St. Augustine of Hippo - On Heretics & Heresies

Bishop & Doctor of the Church (354 - 430 AD)

"Shall we hesitate to take refuge in the bosom of that Church, which, as is evident to all, possesses the supreme authority of the Apostolic See through the Episcopal succession? In vain do heretics rage round it...To refuse to the Church the primacy is most impious and above measure arrogant...what can be greater evidence of pride and rashness than to be unwilling to learn about the books of the divine mysteries from the proper interpreter. (De Unitate Credendi, cap. xvii., n. 35).

"So the Christian is a Catholic as long as he lives in the body: cut off from it he becomes a heretic - the life of the spirit follows not the amputated member." (S. Augustinus, Sermo cclxvii., n. 4)

"Heresies have arisen, and certain perverse views ensnaring souls and precipitating them into the abyss only when the Scriptures, good in themselves, are not properly understood" (In Evang. Joan., tract xviii., cap. 5, n. 1)

"No one who merely disbelieves in all (these heresies) can for that reason regard himself as a Catholic or call himself one. For there may be or may arise some other heresies, which are not set out in this work of ours, and, if any one holds to one single one of these he is not a Catholic" (S. Augustinus, De Haeresibus, n. 88).

(Pope Leo XIII - But he who dissents even in one point from divinely revealed truth absolutely rejects all faith, since he thereby refuses to honour God as the supreme truth and the formal motive of faith.)
"In many things they are with me, in a few things not with me; but in those few things in which they are not with me the many things in which they are will not profit them" (S. Augustinus in Psal. liv., n. 19)

"You, who believe what you like, believe yourselves rather than the gospel" (S. Augustinus, lib. xvii., Contra Faustum Manichaeum, cap. 3)

"There is nothing more grievous than the sacrilege of schism....there can be no just necessity for destroying the unity of the Church" (S. Augustinus, Contra Epistolam Parmeniani, lib. ii., cap. ii., n. 25)

St. Augustine publicly attests that, "the primacy of the Apostolic chair always existed in the Roman Church" (Ep. xliii., n. 7); and he denies that anyone who dissents from the Roman faith can be a Catholic. "You are not to be looked upon as holding the true Catholic faith if you do not teach that the faith of Rome is to be held" (Sermo cxx., n. 13)

What doth it profit thee not to offend the Father, who avenges an offense against the Mother? What doth it profit to confess the Lord, to honour God, to preach Him, to acknowledge His Son, and to confess that He sits on the right hand of the Father, if you blaspheme His Church? Hold fast, therefore, O dearly beloved, hold fast altogether God as your Father, and the Church as your Mother" (Enarratio in Psal. Lxxxviii., sermo ii., n. 14)

"Men of corrupt mind, who have made shipwreck of the faith, cannot help being slaves. . . They are slaves to a threefold concupiscence: of will, of pride, or of outward show" (St. Augustine, De Vera Religione, 37)

"if reason is turned against the authority of sacred Scripture, no matter how specious it may seem, it errs in the likeness of truth; for true it cannot be." (Epistola 147, ad Marcellinum," 7 (PL 33, 589))

"men think, or would have it believed, that Christian teaching is not suited to the good of the State; for they wish the State to be founded not on solid virtue, but on the impunity of vice." (Arcanum, no. 81)

"Our Lord has bequeathed to us His Body and Blood under the form of substances in which a multitude of things have been reduced to unity, for one of them, namely bread, consisting as it does of many grains is yet one, and the other, that is to say wine, has its unity of being from the confluent juice of many grapes." (Tract. xxxvi., in Joan nn. 13, 17)