On True Religion

Contents

Reading pages: 1–11 · 12–24 · 25–34 · 35–44 · 45–54 · 55

1. 1Augustine begins by observing that the pagan philosophers held conflicting views in their schools while sharing the same temples and rites with the people.
2. 2Augustine interprets Socrates' oaths by dogs and stones as a rebuke of idolatry, but notes that neither he nor Plato turned the people from their idols.
3. 3Augustine argues that what Plato could only hope a divine man might achieve, persuading the peoples to seek the unseen truth, has been accomplished through Christ and the preaching of the Gospel throughout the world.
4. 4Augustine urges the Platonists to acknowledge Christ, through whom the peoples have been persuaded of what their masters could not teach them, and suggests that Plato and his followers would become Christians if they lived now.
5. 5Augustine contrasts the philosophers, who kept rites in common with the people while disagreeing in doctrine, with the Church, which does not share the sacraments with heretics, and concludes that true religion is found only among catholic Christians.
6. 6Augustine describes how the catholic Church makes use of pagans, heretics, schismatics and Jews, tolerates carnal members as chaff, and how good men unjustly expelled should remain loyal without forming separate assemblies.
7. 7Addressing Romanianus, Augustine states that the Christian religion of the catholic Church must be held, and that it rests on the history and prophecy of God's saving dispensation, which leads to knowledge of the Trinity as creator of all things.
8. 8Augustine explains that the articles of faith first accepted on authority come to be understood, and that heresies serve God's providence by rousing catholics to seek and open the truth.
9. 9Augustine says the work is aimed chiefly at the Manichaeans, whose doctrine of two warring substances and two souls he summarizes, and attributes any truth in it to God and any error to himself.
10. 10Augustine explains that religious error consists in worshiping soul, body, or mental images in place of God, and that the Christian religion is God's temporal help for restoring fallen man.
11. 11Augustine argues that all life and all bodies, insofar as they exist, come from God and are good, while wickedness is the soul's voluntary turning from God toward bodies and so toward nothingness.
12. 12Augustine explains that the soul that loves bodies becomes carnal and suffers pain, but the soul that conquers its desires by God's grace is restored, loves God and neighbor, and will receive back its body made pure in the resurrection.
13. 13Augustine explains that the devil is evil not by nature but by his own will, having fallen through pride by loving himself more than God.
14. 14Augustine argues that sin is necessarily voluntary, so that souls have free choice of the will, and that even man's yielding to the devil's persuasion was by consent.
15. 15Augustine argues that the mortality of the body after sin, though a just punishment, shows God's mercy by turning human love from bodily pleasures toward truth.
16. 16Augustine describes the incarnation of the Son as God's greatest help to the human race, showing the dignity of human nature, and presents Christ's life, death and resurrection as a complete moral teaching.
17. 17Augustine explains that God's teaching is given both plainly and in figures and sacraments, and defends the unity of the Old and New Testaments, comparing God to a physician who prescribes differently for different conditions.
18. 18Augustine explains that created things can fail because they are made from nothing, yet whatever has any form, and even the capacity for form, is good and comes from God.
19. 19Augustine argues that whatever can be corrupted is good, since corruption harms only what has some soundness, and that only God is the incorruptible good.
20. 20Augustine explains that evil is not a substance but the soul's disordered will in preferring lower goods, illustrating with the tree of paradise, a stylus, and the sun, and warns against imagining God as boundless bodily light.
21. 21Augustine explains that bodies become ‘vanity’ only for those who pursue them as the highest good, and that the multiplicity of temporal things scatters fallen man from the unity of God.
22. 22Augustine compares the passing of temporal things to the syllables of a verse, which are beautiful in sequence though the art that makes them is unchanging, and says that only the impious are displeased with the order of the universe.
23. 23Augustine concludes that no nature is evil, that the restored soul will possess the world rather than be possessed by it, and that the universe remains beautiful through the condemnation of sinners, the testing of the just, and the perfection of the blessed.
24. 24Augustine explains that God's healing of the soul proceeds by authority, which asks for faith, and then by reason, which leads to understanding, beginning from the bodily things by which we are held.
25. 25Augustine argues that those who teach the worship of one God are to be believed before those who teach many, and that the miracles which won faith at first were not continued into his own time, lest people always seek visible things.
26. 26Augustine traces the ages of the ‘old man’ from infancy to old age and the seven spiritual ages of the ‘new man’ reborn inwardly, ending in eternal rest.
27. 27Augustine applies the old and new man to the whole human race, divided into the impious and the people of God, whose history in the Old Testament prefigures the New, until the resurrection and judgment.
