But though I pressed towards you, I was thrust back from you so that I might taste of death, for you resist the proud. And what was prouder than for me to maintain with a marvelous madness than I myself was by nature what you are? For since I was subject to change (that much was very clear to me, my very desire to become wise of the worse to change for the better) still I chose to imagine that you were subject to change rather than to see myself not to be what you are.

Therefore I was repelled by you and you resisted my changeable stiff-neckedness. So I went on making mental images of bodily forms. Being flesh I accused the flesh; and being a wind that passes away. I did not return to you but kept on wandering towards things that have no being neither in you nor in me nor in the body. They were not created for me by your truth but they were made up out of corporeal things by my vanity.

I used to ask your faithful little ones, my fellow citizens from whom I was in exile though I did not know it and I used to ask flippantly and foolishly, "Why does the soul err if God created it?" But I would not allow anyone to ask me, "Why, then, does God err?" Yet I maintained that your immutable substance was forced to err rather than to confess that my mutable substance had gone astray through its own fault and now lay in error for its punishment.

I was about twenty-six or twenty-seven years old when I wrote these books, mediating on the corporeal images which clamoured in the ears of my heart. These I directed, O sweet Truth to your inward melody, meditating on 'the beautiful and the fitting', longing to stay and listen to you to rejoice at the Bridegroom's voice but I could not. By the voices of my own errors I was driven forth and by the weight of my own pride, I was sinking into the lowest pit. For you did not make me to bear joy and gladness nor did the bones rejoice which were not yet humbled.

And what did it profit me that when I was barely twenty years old, a book of Aristotle's entitled The Ten Categories fell into my hands? I hung on its very name as something great and divine since my teacher who taught me rhetoric at Carthage and others who were considered learned referred to it with cheeks swelling with pride. I read it alone and understood it without the aid of anyone. And on conferring with others who said that they had scarcely understood it with the aid of tutors who not only explained it orally but drew many things in the sand, they could tell me no more about it than I had learned by reading it alone.

And the book appeared to me to speak very clearly of substances, such as man; and of his features, such as the figure of a man, the shape and size, height; and of his relationship whose brother he is; or where placed or when born or whether he stands or sits; is shod or armed or is doing something or having something done to him - and all the other countless things that might be classed under these nine categories - of which I have given some examples or under that chief category of substance.

What did all this profit me since it actually hindered me? For imagining that whatsoever existed was included in those ten categories, I tried to understand you, O my God, your wonderful and immutable unity in the same way, as if you were subject to your own greatness or beauty; so that they should exist in you as their subject, as it is in bodies - whereas you are yourself your own greatness and beauty. But a material body is not great or fair because it is a body since it would not cease being a body if it were smaller or less beautiful. But what I conceived of you was falsehood not truth - fictions of my misery not the realities of your blessedness. For you had commanded and it was done in me that the earth should bring forth briars and thorns to me and that in the sweat of my brow I should eat my bread.

And what did it profit me that all the books that I could find of the so-called liberal arts I could read and understand by myself, I who was a slave of vile affections? I took delight in them not knowing him from whom came all that was true or certain in them. For I had my back to the light and my face towards the things enlightened, so even when I discerned things enlightened, my face itself was not enlightened. Whatever was written either on rhetoric or logic, geometry, music or arithmetic, I understood without any great difficulty and without any instructor, as you know, O Lord my God because both quickness of understanding and acuteness in discerning were your gifts.

Yet I did not give you thanks for them. So they did not serve to my profit but for my harm since I desired to get so great a share of my substance into my own power. I did not reserve my strength for you but went away from you into a far country, to waste my substance on harlotry. What good was it to me to have good abilities if I did not employ them to good use? For I did not perceive that those arts were attained with great difficulty even by the studious and talented until I attempted to explain them to others and he was considered the most proficient in them who could follow my explanations most easily.

But what did it profit me while I supposed you, O Lord, God, the Truth, to be a vast and bright body and I, a fragment do not blush, O my God, to confess before you, your mercies towards me and to call on you. I who did not then blush to profess my blasphemies before men and to bark against you. Of what profit to me was my nimble wit in those sciences and all those knotty volumes which I unravelled without human aid, seeing that I erred so odiously and with such sacrilegious shamelessness in the doctrine of piety? A far slower wit was more profitable to your little ones since they did not depart from you that in the nest of your Church they might safely become fledged and nourish the wings of their charity by the food of a sound faith.

O Lord our God, under the shadow of your wings let us hope. Protect us and carry us. You will carry us when we are little and even down to our gray hairs you will carry us; for when you are our strength, then it is strength indeed, but when it is our own, then it is weakness. Our good lives only with you; when we are averted, we are perverted. Let us now, O Lord, return that we may not be overturned because with you good lives without any decay, for you are that good. We need not fear that because we fell away from it, we will find no place to which we can return; for when we left it, our home, your eternity, did not fall.

BY SAINT AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO

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Sunday, May 24, 2009

I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!

I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.

HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -