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О Христе говорит пророк <...> в следующих словах: «Вот, наступают дни, говорит Господь, — и восставлю Давиду Отрасль праведную, и воцарится Царь, и будет поступать мудро, и будет производить суд и правду на земле. Во дни Его Иуда спасется и Израиль будет жить безопасно; и вот — имя Его, которым будут называть Его: «Господь — оправдание наше!»» (Иер. 23:5-6).

DO NOT LISTEN TO FALSE PROPHETS. AUGUSTINE: I know other persons, however, whom an abysmal lack of wisdom and prudence so deceives and tricks that they think that the faith that they pretend to have will help them before God without the works of justice. They commit abominable crimes without fear by reason of this kind of error, while they believe that God is the avenger not of crimes but of lack of faith. Not only are they willing thus to ruin themselves, but also they strive by their snares to trap others in whom there is not light of divine knowledge. Do not listen to the words of the prophets who invent a vain vision for themselves, which they speak as false prophets from their own heart and not from the mouth of the Lord. They say to those that reject the words of the Lord, “Peace shall be yours,” and to all who walk according to their own desires, to everyone who walks in the error of his heart, they have said, “No evil shall come on you.” THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 13.

 

THE LORD IS NEAR TO EVERYONE. AUGUSTINE: How shall I call on my God—my God and my lord? For when I call on him, I ask him to come into me. And what place is there in me into which my God can come—into which God can come, even he who made heaven and earth? Is there anything in me, O Lord my God, that can contain you? Do indeed the heaven and the earth that you have made and in which you have placed me, contain you? Or, since nothing could exist without you, does whatever exists contain you? Why, then, do I ask you to come into me, since I indeed exist and could not exist if you were not in me? Because I am not yet in hell, though you are even there. For “if I go down into hell, you are there.” I could not exist, O my God, I could not exist at all, unless you were in me. Or should I not rather say that I could not exist unless I were in you, “from whom, through whom and in whom are all things?” It is even so, O Lord, even so. Where do I ask you to be, since I am in you? Or, from where can you come into me? Where may I go beyond heaven and earth, in order that my God may then come into me, he who has said, “I fill heaven and earth.” CONFESSIONS 1.2.2.

 

GOD’S LOVE ENDURES. AUGUSTINE: A person’s conscience accuses itself if he doesn’t love someone who loves him, or love in return someone who loves him, expecting nothing from that person but indications of his love. So he mourns if someone dies, experiences the gloom of sorrow, that saturating of the heart in tears. All sweetness turns into bitterness on the loss of the life of the dying, the death of the living. Blessed is the one who loves you and has his friend in you. . . . For he alone loses none dear to him. All are dear to him who cannot be lost. And who is this but our God, the God who created heaven and earth and fills them, because by filling them he created them? No one loses you but the one who leaves you. CONFESSIONS 4.9.14.

 

GOD ALONE IS THE CREATOR. AUGUSTINE: It was by this same divine creative force, which knows not what it is to be made but only how to make, that roundness was given to the eye, to the apple and to other objects that are by nature round and that we see all about, taking on their form with no extrinsic cause but by the intrinsic power of the Creator, who said, “Do I not fill heaven and earth?” and whose wisdom “reaches from end to end mightily and orders all things sweetly.” CITY OF GOD 12.26.

 

SHALL WE SEE GOD WITH OUR EYES? AUGUSTINE: The question still remains whether they will see God with their eyes open and by means of these bodily eyes. For, of course, if spiritual eyes in a spiritual body can see no better than our present eyes can see, then it will certainly be impossible for even spiritual eyes to behold God. If the spiritual realm, without material form, circumscribed by no place but everywhere wholly present, is to be visible to the eyes of a spiritual body, then those eyes will most certainly have to have a power altogether unlike the power of any eyes on earth. It is true that we say that God is in heaven and on earth, and he himself through a prophet says, “I fill heaven and earth.” But this does not mean that in heaven we shall say that God has one part there and another part on earth. For he is entirely in heaven, and he is entirely on earth. He is in both simultaneously, not merely successively—which is utterly impossible in the case of any material substance. CITY OF GOD 22.29.

