need some help with augustine

I need some help navigating Augustine. First, I recently heard an interview with Tim Keller where he mention Augustine's writing on disordered love regarding how the only way to rightly order love is to love God supremely. Does anyone know where this is in Augustine's work?

Second is there a way to set up a reading plan for only Augustine's work in ECF?

Thanks All!

Dan

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Mike Pettit

I need some help navigating Augustine. First, I recently heard an interview with Tim Keller where he mention Augustine's writing on disordered love regarding how the only way to rightly order love is to love God supremely. Does anyone know where this is in Augustine's work?

Second is there a way to set up a reading plan for only Augustine's work in ECF?

Thanks All!

Dan

I would suggest Augustine's "On Christian Doctrine" Book 1 Chapter 27.

chap. 27.—the order of love

28. Now he is a man of just and holy life who forms an unprejudiced estimate of things, and keeps his affections also under strict control, so that he neither loves what he ought not to love, nor fails to love what he ought to love, nor loves that more which ought to be loved less, nor loves that equally which ought to be loved either less or more, nor loves that less or more which ought to be loved equally. No sinner is to be loved as a sinner; and every man is to be loved as a man for God’s sake; but God is to be loved for His own sake. And if God is to be loved more than any man, each man ought to love God more than himself. Likewise we ought to love another man better than our own body, because all things are to be loved in reference to God, and another man can have fellowship with us in the enjoyment of God, whereas our body cannot; for the body only lives through the soul, and it is by the soul that we enjoy God.

Don Awalt

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/588855#Comment_588855

Augustine's Confessions is the best source IMHO - it is quoted often when speaking of disordered love. Searching your library for "disordered love" NEAR Augustine will give some hits I am sure.

One summary of the text around pages 45-47:

The famous incident of the pears illustrates well Augustine’s disordered love. Augustine describes a pear tree near his father’s vineyard. It was loaded with fruit neither “attractive to look at nor to taste.” Yet Augustine’s “greedy love of doing wrong,” together with a “lack of sense of justice or a distaste for what was right,” moved him and his friends to pillage pears they did not desire or need. “We took away an enormous quantity of pears, not to eat them ourselves, but simply to throw them to the pigs. Perhaps we ate some of them, but our real pleasure consisted in doing something that was forbidden.”

By the way search of Keller's Sermon archive, available under Logos, shows he elaborates on this too.

Dan Starcevich

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/588855#Comment_588855

thanks so much!

Ken McGuire

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/588858#Comment_588858

Augustine's Confessions is the best source IMHO - it is quoted often when speaking of disordered love. Searching your library for "disordered love" NEAR Augustine will give some hits I am sure.

Yeah - that is the obvious work - although there is quite a bit of his treatise on the Trinity where it comes up.

But the passage of Confessions that came to my mind was when he spoke about the death of a friend in book 4 of his sorrow since he found that he loved him in himself rather than in God...

The Enchiridon is also an easily approachable source for this theme.