the soul, which is the true wisdom that directs itself to the end where God shall be all in all in eternal certitude and perfect peace. Here our peace is with God through faith; and yet is rather a solarium miseriae than a gaudium beatitudinis, as it will be hereafter. But the end of those who do not belong to the City of God will be miseria sempiterna, which is also called the second death, since the soul alienated from God cannot be said to live, nor that body be said to live which is enduring eternal pains.[1] Augustine devotes a whole book, the twenty-first, to an exposition of the sempiternal, non-purgatorial, punishment of the damned, whom the compassionate intercession of the saints will not save, nor many other considerations which have been deemed eventually saving by the fondly lenient opinions of men. His views were as dark as those of Gregory the Great. Only imaginative elaboration was needed to expand them to the full compass of mediaeval fear.
Augustine brought all intellectual interests into the closure of the Christian Faith, or discredited whatever stubbornly remained without. He did the same with ethics. For he transformed the virtues into accord with his Catholic conception of man's chief good. That must consist in cleaving to what is most blessed to cleave to, which is God. To Him we can cleave only through dilectio, amor, and charitas. Virtue which leads us to the vita beata is nothing but summus amor Dei. So he defines the four cardinal virtues anew. Temperance is love keeping itself whole and incorrupt for God; fortitude is love easily bearing all things for God's sake; justice is love serving God only, and for that reason rightly ruling in the other matters, which are subject to man; and prudence is love well discriminating between what helps and what impedes as to God (in deum).[2] Conversely, the heathen virtues, as the heathen had in fact conceived them, were vices rather than virtues to Augustine. For they lacked knowledge of the true God, and therefore were affected with fundamental ignorance, and were also tainted with pride.[3] Through his unique power of religious
- ↑ Civ. Dei, xix. caps. 49, 20, 27, 28.
- ↑ De moribus Ecclesiae, 14, 15; cf. Epist. 155, §§ 12, 13.]]
- ↑ Civ. Dei, xix. 25.
