The City of God is a great work by St. Augustine. Written in the 5th century AD, it is a response to critics who blame Christianity for the fall of Rome, and it builds from this start into an elegant, well-structured comparison between the City of God and the City of the World, examining the origin, thought, and state of all who attach themselves to God on one hand and anything else on the other.
Augustine's systematic approach to theology is applied to great and small alike, as can be seen in the following passage from Book 14, Chapter 15:
"Pleasure is preceded by a certain appetite which is felt in the flesh like a craving, as hunger and thirst and that generative appetite which is most commonly identified with the name 'lust,' though this is the generic word for all desires. For anger itself was defined by the ancients as nothing else than the lust of revenge; although sometimes a man is angry even at inanimate objects which cannot feel his vengeance, as when one breaks a pen, or crushes a quill that writes badly. Yet even this, though less reasonable, is in its way a lust of revenge, and is, so to speak, a mysterious kind of shadow of retribution, that they who do evil should suffer evil."
I would like to think that Augustine's pen malfunctioned just as he was discussing the ancients, leading him to include in his great theological work a brief discourse on anger at inanimate objects.
From Chesterton: "I have known some people of very modern views driven by their distress to the use of theological terms to which they attached no doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer was jammed tight and they could not pull it out. A friend of mine was particularly afflicted in this way. Every day his drawer was jammed, and every day in consequence it was something else that rhymes to it."
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