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“432In the end, grace may prove irresistible, but love can never be forced. Augustine knew this.”
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“In practice, sin’s counterfeit of God’s love is impossible to perfect, for perfection here ends in the void, the undoing of the bonds of creation. The soul that falls away into sin continues to love mortal beloveds, but its attachments lack measure, and so its love goes begging. It wanders about aimlessly in a ‘wasteland of need’ (regio egestatis).”
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“There is a fine line between humility and humiliation, and when Augustine’s critics, both loyal and disloyal, fault him for morbid self-criticism, they generally mean to imply that he has crossed the line. You can have a relationship with another person only if you know something of humility; otherwise your ego gets in the way. If, however, you are humiliated instead of humbled, there is no ‘you’ to enter into a relationship. Massilians and Pelagians had differing understandings of when humility before God became too much of a good thing, but they had common cause in not liking Augustine’s scruples about the human will to relate to God. If everything about the soul’s relationship to God is God’s doing, including the very desire to be in relation, where exactly does the soul surface in its redemption? The Word seems to have become a monologue.”
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