(3) Three points of principle that govern and delimit any presentation of Augustine:
1) diverse trains of thought appear side by side;
2) dogmatic rigidity steadily increased as Augustine grew older;
3) there is a biographically demonstrable development that involves a marked change in the
horizon of Augustine's thinking.
(3) "Augustine's every perception and every remark about love refer at least in part to his love of neighbour."
(5) "For Augustine, authority commands from without what we would also be told by conscience, the inner law, if habit had not ensnared us in sin."
(9) "Every craving...is tied to a definite object, and it takes this object to spark the craving itself, thus providing an aim for it. Craving is determined by the definitely given thing it seeks, just as a movement is set by the goal toward which it moves."
(9) "Once we have the object our desire ends, unless we are threatened with its loss. In that case the desire to have (appetitus babendi) turns into a fear of losing (metus amittendi). As a quest for the particular good rather than for things at random, desire is a combination of "aiming at" and "referring back to."
(11) "Thus (what) the good love craves is life, and (what) the evil fear shuns is death. The happy life is the life we cannot lose. Life on earth is a living death, mors vitalis, or vita mortalis. It is althogether determined by death; indeed it is more properly called death. For the constant fear that rules it prevents living, unless one equates being alive with being afraid."
(11) "By putting an end to life, death is at the same time the cause of constant worry of life about itself -- the endless concern about it transient happiness -- and about life after death."
(13) "Every good and every evil lie ahead. What lies at the end of the road we keep walking all our lives is death. Every present moment is governed by this imminence. Human life is always "not yet." All "having" is governed by fear, all "not having" by desire...The future is by no means unknown since it is nothing but the threatening or fulfilling "not yet" of the present. However, every fulfillment is only apparent because at the end loom death, the radical loss. This means that the future, the "not yet" of the present, is what we must always fear. To the present, the future can only be menacing. Only a present without a future is immutable and utterly unthreatened. In such a present lies the calm of possession. This possession is life itself. For all goods exist for life alone, to protect is from its loss, from death."
(13-15) Note Arendt's exploration of time, remembrance, and expectation; is it related to what Beckett explores in Molloy's ending?
(15) "Time exists only insofar as it can be measured, and the yardstick by which we measure it is space. Where is the space located that permits us to measure time? For Augustine the answer is: in our memory where things are being stored up. Memory, the storehouse of time, is the presence of the "no more" (iam non) as expectation is the presence of the "not yet"(nondum).
Therefore, I do not measure what is no more, but something in my memory that remains fixed in it. It is only by calling past and future into the present of remembrance and expectation that time exists at all. Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now."
(16) "Life, too, becomes a "thing," an object that disappears from the word, like all other objects of our desires, does not endure. From this perspective of desire, life is looked upon from the outside (from outside the living person) as something that occurs in the world and mutably clings to the immutable in order to gain permanence from it. Such permanence is granted by eternity, the object of desire."
(17) "As it takes an object to determine and arouse desire, Augustine defines life itself by what it craves. Life craves the goods occurring in the world, and thus turns itself into one of them only to find out that things (res), if compared to life, are of almost sempiternal permanence. Things endure. They will be tomorrow what they are today and what they were yesterday. Only life vanishes from day to day in its rush toward death. Life does not last and it does not remain identical. It is not ever-present and, indeed, is never present, since it is always not yet or no more."
(17) Love of the world?
(18) "Desire mediates between subject and object, and it annihilates the distance between them by transforming the subject into a lover and the object into the beloved. For the lover is never isolated from what he loves; he belongs to it."
(18) "The quest for worldliness changes man's nature. This quest transforms him into a worldly being. In cupiditas, man has cast the die that makes him perishible. In caritas, whose object is eternity, man transforms himself into an eternal, nonperishible being. Man as such, his essence, cannot be defined because he always desires to belong to something outside himself and changes accordingly. Hence, he is seen by Augustine in his isolation as seperated from things as well as from persons. However, it is precisely this isolation that he cannot bear."
