The Essential Augustine (continued)
APPROACHING GOD THROUGH UNDERSTANDING 123 knowledge. The soul's journey to God is not an intellectual exercise but a progress in man's heart—and an ontological perfecting of his whole being.
CREATION IS A GREAT BOOK*
Some people read books in order to find God. Yet there is a great book, the very appearance of created things. Look above you; look below you! Note it; read it! God, whom you wish to find, never wrote that book with ink. Instead, He set before your eyes the things that He had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that? Why, heaven and earth cry out to you: "God made me!"
THE JOURNEY OF THE SOUL TO GOD?
Wherefore you will certainly not deny that there is 33. an immutable truth, containing all things that are immutably true, which you cannot say is yours or mine or any one man's, but that in some wonderful way a mysterious and universal light, as it were, is present and proffers itself to all in common. But who would say that that which is commonly present to all who reason and understand belongs properly to the nature of any one of them? For you remember, I think, what we said a little while ago about the bodily senses namely, that those things which we perceive in common by the sense of the eyes or ears, such as colors and sounds, do not pertain to the nature of our eyes or ears, but are there for all to perceive in common. So too it will not do for you to say that those things which we see in common, each with his own mind, pertain to the nature of the mind of either one of us. For what the eyes of two persons see at the same time, cannot be said to be the eyes of this man or of that, but is some third thing to which the gaze of both is turned. E. That is manifestly true.
Sermon, Mai 126.6; trans. V.J.B. + On Free Choice, Il, 12, 33-34; 15, 39-40; 16, 41-42; trans. C.M. Sparrow, St. Augustine on Free Will (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Studies, 1947), pp. 64-73. Used with permission.