De visione Dei

unless God: were infinite: he would not be the end of desire. Fire does not cease from burning: nor the love of desire which is borne to you, God,, who are the form of all desirable! and that truth which in every desire is desired. Whence because I have begun from your honey-flowing gift to taste your incomprehensible sweetness, which becomes to me so much more pleasing, by how much more infinite it appears: I see that for this you, God, are unknown to all creatures, that they have in this most sacred ignorance greater rest, as in a treasure innumerable and inexhaustible. For with much greater joy is he suffused, who finds such a treasure which he knows to be utterly innumerable and infinite: than he who finds one numerable and finite. Hence this most sacred ignorance of your greatness: is the most desirable pasture of my intellect. Most when I find such a treasure in my field: so that the treasure be mine. O fount of riches: you will to be grasped by my possession, and to remain incomprehensible and infinite, for you are the treasure of delights, of which none can seek the end. How could appetite seek not to be? Whether the will seeks to be, or seeks not to be: appetite itself cannot rest, but is borne to infinity. You descend, Lord, that you be grasped: and remain innumerable and infinite. And unless you remained infinite: you would not be the end of desire. You are therefore infinite: that you be the end of all desire. For intellectual desire is not borne to what can be greater, or more desirable. But all short of the infinite: can be greater. The end of desire therefore: is infinite. You therefore, God, are infinity itself: which alone in every desire I desire. To the knowledge of which infinity indeed I cannot come nearer: than that I know it to be infinite. The more therefore I comprehend you my God the more incomprehensible: the more I attain you, for I more attain the end of my desire. Therefore whatever meets me which strives to show you comprehensible: this I cast away, for it seduces. My desire in which you shine, leads me to you: for it casts away all that is finite and comprehensible. For in these it cannot rest: for through you it is led to you. But you are beginning without beginning: and end without end. Desire is therefore led through the eternal beginning, from which it has that it is desire: to the end without end. And this is infinite. That therefore I, a little man, would not be content with you my God if I knew you comprehensible: is because I am led through you to you into the incomprehensible and infinite. I see you, Lord my God. In a certain mental rapture: that if sight is not sated by seeing, nor hearing by hearing, then less the intellect by understanding. It is not therefore what sates the intellect, or what is its end: what it understands. Nor can what it does not at all understand sate it: but only what it understands by not understanding. For the intelligible which it knows does not sate: nor does the intelligible sate which it wholly knows not. But the intelligible which it knows to be so intelligible, that it can never be fully understood: this alone can sate. As one having insatiable hunger is not sated by short food which he can swallow, nor by food which does not reach him: but only by that food which reaches him, and although it is continually swallowed, yet can never be fully swallowed. Since such it is that by swallowing it is not diminished: for it is infinite.