GOD IS EVERYWHERE IN KEEPING WITH HIS CHARACTER. AUGUSTINE: Therefore, God is poured forth in all things. He says by the prophet, “I fill heaven and earth,” and, as I quoted a short time before of his wisdom, “He reaches from end to end mightily and orders all things sweetly.” It is likewise written, “the Spirit of the Lord filled the whole world,” and one of the psalms has these words addressed to him: “Where shall I go from your Spirit, or where shall I flee from your face? If I ascend up into heaven, you are there. If I descend into hell, you are there.”

Yet God so permeates all things as to be not a quality of the world but the very creative substance of the world, ruling the world without labor, sustaining it without effort. Nevertheless, he is not distributed through space in a physical sense so that half of him should be in half of the world and half in the other half of it. He is wholly present in all of it in such a way as to be wholly in heaven alone and wholly in the earth alone, and wholly in heaven and earth together; not confined in any place, but wholly in himself everywhere. LETTER 187.14.

 

THE BEAUTY OF THE FIELD. AUGUSTINE: Through the indescribable wisdom of God residing in the Word, we understand that all things are with him and the Word himself is all things. Is not the beauty of the field in a manner with him, since he is everywhere and has said, “Heaven and earth I fill”? What is not with him, of whom it is said, “If I shall have ascended into heaven, you are there. If I descended into hell, you are present”? EXPOSITIONS OF THE PSALMS 50.18.

 

COME TO CHRIST. AUGUSTINE: Listen to him: “Come to me, all you who labor.” You do not put an end to your labor by running away. You prefer to run away from him, do you, not to him? Find somewhere, and run away there. But if you cannot run away from him, for the good reason that he is present everywhere, the next thing to do is to run away to God, who is present right where you are standing. Run away, then. So, you see, you have run away beyond the heavens, he is there. You have gone right down to hell, he is there. Whatever solitary places of the earth you may choose, there he is, the one who said, “I fill heaven and earth.” So if he fills heaven and earth and there is nowhere you can run away to from him, do not go on laboring with all that trouble. Run away to him where he is present right beside you, to avoid experiencing him as he comes to judge you. SERMON 69.4.

 

THE WORD OF GOD BECAME HUMAN. AUGUSTINE: So the aspect he chose was the one by which Christ came into the world. He came, after all, insofar as he was man. Because insofar as he was God, he was always here. Is there anywhere God is not, I mean, seeing that he said, “I fill heaven and earth”? Christ is certainly the power of God and the wisdom of God. Of this wisdom it says, “She reaches from end to end mightily and disposes all things sweetly.” So then, “he was in this world, and the world was made through him, and the world did not know him.” He was here, and yet he also came. He was here by divine greatness; he came by human weakness. So because he came by human weakness, that is why Paul declared his coming by saying, “The word is human.” The human race would not have been set free unless the Word of God had agreed to be human. After all, people are said in particular to be human who show some humanity, above all by giving hospitality to human persons. So if human beings are called human because they receive human beings into their homes, how human must that one be who received humanity into himself by becoming human? SERMON 174.1.

 

THE FATHER IS WITH THE SON. AUGUSTINE: Jesus said, “He that sent me is with me.” He had already said this before, but he is constantly reminding them of this important point. “He sent me,” and “He is with me.” If then, O Lord, he is with you, it is not so much that the One has been sent by the other but rather that you both have come. And yet, while both are together, one was sent, the other was the sender. Incarnation is a sending, and the incarnation itself belongs only to the Son and not to the Father. The Father therefore sent the Son but did not withdraw from the Son. For it was not the case that the Father was absent from the place to which he sent the Son. For where could the Maker of all things not be? Where could he not be who said, “I fill heaven and earth”? TRACTATES ON THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 40.6.