Quote by Ronald Knox

“Sin, the Fall, salvation, grace, election-how is it that they loom so large in the vocabulary of a movement which should have been Platonist, should have been theocentric? It is due, I think, to the overmastering influence of one man, St. Augustine. A Platonist if ever there was one, yet Fenelon quarried no material from him in writing the Maximes des saints. St. Augustine was a man in whom the moral struggle had become inextricably entwined with the search for God; further, he had to enter the lists against the great heresy of Pelagius, which sought to by-pass the mystery of redemption. Consequently, the doctrine of grace became a major preoccupation with him, and he darkened in, perhaps too unsparingly, the outlines of St. Paul's world-picture. Moreover, he sought to pluck the heart out of a mystery by his theory of the two rival delectations. If you avoided sin, it was only because conscious love for God then and there neutralized the attraction of it; your decision was made on a balance of motives. Exaggerated now from this angle, now from that, St. Augustine's theology has provided, ever since, the dogmatic background of revivalism.”

Quote by Ronald Knox