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Some Aspects of St. Augustine's Literary Aesthetics, Studied Chiefly In De Doctrina Christiana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Archibald M. Young
Archibald M. Young
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario
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Extract

When Augustine was a young man, he tells us in his Confessions, he asked himself and his friends,

“Do we love anything 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 the 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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , July 1969 , pp. 289 - 299
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1969

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References

1 Confessions, 4.13.20.

2 Maeitain, Jacques, Art and Scholasticism (1935), 3Google Scholar.

3 D.D.C, 1.2.2.

4 Ibid., 1.2.2; 2.1.1.

5 Exodus 3.14.

6 Conf., 13.32.47

7 D.D.C., 1.13.12

8 Ibid., 1.2.2

9 Ibid., 2.1.1

10 Ibid., 1.4.4–1.5.5.

11 Ibid., 1.4.4.

12 Canticles [Song of Solomon] 4.2.

13 D.D.C., 2.6.7.

14 Ibid., 2.1.1.

15 Cf. D.D.C., 3.7.II, where the image is compared to the husk that obscures the kernel of meaning.

16 Ibid., 1.2.2; 2.1.1.

17 Philemon 20.

18 D.D.C., 1.33.37.

19 Ibid., 2.6.8.

20 De Musica, 6.29.

21 Ibid., 6.1.1.

22 Conf., 13.28.43.

23 De Gen. c. Man., 1. 50.21.

24 I Cor. 1.21; cf. D.D.C., 1.13.12.

25 Conf., 7.19.25.

26 The idea of marriage is apposite here; yet, to my knowledge, it is a figure St. Augustine used far less frequently than other and related images of union.

27 Proverbs 8.22.

28 John 14.6.10.

29 D.D.C., 1.34.38 (the italics are mine).

30 Conf., 13.23.38.

31 Ibid., 13.23.36–37.

32 D.D.C., 4.18.37.