Miscellanea Sententiae [Incertus]

Miscellaneous Sayings, of Uncertain Author. To be simple and prudent. Thief and robber. Dangers everywhere. Princes. Degrees of sin. Obscure reading. Fornicatress and adulteress. Old age. Weak body. Truth. Scripture. Judgments at the gate. Hatred of the reprover. Fleetingness of the world. Forbidden sorrow. To render judgment and mercy. Perversity of the world. Friend. The soul of Jerusalem. Offered to God. Whence the heart is taken away. Lion. The natural conversation of each. The Lord commands in the Gospel that we be simple as doves, and cunning as serpents (Matthew 10:16): so that, imitating the simplicity of doves and the cunning of the serpent, we may neither be able to harm others, nor suffer snares from others, but by simplicity and prudence we may have a man tempered; because prudence without goodness is malice, and simplicity without reason is called folly. Other birds hasten to protect their young even at the peril of their own life; and when they see a hawk, a snake, a raven, or a crow approach their nest, they fly hither and thither, and tear them with bite and claws, and testify to the parent’s grief with a plaintive cry: only the dove does not grieve for her stolen young, nor does she complain.

Difference between thieves and robbers. Thieves lie in wait and deceive by hidden fraud; robbers boldly seize the property of others. He who often sails sometimes suffers a storm. He who frequently takes to the road either endures the attacks of robbers or at least fears them. And in every art, both glory and detraction arise with favorable and adverse winds, while either friends praise beyond merit, or enemies disparage more than is just. Therefore God gave princes, so that they might correct the erring people and lead the erring back to the right path. The first sin is to have thought of what is evil; the second, to have acquiesced to perverse thoughts; the third, to have completed in deed what you resolved in mind; the fourth, after sinning, not to do penance, but to take pleasure in your own offense. Rust, however, is said to descend properly in the night dew, to stain the hidden grains in the ears with the color of red lead, or to suit the gnats. Forgive.

Obscurity of reading arises in three ways: either from the difficulty of the subject matter, or the inexperience of the teacher, or the excessive slowness of the learner. A fornicatress is she who couples with many; an adulteress, she who, deserting one husband, joins herself to another. For we read that Ahab, king of Israel, flowed in such great delights that he made for himself an ivory house (3 Kings 22:39). Old age brings with it many goods and many evils: goods, because it frees you from the most powerless masters, the pleasures, because it imposes moderation, breaks the assaults of lust, increases wisdom, gives more mature counsels; and, with the body growing cold, it sleeps with the perpetual virginity of the Shunammite, despising luxury (1 Kings 1:4). I have read in a certain controversy: The weakness of the body also drags down with it the powers of the soul. For with one truth arising, many falsehoods are destroyed. For we ought to understand Holy Scripture first according to the letter, doing in ethics whatever precepts are given; second according to allegory, that is, spiritual understanding; third according to the blessedness of future things.

Now at the gate of the city, according to the ancient custom of the Jewish people, judgments were held (Deut. 17 and 2), and we often read this and have frequently interpreted it: so that a farmer coming to a case would not be terrified by the crowd of the city and the unfamiliar sight, nor would a city-dweller have to hurry far from the city and seek transport by beasts of burden. It is a great sin to hate the one who rebukes you: especially if he rebukes you not out of hatred but out of love, if he does so alone with you alone, if he does so with a brother as witness, if afterwards in the presence of the Church; so that he seems to bring a charge not out of a desire to slander, but for your correction. For worldly things, and all bodies, flow away moment by moment. Nothing is more fleeting than the world and worldly things, which we lose even as we hold them: and through infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, advancing age, and the final years of old age we change and run, and unknowingly we reach the boundaries of death. The Church is commanded not to have sadness and anxiety over worldly things and losses that customarily occur in this world, and its inhabitants are told: you who are in the Church of the Lord, always rejoice; and whatever happens to you, be grateful for the judgments of God. I do not say this because you should not weep; for blessed are those who weep, since they themselves will laugh (Luke 6:21): but I advise this, that you not weep over those things which belong to the world.

If someone has died among relatives, if the treasury has seized property, if either gout or any other disease has invaded the body, do not weep, do not pour forth tears: do not consider present things, but future ones; rather, beware lest you insult the falling, and think another's ruin to be your own edification. The Lord asks of us, and as if having our salvation as necessary, demands to receive what benefits the giving, so that we may do judgment, that is, do nothing without counsel and reason, and before the mind judges what it is about to do, and afterwards it is completed in deed, and let us love mercy, and not be merciful as if from necessity or compulsion. The holy man has perished from the earth, and there is no upright man among men: everywhere there are snares, everywhere fraud. Innocent blood is shed, for avarice and lust kinship is ignored: and they not only do evil, but also defend it, and by changing names call what is evil good. The princes themselves do not accept gifts from those offering, but compel subjects to give, and demand: and the judge in rendering is such that he judges another as he himself is judged by another; so that they lend mutual favor to their crimes, and defend themselves in another's crime.

