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Content:

1 God

1.1 The Love of God

1.2 To see the creations

1.3 To knwo truth

1.4 The Divine 

1.5 God deeds

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2 The religious

2.1 The Christian

2.2 To confess

2.3 The Good

2.4 On God forgivness

2.6 On Sin

2.7 The loss of Paradise 

2.8 Free will on gods eyes

2.9 Prayers

2.10 Jesus Harmony

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3 Questioning

3.1 Questioning God’s creations

3.2 Questioning Devil 

3.3 Questioning the belivers

3.4 A critic on the bible

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4 A criation

4.1 The creation of God

4.2 The creation of devil

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1 God

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By a change for the better it has become converted to that which cannot change either for the better or for the worse. That is what you alone are. You alone are in absolute simplicity. To you it is not one thing to live, another to live in blessed happiness, because you are your own blessedness. (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.275)

The word spoken to me was not “Where he is, there will you be also”, but “Where you are, there will he be also”. I confess to you Lord that to the best of my memory (and it is a matter which I have frequently discussed) I was more moved by your answer through my vigilant mother than by the dream itself. (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.50)

How unhappy I was, and how conscious you made me of my misery. (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.97)

Kurtz is the embodiment of this, someone who has thrown away all his pretense of Western culture and lives like a demigod among the “savages”. The horror he sees is just that, the true nature of man, or at least his underlying nature. (Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad)

So that this divine foreknowledge does not change the nature and property of things; it simply sees things present to it exactly as they will happen at some time as future events. It makes no confused judgements of things, but with one glance of its mind distinguishes all that is to come to pass whether it is necessitated or not. Similarly you, when you see at the same time a man walking on the earth and the sun rising in the sky, although the two sights coincide yet you distinguish between them and judge the one to be willed and the other necessitated. In the same way the divine gaze looks down on all things without disturbing their nature; to Him they are present things, but under the condition of time they are future things. And so it comes about that when God knows that something is going to occur and knows that no necessity to be is imposed upon it is not opinion, but rather knowledge founded upon truth. (Boethius - The Consolation of Philosophy (Penguin) p.135)

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1.1 The Love of God

There is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God - a light, voice, odour, food, embrace of my inner man, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bound of union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my god. (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.183)

They love truth for the light it sheds, but hate it when it shows them up as being wrong. (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.200)

Let then know the pain of foil, of suffering, of loss, so that they at acquire true strength. (Seneca - Dialogues and Essays Oxford p. 5)

It is no different with God, let me assure you: he does not pamper a good man like a favourite slave; he puts him to the test, hardens him, and makes him ready for his service. (Seneca - Dialogues and Essays Oxford p. 4)

If the grain of wheat, falling into the earth, does not die, it remains alone, but if it dies it produces much fruit. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Os Irmao Karamazov (Editora 34)

Boethius appears to have combined two ideas: the idea of a mutable Fate governing and revolving all things, which he read of in the treatise On Providence and Fate by the fifth-century Neoplatonist Proclus, and the idea, already touched on at eh end of Booj III chapter 12, of God as the “still point of the turning world’, an idea he found in the philosophy of Plotinus. The union of the two ideas is perfect. The more the should fees itself from corporeal things, and thus, according to both Proclus and Plotinus, from Fate, the closer it approaches the stability and simplicity of the place of rest at the centre, which according to Plotinus is God. (Boethius - The Consolation of Philosophy (Penguin) p.xxviii)

It had become easy for me, nobody could have less gift for the holy than I; but nevertheless I had repeatedly come across the miracle that Christian theologians have given the beautiful name of (grace), that gothic experience of reconciliation, non-resistance, willing consent, which is nothing other than the Christian devotion of the ego or the Indian knowledge of unity (einheit). Oh, and now I was once again so completely outside of unity (einheit), was an isolated, suffering, hating, hostile self. (Kurgast - Herman Hesse p.77)

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1.2 To see the creations

Animals both small and large see it, but they cannot put a question about it. In them reason does not sit in judgement upon the deliverances of the senses. But humans being can put a question so that ‘the invisible things of God are understood and seen through the things which are made’. (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.184)

