Wednesday, September 17, 2014

St. Augustine: "Anyone who knows truth knows it"

“Anyone who knows truth knows it, and whoever knows it knows eternity. Love knows it.

“O eternal Truth, true Love, and beloved Eternity, you are my God, and for you I sigh day and night. As I first began to know you you lifted me up and showed me that while that which I might see exists indeed, I was not yet capable of seeing it. Your rays beamed intensely upon me, beating back my feeble gaze, and I trembled with love and dread. I knew myself to be far away from you in a region of unlikeness, and I seemed to hear your voice from on high: “I am the food of the mature; grow then, and you will eat me. You will not change me into yourself like bodily food: you will be changed into me.” And I recognized that you have chastened man for his sin and caused my soul to dwindle away like a spider’s web, and I said, “Is truth then a nothing, simply because it is not spread out through space either finite or infinite?” Then from afar you cried to me, “By no means, for I am who am.”

“I heard it as one hears a word in the heart, and no possibility of doubt remained to me; I could more easily have doubted that I was alive than that truth exists, truth that is seen and understood through the things that are made.”

~St. Augustine: The Confessions, Bk. VII, Chap. 20.

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