Blogue-Blague

(Thus one can see why his works are one of the foundations of western philosophy, regardless if they are for the faithful or the empiricists. This passage is absolutely sublime and superb, and it is the foundation of the nature of reality, discussed by dozens after him....)

O Truth, Truth, how inwardly even then did the marrow of my soul sigh for thee when, frequently and in manifold ways, in numerous and vast books, [the Manicheans] sounded out thy name though it was only a sound! And in these dishes--while I starved for thee--they served up to me, in thy stead, the sun and moon thy beauteous works--but still only thy works and not thyself; indeed, not even thy first work. For thy spiritual works came before these material creations, celestial and shining though they are. But I was hungering and thirsting, not even after those first works of thine, but after thyself the Truth, "with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." Yet they still served me glowing fantasies in those dishes. And, truly, it would have been better to have loved this very sun--which at least is true to our sight--than those illusions of theirs which deceive the mind through the eye. And yet because I supposed the illusions to be from thee I fed on them--not with avidity, for thou didst not taste in my mouth as thou art, and thou wast not these empty fictions. Neither was I nourished by them, but was instead exhausted. Food in dreams appears like our food awake; yet the sleepers are not nourished by it, for they are asleep. But the fantasies of the Manicheans were not in any way like thee as thou hast spoken to me now. They were simply fantastic and false. In comparison to them the actual bodies which we see with our fleshly sight, both celestial and terrestrial, are far more certain. These true bodies even the beasts and birds perceive as well as we do and they are more certain than the images we form about them. And again, we do with more certainty form our conceptions about them than, from them, we go on by means of them to imagine of other greater and infinite bodies which have no existence. With such empty husks was I then fed, and yet was not fed.