If you have a friend, possess him in temptation. I have read in some controversy: A friend is sought for a long time, rarely found, and with difficulty kept. It seems to me that every soul of Jerusalem, in which the temple of the Lord and the vision of peace and the vessels of the Scriptures were built, and afterwards, overcome by sins, was led into captivity and handed over to torments, speaks against Babylon, that is, the confusion of this world, and against the opposing power which presides over this world: Do not insult me, my enemy, because I have fallen and I will rise again: for the Lord raises up the crushed (Ps. 145:8), and speaks through the prophet, Does not he who fall, rise again? (Ps. 40:9), and, I do not desire the death of the sinner, but that he be converted and live (Ezek. 33:11). The Lord does not accept what is offered, but the will of those who offer. God does not accept vows from the wages of a prostitute. It is a severe punishment when, at the time of harvest and vintage, the hoped-for crops and wine are taken away, and are, in a way, snatched from the hands of those holding them.

One is not to be blamed who converts a prostitute to chastity; but rather praised, because he has made a good woman out of an evil one. He who remains good is not himself polluted if he associates with an evil man; but he who is evil is turned to good, if he follows good examples. Fornication, like wine and drunkenness, takes away the mind. For just as wine and drunkenness render him who has drunk incapable of his own mind, so fornication and lust pervert the senses, weaken the spirit, and make a brute animal out of a rational man, so that he pursues cookshops, brothels, and the haunts of lust. He who is loved by the Lord is corrected (Prov. 3:12); he who is neglected is abandoned to his own sins. The nature of lions is said to be such that, when they roar and thunder, all living creatures tremble, so that they cannot move at a steady pace; so great is the terror, so great the strength. It is natural that all craftsmen speak in examples of their own art, and each one, in whatever pursuit he has spent his life, brings forth its likenesses: for example, he who is a sailor and a helmsman compares his sadness to a storm, calls a loss a shipwreck, names his enemies contrary winds; again, prosperity and joy he calls a very gentle breeze and favorable winds, calm seas and plains like the sea. On the other hand, a soldier, whatever he says, sounds of shield, sword, breastplate, helmet, lance, bow and arrows, death, wounds, and victory.

A scoundrel who has been flogged makes not only a wise man but even a fool more prudent (Prov. 19:25; 21:11). A WARNING CONCERNING THE SERMONS TO THE BROTHERS IN THE DESERT. In that collection of Sermons there were two truly Augustinian ones, which, namely, are called On the Common Life of Clerics, holding their place in the earlier volume, in order and at 35G. We will allow almost all the rest to be considered and called spurious and unworthy of Augustine by the learned. Among them, Baronius, in the year of Christ: The author, he says, of those sermons is to be called nothing but an impostor, since he has made a most holy and learned man the assertor of many falsehoods. And in the year: That frigid fabricator babbles many delirious, vain, and fabulous things under the name of so great a Father, he chatters monstrous lies, etc. Bellarmine, in his book On Ecclesiastical Writers: The Sermons, he says, to the Brothers in the Desert seem for the most part to be fabricated. Among them many are frivolous and fabulous. The phrasing is inept, improper, and muddy, so that it is a wonder that such sermons could have been attributed to St. Augustine by any prudent man. The Louvain Theologians, in the censure prefixed to the same sermons: It is sufficiently established that they were written under the name of St. Augustine by some semi-Latin writer of a cart of exercises. Sometimes he mixes in words of Augustine, Caesarius, and Gregory. Martin Lipsius, from certain phrases and diction, suspects the author was a Gallo-Flandrian declaimer.

The Louvain scholars, who follow Mauburnus, add that these sermons were condemned and rejected by the Apostolic Conservator at Reggio in the year 1414. Erasmus writes in his preface to Augustine addressed to Fonseca, Archbishop of Toledo: "Among all those things falsely inscribed to him, nothing is more insipid or more shameless than the Sermons to the Hermits, in which there is neither the words, nor the sentiments, nor the spirit, nor anything at all worthy of Augustine." The same author, in the third book of his work On the Method of Preaching, says: "In these sermons, the Flemish writer also mentions beer, as I suspect, Augustine. Everything crackles with utter barbarism, except for those bits which have been stitched in from other authors. For, just as that craftsman took certain arguments from the Life of Augustine, so he took the material from various places of different authors, though everything is done ignorantly and shamelessly." We pass over the censures of Paul Langius in his Chronicle of Citizens for the year 1259, of John Mauburnus in The Hunting Ground of the Canon Regular, of Simon Yerlinus in The Augustinian Crisis, and of others. Erasmus thinks the work is that of some monk from the Order of the Augustinians, who by this pretense sought to commend his sodality to the world, if he had persuaded them that so great a man was the author of his institute. Moreover, to us such sermons seem as if they could have been spitefully and maliciously fabricated by some rival of the Augustinian Order. Certainly, learned men from that same Order now at last openly reprove and repudiate them.

