Excerpts from St. Augustine's "Confessions"
These excerpts are truly profound and amazing... these are some of my favorite portions from the book that I just finished. If anyone wants to read a theological/philisophical classic, St. Augustine's "Confessions" is a MUST. It was incredible. I feel such a desire for knowledge, more than ever. All I desire to do is read and learn and apply. St. Augustine is truly one of the greatest Christian thinkers, and I thank God for sending one the great fathers of our Faith into my life and using them to further direct and guide me through this world.
Should not everyone's goal in life be to find truth? Ultimate truth, beyond all other images and imposters, but the truth that holds no lies, has no beginning, no end... but is. But why does this truth frighten so many people away from itself...from the source of truth, from Truth itself? If God, Jesus, is the Truth, why dost not all persons everywhere flock to know this Truth and partake of it. Alas, mankind is in a destitute state. Hence, while we love to deceive, we hate to be deceived. Therefore, when the ultimate Truth shed's His light upon men, revealing their true selves, revealing how they've been fooled and deceived -- men reject and despise the Truth, blocking the reality of their deception and the depth of their fallen selves. To put it simply: pride gets in the way. We hate the ultimate good, because we have become so intertwined and enthralled in the deception that we ourselves can save our doomed souls... yet it is all in vain. Nothing that we do will save us. But our hope is in the Truth! For this Truth, our merciful Savior, through his divine and sovereign love and mercy has given us a chance for redemption. O merciful Lord! O loving Father! What compassion is this?! What love! You have come to earth, You live in men, and enable us to do the will of God every day. We live, yet not of ourselves, we live in You, and in Your rest we will abide forever through the faithfulness of Your Almighty Goodness.
Ok, I've spoken enough, here's St. Augustine...
"This then is the fruit of my confession - the confession not of what I have been, but of what I am - in that I confess not only before You, with inward exulatation yet trembling, with inward sorrow yet with hope as well: but also in the ears of the believing sons of men, companions of my joy and sharers of my mortality, my fellow citizens, fellow pilgrims: those who have gone before, and those who are to come after, and those who walk the way of life with me. These are Your servants, my brethren, whom You have chosen that they should be Your sons, my masters whom You have commanded me to serve if I am to live with You and in You. And this Your word to me would be a lesser thing, if it merely commanded me by word and did not go before me in the doing. Thus I do it, in deed and in word, I do it under Your wings, for the peril would be too great were not my soul under Your wings and subject to You, and my infirmity known to You. I am but a little one, yet my Father lives forever and my Protector is sufficient for me. For He is the same who begot me and who watches over me: and You are all my good, You the almighty who are with me even before I am with You. To such then as You command me to serve will I show, not what I was, but what I now am, what I continue to be." p. 214 IV.
"I can also name forgetfulness and know what I mean by the word; but how should I recognize the thing itself unless I remembered it? I am not speaking of the sound of the word, but of the thing the sound signifies; for if I had forgotten the thing, I should be unable to remember what the sound stood for. When I remember memory my memory itself is present to itself by itself; but when I remember forgetfulness, then memory and forgetfulness are present together - forgetfulness which I remember, memory by which I remember. But what is forgetfulness except absense of memory? How then can that be present for me to remember, which when it is present means that I cannot remember. If what we remember we hold in our memory, and if, unless we remembered forgetfulness, we should not on hearing the word recognize what is meant by it, then forgetfulness is contained in the memory. Therefore that is present, to keep us from forgetting it, which when it is present we do forget. Are we to understand from this that when we remember forgetfulness, it is not present to the memory in itself but by its image: because if it were present in itself it would cause us not to remember but to forget? Who can analyze this, or understand how it can be?
Assuredly, Lord, I toil with this, toil within myself: I have become to myself a soil laborious and of heavy sweat. For I am not now considering the arts of the heavens, or measuring the distances of the stars, or seeking how the earth is held in space; it is I who remember, I, my mind. It is not remarkable if things that I am not are far from my knowledge: but what could be closer to me than myself? Yet the power of memory in me I do not understand, though without memory I could not even name myself. What am I to say, when I see so clearly that I remember forgetfulness? Am I to say that something I remember is not in my memory? Or am I to say that forgetfulness is in my memory to keep me from forgetting? Either would be absurd. Is there a third possibility? Could I say that the image of forgetfulness is retained in my memory, not forgetfulness itself, when I remember it? But how could I say this since if the image of a thing is imprinted on the memory, the thing itself must first have been present, for the image to be able to be imprinted? Thus I remember Carthage and such other places as I have been in; I remember the faces of men I have seen and things reported by the other senes; I remember the health or sickness of the body. For when these were present, the memory received their images from them, and these remained present to be gazed on and thought about by the mind when in their absence I might choose to remember them. It follows that if forgetfulness is retained in the memory by means of an image and not in itself, then itself must at some time have been present for its image to be received. But when it was present, how did it write its image in my memory since by its presence it destroys what it finds noted there? At any rate whatever the manner of it, however incomprehensible and inexplicable, I am certain that I do remember forgetfulness, although by forgetfulness what we remember is effaced."
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