Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
Confessions 19
Confessions, Augustine came to believe that, while contemplation may be mystical, it is an experience that starkly reveals our distance from God and calls forth confession.28 From Confessions, Book 7:
(9.13) First of all, desiring to show me how You "resist the proud but give grace to the humble" (1 Pt 5:5) and by what great mercy You have shown the way of humility to humanity in the fact that Your "Word was made flesh and dwelt among us" (Jn 1:14), You provided me, by means of a man who was puffed up with the most monstrous pride,29 certain books of the Platonists, which were translated from the Greek tongue into Latin. . . .
(10.16) Admonished [by these Platonist books] to return to myself, I entered into my innermost parts under Your guidance. I was able because You became my helper (Ps 29:11). I entered in and saw with the eye of my soul (whatever its condition) the immutable Light above this same eye of my soul and above my mind—not this everyday light which is visible to all flesh, nor was it a brighter light of somewhat the same kind, as it were, which shines out much more clearly and fills the whole of space with its magnitude. It was not this, but something different, quite different from all these. Nor was it above my mind in the way that oil is above water, nor as the heavens are above the earth, but superior in the sense that It had made me, and I was inferior in the sense that I had been made by It. The one who knows the truth knows It, and the one who knows It knows eternity. Love knows It. O eternal Truth and true Love and beloved Eternity, You are my God. For You I sigh day and night (Ps 41:4). When I first knew You, You took me up to You so that I might see that there was something to see, but that I was not yet ready for vision. Shining Your light upon me so strongly, You struck down my feeble gaze, and I trembled with love and with awe. I discovered that I was far from You in this land of unlikeness, as if I heard Your voice from on high: "I am the food of the great. Grow great and you shall eat of me. Nor will you change Me into you, as is done with the food of your flesh, rather will you change into Me." I recognized that "for his iniquity You have corrected man" and "You made my soul shrivel up like a spider web" (Ps 38:12). So I said: "Is truth then nothing because it is not diffused through space, either finite or infinite?" And You cried out from afar: "Yes, truly, I am Who am!" (Ex 3:14). I heard it, as one hears something in one's heart. There was no reason for me to doubt. I could more
28. For a careful analysis of these ascent texts, see John Peter Kenney, The Mysticism of Saint Augustine: Rereading the Confessions (New York: Routledge, 2005), esp. 49–72. Kenney helpfully demonstrates that while Augustine draws heavily on Plotinus's terminology, his perspectives on the mystical encounter differ radically from those of Plotinus.
29. "Man . . . puffed up with the most monstrous pride": Scholars have speculated on who this might have been. Pierre Courcelle has argued that it was Manlius Theodorus, a prominent Neoplatonist in Milan. For a discussion, see O'Donnell, 2:419–20.