Jacobus Hommei, in his book of Collectanea to which he gave the title Supplementum Patrum, page 645, states his opinion concerning these sermons in these words: "Few exhibit to me the style and genius of the holy Doctor; many lie, and very many give offense." Lupus Christianus, in his book De Origine Eremitarum S. Aug., chapter 35, strives with all his might and main that these same sermons be rejected. "I say, therefore," he says, "and I constantly assert that the aforesaid sermons are not Augustine's, but are the work of some impostor or other." And a little later: "That good author of these sermons, therefore, imitated certain men of our own age, who think it licit and pious frauds to scatter abroad among the common people fabricated miracles and other falsehoods of that kind for the praise and commendation of some religious order. For it is evident," he says, "that the author was an Augustinian hermit." Finally, having discussed them more laboriously and observed many errors in the sermon, he concludes: "It is therefore established that the author of these sermons is not St. Augustine, but some most shameless liar or most profoundly ignorant man." Bernard Vindingus, likewise an Augustinian theologian, having cited and approved the censure of Bellarmine in the Criticus Augustinianus, writes among other things to the sermon: "For indeed many other and equally foolish fables about Peter, Judas, and Simplicius in sermon 28, about Cyril in sermon 33, about the headless Ethiopians in sermon 37, about Caesar's tomb in the sermon on a certain soul departing from Egypt, sermon...

69. Would anyone dare to fabricate under the honorable name of Augustine? Should I not hold it as certain that he has most wickedly lied in this matter as well? etc. About three hundred years ago, that celebrated hermit of the Augustinian Order, Jordan of Saxony, who was born at Quedlinburg and died at Vienna on the Danube in the year 1380, published that collection of Sermons (certainly never praised by anyone before). The autograph of Jordan is preserved by the Reverend Fathers.

Augustinians in the greater convent of Paris, once sent here by the care of the author himself, who wrote a warning on the front of the volume in these words: Since, according to the saying of the Wise Man, "Rivers return to the place from which they flow out, so that they may flow again," hence it is that I, Brother Jordan of Saxony, called of Quedlinburg, the least among the Parisian scholars, have collected into one volume certain sermons of our most blessed father and distinguished doctor Augustine, together with certain other treatises, or opuscula, or legends, concerning the life and deeds of the same holy Father and his pious mother, Saint Monica, and concerning their translations, as they came to me from everywhere by trustworthy assertion and faithful communication—some indeed from Paris, some from the Roman Curia, and several also from ancient and approved monasteries—and I have taken care to send it to the Parisian place, certainly a copious sea, from which all rivers of knowledge are known to flow, so that from there they may flow again throughout the entire Order, beseeching in the bonds of charity that whichever brother from the study of our Parisian convent, for which I have decreed to place this book in the library of that convent for common use as a small gift of charity, should read in it, or perhaps have it transcribed, may pray for the soul of the giver, so that by the merits of Augustine he may enjoy the joys of heaven.

In Jordan's volume, not all the sermons that follow here are extant; but only these: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 54, inscribed "To the Brothers in the Hermitage"; afterwards, however, is placed the sermon now fifth in order, but which we place among the last by Jordan, and called "To the Presbyters of Hippo." To this Jordan immediately subjoined two sermons on the common life of clerics. Then the sermons 58, 43, 44, and three others, and 76. The Colbertinus and Victorinus codices agree with Jordan's autograph in such a way that we believe them to have been copied from it, although they omit the warning at the beginning and some sermons at the end. Mauburnus testifies that he has seen several books of the same collection, and that they differ in the number of sermons. In Germany, he says, there are 26 or 27. In Brabant, 32 or more. In Italy they have exceeded the number of sixty, and still daily increase. The style of the earlier sermons (with one exception, 45) is entirely the same. The rest have been collected from various manuscripts, but are less faithfully presented. For augmenting the collection, the greatest opportunity was provided by our Germanense or some similar exemplar, which indeed contains sermons 49, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, and 68, to which, however, the author of the collection added much of his own and altered.