To Hold an unjust world, on a Godly pedestal

Okay, there’s so much in these few books and most of it intrigued me. I feel like I could bounce around from subject to subject, but then I’d run the risk of being incoherent and losing myself. I’ll stick to one, though— Augustine’s view of sin and truth.

     As Augustine speaks of his past follies and the delight he found in his “wicked” lifestyle, his words are always past tense and they’re coloured with regret. I mean, his verb tense is likely because of his present point in time recalling his former, but I initially read it as a sign of growth in wisdom and understanding, but most of all regret.

     “.  . . Oh my God, my great mercy, my refuge from the terrible dangers in which I was wandering. My stiff neck took me further and further away from you. I loved my own ways, not yours. The liberty I loved was a merely that if a runaway.” ~ Book 3 Ch. 5

     As he grew and matured in his ways, he saw the err, he saw his mistakes and sought truth. Between people the truth differs. One truth that was used at one point in time, given to one person on the other hemisphere, or in another person of the same household doesn’t fit everywhere else. What God tells one man doesn’t always work for the next. Augustine followed the truth of others without finding his own. His Truth was His God, and their’s the things that his God created. They worshipped and idolised them, they allowed the truth they made themselves to blind their eyes to something greater than what they could see. They lived in fantasy that gave them no benefit other than a pleasing view— an aesthetic. And because he took their truth as his own, because he stopped where they told him to, without venturing to see what he could for himself, he unknowingly wrapped a blindfold around his eyes.

     Everything Augustine went through plenty of us go through today. We get caught up in lust, (sexual, vengeful and otherwise) we take on an unquestioned truth as our own in an attempt to free ourselves from ourselves and we are wounded by our own transgressions and still God shines on us. Still he calls us from the deep and that’s what he is that’s his name, he is Love.

PS. I commented on Abigayle’s and Anna-Kate’s posts.