Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
whom no one seeks unless admonished, whom no one finds unless purified; O God, whom to abandon is to perish, whom to heed is to love, whom to see is to have; O God, to whom faith rouses us, hope lifts us, charity unites us; O God, through whom we overcome the enemy, to you I pray; O God, whom we receive lest we perish altogether; O God, by whom we are admonished to be ever watchful; O God, through whom we distinguish good from evil; O God, through whom we flee evil and follow the good; O God, through whom we overcome yielding to adversities; O God, whom we rightly serve and by whom we are rightly ruled. O God, through whom we learn that so many things once ours are foreign to us, and discover so many things once foreign to us are ours; O God, through whom we learn not to cling to the charms and lures of evil; O God, through whom trivial things lessen their lessening of us; O God, through whom what is better in us is not made subject to our lower self; O God, through whom death is swallowed up in victory; O God, who converts us; O God, who strips us of what is not and clothes us with what is; O God, who makes us worthy to be heard; O God, who strengthens us; O God, who leads us into all truth; O God, who speaks to us of all that is good, who does not lead to senseless things nor permit us to be made so; O God, who calls us back to the road; O God, who brings us to the doorway; O God, who causes it to be opened to those who knock; O God, who gives the bread of life; O God, through whom we thirst for the cup, from which, once drunk, we never more thirst; O God, who "convicts the world in regard to sin, to justice, and to judgment" (Jn 16:8); O God, through whom those who believe minimally do not upset us; O God, through whom we denounce the error of those who think that souls have no merits before you; O God, through whom we do not serve "weak and destitute elemental powers" (Gal 4:9); O God, who purges us, who prepares us for divine rewards, be well-disposed and come to my aid.47
The Vision of God
One thing Augustine drew from his reading of those "books of the Platonists"48 was a method of mystical contemplation that led one to seek to pierce through the ephemeral world visible to the senses and to rise inwardly and upwardly, elevating the mind, however briefly, to the eternity of God. Earlier we saw two accounts of such ascents in
47. Soliloquia 1.1.2-1.3 (BA 5:26–30); my trans., based on Gilligan, FOTC 5:344–47. See retr. 1.4.2 (BA 12:290). On this prayer, as well as the Trinitarian references in De beata vita 4.33–35 (quoted above), see Lewis Ayres, " 'Giving Wings to Nicaea': Reconceiving Augustine's Earliest Trinitarian Theology," Augustinian Studies 38 (2007): 21–40.
48. See p. 18 in Chap. 1, above.