Of all the autobiographies ever written by mere mortals, Confessions by Saint Augustine of Hippo is the greatest. In this masterpiece, you will find a Doctor of the Church longing for the true Doctor of the soul, Christ. This excerpt explains the hierarchy of obedience, crimes against nature, and love of God more than the world.
Crimes Against Nature
Can it be unjust anytime or anywhere to love God with all your heart and soul and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself? So it is that crimes against nature, such as the men of Sodom committed, are everywhere and always to be detested and punished. Even if all peoples should practice them, divine law must hold them alike guilty of the crime, for it did not fashion men that they should use themselves in this way. Indeed that friendship that should bind us with God is violated when nature, whose author he is, is befouled by a perversion of lust.
But crimes against the customs of men are to be shunned, according to the differences among those customs; so that what citizens or nations have settled and confirmed among themselves by law or tradition should not be violated at the pleasure of anyone, whether a citizen or a traveler. Vile is the part that does not accord with the whole.
When God’s Will Is Countercultural
But when God commands something contrary to the customs or the constitutions of any nation, it must be done, even if it has never been done before. If it has been neglected, it must be reestablished. If it has not been set in law before, it must be set in law now. For if it is lawful for a king to command something in the city he governs, which neither he nor any of the kings before him have commanded before, and if it is not against the common life of the city to obey him—rather, it would be so if he were not obeyed, for by the general consent of human societies, people should obey their kings—how much more then is it lawful to obey God, the ruler over the whole created universe, in all that he commands, and without any wavering! For as in human society the greater power is set over the lesser, which must obey, so too God, over all.
Heinous Love for the World
The same thing applies to heinous crimes, done from a lust to do harm, either by slander or by violence. Sometimes it is for revenge, as of enemy against enemy, or to get something belonging to someone else, as of the bandit against the traveler, or to avert an evil, as of someone afraid of another; or out of envy, as of the wretched fellow who hates the man who is happier than he is, or the prosperous man who fears that someone may grow to be his equal, or who grieves when the other is so; or for the sheer delight to see someone suffer, as with spectators at the gladiatorial games, or mockers and tricksters generally.
These are the wellheads of iniquity, bubbling up with the love of playing the prince, of seeing things, and of feeling things, whether one alone or two together or all of them at once. So do we live badly, set against the three and seven, your psaltery of ten strings, your ten commandments, O God most sublime and sweet.
God Purifies and Protects
But what crimes can be committed against you, who cannot suffer corruption? What evil deeds can touch you, who cannot be harmed? But you avenge the evil that men perpetrate against themselves, for when they sin against you, they commit impiety against their own souls, and iniquity tells lies to itself. For men corrupt or pervert the nature which you created and ordained for them; or they make use of permissible things, but out of all good measure; or they burn in lust for things that are not permitted, things against nature; or they are held to blame, raving against you in mind and speech, kicking against the pricks; or they are glad to break the bonds of human society, and they come together in gangs or sects, according as something pleases or offends them. And that is what men do when they forsake you, O Fountain of life, who are the one and true creator and ruler of the universe, and in their selfish pride they love a mere part, which they mistake for a whole unity.
The way to return to you is by a humble piety, and then you burn out of us our evil habits, and you look with favor on those who confess their sins, and you hearken to the groans of those who are bound hand and foot, and you loose us from the chains we ourselves have forged. You will do so, if we do not raise up against you the horns of a false liberty, by an eagerness to have more even at the risk of losing all, loving our own private good more than we love you, the Good of all.
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This article is taken from a chapter in Confessions by Saint Augustine which is available from TAN Books.