Yet even thus, in its miserable condition, it prefers to find joy only in that truth by which all things are true - without any distraction interfering. (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.200)

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1.3 To knwo truth

By the Platonic books I was admonished to return into myself. (...) It was not that light, but a different thing, utterly different from all our kinds of light. It transcended my mind, not in the way that oil floats on water, nor as heaven is above earth. It was superior because it made me, and I was inferior because I was made by it. The person who knows the truth knows it, and he who knows it knows eternity. Love knows it. Eternal truth and true love beloved eternity: you are my God. To you I sigh ‘day and night’. (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.123)

Then this alone could ravish and absorb and enfold in inwards joys the person granted the vision. So too eternal life is of the quality of that moment of understanding after which we sighed. Is not this the meaning of ‘Enter into the joy of your Lord’? And when is that to be? Surely it is when ‘we all use again, but are not all changed’. (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.172)

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1.4 The Divine 

The form of the divine substance is such that it does not spread out into outside things or take up into itself anything from them. As Parmenides says of it, Like the mass of a sphere well-rounded in all ways. (Boethius - The Consolation of Philosophy (Penguin) p.82)

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1.5 God deeds

Onion tale: the woman’s only good deed was to give an onion to a beggar, the angel was taking her from the lake of hell with the onion, others realized, they held on to her, and she kicked them, the onion broke, and until today she stays there. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Os Irmao Karamazov (Editora 34)

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2 The religious

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2.1 The Christian

‘Did you know that I am already a Christian unless I see you in the church of Christ.’ Victorious laughed and said: ‘Then do walls make Christians?’ (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.136)

He loves you less who together with you loves something which he does not love for your sake. O love, you ever burn and are never extinguished. O charity, my God, set me on fire. You command continence; grant what you command, and command what you will. (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.202)

But while I pass from the discomfort of need to the tranquillity of satisfaction, the very transition contains for me an insidious trap of uncontrolled desire. The transition itself is a pleasure, and there is no other way of making that transition, which is forced upon us by necessity. (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.205)

Christian faith only served to keep the lower class in slavery (Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Os Irmao Karamazov (Editora 34)

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2.2 To confess

Clean me from my secret faults, Lord, and spare your servant from sins to which I am tempted by others ‘ I believe and therefore I speak’ (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.6)

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2.3 The Good

As you did not make all things equal, all things are good in the sense that taken individually they are good, and all things taken together are very good. For our God has made ‘ all things very good’. (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.125)

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2.4 On God forgivness

There is more joy in heaven for one sinner who repents than ten righteous ones. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Os Irmao Karamazov (Editora 34)

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2.5 On forgivness

May I be a sinner before everyone, in return I will also be forgiven by everyone - this is paradise. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Os Irmao Karamazov (Editora 34)

The sinner’s article is torment, sin exposed to all is paradise. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Os Irmao Karamazov (Editora 34)

Everything that is true and beautiful, is always full of forgiveness. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Os Irmao Karamazov (Editora 34)

bathe the earth with the tears of your heritage and love your tears. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Os Irmao Karamazov (Editora 34)

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2.6 On Sin

Sin is only in men and not in nature (Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Os Irmao Karamazov (Editora 34)

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2.7 The loss of Paradise 

That is to say, it is the guilt of the men themselves: They have taken paradise, wanted freedom and kidnapped the fire of the heavens, knowing themselves that they would become unhappy, therefore, no compassion for them. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Os Irmao Karamazov (Editora 34)

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2.8 Free will on gods eyes

It is impossible for the two events I mentioned just now - the rising of the sun and the man walking - not to be happening when they do happen; and yet it was necessary for one of them to happen before it did happen, but not so for the other. And so, those things which are present to God will without doubt happen; but some of them result from the necessity of things, and some of them from the power of those who do them. (Boethius - The Consolation of Philosophy (Penguin) p.136)

The power of this knowledge which embraces all things in present understanding has itself established the mode of being for all things and owes nothing to anything secondary to itself. And since this is so, man’s freedom of will remains inviolate and the law does not impose reward and punishment unfairly, because the will is free from all necessity. (Boethius - The Consolation of Philosophy (Penguin) p.137)

