The Confessions of Saint Augustine [ By: Augustine of Hippo]

The Confessions of Saint Augustine / translated by Edward Bouverie Pusey

But those poles were not far distant from one another, with vast uncharted territory between. Rather, they were elements of an intimate personal relationship destined for permanent and indissoluble union. To treat God and self as two different things is to introduce the fatal distinction that the serpent taught to Eve. The relation between creator and creature is totally different from that which obtains between any two created things in the material world. Each created object participates in a complex world of material objects from which God seems far away. But the creator is equidistant from all creatures--equally close to all.

Theologians write about God dispassionately and objectively, in serene detachment, but in doing so avail themselves of a compendious device that runs the risk of negating the truth of all they say. Christian theology only succeeds when the believer sees that the story of all creation ("macrotheology") and the private history of the soul ("microtheology") are identical. Differences between the two are flaws of perception, not defects inherent in things.

Saints do not have to be taught this identity, for theology realized is holiness. But even saints, when they are theologians, often find it hard to embody their intuition in their works. For Augustine, the crisis came early in life. Despite his reputation as a self-revelatory writer, he left behind little direct testimony about the condition of his soul at different times, but we can see that the first years of his episcopacy were a time of trial. He had managed the transformation from virtual pagan to devout Christian with reasonable equanimity. The map for that conversion was clear enough and commonly followed. Even his elevation to the priesthood in the church of Hippo had brought with it few fresh anxieties