Augustine felt a closeness of God to man with extraordinary intensity. God's presence in man is profound and at the same time mysterious, but he can recognize and discover it deep down inside himself. "Do not go outside", the convert says, but "return to within yourself; truth dwells in the inner man; and if you find that your nature is changeable, transcend yourself. But remember, when you transcend yourself, you are transcending a soul that reasons. Reach, therefore, to where the light of reason is lit" (De vera religione, 39, 72). It is just like what he himself stresses with a very famous statement at the beginning of the Confessions, a spiritual biography which he wrote in praise of God: "You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you" (I, 1, 1).
God's remoteness is therefore equivalent to remoteness from oneself: "But", Augustine admitted (Confessions, III, 6, 11), addressing God directly, "you were more inward than my most inward part and higher than the highest element within me", interior intimo meo et superior summo meo; so that, as he adds in another passage remembering the period before his conversion, "you were there before me, but I had departed from myself. I could not even find myself, much less you" (Confessions, V, 2, 2). Precisely because Augustine lived this intellectual and spiritual journey in the first person, he could portray it in his works with such immediacy, depth and wisdom, recognizing in two other famous passages from the Confessions (IV, 4, 9 and 14, 22), that man is "a great enigma" (magna quaestio) and "a great abyss" (grande profundum), an enigma and an abyss that only Christ can illuminate and save us from. This is important: a man who is distant from God is also distant from himself, alienated from himself, and can only find himself by encountering God. In this way he will come back to himself, to his true self, to his true identity.
-Benedict XVI Jan 30, 2008
Posted by Carlos J. Medina
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