Friday, February 03, 2006 Aesculus. Friday, December 16, 2005 "I came to Cathage and found myself in a cauldron sizzling wih illicit passions. As yet I had never been in love and I longed to be; and in my spiritual emptines I hated the thought of how I might be if the void were filled. Monday, December 12, 2005 I was reflecting over the entire year over the past few days...
Verbum Sapientia.
It's increasingly mortifying loving you.
-kisses your forehead-
Verbum Sapientia.
Being in love with love, I looked for an object for my love, and I despised the idea of certainty and a life without risks. I refused to satisfy my internal hunger with your spiritual food, my God, and I was unaware of my need. I had no appetite for incorruptible nourishment, not because I had eaten enough but because the emptier I became, the more unappetizing such food seemed to me.
My soul was sick and covered in sores, and it rubbed up against material things in a depserate attempt to relieve the itching, But since material things have no soul, they cannot be loved. To love and also be loved in return was what excited me, especially if I could enjoy my lover's body.
So I polluted the stream of friendship with the filth of lust and obscured its brightness wtih foul passions. But despite this shameful and degrading behaviours, in my excessive vanity I hoped to be regarded as elegant and civilized.
I also fell in love- in truth, I was longing to become love's prisoner. My God, how merciful you were, how kind, to mix so much bitterness in with that sweetness: my love was returned and secretly I became enslaved by my joy, happy to be bound by chains, with the result that I was flogged with the red-hot metal rods of jealousy, suspicion, fear, anger and division."
- 3:1, 1
Confessions of St Augustine
Verbum Sapientia.
Ego non ignara mali.
Gratia placendi me, inscribo hoc; Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret; mali principii malus finis. Nemo fuit repente turpissimus, est nil conscire sibi et nulla pallescere culpa. Nihil tetigit quod non inficit. Sentit malus pudor malo modo. In hoc est nulli secundus. Ne (non) plus ultra mali.
Sed habeo bona fides in Dies Dominica i Januarius MMVI - Dies Dominica xxxi December MMVI.
Translated it means:
I'm not unacquainted with misfortune.
For the sake of pleasing myself, I write this;
Inborn character is ineradicable; the bad end of a bad beginning. No man becomes a villain all at once and he is conscious of no fault and turns pale at no accusation. He touches nothing without tainting it. He feels false shame in an evil manner. In this, he is second to none. The perfection of evil.
But I've good faith in next year.