Through the Church Fathers

What the heathen said truly was never theirs to keep, and what has no form cannot be pictured by a mind that wants a picture. Augustine tells the Christian to take the gold and silver of pagan learning, the true things and the useful precepts, and turn them to the preaching of the gospel, as Israel took the vessels of Egypt. The same learning will puff a man up unless charity builds him. Christ is the passover. The meek herb marks the door. Scripture then outruns every book brought out of Egypt: what is hurtful is condemned there, what is useful is already there, and much is there that can be learned nowhere else. In the Confessions he tries to say what formless matter was. Thought finds it is neither an intelligible form, such as life or justice, nor anything the senses can reach. The mind knows it by knowing that it is ignorant. Aquinas asks who assumed, and what was assumed. The whole Trinity caused the work. Only the Son terminated it. He took human nature to His own Person, not a man already existing, and not a second person beside Himself.
Today’s Readings:
Augustine — On Christian Doctrine, Book 2, Chapters 40–42 (Sections 60–63) Augustine — The Confessions, Book 12, Chapter 5 (Section 5) Thomas Aquinas — Summa Theologica, Part 3, Questions 3–4 (Articles 1–8 and 1–6)
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A man can learn the rules of argument and still miss the truth they serve, and a word can name what has no shape of its own. Augustine warns the studious not to mistake dialectic, rhetoric, or the science of number for the secret of a happy life. The rules are true, and number was discovered rather than invented, but the man who will not trace that truth back to God may be learned and still not wise. What is useful among the heathen is to be taken soberly. What binds a man to demons is to be refused. In the Confessions he asks what name can carry formless matter to a duller mind, and he answers with the earth and the deep, lowest and least beautiful, invisible and without shape, out of which the shapely world was made. Aquinas then asks how the Word took flesh. Not by mixture, and not by a second person set beside the Son. Two natures remain. One Person subsists in both, by grace, with no merits going before.
Today’s Readings:
Augustine — On Christian Doctrine, Book 2, Chapters 37–39 (Sections 55–59) Augustine — The Confessions, Book 12, Chapter 4 (Section 4) Thomas Aquinas — Summa Theologica, Part 3, Question 2 (Articles 1–12)
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A valid argument can still land on a false conclusion, and a true opinion can be joined by a bad one. Augustine draws that line in On Christian Doctrine, then turns it on definition and eloquence: the rules stay true even when poets, heretics, or a clever speaker put them to a false use. In the Confessions he looks further back, at the earth that was invisible and formless, and at the darkness on the face of the deep. That darkness was not a second substance. It was the absence of light, as silence is the absence of sound. And yet the formless matter was not altogether nothing. Aquinas then asks whether it was fitting for God to become incarnate, and whether that coming was necessary. Goodness communicates itself, and the highest good in the highest way. God could have restored us otherwise. There was no more fitting way. Scripture assigns the Incarnation to sin, and the fullness of time was neither the beginning of the world nor its end.
Today’s Readings:
Augustine — On Christian Doctrine, Book 2, Chapters 33–36 (Sections 51–54) Augustine — The Confessions, Book 12, Chapter 3 (Section 3) Thomas Aquinas — Summa Theologica, Part 3, Question 1 (Articles 1–6)
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Today we move from reasoning, to creation, to disciplined Christian life. In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine explains why Christians should know something of the mechanical arts and especially logic: reasoning can help us understand Scripture, but it must never become an exercise in sophistry, and the laws of logic are not human inventions but realities we discover in the order God has made. In Confessions, Augustine turns upward from the visible heavens to the mysterious “heaven of heavens,” distinguishing the created world we see from the higher reality belonging especially to God. Finally, Aquinas asks why there are different religious orders, why both active and contemplative forms of religious life can be legitimate, and how vows bind those who enter them. Together, the readings ask what it means to use the mind, contemplate creation, and order one’s life toward God. Pasted text Pasted text Pasted text
Today’s Readings:
Augustine of Hippo — On Christian Doctrine, Book 2, Chapters 30–32, Sections 47–50
Augustine of Hippo — The Confessions, Book 12, Chapter 2, Section 2
Thomas Aquinas — Summa Theologica, Part 2–2, Questions 188–189 — Forms of Religious Life and Entry into Religion

Olympiads and consuls are not baptism, but they can keep a reader from making Christ forty-six years old because the temple took forty-six years to build. Augustine will use profane history that way, and he will let Ambrose use it to unmask the slander that Jesus learned His words from Plato. Herbs that heal when drunk are one thing; herbs that heal when hung on the neck are another. The stars may be calculated; they are almost no help to Scripture, and they sit too near the diviners. The Confessions opens a new book with the poverty of inquiry: the hand that knocks works harder than the hand that receives. The promise still stands, because Truth made it. Aquinas then names a school, not a finished saint. Poverty, continence, and obedience are the vows that clear the three chief obstacles. The religious does not claim to have arrived. He claims to stay in the practice.
Today’s Readings:
Augustine of Hippo — On Christian Doctrine, Book 2, Chapters 28–29 (Sections 42–46)
Augustine of Hippo — The Confessions, Book 12, Chapter 1 (Section 1)
Thomas Aquinas — Summa Theologica, Part 2–2, Questions 186–187 (The Religious Life and Its Discipline)
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