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| As Ambrose Was Occupied with Business and Study, Augustin Could Seldom Consult Him Concerning the Holy Scriptures.
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Chapter III.—As Ambrose Was
Occupied with Business and Study, Augustin Could Seldom Consult Him
Concerning the Holy Scriptures.
3. Nor did I now groan in my prayers that Thou
wouldest help me; but my mind was wholly intent on knowledge, and
eager to dispute. And Ambrose himself I esteemed a happy man, as
the world counted happiness, in that such great personages held him
in honour; only his celibacy appeared to me a painful thing. But
what hope he cherished, what struggles he had against the
temptations that beset his very excellences, what solace in
adversities, and what savoury joys Thy bread possessed for the
hidden mouth of his heart when ruminating443
| 443 In his Reply to Faustus (vi. 7), he,
conformably with this idea, explains the division into clean and
unclean beasts under the Levitical law symbolically. “No
doubt,” he says, “the animal is pronounced unclean by the law
because it does not chew the cud, which is not a fault, but its
nature. But the men of whom this animal is a symbol are unclean,
not by nature, but from their own fault; because, though they
gladly hear the words of wisdom, they never reflect on them
afterwards. For to recall, in quiet repose, some useful instruction
from the stomach of memory to the mouth of reflection, is a kind of
spiritual rumination. The animals above mentioned are a symbol of
those people who do not do this. And the prohibition of the flesh
of these animals is a warning against this fault. Another passage
of Scripture (Prov. xxi. 20) speaks of the precious
treasure of wisdom, and describes ruminating as clean, and not
ruminating as unclean: ‘A precious treasure resteth in the mouth
of a wise man, but a foolish man swallows it up.’ Symbols of this
kind, either in words or in things, give useful and pleasant
exercise to intelligent minds in the way of inquiry and
comparison.” | on it, I could neither conjecture,
nor had I experienced. Nor did he know my embarrassments, nor the
pit of my danger. For I could not request of him what I wished as I
wished, in that I was debarred from hearing and speaking to him by
crowds of busy people, whose infirmities he devoted himself to.
With whom when he was not engaged (which was but a little time), he
either was refreshing his body with necessary sustenance, or his
mind with reading. But while reading, his eyes glanced over the
pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and
tongue were silent. Ofttimes, when we had come (for no one was
forbidden to enter, nor was it his custom that the arrival of those
who came should be announced to him), we saw him thus reading to
himself, and never otherwise; and, having long sat in silence (for
who durst interrupt one so intent?), we were fain to depart,
inferring that in the little time he secured for the recruiting of
his mind, free from the clamour of other men’s business, he was
unwilling to be taken off. And perchance he was fearful lest, if
the author he studied should express aught vaguely, some doubtful
and attentive hearer should ask him to expound it, or to discuss
some of the more abstruse questions, as that, his time being thus
occupied, he could not turn over as many volumes as he wished;
although the preservation of his voice, which was very easily
weakened, might be the truer reason for his reading to himself. But
whatever was his motive in so doing, doubtless in such a man was a
good one.
4. But verily no opportunity could I find of
ascertaining what I desired from that Thy so holy oracle, his
breast, unless the thing might be entered into briefly. But those
surgings in me required to find him at full leisure, that I might
pour them out to him, but never were they able to find him so; and
I heard him, indeed, every Lord’s day, “rightly dividing the
word of truth”444
among the
people; and I was all the more convinced that all those knots of
crafty calumnies, which those deceivers of ours had knit against
the divine books, could be unravelled. But so soon as I understood,
withal, that man made “after the image of Him that created
him”445
| 445 Col. iii. 10, and
Gen. i. 26, 27. And because we are created in
the image of God, Augustin argues (Serm. lxxxviii. 6), we
have the ability to see and know Him, just as, having eyes to see,
we can look upon the sun. And hereafter, too (Ep. xcii. 3),
“We shall see Him according to the measure in which we shall be
like Him; because now the measure in which we do not see Him is
according to the measure of our unlikeness to Him.” | was not so
understood by Thy spiritual sons (whom of the Catholic mother Thou
hadst begotten again through grace), as though they believed and
imagined Thee to be bounded by human form,—although what was the
nature of a spiritual substance446
| 446 See iii. sec. 12, note, above. | I had not the faintest or dimmest
suspicion,—yet rejoicing, I blushed that for so many years I had
barked, not against the Catholic faith, but against the fables of
carnal imaginations. For I had been both impious and rash in this,
that what I ought inquiring to have learnt, I had pronounced on
condemning. For Thou, O most high and most near, most secret, yet
most present, who hast not limbs some larger some smaller, but art
wholly everywhere, and nowhere in space, nor art Thou of such
corporeal form, yet hast Thou created man after Thine own image,
and, behold, from head to foot is he confined by space.
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