Catholic Thought discussion
St. Augustine, The Confessions
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Book XII
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O Truth, illumination of my heart,
let not my own darkness speak to me!
I slid away to material things, sank into shadow,
yet even there, even from there, I loved you.
Away I wandered, yet I remembered you.
I heard your voice behind me, calling me back,
yet scarcely heard it for the tumult of the unquiet.
See now, I come back to you,
fevered and panting for your fountain.
Let no one bar my way,
let me drink it and draw life from it.
Let me not be my own life:
evil was the life I lived of myself;
I was death to me; but in you I begin to live again.
Speak to me yourself, converse with me.
I have believed your scriptures,
but those words are full of hidden meaning.
I read introductions to books sometimes, after I read the text, and here in “Confessions” I was warned by the translator Rex Warner that readers may be “somewhat repelled by the lengthy speculation of the last section.” He is referring to the last three books of “Confessions”. Warner, Introduction, (p. viii)The first chapters of Book XII go round and around speculating about creation, nothing, matter without form, creating matter into form, etc, finally arriving where I would have started from and ended it there that God created something out of nothing. These speculations did not elucidate anything major for me though your comment Kerstin that “God cannot be of the same substance as creation, otherwise he wouldn’t be totally Other” is helpful. St. Augustine then tells us again how Genesis describes God’s creation. Has anyone in the group heard something more in this discussion that adds to your understanding of the Genesis? St. Augustine comes around to that same conclusion in Chapter 25 of this book when he writes referring to 1 Corinthians 4-6: “Let us not, then, ‘go beyond what is written and be puffed up for the one against the other.’" What is simple enough here is how St. Augustine thanks God for remembering him and bringing him to faith. He prays also for greater clarity of the mystery of God’s creation. (Chapters 1-11) He prays also for those who despise the word of God with a “Have pity, O Lord God, lest those who pass by trample on the unfledged bird, (501) and send thy angel who may restore it to its nest, that it may live until it can fly.” (Chapter 27)
Chapters 12 through 22 are mostly abstruse to me. St. Augustine is answering some objections to Genesis. These objections perhaps were familiar in his time but they are a mystery to me as given in these chapters. Why would someone be concerned whether God first created “unformed of formed entity”? Why the unease whether God created visible and invisible world together or not? I am not concerned with questions such as “what, then, is to be said about the waters that are above the firmament? (Chapter 12) (I am aware of the Biblical concept of the firmament with waters above a solid upper dome.) I admire most of this volume otherwise but several chapters in this book are the difficult part. St. Augustine advises near the end of this book that two or more interpretations of what Moses meant may be equally correct.
I hesitated putting in above notes. If I am making errors in my reading of the chapter I welcome any and all corrections.
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At some point I was hoping someone would articulate why these last four books are included. Or better put, why doesn't Augustine end Confessions with Book IX? I don't have an answer.
I'm baffled to be honest, but I assume the philosophical excursions provide an understanding of the biography.
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In the introduction of my text it is mentioned that there have been editions of the "Confessions" ending with book IX for that very reason.
We still have to read book XIII, so I am hopeful something more clear as to the reason of these philosophical chapters will emerge. So far, this approach seems to be steeped in Greek philosophy, though I don't know enough about it to comment in a meaningful way.
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It probably all relates to the nature of humanity, the nature of God, the nature of His creation, and the nature of sin, all in the context of Augustine's early life and conversion. I just don't understand it...lol.
Sadly, it was this final section that took me the longest to read and ended up overwhelming my recollection of the Confessions. When I think of this book, I think of slogging through, totally confused, these chapters.
In the previous books Agustine talked about memory and time and eternity, which were really stepping stones to the current book as he contemplates creation, heaven and earth, the material and the immaterial.
God cannot be of the same substance as creation, otherwise he wouldn’t be totally Other. “(7) Not from your own substance did you make heaven and earth.” He talks about form and formlessness. “(9) Where there is no form, neither is there order, and nothing comes or passes away; and where this does not happen there are certainly no days, nor any variation between successive periods of time.” Yet with the onset of creation we do have form and order, we have time, and these things are mutable, so they can’t be eternal. Augustine evokes the Church in these beginning paragraphs as in the above quote from paragraph 19, and in these following paragraphs: