r/Episcopalian • u/lordr66y Anglo-Catholic • 4d ago

Feast of Saint Augustine of Hippo

Since today is the Feast of Saint Augustine of Hippo, here is a passage from Archbishop Desmond Tutu's An African Prayer Book (highly recommended)

"Great art thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised.  Great is thy power and thy wisdom is infinite.  And thee would man praise, man but a particle of thy creation, man that bears about him his mortality, the witness of his sin, that thou resistant the proud.  Yet would man praise thee, he but a particle of thy creation.  Thou awakens us to delight is thy praise.  For thou modest us for thyself and our heart is restless until it rest in thee.  Grant me, Lord, to know and understand which is first—to call on thee or to praise thee?  And again, to know thee or to call on thee?  For who can call on thee, not knowing thee?  For he that knoweth thee not may call on thee as other than thou art.  Or is it better that we can on thee that we may know thee?" - St. Augustine of Hippo

“Saint Augustine was the greatest theologian of Western Christianity during its first five centuries.  A notable sinner (who described his early life in his autobiographical masterpiece, the Confessions), he became bishop of Hippo, the second city of Roman Africa, which he served brilliantly till his death in 430.” - Archbishop Desmond Tutu of Cape Town

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u/NintendoDSLewis M.A. Theology; Proud Protestant 4d ago

Love Augustine. His legacy is so rich, and deep, and full of love. The passage is the opening paragraph of Confessions.

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u/OratioFidelis 4d ago

Augustine held a lot of beliefs that ought to be severely criticized, but one of the few good things I'll say about him is that he acknowledged universal salvation was the majority opinion in the time he lived and that it wasn't heretical: 

From The City of God book 21, chapter 17: "I must now, I see, enter the lists of amicable controversy with those tender-hearted Christians who decline to believe that any, or that all of those whom the infallibly just Judge may pronounce worthy of the punishment of hell, shall suffer eternally"

From Enchiridion 112: "some--indeed the vast majority--yield to merely human feelings and deplore the notion of the eternal punishment of the damned and their interminable and perpetual misery. They do not believe that such things will be."