{"collection":"chr","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/chr/ecf/101/1010072.htm","path":"chr/ecf/101/1010072.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/chr/ecf/101/1010072.htm","text":"Chapter XIII.\u2014Love Originates from Grace and Beauty Enticing Us.\n20. These things I knew not at that time, and I loved these lower beauties, and I was sinking to the very depths; and I said to my friends, \u201cDo we love anything but the beautiful? What, then, is the beautiful? And what is beauty? What is it that allures and unites us to the things we love; for unless there were a grace and beauty in them, they could by no means attract us to them?\u201d And I marked and perceived that in bodies themselves there was a beauty from their forming a kind of whole, and another from mutual fitness, as one part of the body with its whole, or a shoe with a foot, and so on. And this consideration sprang up in my mind out of the recesses of my heart, and I wrote books (two or three, I think) \u201con the fair and fit.\u201d Thou knowest, O Lord, for it has escaped me; for I have them not, but they have strayed from me, I know not how.","title":"Nicene and Post Nicene-Fathers, Vol. I: The Confessions: ...","type":"page"}