Month: November 2016

St. Augustine: Good things, empty hands

~ fatherhorton

God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them.

Attr. St. Augustine

It didn’t take me long to discover that this quotation (if such it be) was popularized by Dr. Gerald May, who wrote in Addiction and Grace: “St. Augustine once said that God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them” (p. 17 of the 2007 edition on Amazon). As far as I can tell (I don’t own the book), he didn’t give a source.

I found places that say it’s from City of God, but nothing more precise. The Penguin Classics edition of City of God runs to a nifty 1,184 pages, weighing 1.8 pounds–in other words, it’s massive, so a citation needs more than the name of the work to be useful. I looked at several public domain translations, and the quotation is not in any of them, nor did I find anything which might have been the foundation for a paraphrase.

I tried going to a site that has the complete works of St. Augustine in Latin. (Searching an Italian site for words in Latin is good nerdy fun.) Unfortunately, the possible quotation in question has no very unique words in it when I try a translation back into Latin. I ended up searching for manus (hand/hands) and then searching within the 634 results for nobis  (to us). No dice.

I think I’ve mentioned before that it would be a brave man indeed who would claim to know for certain that St. Augustine didn’t write something, given the extent of his works, but I’m dubious on this one.

Update: February 24, 2024

A commenter thinks he found the source in the works of another person to whom fauxtations are often attributed: C. S. Lewis.

Concerning your November 2016 post on St. Augustine: Good things, empty hands. I found the quote in C.S. Lewis’ Collected Letters (“St. Augustine says ‘God gives where He finds empty hands.’” pg. 1555), and it may be a paraphrase from Augustine’s Homilies on the Psalms: ‘It is good for the rich man to acknowledge his poverty. If he thinks himself full this is mere puffing, not abundance. Let him recognize that his hands are empty so that God can fill them’ (Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings. 1988, Mahway, NJ. Paulist Press. 244.)