Augustine on rightly ordered love
“Love, and do what you will.”
Plain English
Augustine is not saying desire excuses anything. He means that if love is truly ordered toward God and neighbor, action will follow the right shape.
Why it matters
It became a compressed Augustinian account of Christian ethics: the root of action matters.
About Augustine
Augustine became the grammar of Western Christianity. Confessions gave the church a new way to write about memory, desire, sin, grace, and the divided self; City of God gave it a way to think about history after Rome's collapse; his anti-Pelagian writings shaped later arguments about grace and freedom. Catholics, Protestants, medieval scholastics, Reformers, and modern philosophers all keep returning to him because he asked questions that did not expire. To understand the Western church, you have to understand what Augustine made possible.
- Lifespan
- 354 – 430
- Era
- Nicene
- Born in
- Thagaste
- See
- Hippo Regius
- Region
- Africa
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