Key Arguments

• He acknowledges that he wrongly applied the Aristotelian scheme of categories to God, as if God were a subject with properties: he ‘tried to conceive you also, my God, wonderfully simple and immutable, as if you too were a subject of which magnitude and beauty are attributes.’
• He corrects this by asserting that in God, unlike in bodies, what we call ‘attributes’ are identical with God’s very being: ‘I thought them to be in you as if in a subject, as in the case of a physical body, whereas you yourself are your own magnitude and your own beauty.’
• He contrasts this with bodies, which remain bodies even when more or less great or beautiful, showing that having magnitude or beauty is accidental to them: ‘By contrast a body is not great and beautiful by being body; if it were less great or less beautiful, it would nevertheless still be body.’
• He radically rejects his former picture as falsehood and projection of his misery: ‘My conception of you was a lie, not truth, the figments of my misery, not the permanent solidity of your supreme bliss.’
• He adds a second, cruder error: he ‘thought that you, Lord God and Truth, were like a luminous body of immense size and myself a bit of that body’, which he now labels ‘extraordinary perversity’ and ‘blasphemies’ which he had publicly professed.
• By calling these images ‘lie’, ‘figments’, ‘perversity’, and ‘blasphemies’, he implies that any material or composite conception of God is not merely inadequate but religiously perverse and sacrilegious.

Source Quotes

is comprehended under the ten categories, I tried to conceive you also, my God, wonderfully simple and immutable, as if you too were a subject of which magnitude and beauty are attributes.341 thought them to be in you as if in a subject, as in the case of a physical body, whereas you yourself are your own magnitude and your own beauty. By contrast a body is not great and beautiful by being body; if it were less great or less beautiful, it would nevertheless still be body.

is comprehended under the ten categories, I tried to conceive you also, my God, wonderfully simple and immutable, as if you too were a subject of which magnitude and beauty are attributes.341 thought them to be in you as if in a subject, as in the case of a physical body, whereas you yourself are your own magnitude and your own beauty. By contrast a body is not great and beautiful by being body; if it were less great or less beautiful, it would nevertheless still be body. My conception of you was a lie, not truth, the figments of my misery, not the permanent solidity of your supreme bliss.

By contrast a body is not great and beautiful by being body; if it were less great or less beautiful, it would nevertheless still be body. My conception of you was a lie, not truth, the figments of my misery, not the permanent solidity of your supreme bliss. You had commanded and it so came about in me, that the soil would bring forth thorns and brambles for me, and that with toil I should gain my bread (Gen.

(31) But what good did this do for me? I thought that you, Lord God and Truth, were like a luminous body of immense size and myself a bit of that body. What extraordinary perversity! But that is how I was, and I do not blush, Lord God, to confess your mercies to me and to call upon you, for at that time I was not ashamed to profess before men my blasphemies and to ‘bark against you’ like a dog (Judith 11: 15).

Key Concepts

• is comprehended under the ten categories, I tried to conceive you also, my God, wonderfully simple and immutable, as if you too were a subject of which magnitude and beauty are attributes.
• 341 thought them to be in you as if in a subject, as in the case of a physical body, whereas you yourself are your own magnitude and your own beauty.
• By contrast a body is not great and beautiful by being body; if it were less great or less beautiful, it would nevertheless still be body.
• My conception of you was a lie, not truth, the figments of my misery, not the permanent solidity of your supreme bliss.
• I thought that you, Lord God and Truth, were like a luminous body of immense size and myself a bit of that body. What extraordinary perversity!

Context

Book IV, section xvi (30–31): Augustine reflects on how, under Manichaean and philosophical influence, he erroneously conceived God in terms drawn from bodily substances and the Aristotelian categories, and he contrasts this with his mature view of God’s simplicity and self‑identical perfection.