Augustine: Earlier Writings
l69 AUGUSTINE: EARLIER WRITINGS and number will reply: '*Lo, here am I." Examine the beauty of bodily form, and you will find that everything is in its place by number. Examine the beauty of bodily motion and you will find everything in its due time by number. Examine the art which produces all these things and you never anywhere find in it either space or time, but it is alive with number. It has neither place in space nor length of days. And yet those who want to become artificers, while they accustom themselves to learning their art, move their bodies in space and time, and their minds at least in time. They become more skilled, I mean, with the passing of time. But rise above even the mind of the artificer to behold the eternal realm of number. Then wisdom will shine upon you from its inward seat, from the secret place of truth.
If truth repels you still because you look for it somewhat languidly, direct your mental vision to that path in which "she shows herself graciously." Remember that you have postponed a vision that you wdll seek again when you have become stronger and sounder.
43. Woe to those who abandon thy leading and wander among things which are but signs of thy working, who love thy nod rather than thyself and are oblivious to what thou teachest thereby, O Wisdom, sweetest light of the purified mind. For thou ceasest not to suggest to us what and how great thou art. Thy pleasure is the whole glory of created beings. An artificer somehow suggests to the spectator of his work, through the very beauty of the work itself, not to be wholly content with that beauty alone, but to let his eye so scan the form of the material thing made that he may remember with affection him who made it. Those who love thy creatures in place of thee are like men who, listening to an eloquent sage, pay too much attention to the sweetness of his voice and the aptness of his verbal style and miss the meaning of his sentences, of which the words are but the sound-signals, as it were. W'oe to those who turn away from thy light and are happy enough to remain in their own obscurity. It is as if they turned their backs on thee and went on vith their carnal labours in their own shadows; yet even so what pleases them is theirs because of thy light shining all round them. But so long as the shadow is loved the mind's eye is made languid and becomes less able to bear to behold thee.
So a man becomes more and more shrouded in darkness so long as he pursues willingly what he finds in his weakness is more easy to receive. Then he begins not to be able to see what supremely is, and to consider that to be evil which deceives him because