Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings
INTRODUCTION
since she is eternal and "'have been" and "going to be" are not eternal. And as we talked, yearning toward this Wisdom, we did with the whole strength of our hearts' impulse just lightly come into touch with her, and we sighed and left behind there the first fruits of the Spirites
Many have noted in this description the structure of Neoplatonic ecstasy and the presence of the Holy Spirit with His gifts of union and transformation. Nor is this an isolated experience. Years lateer when in Book X of the Confessions he recorded his present state of soul, he referred to frequent experiences as foretastes of eternal life:
And in all these things which I contemplate as I am consulting You I find no secure place for my soul except in You, and in You I pray that what is scattered in me may be brought together so that nothing of me may depart from You. And sometimes working within me You admit me to a state of feeling quite unlike any I am used to, a kind of sweet delight which if it were made permanent in me would be something not of this world, not of this life.>
It has proven misleading to some that Augustine does not radically separate the philosophic way to the discovery of truth and of God from the mystical approach to the contemplation of God. He accented the dynamism of the human spirit as a drive for the Absolute, the presence of God in the human mind. The desire to know and to love is a basic urge toward absolute truth and goodness or God, a desire made powerful and efficacious by grace. The spirit's natural contact with God is the foundation for the life of faith. God's presence in the mind was the prethematic experience of Augustine as described in the Confessions and analyzed in
On the Trinity. In ht early philosophical dialogues he reasoned to God's presence there by an analysis of truth as illumination: an intuition of the regulating truths of the intellectual and moral life
84. Conf., 1X.10. 85. Ibid., X.40.