Jun
25
2011
Fav #3: “He knows what I mean”
“Freedom, therefore, for Augustine, cannot be reduced to a sense of choice; it is a freedom to act fully. Such freedom must involve the transcendence of a sense of choice. For a sense of choice is a symptom of the disintegration of the will; the final union of knowledge and feeling would involve a man in the object of his choice in such a way that any other alternative would be inconceivable. . . .
‘Give me a man in love; he knows what I mean. Give me one who yearns; give me one who is hungry; give me one far away in this desert, who is thirsty and sighs for the spring of the Eternal country. Give me that sort of man; he knows what I mean. But if I speak to a cold man, he just does not know what I am talking about.’”
Peter Brown, quoting Augustine, in Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley, 1967), pages 374-375.