St. Augustine on Virtue

I am hopelessly behind on my City of God reading.  I've been involved in a twitter group study led by Professor C. C. Pecknold of Catholic University of America.  It was a 15 week long program, where he assigned reading from The City of God and then every Thursday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. on twitter with the hashtag #CivDei, he led us through the reading we'd done, pulling out its significance and helping us to understand what we'd read.  I mostly kept up for the first 13 weeks.  However, I had to take my Latin final and realized I had to either study Latin or read City of God, so City of God got pushed aside. Then it turned out the next week we had to read not one, but two chapters.  So now I was 3 chapters behind.  St. Augustine is slow going for me.  For one thing the print is tiny in this edition and often my eyes are too strained (probably from being on the computer too much during the day), so this slows my reading capacity by a lot.  But also, this is deep stuff and Augustine goes into very great detail about everything, so it is not a light read to begin with.  I kept slogging on, hoping to catch up, but Book XVIII was a killer for me!  It took me 2 weeks just to get through it.  I thought it would never end!

But I finished it!  Hooray!  I tucked into Book XIX, which I had heard from eavesdropping on the twitter group was fantastic!  However, Passover and Easter loomed on the horizon and then I got sick.  Somehow, time got away from me, despite my best intentions.  The group moved on to Books XX, XXI and last night, finished with Book XXII.  And I am still limping through Book XIX.

I am determined to finish this anyway.  So now City of God is my morning meditation.  I've actually been putting the kitchen timer on for 30 minutes each morning and reading as much as I can.  Frankly, not having the weekly deadline is making me enjoy it a bit more.  So many quotable quotes!

St. Augustine has such personality!  He can be sarcastic as all get out.  At times he stick in a little humor, even occasionally of the bodily sort.   He is frank and full of common sense.  At other times he gets so bogged down in details; he loves precision and categorizing everything very closely.  And sometimes he writes so beautifully and poetically, it makes my heart sing.

Today, I was inspired by this passage.  He is talking about how the pagan philosophers were, as he puts it, 'amazingly idiotic' when they determined that one can find the ultimate good within ourselves.  They believed the wise man can find happiness in this life.  A wise man is virtuous; virtue being the art of living right.  Augustine begins to take this assertion apart by analyzing what the virtues actually do:

And what of the virtue called prudence?  Does she not employ all her vigilance in distinguishing good from evil, so that in our pursuit of the good and our endeavor to shun the evil, no mistakes may creep in?  And does not she herself thus testify that we are in the midsts of evils, or rather that evils are in us?  For she teaches us that it is an evil to consent in sinning, and a good to refuse to consent.  But although prudence teaches us not to consent to that evil, and self-control causes us not to consent, neither prudence nor self-control removes that evil from this life.  Consider the virtue of justice.  The function of justice is to assign to each his due; and hence there is established in man himself a certain just order of nature, by which the soul is subordinated to God, and the body to the soul, and thus both body and soul are subordinated to God.  Does not justice demonstrate in performing this function, that she is still laboring at her task rather than resting after reaching its completion?  For, we may be sure,  the less the soul has God in mind in all its thinking, the less it is subordinated to God, and the more the desires of the flesh* oppose the spirit the less subordinate the body is to the soul.  So long, therefore, there is in us this weakness, this disease, this lethargy, how shall we dare to claim that we are saved?  And if not saved, how shall we dare to assert that we are already blessed with that final bliss.

* Lest you think St. Augustine means 'flesh' in the sense that the body is evil, let me correct you.  He already, hundreds of pages ago, has stated that all God's creation is good and reflects His glory.  But he is using the word 'flesh' in St. Paul's sense of being of the temporal, corruptible world rather than of the spirit which leads to the eternal.