Confessions by Augustine (Available from Amazon or free here) - Read Books III and IV.
Book IV covers his life from nineteen to twenty-eight. Augustine is dabbling in the heresy of the Manichaeans and begins teaching rhetoric in his native town. It is here that he is shaken by the death of a close friend. Then Augustine moves to Carthage and continues his study of philosophy including a book of Aristotle. In his desire to understand God, he ends up attributing to God what his own sinful mind believes God to be.
I enjoyed Augustine's puzzling over what is beauty: 'These things I then knew not, and I loved these lower beauties, and I was sinking to the very depths, and to my friends I said, “Do we love any thing but the beautiful? What then is the beautiful? and what is beauty? What is it that attracts and wins us to the things we love? for unless there were in them a grace and beauty, they could by no means draw us unto them.” And I marked and perceived that in bodies themselves, there was a beauty, from their forming a sort of whole, and again, another from apt and mutual correspondence, as of a part of the body with its whole, or a shoe with a foot, and the like. And this consideration sprang up in my mind, out of my inmost heart, and I wrote “on the fair and fit,” I think, two or three books. Thou knowest, O Lord, for it is gone from me; for I have them not, but they are strayed from me, I know not how.'
In a day when the word beauty is thrown around in pop lyrics and magazines, people do not seem to seriously consider what is true beauty.
The quick answer is that it is God that defines what is beautiful, so no wonder Augustine was lost.
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.
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