79. Civ. Dei 22.29 (CCL 48:861–62); trans. Walsh and Honan, FOTC 24:503–5.
Seeing God in All Things
Augustine had long wrestled with what the Scriptures meant by "seeing God face-to-face" and what Jesus had, in the Sermon on the Mount, promised: that the pure in heart will "see God." How, Augustine asked, could we see God if God is bodiless, utterly immaterial? He had once considered that that seeing was "intellectual," but as he got older, he came to assert that we might come to see God with transfigured eyes in our transfigured resurrected bodies. In the work's closing pages, Augustine boldly asserts this daring view, that we will indeed come to see God in and through all creation. From On the City of God, Book 22: (29) What is possible—even highly probable—is that we shall be able to see the material bodies of the new heaven and the new earth in such a way that, by means of our own bodies and of all the others which we shall see wherever we turn our eyes, we shall see God, and we shall see Him with the utmost clarity as being everywhere present and as regulating the whole universe, including material things. We shall see Him in a way different from the way in which His "invisible attributes" are now seen, "being understood by the things that are made" (Rom 1:20), for "we see now through a mirror in an obscure manner" and only "in part" (1 Cor 13:12), and we must rely more on the eyes of faith, whereby we believe, than on the eyes of the body, whereby we see the beauty of the material universe. Think about human beings with whom we now live, how their very movements pulse with life, so that, as soon as we turn our eyes to them, we do not merely believe that they are alive; we see it. Even though we now have no power to see "living-ness" apart from the "living bodies," nevertheless, we shall then see with the eyes of our spiritual bodies. We shall see the immaterial God, ruling all things, and we shall see Him by means of our bodies. . . . He will be seen in the spirit, and each of us will see Him within our own selves and in one another. He will also be seen in Himself, be seen in the new heaven and the new earth and in every creature then existing. And by means of our [resurrected] bodies, He will be seen in every material object towards which the eyes of our spiritual bodies happen to direct their gaze.79
79. Civ. Dei 22.29 (CCL 48:861–62); trans. Walsh and Honan, FOTC 24:503–5.