(19) "Love that denies a worldly object, be it a thing or a person, is constantly frustrated in its quest for happiness."
(19) "For happiness, which is the reversal of isolation, more is required than mere belonging. Happiness is achieved only when the beloved becomes aa permanently inherent element of one's own being."
(19) "Hence, for happiness, which is the reversal of isolation, more is required than mere belonging."
(20) "Goods outside myself are not within my power, and among them is the highest good, life itself."
(21) God "circulating within us."
(22) "Augustine's uncritical use not only of Stoic but also of Neoplatonic categories could not help but lead him into inconsistencies, if not into outright contradictions."
(22) the question of space?
(23) Man cannot be absolutely fearless...merely a hyperbole?
(23) "To be sure, true being means "not being in want" and the corresponding attitude would be fearlessness. However, the specific quality of being human is precisely a fear that nothing can remove. This fear is no idle emotion, but rather the manifestation of dependence. Desire is not bad because the "outside" is bad. Rather, desire is bad and slavish because it entails dependence on what is, in principle, unattainable."
(27) "In other words, man's present life is being neglected for the sake of his future, and loses its meaningfulness and weight in comparison with that true life which is projected into an absolute future and which is constituted as the ultimate goal of present, worldly existence."
(28) "Since craving is the basic mode of human existence, men always "forget over something," namely, over whatever they happen to desire. Desire itself is a state of forgetfulness."
(28-29) "Insofar as human existence is temporal, its mode of being is from an origin toward an end. The transit achieves oblivion of the "from" over the "toward," whereby the forgetting of the origin obliterates the entire dimension of the past."
(34) " A life governed by caritas aims at a goal that, in principle, lies outside the world, and thus outside caritas as well. Caritas is but the road that connects man and his ultimate goal. Stretching out in this purposive direction, caritas possesses a provisional sort of eternity. By the same toek the world, as a mere means toward this end, loses its awesome character and gains some sense by being made relative through the process."
(35) "Caritas comes to terms with life and the world by "using" them freely, that is without being bound by them...Life on earth is not independent even in caritas. Life on earth remains subject to the fear of losing the "highest good." Hence, for the present time, human life remains tied to desire and fear...If we succeed in freeing ourselves from the world, we become the "slaves of caritas (servi caritatis) and subject to "chaste fear" (timor castus)."
(35) "Thus, the freedom of caritas is a future freedom. Its freedom on earth consists in anticipating a future belonging for which love as desire is the mediator. The sign of caritas on earth is fearlessness, whereas the curse of cupiditas is fear - fear of not obtaining what is desired and fear of losing it once it is obtained."
(36-37) "From the viewpoint of the anticipated future, the world is not only not eternal, it never exists for its own sake. Hence, man's proper attitude to the world is not "enjoyment" (frui) but "use" (uti).
(37) "The relevance of means and tools is determined by the ultimate purpose of the user. And so the world, which is harnessed to the "for the sake of," receives its meaning from the purposiveness of the user. Viewed from this perspective, the world is set into a definite order - it is the order of the relative importance of means toward a definite end."
(37) "In the search for his own self, human existence itself becomes the object of craving and desire; that is, a "thing" that is love as though it were objectively extant, a "true life" outside the present life. This "reification" of existence is completed precisely by its projection into a future of timeless stability. He who returns from the absolute future to regulate the world will see even his own present existence as a "thing" among things, to be fitted into the rest of what exists."
(42) "The establishment of the order that assigns to each thing its proper place can originate only from outside. This demands an objectivity and a basic lack of concern with the particular entities being arranged. The "outside" is the absolute future anticipated in hope.
(48) Memory undoes the past. The triumph of memory is that in presenting the past and thus depriving it, in a sense, of its bygone quality, memory transforms the past into a future possibility. What has been can be again - this is what our memory tells us in hope or in fear."