Monday, November 21, 2011

Saint Augustine's Confessions: Themes

Throughout the book Augustine wrestles with the idea of God.  How can our brains comprehend the massive idea of God without trying to reduce Him to a material form?  How do we perceive God?  

"How could I see this when me eye saw only the body and my mind only a construct?  Nor did I realize that God is a spirit, without parts of his whole having their own length or breadth or weight.  Any part would weigh less than the whole.  If spread everywhere, such a body would still weigh more or less in any spacial segment of it, and each part could not be everywhere, as with the spirit, as with God" 

He also thinks about how we perceive the world around us.

"I 'called up before my mind' the whole range of creation, whatever is obvious in it to our senses - earth and sea and air and stars and trees and animals - and whatever is not taken in by our senses - the high spiritual canopy and all angels and all spiritual entities.  But even the latter, like the former, I imagined as occupying some kind of place.  I made out the whole of creation as one vast physical stuff, articulated into different sorts of material bodies - the real bodies or those I imagined as the spiritual realities.  I made it out as vast, without giving it any specific magnitude (which I could not measure) but, be it ever so large, reaching a certain limit in any of its extensions.  And you, Lord, I saw as embracing and pervading all parts of this mass, but stretching far outside it on all sides - as if there were a sea everywhere, and everywhere only this boundless sea throughout the endless reaches, and in the sea a huge but not infinite sponge, totally soaked with that sea in every particle of it."

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