Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings
INTRODUCTION
experienced as a youth but one that was reinforced by his reading of St. Paul and St. John. The discussion of conversion as the soul's journey to God used the language of reditus® at times to indicate introversion in contrast to preoccupation with the sensible world, more often to indicate Godlikeness or that primary state of graced perfection to which the soul yearns to return.
In the first six books of the Confessions he relates how he had sought God outside himself by means of his bodily senses. In the seventh book he explains how the Platonists had taught him to go from the exterior to the interior, the "better part," and how he had attempted, like the Platonists, to use his intellect to see God, trying to take himself from his own interior to the superior, or God.
I was admonished by all this to return to my own self, and, with you to guide me, I entered into the innermost part of myself, and I was able to do this because you were my helper. I entered and I saw with my soul's eye (Such as it was) an unchangeable light shining above this light of my soul and above my mind. It was not the ordinary light which is visible to all flesh, nor something of the same sort, only bigger, as though it might be our ordinary light shining much more brightly and filling everything with its greatness. No, it was not like that; it was different, entirely different from anything of the kind. Nor was it above my mind as oil floats on water or as the heaven is above the earth. It was higher than I, because it made me, and I was lower because I was made by it. He who knows truth knows that light, and he who knows that light knows eternity. Love knows it. O eternal truth and true love and beloved eternity! You are my God; to you I sigh by day and by night. And when I first knew you, you raised me up so that I could see that there was something to see and that I still lacked the ability to see it. And you beag back the weakness of my sight, blazing upon me with your rays, and I trembled in love and in dread, and I found that I was far distant from you, in a
8. Cf. R. D. Crouse, "Recurrens in te unum: The Pattern of St. Augustine's Confessions," Studia Patristica XIV (Berlin, 1976).