Vigils Reading

LOVE GOD AND NEIGHBOUR

From a sermon by St Augustine of Hippo

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Make it up with your adversary while he is with you on the road. This life

is called a road, along which everybody travels. And this adversary does not go

away. But who is this adversary? This adversary is not the devil, for Scripture

would never urge you to come to an agreement with the devil. So who is this

adversary? It is the word of God. Why is it your adversary? Because it

commands things against the grain which you do not do. It tells you: Your God

is one; worship one God.

What you want is to put away the one God who is like the lawful husband

of your soul and go fornicating, and what is much more serious, not openly

deserting and repudiating him as apostates do, but remaining in your husband’s

house and letting in adulterers. That is, as if you were a Christian you do not

leave the Church but you consult astrologers or sorcerers.

You are told, Do not take the name of the Lord your God in vain and you

are told to observe the Sabbath in a spiritual way, in hope of the future rest

which the Lord has promised you. Whoever does whatever he can for the sake of

that future rest, even though what he is doing seems toilsome, nonetheless he

already has the Sabbath in hope, though he does not yet have it in fact. But as for

you, the reason you want to rest is in order to work, whereas you ought to be

working in order to rest.

You are told, Honour your father and your mother. You heap insults on

your parents, which you certainly do not want to endure from your children.

You are told, You shall not kill. But you want to kill your enemy; and the only

reason you do not do it is that you are afraid of the human judge. Do you not

realize that God is the witness of your thoughts? The man you want dead is alive,

but God holds you to be a murderer in your heart.

You were singing earlier on: O God, I will sing you a new song, on a harp

of ten strings I will play to you. Now I am strumming these ten strings. You see,

the decalogue of the Law has ten commandments. These ten commandments

are arranged in such a way that three refer to God and seven refer to men.

Commandments on three strings refer to God. But to the other commandment,

that is, the love of neighbour, seven strings refer to how people should live

together. This series of seven, like seven strings, begins with the honouring of

parents: Honour your father and your mother… Let us join these to those three

that refer to love of God, if we wish to sing the new song to the harp of the ten

strings.

The ten commandments are reducible to those two commandments, that

we should love God and our neighbour, and these two to the one we are looking

for: What you do not want done to you, do not do to another. There the ten are

contained, and there also are contained the two. Sing to the harp of ten strings,

sing a new song, and come to an agreement with the word of God, while it is with

you on the road.