Thought for the Day

Excellent quote, although I think it is misattributed to St. Augustine, probably because St. Liguori cites it as from him at least twice. From what I have been able to determine, it comes from “The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ” by St. Liguori, who quotes Bernardinus Bustis as quoting this as from St. Augustine. In Bustis’ work he cites it as from a “certain sermon” of St. Augustine, although there doesn’t seem to be a genuine work of St. Augustine employing that quotation. St. Liguori also quotes it in his “The Passion and Death of Jesus Christ,” albeit without the attribution to Bustis.

I had Gemini trying to convince me that Bustis lifted it originally from St. Edmund’s Mirror (and sent me on several fruitless chases through Latin and middle English manuscripts…), which has something vaguely similar about one Pater noster said with devotion being worth more than a thousand said without, but nothing like what the AI was confidently hallucinating!

The quote in Bustis might come from some pseudo-Augustine works of the time, but I haven’t been able to track it down. BTW, St. Edmund’s Mirror, from what I was briefly seeing when going through it, seems kind of awesome.

https://archive.org/details/mirrorofstedmund00edmu/page/10/mode/2up

The full quote (whatever the source) that Bustis has is great though:

“How great a merit it is to mourn the Passion of the Son of God, Augustine shows in a certain sermon, saying that he merits more who sheds even one single tear in memory of the Passion of Christ, than if he were to journey on a pilgrimage all the way to the Promised Land; and than if for a whole year he were to recite the entire Psalter every week; and more than if he were to take the discipline every week of the year, or were to fast on bread and water.

Whence it is read that a certain man, struggling at the point of death, was led in an ecstasy to judgment; and he saw his merits and demerits being weighed before the Judge; and, his demerits outweighing, he cried out: ‘If for my salvation the merits of the works which I have done do not suffice, at least place the faith and devotion which I had toward Jesus Christ crucified for us, and toward His passion and death.’ And after a little while, he cried out again, saying: ‘Now it is well.’ And so he happily gave up his spirit.”