Treatises on Marriage and Other Subjects

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THE CREED Chapter 1 m ECEIVE, MY SONS, the rule of faith which is called the Creed. When you have received it, write it on your hearts; recite it daily to yourselves. Before you go to sleep, before you go forth, fortify yourselves with your Creed. No one writes the Creed so that it can be read; let your memory be your codex that you may be able to review it if it should happen that forgetfulness effaces what diligence has given you. You will believe what you hear yourself saying, and your lips will repeat what you believe. The Apostle says truly: 'For with the heart a man believes unto justice, and with the mouth profession of faith is made unto salvation' ;1 this is the Creed that you will be going over in your thoughts and repeating from memory. These words that you have heard are scattered throughout the divine Scriptures . They have been assembled and unified to facilitate the memory of dull mankind in order that everyone will be able to say the Creed and adhere to what he believes. Can it be that up to this point you have heard merely that God 1 Rom. 10.10. 289 290 SAINT AUGUSTINE is all-powerful? You are beginning to hold Him as a Father when you will be born of Mother Church. (2) You have already received, you have meditated, and vou have clung to the fruits of your meditation, so that you may say: 'I believe in God, the Father Almighty.' God is all-powerful, and, since He is all-powerful, He cannot die, He cannot be deceived, He cannot lie, and, as the Apostle says, 'he cannot disown himself.'2 Very much He cannot do, yet He is all-powerful; because He cannot do these things, for that very reason is He all-powerful. If He could die, He would not be all-powerful; if He could lie, if He could be deceived, if He could deceive, if it were possible for Him to do an injustice, He would not be omnipotent; because, if it were in Him to do any of this, such acts would not be worthy of the Almighty. Absolutely omnipotent, our Father cannot sin. He does whatsoever He wills: that in itself is omnipotence. He does whatever He wishes well, He does whatever He wishes justly, but, whatever is evil, that He does not will. No one has the power to resist the Omnipotent and not do what God wills. He made heaven and earth, the sea, and all the creatures that are in them, visible and invisible; invisible, as in heaven the Thrones, Dominions, Principalities, Powers, Archangels, Angels, all of whom will be our fellow citizens if we shall have lived rightly. He made the visible creatures of heaven the sun, moon, stars. He adorned earth with His terrestrial animals; He filled the sky with winged creatures, land with moving and creeping things, the sea with fish; He filled all regions with their proper creatures. He made the mind of man to His own image and likeness; that is where the image of God is-in the mind. That is why the soul cannot be comprehended even by itself, where the image of God is. For this purpose have we been made, to be lord and master over all other creatures, but through the 2 2 Tim. 2.13. THE CREED 291 sin of the first man we have fallen and have all come into the inheritance of death. We have become lowly mortals, filled with fears and errors. This is the wage of sin. Every man is born with this penalty and guilt.3 That is the reason, just as you have seen today, just as you know, even little children are breathed upon and exorcized, so that the hostile power of the devil who deceived mankind in order to gain possession of men may be driven out of them. It is not, then, a creature of God that is breathed upon and exorcised in infants, but him under whose sway all are who are born with sin, for he is the prince of sinners. Now, on behalf of one who fell and thereby sent all to death there was sent into the world One without sin, who would lead back to life all who believed in Him, by liberating them from the power of sin. Chapter...