“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).