make contact with your minds, with your inner selves by some sort of suitable
216 SAINT A UG USTINE - SERMONS
God"; I say, "Show me your spirit."14 You sweat, you get tired, you're in a fix, when I say, "Show me your spirit." I know you can't do it. Why can't you? Because your spirit is invisible. And yet it is, in you, better than your body; while my God is better than your spirit. So how am I to show you my God, when you can't show me your spirit, and I can show you that my God is better than your spirit?
Look, if you say to me, "You can tell my spirit from its work; because I turn my eyes to see, my ears to hear, move my tongue to speak, produce my voice to make a sound, from all this you can understand and know my spirit"; it means you yourself realize you can't show it to me in itself, but you tell me to know it from its works. So there you are, I too will show you my God from his works. And I won't go off far away, I won't send your unbelief to remote things you cannot, perhaps, grasp. I won't run through the works of my God in this sort of way: "He made things invisible, he made things visible; that is, heaven and earth, the sea and all the things that are in them (Ps 146:6)."I'm not dispatching you through many things; I'm going back to you yourself. You're certainly alive; you have a body, you have a spirit. The body's visible, the spirit's invisible. The body's the habitation, the spirit the inhabitant; the body's the vehicle, the spirit the user of the vehicle; the body's like a vehicle which has to be driven, the spirit the driver of your body. Look at the senses of your body; they're plainly like doors in your body, through which messages may be brought to your spirit living inside; eyes, ears, sense of smell, taste, touch, the arrange¬ ment of limbs. What's that inside, that you think with, that you give life to all these other things with? The whole of that, which you marvel at in yourself_ the one who made that, that's who my God is.
The divine name, "Iam who lam "
5. So then, my dear brothers and sisters, if I've managed, as best I could, to make contact with your minds, with your inner selves by some sort of suitable conversation, if by talking I've reached those who stay in mud houses (Jb 4:19), that is, your spirits dwelling in your bodies, don't try to work out divine realities from the things you know. God surpasses everything, heaven and earth. Don't set before your eyes a kind of great big burly blacksmith,15 putting something together, fitting it out, tooling it, turning it, twisting it; or even a kind of emperor, seated on a royal throne of splendid, ornate workmanship, and creating by giving orders. Smash the idols in your minds, pay attention to what Moses was told when he asked God what his name was: lam who am (Ex 3:14). Whatever else there is, in comparison with him it is not. That which truly is, is incapable of being changed in any respect whatever.
Everything that changes and fluctuates, and does not cease at any time at all to alter, was and will be; you can never catch hold of is in it. But God doesn't have any was and will be. What was, no longer is; what will be, isn't yetand what is coming in such a way that it will pass, will be in such a way that it never is. Contemplate, if you can, I am who am. Don't roll around and revolve like
SERMON 223A 217 wheels, don't be driven by revolving, temporal thoughts.16 Stand still at is, stand still at just is. Where are you going? Stand still, so that you too may be able just to be.
But when do we catch hold of fleeting thought, and nail it to what abides? When can we ever do this? And so God took pity; and the one who is, and the one who said, This is what you shall say to the children of Israel: He who is has sent me to you (Ex 3:14), having spoken the name of his substance, goes on next to speak the name of his mercy. What is the name of his substance? I am who am; you shall say to the children of Israel: He who is has sent me to you. But Moses was a man, and was up to his neck in things that in comparison with that other one are not; he was on earth, he was in the flesh; and in that flesh he was a soul, he was a changeable nature, he was carrying the load of human frailty. I mean, when was he ever going to grasp what was said to him, I am who am? After all, the one who could not be seen was speaking to him by means of what his eyes could see, and the hidden God was using what could be seen as his instrument. (I mean, none of what Moses could see was God; because even the sound that proceeds from me, a mere human being, isn't the whole of my word; I've a word in my mind which makes no sound; the sound passes, the word remains.)17
So when God said,18 lam who am, and You shall say to the children of Israel: He who is has sent me to you; as though he was incapable of understanding what I am who am could mean, not to mention He who is has sent me to you (or perhaps, if he himself could understand it, it would still have to be read to us, who wouldn't be able to understand it), immediately after the name of substance, he told him his name of mercy. It's as though he said to Moses, "You can't grasp what I said, Iam who am. Your mind doesn't stand still, you are not unchange¬ able together with me, nor is your mind unchangeable. You have heard what I am; now hear what you can grasp, hear what you can hope in." God said again to Moses, lam the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob (Ex 3:15).19 "You cannot grasp the name of my substance; grasp the name of my mercy. Iam the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. "
But what I am is eternal; Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, indeed, are eternal; or rather I shouldn't say eternal, but made eternal by him.20 At any rate, this was how the Lord himself refuted the misrepresentations of the Sadducees; as they denied the resurrection, he gave them the testimony of scripture from this passage: Read what the Lord said to Moses in the bush: I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living; for all are alive for him (Lk 20:37-38). Accordingly here too God did not add This is my name for ever after saying I am who am; about this, I mean, nobody doubts that that which is is, precisely because it is eternal. But it was when he said I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, that he added This is my name for ever. As though to say, "Why be afraid because of the mortality of the human race? Is what you're dreading, perhaps, that when you've died, you won't exist anymore? This is my