These things I then knew not, and I loved these lower beauties,
and I was sinking to the very depths, and to my friends I said, "Do we
love any thing but the beautiful? What then is the beautiful? and what
is beauty? What is it that attracts and wins us to the things we love?
for unless there were in them a grace and beauty, they could by no
means draw us unto them." And I marked and perceived that in bodies
themselves, there was a beauty, from their forming a sort of whole,
and again, another from apt and mutual correspondence, as of a part of
the body with its whole, or a shoe with a foot, and the like. And this
consideration sprang up in my mind, out of my inmost heart, and I
wrote "on the fair and fit," I think, two or three books. Thou
knowest, O Lord, for it is gone from me; for I have them not, but they
are strayed from me, I know not how.
But what moved me, O Lord my God, to dedicate these books unto
Hierius, an orator of Rome, whom I knew not by face, but loved for the
fame of his learning which was eminent in him, and some words of his I
had heard, which pleased me? But more did he please me, for that he
pleased others, who highly extolled him, amazed that out of a
Syrian, first instructed in Greek eloquence, should afterwards be
formed a wonderful Latin orator, and one most learned in things
pertaining unto philosophy.
Pages:
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118