The Vision of God and Augustine’s De uidendo Deo liber unus (= ep. 147)

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The Vision of God and Augustine’s De uidendo Deo liber unus (= ep. 147), Page 1 of 1

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De uidendo deo liber unus was originally conceived as a letter (= ep.147), but St Augustine decided to include it among his books. That was probably because the issue of the vision of God finally acquired a great complexity in his thought. The present study intends to focus especially on certain aspects that have to do with the method of inquiry of the central issue in question, i. e. the vision of God especially at the present time. Augustine proposes here what I would call a dialectical methodology of interiority. The central issue raised here is to establish the vision of God but to achieve this, an inner research is necessary, and this is Platonic dialectics. I call it a methodology of intimacy in St Augustine, that is, a dialectical access to truth. To find the object, God, it is necessary beforehand, methodologically to clear the way and to undertake a research that, as it seems, has discernible platonic features. This supposes an effort to make the vision of mind transparent to the object, in other words, to liberate the spirit by means of a stripping of all that hinders and obscures that mentis obtutus.