Lumen Fidei - page 42

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Son of God for our sake. In this circular move-
ment, the light of faith illumines all our human
relationships, which can then be lived in union
with the gentle love of Christ.
33. In the life of Saint Augustine we find a sig-
nificant example of this process whereby reason,
with its desire for truth and clarity, was integrated
into the horizon of faith and thus gained new
understanding. Augustine accepted the Greek
philosophy of light, with its insistence on the
importance of sight. His encounter with Neo-
platonism introduced him to the paradigm of the
light which, descending from on high to illumine
all reality, is a symbol of God. Augustine thus
came to appreciate God’s transcendence and dis-
covered that all things have a certain transpar-
ency, that they can reflect God’s goodness. This
realization liberated him from his earlier Man-
ichaeism, which had led him to think that good
and evil were in constant conflict, confused and
intertwined. The realization that God is light
provided Augustine with a new direction in life
and enabled him to acknowledge his sinfulness
and to turn towards the good.
All the same, the decisive moment in Au-
gustine’s journey of faith, as he tells us in the
Confessions
, was not in the vision of a God above
and beyond this world, but in an experience of
hearing. In the garden, he heard a voice telling
him: “Take and read”. He then took up the book
containing the epistles of Saint Paul and started
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