114 Col. ii. 20. Viventes de hoc mundo decernitis.
117 [Augustine here gives the Protestant interpretation of the word "rock," in the passage, "on this rock I will build my church."-W.G.T.S.]
121 [The meaning seems to be, that the vivid realization that Christ's body rose from the dead is the reward of a Christian's faith. The unbeliever has no such reward.-W.G.T.S.]
129 Isa. vi. 10; Matt. xiii. 15.
132 [This explanation of the "back parts" of Christ to mean his resurrection, and of "the place that is by him," to mean the church, is an example of the fanciful exegesis into which Augustine, with the fathers generally, sometimes falls. The reasoning, here, unlike that in the preceding chapter, is not from the immediate context, and hence extraneous matter is read into the text.-W.G.T.S.]
135 [The original has an awkward anacoluthon in the opening sentence of this chapter, which has been removed by omitting "quamquam," and substituting "autem" for "ergo."-W.G.T.S.]
1 [The English translator renders "animalium" by "psychical," to agree with yuxiko/j in 1 Cor. ii. 14. The rendering "natural" of the A.V. is more familiar.-W G. T. S.]
2 [This is an important passage with reference to Augustine's learning. From it, it would appear that he had not read the Greek Trinitarians in the original, and that only "a little" of these had been translated, at the time when he was composing this treatise. As this was from A.D. 400 to A.D. 416-, the treatises of Athanasius (d. 373), Basil (d. 379), Gregory of Nyssa (d. 400?), and Gregory of Nazianzum (d. 390?) had been composed and were current in the Eastern church. That Augustine thought out this profound scheme of the doctrine of the Trinity by the close study of Scripture alone, and unassisted by the equally profound trinitarianism of the Greek church, is an evidence of the depth and strength of his remarkable intellect.-W. G. T. S.]
9 See above, Book ii. chap. vii. n. 13.
13 [The original is: "ut sit participatio ejus in idipsum." The English translator renders: "So that it may partake thereof in itself." The thought of Augustine is, that the believing soul though mutable partakes of the immutable; and he designates the immutable as the in idipsum: the self-existent. In that striking passage in the Confessions, in which he describes the spiritual and extatic meditations of himself and his mother, as they looked out upon the Mediterranean from the windows at Ostia-a scene well known from Ary Schefer's painting-he denominates God the idipsum: the "self same" (Confessions IX. x). Augustine refers to the same absolute immutability of God, in this place. By faith, man is "a partaker of a divine nature," (2 Pet. i. 4.)-W.G.T.S.].