.It is four hundred years now since those nailsWere hammered in that split the worldAnd not just flesh. Text and ...”

“... And who would want to say that Jude deserves canonical privileges denied to the Confessions of St Augustine? Well, Augustine, very likely. But it can be made to seem very odd that a choice made seventeen hundred or more years ago, on the basis of arguments of which we don’t know the details and probably wouldn’t accept ...”

“... we know very little, is ranked among the greatest of theologians, next only to St Paul and St Augustine. Of his publications, the centrepiece is the dauntingly hefty Summa Theologiae. In its dry, brisk, low-key manner, this formidable compendium of theology, metaphysics, ethics and psychology ranges from Thomas’s celebrated demonstrations of the ...”