6. In the old days the Roman Empire had given its children considerable freedom in exchange for their submission to the essential discipline necessary for the maintenance of the state. A peasant could become a landowner. The reforms of Diocletian and Constantine were the legislative experiments of men who had been imperfectly educated on the bases of the old Roman civilization and whose personal experience had been too consciously pre-occupied with violence and compulsion. Hence they treated the organic as inorganic and made every man a peg stuck in a hole. 30. Augustine was a dreamy student.
33. The sense of guilt which we all have and which seems to be due to an inherent shame at individual experience… The real offense of homosexuality brings the confusion of passion into the domain where one ought to be able to practice calmly the art of friendship…
The gratuitous character of adolescent delinquency
34. A’s dislike of Greek … his natural hatred of suavity
60. A and his friends Alypius and Nebridius 77. God is so entirely taken for granted that He is almost ignored.
83. After baptism, A and Alypius and a new found friend Evodius returned to Africa.
104. The root of sin was regarded by Ambrose not as sensuous, not as a mere matter of fleshly appetites, but as situated more deeply in man’s perverse use of his free will.
105. But now A depicted the relationship between God and man as being passionate and eventful and subject to useful alienation, followed by happy reconciliation, like the relationships of the flesh.
110. All classicism [Aquinas] depends on a previous romanticism [Augustine].
111. Jerome was a saint in the highly technical sense of the word, being a literary genius of repellent disposition and venomous tongue.
156. A was one of those people who never deserve forgiveness, but always receive it.
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