Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings
INTRODUCTION
region of total unlikeness, as if I were hearing your voice from on high saying: "I am the food of grown men. Grow and yourshall feed upon me. And you will not, as with the food of the body, change me into yourself, but you will be changed into me!''?
We see that Augustine was drawn to God by natural desire. He ascended from the body to sense power and from sense power to intellectual judgment by which he acknowledged the eternity of Truth above his changing mind. "And then in a flash of a trembling glance, my mind arrived at That Which Is."!° He was torn away by the weight of his sins, bad habits that enchained him and made him fall back, through weakness. He tried to find a way of gaining the strength needed for enjoying God but could not find it until he embraced that Mediator betwixt God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who is over all, God blessed for evermore, calling to him and saying: I am the way, the truth, and the life,-and mingling with our flesh that food which I lacked the strength to take; for the Word was made flesh, so that Your Wisdom by which you created all things, might give its milk to our infancy.'!
But he did not immediately embrace the Creator because at that time (A.D. 385) he thought of Christ simply as a man of the very highest wisdom.!? Whereas the Platonists had enabled him to understand the immateriality of God, St. Paul!? admonished him to follow Christ, the only way to the Father. Through the word and/or the actions of Christians, that is, through Monica, Ambrose, Simplicianus, Ponticianus and the two Roman civil servants, Anthony, Victorinus, Paul, through such Christians Augustine had been awakened to the reality of the kingdom of God, which is not of this world.
When Augustine finally understood that Christ in the Scrip-
9. Conf. VII.10. 10. Ibid., VII.17. 11. Ibid., VII.18. 12. Ibid., VII.19. 13. Rom 13:13.