228 Christianity as Mystical Fact effect
of
the
question:
**Can
man know
anything whatever?" At the beginning of his struggles, Augustine's thoughts clung to the perishable things of sense.
He
could only picture the spiritual
to himself in material images. liverance for stage. **
him when he
It is
above
rises
He thus describes it in his
When I wished to think of God,
a dethis
Confessio?is: I
could only
imagine immense masses of bodies and believed that was the only kind of thing that could exist. This was the chief and almost the only cause of the errors which I could not avoid. " He thus indicates the point at which a person must arrive who is seeking the true life of the spirit. There are thinkers, not a few, who maintain that it is impossible to arrive at pure thought, free from any material admixture. These thinkers confuse what they feel bound to say about their own inner life, with what is humanly possible. The truth rather is that it is only possible to arrive at higher knowledge when thought has been liberated from all material things, when an inner life has been developed in which images of reality do not cease when