Quotation
Last reviewed:
“My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.”
Augustine of Hippo · Christian Platonism · Medieval · c. 397–400
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes love as the gravity of a person: not a mood added on top of a life, but the weight that moves someone toward whatever is treated as a resting place. Fire rises, stones fall, and loves carry souls. A rival reading hears a romantic claim that feeling justifies the direction, as if whatever one loves is thereby the right place to land. He thinks the weight is real whether the place is right or not; The sentence is in book thirteen, late, where charity is being tied to the Spirit and to rest.
Did Augustine of Hippo really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Henry Chadwick's translation of Confessions book thirteen. The Latin pondus meum amor meus compares love to a physical weight that carries a body to its place. Secure. This English is a translation.
Where it comes from
Confessions XIII.9.10
Approximate date: c. 397–400.
How to use it
A commute from Guildford that always ends in the same argument at home is being carried by a love, of being right, of peace, of not being the one who yields, whether or not that love has been named. Augustine's image asks for the name. It does not say the love is wise because it is strong; A direction can be steady and still be the wrong resting place, which is why the Confessions spends so long on disordered weights.
A mindset reading
The image is not permission to follow the heaviest feeling in the room. Weight explains movement. It does not bless the destination; People quote the line as if authenticity were the only virtue, and then skip his long sorting of loves into those that rest in God and those that rest in the self; The carrying is descriptive; The judgement of where one is carried is a further question.
Understand the philosophy
The key term is weight, pondus, borrowed from the idea that bodies move toward their proper places, and applied to love as what carries a soul. Book thirteen is reading Genesis and the Spirit, and charity is said to be the weight that lifts rather than only the weight that drags. Earlier books have shown loves that carry a person downward. The sentence gathers that physics of desire into one image; Chadwick's English is the translation used here.
- love
- self
- change
FAQ
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes love as the gravity of a person: not a mood added on top of a life, but the weight that moves someone toward whatever is treated as a resting place. Fire rises, stones fall, and loves carry souls. A rival reading hears a romantic claim that feeling justifies the direction, as if whatever one loves is thereby the right place to land. He thinks the weight is real whether the place is right or not; The sentence is in book thirteen, late, where charity is being tied to the Spirit and to rest.
Did Augustine of Hippo really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Henry Chadwick's translation of Confessions book thirteen. The Latin pondus meum amor meus compares love to a physical weight that carries a body to its place. Secure. This English is a translation.
Which work is it in?
Confessions XIII.9.10 Approximate date: c. 397–400.