28. 28Augustine says that the patriarchs and prophets, and now the spiritual teachers of the Church, give each age and each hearer what it can bear, milk for the weak and solid food for the mature, without ever lying.
29. 29Turning from authority to reason, Augustine argues from the order of the world that the soul which gives life is above the body, and the reason which judges the senses is above both.
30. 30Augustine argues from the judgments of beauty and proportion in the arts that the mind judges by an unchangeable law of equality and unity which it does not see in bodies, and that this law above the mind is truth.
31. 31Augustine identifies the unchangeable truth above the mind with God, specifically with the Son, the Father's equal through whom he judges, and explains that the spiritual man may know but not judge this eternal law.
32. 32Augustine argues that things delight because they are beautiful, that their beauty consists in an imperfect unity, and that the perfect unity by which we judge them is seen by the mind and is present everywhere without being in any place.
33. 33Augustine explains that bodies do not lie and the senses do not deceive, since they report only what affects them; error lies in the soul that judges wrongly and seeks to see God with the eyes.
34. 34Augustine urges that bodies be judged as the lowest goods, since every body is a true body but a false unity, and calls for a mind able to see the One beyond the phantasms of imagination.
35. 35Augustine calls the mind to the stillness of thought, free from places and times, and to the light yoke of Christ, which frees it from restless love of temporal things.
36. 36Augustine identifies the perfect Likeness of the One, which fulfills it without any unlikeness, with the Truth and the Word of God, and traces falsity to souls that love works more than their Maker.
37. 37Augustine describes the descending stages of idolatry, from worshiping the soul and the highest creatures, through the sun, moon, stars and the world as a whole, down to idols made by human hands.
38. 38Augustine argues that even those who worship nothing are slaves to the threefold desire of pleasure, pride and curiosity (1 John 2:16), which Christ overcame in his three temptations.
39. 39Augustine urges the reader to return into himself and transcend even his reasoning soul toward the truth, arguing that anyone who doubts is certain of something true and so cannot doubt that truth exists.
40. 40Augustine describes the bodily processes of nourishment and generation as the lowest beauty, mixed by providence with pains so that we seek what is unchangeable, and argues that all things, including evil angels and the punished, are ordered into the beauty of the whole.
41. 41Augustine argues that even punishments are beautifully ordered, praises the beauty of a worm, and urges men and women alike to rule their desire, figured as a woman, under Christ their head.
42. 42Augustine urges using reason while there is light, and points from the numbers present in seeds and in the songs and motions of animals to the unchangeable law of number.
43. 43Augustine argues that the mind judges size and duration by proportion and ordered harmony, and that the measure of order lives unchangeably in the Truth, the Son, the Father's perfect image, through whom all things are made.
44. 44Augustine explains that the rational soul, made toward God, will have all lower things serve it if it serves its Creator, and will rule a sanctified body in the resurrection.
45. 45Even bodily pleasure and pride, rightly understood, point back to the unity and power that belong to God, and it is better to be conquered by a man than by a vice such as envy.
46. 46Whoever loves God above all and his neighbor as himself cannot be conquered, because what he loves cannot be taken from him; the neighbor is to be loved as a man, not for fleshly ties or advantage.
47. 47The man who loves in others only what he has perfectly in himself, and who clings to God alone, envies no one, uses all things and people rightly, and cannot be conquered or robbed of happiness.
48. 48True freedom and rule come from loving God above oneself and loving each thing in its due measure; even pride is a shadow that points back to true freedom.
49. 49Curiosity and the love of spectacles are a distorted desire for truth; the mind's own light shows the falsehood of materialist and Manichaean fantasies and leads to the eternal being of God.
50. 50God in his mercy has given humanity visible signs, Scriptures, and allegories as steps to the truth, and Augustine lists the questions about history, allegory, and biblical language that must be settled to read them rightly.
51. 51Instead of theater and poetry, the mind should feed on the Scriptures and long to see the Wisdom that orders the whole world.
52. 52The mind should turn from the beauty it perceives through the senses to the eternal law by which it judges, for curiosity, pride, and pleasure are distorted longings for knowledge, power, and rest found only in God.
53. 53Those who love the true ends of knowledge, action, and bodily life, namely truth, peace, and health, receive a foretaste of them now and their perfection after the resurrection.
54. 54Those who misuse the mind for visible things, contests, and bodily appetites are bound and cast into outer darkness, while those who use the senses and mind to know and love God enter the joy of their Lord, as the parable of the talents shows.
55. 55Augustine closes by urging his readers to worship no creature, neither phantoms, works, beasts, the dead, demons, elements, heavenly bodies, nor even angels, but the one God, the Trinity of one substance, to whom true religion binds us.