LITERATURE: Confessions – Opening thoughts

There is a palpable difference when reading a few pages of Saul Bellow and switching to Augustine.  In both cases we have a first person narrator, and the centuries separating the language is not the only difference in voice that changes the style of the reading.  There’s a slow and deliberate intensity to the reading of Augustine that comes not from the old style writing–and this is a modern translation–but from the context of what is being read.

Do heaven and earth contain you because you have filled them? or do you fill them and overflow them because they do not contain you?  Where do you put the overflow of yourself when heaven and earth are filled?  Or have you, who contain all things, no need to be contained by anything because what you will you fill by containing it?  (p. 4)

Augustine begins his Confessions by questioning the nature of God. This is a good starting point for anyone who studies theology because intellect requires that we question faith.  From introspection and reflection on self it is a natural step to seek answers to existence and creation.

Augustine’s tone, if faithfully translated, suggests a respectful line of questioning that implies a distance that wants to be traversed, a sense of ‘you made me intelligent enough to ask you this, and gave me the blessing to do so.’

Augustine may be exactly what I should be reading right now.