Confessions (The World's Classics)

by Augustine of Hippo

‘Do we love anything except that which is beautiful? What then is a beautiful object? And what is beauty? What is it which charms and attracts us to the things we love? It must be the grace and loveliness inherent in them, or they would in no way move us.’ I gave the subject careful attention, and saw that in bodies one should distinguish the beauty which is a kind of totality and for that reason beautiful, and another kind which is fitting because it is well adapted to some other thing, just as part of the body is adapted to the whole to which it belongs as a shoe to a foot and like instances. This thought bubbled up in my mind like a spring from the deepest level of my heart, and I wrote On the Beautiful and the Fitting in two or three books, I think—you know, God, for I have forgotten. I no longer have this work; I do not know how it went astray from me.