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Daily Inspiration Quote by Saint Aurelius Augustine

"The spiritual virtue of a sacrament is like light; although it passes among the impure, it is not polluted"

About this Quote

Augustine’s image is doing courtroom work disguised as poetry: the sacrament, he insists, doesn’t take on the moral grime of whoever handles it. Light moves through sewage without becoming sewage. That’s not a dreamy metaphor; it’s a surgical answer to a crisis in the early church, when Christians were fighting over whether “tainted” clergy could administer valid rites. After persecution, some bishops and priests were accused of compromise, cowardice, even betrayal. The Donatist movement wanted a pure church with pure ministers. Augustine wants a church that can survive history.

The intent is institutional and pastoral at once. By separating the holiness of the sacrament from the holiness of the minister, he protects ordinary believers from constant spiritual insecurity. If grace depended on the priest’s private virtue, the faithful would be trapped in an anxious detective story: Was my baptism real? Was that Eucharist counterfeit? Augustine’s light metaphor shuts that down. The sacrament’s efficacy comes from God, not from the officiant’s character.

The subtext is political in the best sense: it underwrites unity. A community that makes validity contingent on moral perfection becomes a splinter factory; suspicion becomes a sacrament of its own. Augustine’s line also carries a stern realism about human institutions. People are impure. Leaders fail. If the channel of grace can’t pass through compromised hands, it won’t reach anyone. By making the sacrament “unpollutable,” Augustine relocates holiness from personalities to a shared, durable practice - a theology built to outlast scandal, faction, and the messy churn of real life.

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APA Style (7th ed.)
Augustine, Saint Aurelius. (n.d.). The spiritual virtue of a sacrament is like light; although it passes among the impure, it is not polluted. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-spiritual-virtue-of-a-sacrament-is-like-light-151345/

Chicago Style
Augustine, Saint Aurelius. "The spiritual virtue of a sacrament is like light; although it passes among the impure, it is not polluted." FixQuotes. Accessed February 2, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-spiritual-virtue-of-a-sacrament-is-like-light-151345/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The spiritual virtue of a sacrament is like light; although it passes among the impure, it is not polluted." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-spiritual-virtue-of-a-sacrament-is-like-light-151345/. Accessed 2 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

Saint Aurelius Augustine (November 13, 354 - August 28, 430) was a Theologian from Rome.

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