Book X. What Must I Do To Be Saved?

[Nemo]

If you are reading this, you must have known the answer to another question (consciously or unconsciously): Am I a wretch?

Platonism and Christianity (come to think of it, most religions) agree that the current state of man is wretched, and that there is a blessed state that is yet to be achieved.. What they differ on is HOW this blessedness can be achieved.

In Book X, the last book of Part I. Augustine explains the difference between Christianity and Platonism regarding this question.

[Ruth]

I haven't yet read far enough to see your point about difference between Plato and Christianity, but I've read this bit: If any immortal power, then, no matter how great the strength with which it is endowed, loves us as itself, it wants us to be subject, so that we may attain blessedness, to the very one to whom it also is subject and so is blessed. If it does not worship God, it is miserable precisely because it is deprived of God; and if it does worship God, it certainly does not want to be worshiped itself in place of God.

This is the end of chapter 3. In the chapters after that he explains about sacrifice, and how we should only make sacrifices to God.

I think the point is that true happiness is found in offering yourself to God. He also quotes psalm 51 about the sacrifice of a broker and contrite heart.

I think this is true, but paradoxical, and difficult to grasp. So often we think that sacrifice, contrition, being subject, are all only leading to some morbid gloominess. Just yesterday I had a conversation on this topic with my daughter (13) who objected to Jesus's words "without me you can do nothing", and I told her that if ever another human says such things, it's indeed sick and dangerous and dysfunctional, but God is so different that being subject to him lifts us up.

[Nemo]

Ruth wrote: "I haven't yet read far enough to see your point about difference between Plato and Christianity, but I've read this bit: If any immortal power, then, no matter how great the strength with which it ..."

Good points.

Your daughter's objection is also one of the, if not the, main objections to Christianity, and the central theme of City of God: Christ is the only Way to man's blessedness in God. This blessedness consists in worship, sacrifice, among other things, all of which are accomplished in and through Christ.

To use an analogy, if someone says to us, "Without the sun, all lives on earth would cease to exist", or "Without food and water, you can do nothing". We would not object, because the person is simply stating the truth; When Jesus says, "Without me you can do nothing", He is simply telling the Truth (if Christianity is true), and it would be foolish on our part to turn away from Him, just as it would be foolish, and fatal, to turn away from what keeps us alive.

I think this is also why Augustine has taken the pains to defend Christianity against pagans.

[Nemo]

Dual Nature Of Christ and the Worship Of God

True Mediator, in so far as, by assuming the form of a servant, He became the Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, though in the form of God He received sacrifice together with the Father, with whom He is one God, yet in the form of a servant He chose rather to be than to receive a sacrifice, that not even by this instance any one might have occasion to suppose that sacrifice should be rendered to any creature. Thus He is both the Priest who offers and the Sacrifice offered. And He designed that there should be a daily sign of this in the sacrifice of the Church, which, being His body, learns to offer herself through Him.

Bk. X. Ch. 20


[Nemo]

There is a theory current and popular among Unitarians that, although it is evident that Christ receives worship, He is not God, and He is worshipped not as God, but as a human representative of God, so to speak.

In Chapter 20 (quoted above), Augustine gives a Trinitarian explanation of the relation between the Dual Nature of Christ and the worship of God.