And because, when I wished to think on my
God, I knew not what to think of, but a mass of bodies (for what was
not such did not seem to me to be anything), this was the greatest,
and almost only cause of my inevitable error.
For hence I believed Evil also to be some such kind of substance,
and to have its own foul and hideous bulk; whether gross, which they
called earth, or thin and subtile (like the body of the air), which
they imagine to be some malignant mind, creeping through that earth.
And because a piety, such as it was, constrained me to believe that
the good God never created any evil nature, I conceived two masses,
contrary to one another, both unbounded, but the evil narrower, the
good more expansive. And from this pestilent beginning, the other
sacrilegious conceits followed on me. For when my mind endeavoured
to recur to the Catholic faith, I was driven back, since that was
not the Catholic faith which I thought to be so. And I seemed to
myself more reverential, if I believed of Thee, my God (to whom Thy
mercies confess out of my mouth), as unbounded, at least on other
sides, although on that one where the mass of evil was opposed to
Thee, I was constrained to confess Thee bounded; than if on all
sides I should imagine Thee to be bounded by the form of a human body.
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