- Augustine on what was before God
See how full of old errors are those who say to us: ‘What was God doing before he made heaven and earth? If he was unoccupied’, they say, ‘and doing nothing, why does he not always remain the same for ever, just as before creation he abstained from work? […]
This is my reply to anyone who asks: ‘What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?’ […] I say that you, our God, are the Creator of every created being, and assuming that by ‘heaven and earth’ is meant every created thing I boldly declare: Before God made heaven and earth, he was not making anything. […]
If, however, someone’s mind is flitting and wandering over images of past times, and is astonished that you, all powerful, all creating, and all sustaining God, artificer of heaven and earth, abstained for unnumbered ages from this work before you actually made it, he should wake up and take note that his surprise rests on a mistake. […]
You have made time itself. Time could not elapse before you made time. […]
It is not in time that you precede times. Otherwise you would not precede all times. In the sublimity of an eternity which is always in the present, you are before all things past and transcend all things future, because they are still to come, and when they have come they are past. ‘But you are the same and your years do not fail’ (Ps. 101: 28). Your ‘years’ neither go nor come. Ours come and go so that all may come in succession. All your ‘years’ subsist in simultaneity, because they do not change; those going away are not thrust out by those coming in. But the years which are ours will not all be until all years have ceased to be. Your ‘years’ are ‘one day’ (Ps. 89: 4; 2 Pet. 3: 8), and your ‘day’ is not any and every day but Today, because your Today does not yield to a tomorrow, nor did it follow on a yesterday. Your Today is eternity. So you begat one coeternal with you, to whom you said: ‘Today I have begotten you’ (Ps. 2: 7; Heb. 5: 5). You created all times and you exist before all times. Nor was there any time when time did not exist.
There was therefore no time when you had not made something, because you made time itself. No times are coeternal with you since you are permanent. If they were permanent, they would not be times.
~ Confession, XI (12, 14-17)
- A Love Poem
Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.
~ Confession, X (38)
- On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious
I’ve read this book twice. Sometimes I think I almost get what he’s aiming at, and then it completely slips my mind again. At times the book sounds like it’s arguing for phenomenalism, but that can’t be right. Strange book. I might need to reread it later in life, maybe with some interpretation. I don’t know. - Graffiti in Saxony-Anhalt
- Siddhartha
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse is an amazing book. Who knows what I will read this year, but this might be my book of the year; at least the best I’ve read in recent times.
There is so much in it that I feel very strongly about and so much I agree with, mainly the theme of the search for enlightenment, that is true knowledge of the innermost self. The book suggests that lessons and teachings might never really be able to convey this kind of knowledge.
One theory I have from the book is about the moment when Siddhartha meets the Buddha and explains his problem with the Buddha’s teaching and philosophy. It seems to me that the Buddha might know that his teaching will never be enough to lead someone to true enlightenment, but that it exists to weaken suffering. Like a bandage that never truly heals a wound but protects it, or like a dying man in a hospice who receives medicine that gives the illusion of improvement while only easing his pain. It feels as if the Buddha knows his teachings are a kind of “noble lie”: compassionate, but ultimately limited.
Besides that, our protagonist first follows the path of the Brahmins, but although he is momentarily satisfied, it never lasts. There is no stable, long-term happiness. Later, when he follows the Samanas in the forest and practices asceticism, he is still unsatisfied. When he is full of the world, he is unsatisfied and full of disgust.
Maybe what is needed is to be both an ascetic and not an ascetic, both an atheist and a theist. But is this even possible? What would it mean to hold both as true, in tension with each other?
I2P