Bình An: Trích ‘Thành Phố Của Chúa’ Của Thánh Augustine Thành Hippo (Trường Chay), Phần 2/2

Let us now continue with an excerpt from Saint Augustine’s “The City of God,” Book 19, where we will keep learning about the preserved nature of peace, lying within all beings, as part of a greater “well-ordered harmony.”

“The whole use, then, of things temporal has a reference to this result of Earthly peace in the Earthly community, while in the City of God it is connected with eternal peace. And therefore, if we were animals, we should desire nothing beyond the proper arrangement of the parts of the body and the satisfaction of the appetites, nothing, therefore, but bodily comfort and abundance of pleasures, that the peace of the body might contribute to the peace of the soul. For if bodily peace be awanting, a bar is put to the peace even of the soul, since it cannot obtain the gratification of its appetites. And these two together help out the mutual peace of soul and body, the peace of harmonious life and health.”

“But, owing to the liability of the human mind to fall into mistakes, this very pursuit of knowledge may be a snare to him unless he has a divine Master, whom he may obey without misgiving, and who may at the same time give him such help as to preserve his own freedom. And because, so long as he is in this mortal body, he is a stranger to God, he walks by faith, not by sight; and he therefore refers all peace, bodily or spiritual or both, to that peace which mortal man has with the immortal God, so that he exhibits the well-ordered obedience of faith to eternal law. But as this divine Master inculcates two precepts, the love of God and the love of our neighbor, and, as in these precepts, a man finds three things he has to love, God, himself, and his neighbor, and that he who loves God loves himself thereby, it follows that he must endeavor to get his neighbor to love God, since he is ordered to love his neighbor as himself.”

“And hence the apostle says, ‘Now, if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.’”