2025 Readings 90

 I promised myself that I was going to read Augustine's City of God this summer, and, although I read a chunk of it, I didn't finish it, so that goes down as a failure. However, I did read Augustine's Confessions, which I been meaning to tackle for years. Part of it relates to the epics project, because Augustine did reference Virgil's Aeneid quite a bit, and I'm using that as a hook in one of my chapters. However, more importantly, while I may be a remarkably flawed person of faith, I'm still a person of faith, and the Confessions is simply one of the great works on faith and coming to terms with one's faith that has ever been produced. 

I'll just include one brief section on the challenges of trying to force faith, when you believe that it's time for you to have faith:

We sat down as far as we could from the buildings. I was deeply disturbed in spirit, angry with indignation and distress that I was not entering into my pact and covenant with you, my God, when all my bones were crying out that I should enter into it and were exalting it to heaven with praises. But to reach that destination one does not use ships or chariots or feet. It was not even necessary to go the distance I had come from the house to where we were sitting. The one necessary condition, which meant not only going but at once arriving there, was to have the will to go - provided only that the will was strong and unqualified, but the timing and twisting first this way, then that, of a will half-wounded, struggling with one part rising up and the other part falling down.

This reminds me of a famous scene when the Chinese monk Xuanzang (the inspiration for Journey to the West) had his own battle with forcing faith in a cave in Afghanistan, where he hoped to see the shadow of the Buddha. So, yes, this will also doubtless find its way into the epics book.

I'm, unofficially and fairly casually, working on my list of books to bring to Sicily. Augustine's Confessions is definitely in that list.