Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
this world, Your creatures. I should even have passed by, for the sake of Your love, the philosophers who do speak the truth about such things, O my Father, the highest Good, the Beauty of all things beautiful.
O Truth, Truth—how deeply even then did the marrow of my mind long for You, when they spoke the sound of Your Name to me, frequently and many times in mere words and in many huge books! These were the dishes on which were brought to me—who was starving for You—the sun and moon and Your beautiful works instead of You, Your works and not You, not even the first of these. For Your spiritual works are superior to these bodies, no matter how shining and celestial. But I was hungry and thirsty not for these first things, but for You, O Truth, in whom "there is neither change nor shadow of alteration" (Jas 1:17). Still they set these glowing phantasms on these dishes before me. It would have been better to have loved this sun, which is, at least, true to these eyes, than those falsehoods which deceive the mind through the eyes. Yet because I thought them to be You, I ate—not eagerly, indeed, for You did not savor in my mouth as You are (indeed You were not these empty fictions), nor was I nourished by them, but rather exhausted. Food in dreams is very much like food when one is awake, but sleepers are not nourished by it, for they are asleep. . . . On such empty things was I then nourished—and I was not nourished.
But You, O my Love, for whom I faint that I may be strong (2 Cor 11:10), are neither those bodies which we see, even though they are in the heavens, nor those things which we do not see there, for You have established them in creation yet have not included them among the highest works of Your creation. How distant are You, then, from these phantasms of mine, the phantasms of bodies which do not even exist! The images of bodies which exist are more certain than these, and more certain than these images are the bodies themselves—and You are not that. Nor are You a soul. Soul is a body's life-force, and, for that reason, what gives the body life is better and more certain than a body is.17 But You are the Life of souls, the Life of lives. Living Yourself, You do not change, O Life of my soul.
(6.11) Where were You, then, in relation to me at that time, and how far away? Of course, I was wandering far from You, cut off even from the husks of the swine whom I was feeding on husks.18
17. "More certain than a body is": Henry Chadwick, Saint Augustine: Confessions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 42, has noted: "It is axiomatic for Augustine that what the mind knows by discernment of eternal, metaphysical truth is more certain than its judgment of the perceptions of the five senses, which are unreliable."
18. Conf. 3.6.10–6.11 (CCL 27:31–32); trans. Bourke, FOTC 21:57–59 (modified). After this passage, Augustine gives a terse summary of what, in retrospect, he saw as specific points on which he was deceived. He repeats the phrase "I did not know" (non noveram) and applies it to three issues: (1) evil as a privation of