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2.9 Prayers

Hope is not placed in God in vain and prayers are not made in vain, for if they are the right kind they cannot but be efficacious. Avoid vice, therefore, and cultivate virtue; lift up your mind to the right kind of hope, and put forth humble prayers on high. A great necessity is laid upon you, if you will be honest with yourself, a great necessity to be good, since you live in the sight of a judge who sees all things. (Boethius - The Consolation of Philosophy (Penguin) p.137)

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2.10 Jesus Harmony

Jesus, the only one without sin, who compensates for harmony by suffering. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Os Irmao Karamazov (Editora 34)

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3 Questioning

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3.1 Questioning God’s creations

He would be less than omnipotent if he could not create something good unless assisted by a matter which he had not himself created. (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.116)

God contrived a general plan by which a thing of a certain nature found a certain seat and room. But the formation of qualities he left to the wills of the individuals. For everyone of us is made pretty much what he is by the bent of his desires and the nature of his soul. (Plato Laws p. 236)

The Lord God created light on the first day, the sun, moon and stars on the fourth day. Where did the light shine on the first day? (Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Os Irmao Karamazov (Editora 34)

All these praise you, the creator of everything. But how do you make them? The way, God, in which you made heaven and earth was not that you made them either in heaven or on earth. Nor was it in air or in water, for these belong to heaven and earth. Nor did you make the universe within the framework of the universe. There was nowhere for it to be made before it was brought into existence. Nor did you have any tool in your hand to make heaven and earth. How could you obtain anything you had not made as a tool for making something? What is it for something to be unless it is because you are? Therefore you spoke and they were made, and by your word you made them. (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.225)

‘It is very different, the difference is enormous. The sound are far inferior to me, and have no being, because they are fleeting and transient. But the word of my God is superior to me and abides for ever’. If therefore it was with words which sound and pass away that you said that heaven and earth should be made, and if this was how you made heaven and earth, then a created entity belonging to the physical realm existed prior to heaven and earth; and that utterance took time to deliver, and involved temporal changes. (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.225)

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3.2 Questioning Devil 

If the devil was responsible, where did the devil himself come from? And if even he began as a good angel and became devil by perversion of the will, how does the evil will by which he became devil originate in him, when an angel is wholly made by a Creator who is pure goodness?’ These reflections depressed me once more and suffocated me. (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.114)

Bion says that if God punishes the children of the wicked, that is even more ridiculous than a doctor administering medicines to a son or grandson to cure the illness of his father or grandfather. (Diogenes - Oxford p. 112)

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3.3 Questioning the belivers

Diogenes said, “People pray to the gods for good health, and yet most of them constantly act in such a way as damage their health. (Diogenes - Oxford p. 45)

To a couple who were sacrificing to the gods, in the hope of having a son, he said, “But you don’t sacrifice to ensure what kind of person he’ll turn out to be”. (Diogenes - Oxford p. 45)

A man who was highly superstitious once remarked to Diogenes, “ I could break your head in with a single blow”, to which he replied, “And I for my part could make you tremble with fear simply by sneezing from the left (suddenly)”. (Diogenes - Oxford p. 47)

Consider too how a human being makes contact with God, and though what part of himself, and how that part of himm must be disposed if he is to do so. (Marcus Aurelius - Meditation p.13)

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3.4 A critic on the bible

If I myself were to be writing something at this supreme level of authority I would choose to write so that my words would sound out with whatever diverse truth in quite explicit statement of a single true view of this question in such a way as to exclude other views - provided there was no false doctrine to offend me. Therefore my God, I do not want to be so rash as not to believe that Moses obtained this gift from you. (Saint Augustine - Confessions (Oxford) p.271)

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4 A criation

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4.1 The creation of God

If god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Os Irmao Karamazov (Editora 34)

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4.2 The creation of devil

That if the devil does not exist and, therefore, man created him, then he created him in his image and likeness. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Os Irmao Karamazov (Editora 34)

I am satanas, and nothing human is strange to me. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Os Irmao Karamazov (Editora 34)

In the devil you can believe today. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Os Irmao Karamazov (Editora 34)

 

 

 

 

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