The first collection of Saint Augustine's varied writings on human and divine love—chosen to reflect his lifelong preoccupation with ordo amoris , the principle of rightly directed love.
"My weight is my love," Saint Augustine writes in The Confessions . He sees our ability to love as disordered by sin, so that we often choose badly what and how to love. Only by recognizing that we are commanded to love God first can any other object of our love be properly ordered, Late Have I Loved Thee draws on the riches found in Augustine's sermons, letters, treatises, and Scripture commentaries, as well as passages from The Confessions and City of God.
Augustine (354-430 A.D.) was the most prolific writer of Christian antiquity and the most influential theologian in Church history. In his first encyclical, God Is Love, current Pope Benedict XVI acknowledges his indebtedness to him. When we read Augustine today, we encounter the same direct, eloquent passions his original listeners experienced, infused with his deep sense of human weakness and burning desire for union with God.
Early church father and philosopher Saint Augustine served from 396 as the bishop of Hippo in present-day Algeria and through such writings as the autobiographical Confessions in 397 and the voluminous City of God from 413 to 426 profoundly influenced Christianity, argued against Manichaeism and Donatism, and helped to establish the doctrine of original sin.
An Augustinian follows the principles and doctrines of Saint Augustine.
People also know Aurelius Augustinus in English of Regius (Annaba). From the Africa province of the Roman Empire, people generally consider this Latin theologian of the greatest thinkers of all times. He very developed the west. According to Jerome, a contemporary, Augustine renewed "the ancient Faith."
The Neo-Platonism of Plotinus afterward heavily weighed his years. After conversion and his baptism in 387, Augustine developed his own approach to theology and accommodated a variety of methods and different perspectives. He believed in the indispensable grace to human freedom and framed the concept of just war. When the Western Roman Empire started to disintegrate from the material earth, Augustine developed the concept of the distinct Catholic spirituality in a book of the same name. He thought the medieval worldview. Augustine closely identified with the community that worshiped the Trinity. The Catholics and the Anglican communion revere this preeminent doctor. Many Protestants, especially Calvinists, consider his due teaching on salvation and divine grace of the theology of the Reformation. The Eastern Orthodox also consider him. He carries the additional title of blessed. The Orthodox call him "Blessed Augustine" or "Saint Augustine the Blessed."
“He didn’t abolish love of parents, wife, children, but put them in their right order. He didn’t say, ‘Whoever loves,’ but ‘whoever loves above me’ (Matt 10:37). That’s what the church is saying in the Song of Songs: ‘He put charity in order for me.’ Love your father, but not above your Lord; love the one who begot you, but not above the one who created you.” Augustine, Sermon 344.2
“For Augustine, love is an essential feature of what we are— of who we are, inside, in the inner space of which he wrote with a poet’s insight and accuracy. The selections from his writings collected in this volume are meant to give the reader an understanding of how that could be so for Augustine had an opportunity for rehearsing what it would be like to think that way ourselves.” James J. O’Donnell, “Preface to the Vintage Spiritual Classics Edition,” (xvii).