After yesterday’s slightly mystical post about a new sun rising on the eastern horizon each morning, quite by chance I happened to start reading Augustine’s Confessions later in the evening.
And in Book 1, Chapter 6, I came across this remarkable passage about the relationship between time and eternity; between the succession of created days and God’s ever-present Day:
For thou art infinite and in thee there is no change, nor an end to this present day – although there is a sense in which it ends in thee since all things are in thee and there would be no such thing as days passing away unless thou didst sustain them.
And since “thy years shall have no end,” thy years are an ever-present day. And how many of ours and our fathers’ days have passed through this thy day and have received from it what measure and fashion of being they had? And all the days to come shall so receive and so pass away.
“But thou art the same”! And all the things of tomorrow and the days yet to come, and all of yesterday and the days that are past, thou wilt gather into this thy day.
What is it to me if someone does not understand this? Let him still rejoice and continue to ask, “What is this?” Let him also rejoice and prefer to seek thee, even if he fails to find an answer, rather than to seek an answer and not find thee!
This is a translation by Albert C. Outler, available online. My own version is by J. G. Pilkington, in a beautiful edition published by The Folio Society, and given to me by a dear friend for the tenth anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. I’d seen these Folio editions in second-hand bookshops, but never in my life had I dreamed of ever possessing one!
It’s not just the box or the binding; every page is a work of art. The font (Palatino), the paper, the illustrations. We were arguing over lunch about whether iPads and Kindles will soon replace books. Now I have an answer: “Not if every book were the quality of these Folio books”.
This very part of the Augustine’s beautiful confessions inspired me to write this:
Eternity
I have found eternity orbiting the earth in the now.
My Love for you is not in past days gone by,
Even though I loved you yesterday and the days before.
My Love for you is not held in future days,
Even though I will Love you tomorrow and evermore.
I Love you encapsulated in eternity
I Love you this very sacred hour.
I Love you in and beyond this world
Eternal beautiful now.
And now I must hunt down a Pilkingtin Folio edition!
p.s What is the date of your folio edition I did some research and have found a few but they are all different dates ?
One of them is signed by the artist!
My edition is 2006, with a new introduction by Rowan Williams; but I think the main edition with these illustrations by Simon Brett was 1993. They are absolutely beautiful.
Can I be cheeky and piggy back on this post? Yeserday I posted on my own blog http://www.theinvisibleprovince.blogspot.com
on similar themes and concerns. Might some Bridges and Tangents readers care to have a look?
Do take a look at this post from the Invisible Province at http://theinvisibleprovince.blogspot.com/2010/10/is-internet-weakening-our-ability-to.html – without knowing it we both happened to write about book reading and St Augustine at the same time!
An interesting insight into Augustine, Fr Stephen. I have downloaded the reanslation by A.C.Outler and will begin to read it in the near future. I confess (no pun intended) that St Augustine’s works have been an enigma to me and that I have struggled with them when I have tried to read them in the past.
So interesting! why the struggle Simon? The only struggle I found was why anybody would leave a God Blessed relationship and their beloved God made child, in order to be blessed by God?? If God is Love why would one leave ultimate Love to ultimately Love ? Most compelling!!!! What was it you struggled with ?
My daily struggle = ” I have learnt to Love you to late, beauty at once so ancient and so new”!
My answer
FIDDLESTICKS !!!!!!!!!!
re-considered My Answer
Fossilised fishhooks!!!!!!!!
Yes Beautiful indeed!
This morning I received a bubble wrapped package. Its not often you get a gift that you excitedly rip into like a child at Christmas, or better still like a Charlie from the chocolate factory hunting for the golden ticket.
Having been melted by the little badge and slipping the treasure from its boxed case, the first thing I did was randomly open it, lift the book to my face and inhale in deeply. I just Love the smell of pages and the feeling breathing them in invokes.
I read the page opened and this is what I read.
“that by a secret inspiration you govern, inwardly and outwardly, all the things that you have created”
And the etchings, the beautiful etchings.
Tis the best medicinal £16.00 spent in years!
I struggled with these works earlier in life because I found them perhaps too complex for me at that time. Also, I attempted them without any additional guidance notes which, with hindsight, would have been useful at the time. I feel more ready too read them now and that, given my maturing years, I will be better placed to understand them. I hope this answers your question Mags.
Thank you Simon it was cheeky of me to ask why you struggled, I just wondered if I stumbled upon similar things. There were parts of the book that I found incredibly frustrating being a female and beautiful and frustrating and beautiful!
And inspiring and rage provoking if I could share a last supper one evening Augustine would be one of my guests.
Maybe!
Where and when did venerable (august) holy man lose his ‘g’?
Could it be when IMPERIAL ROMAN CAPITALS S. AVGVSTINVS fell into disuse and the more humanist monastic penmanship of the insular majiscule quill found favor instead (the scribes at Wikipedia tell us that as early as 2nd century BC, folks complained about the illegibility of roman cursive letters and they fell into disuse contemporaneously with the Bishop of Milan’s own output “Had it not been for the monastic scribes of Late Antiquity, the entire literature of Greece and Rome would have perished in Europe; as it was, the patterns of textual survivals were shaped by their usefulness to the severely constricted literate group of Christians…. (when) the ruling classes were no longer illiterate”) ?
The more common english St. Austin appears to point to an ‘avian’ and ‘garrulous’ etymological root
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=augur
a patron saint for twitter perhaps, chuckle!
oops double negative, my bad! The capacity of former potentates for comprehension of written texts should have been cited thusly: “were no longer literate”
and again, this time the sin of omission, urgh, here’s the missing Wikipedia citation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminated_manuscript