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What then is remembered when we desire, and say that we desire joy? For what does the soul desperatlely seek. In its own self-deception and lust, the soul seeks control, that rush of power felt when we reach out and successfully take something for ourselves, whether a sweet bit of food, or a mental idea, or the obedience and praise of others, anything under the sun. The desire for happiness proves a lust for control. The very fact that this desire ‘is found in everybody’ derives from the fact that it the self’s craving to glorify the self. (198) Every self will logically possess it, and in order to fulfill it’s craving for glory, will deceptively disguise such a desire as a pure and good longing for joy! “They love truth for the light it sheds, but hate it when it shows them up as being wrong,” for the truth of their desire is for truth and joy to be their own, for the greatest things to be within their control for the honor and praise of themselves (199). This was the essence of sin revealed by Augustine’s reflection over his stealing of pears. He didn’t desire the pears themselves, but his control and power in the situation. The self will seek glory in whatever circumstances and means available, even if but by taking that thing which itself it does not want. “ I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself.” (29) And what is wickedness except to take for the self the honor and worship and glory due God who is the only One worthy? “What does ambition seek but honor and glory? Yet you alone are worthy of honour and are glorious for eternity. The cruelty of powerful people aims to arouse fear. Who is to be feared but God alone?” (31)

It cannot truly be happiness that all people seek, for Augustine’s own conversion taught him that the entrance into the fellowship and presence of God, “the one necessary condition, which meant not only going but at once arriving there, was to have the will to go.” (147) If people in truth completely desired God, they would instantly find Him, as well as an abundance of joy. “Whereas, if I wish to become God’s friend, in an instant I may become that now.” (143) In answer to the problem of knowledge, to the ancient question of the Meno lies in the realization that the heart does not seek what it does not know. The self deceives itself and others in order to gain control wherever it may. It proclaims “peace!”, “goodness!”, “joy!”, “knowledge!” when in truth it has no experience or understand of what these truly things are. The dying, transient self, ever pressed against the confining wall of the fleeting present moment, craves the stability of eternal presence and being, yet does not receive it from God. The self wants not the being given by God, but its own eternal being, wrested away from connection to and dependence on another. “They wish to be the light not in the Lord but in themselves.” (148)

And now is not the problem greater! We know nothing that is outside of our memory, yet are without a true memory of God or even real joy. Further, our hearts in their corruption do not even actually seek God or their own eternal joy in Him, but seek the pleasure of glory and power, sheer wickedness before the greatness of God. How then is God ever to be found!? How are we ever to come to know Him with our conscious self? Where does our being come from, except that it is given? And further, where does our knowledge come from, whether of God, ourselves, or of mathematical concepts? Augustine answers, “So they  were there even before I had learnt them, but were not in my memory. Accordingly, when they were formulated, how and why did I recognize themand say, ‘Yes, that is true’? The answer must be that they were already in the memory, but so remote and pushed into the background…” (189) However,  though stored in the memory, this recognition is also, as our very being, given by God alone. Truths cannot be wrested and discovered for ourselves, created by our desire for them any more than one might make money grow on trees. Our recognition of truth, as our very sustenance of consciousness, proves but a miracle, a gracious gift from God. Ultimately, Augustine himself presents the answer. He only degenerates into confusions and contradictions when he tries to break this existential truth into digestible parts for intellectual comprehension. Elsewhere he writes, “For what I know of myself I know because you grant me light, and what I do not know of myself, I do not know until such time as my darkness becomes ‘like noonday’ before your face.” (182-3) The knowledge of God comes by revelation; He illuminates the understanding of those who would seek Him. “Where then did I find you to be able to learn of you? You were not already in my memory before I learnt of you. Where then did I find you so that I could learn of you if not in the fact that you transcend me? There is no place, where we go backwards or forwards; there can be no question of place. O truth, everywhere you preside over all who ask counsel of you.” (201) It is not that we know, but that we are known.

How then do we seek Him, how do we enter into this His knowledge of us, and thereby know both ourselves and our God? By the receiving of His revelation through faith that acknowledges to Whom all truth and wisdom belongs. We cannot wait for impossible intellectual comprehension of the presence of God. Only by faith can we access the knowledge of God that abides in the ephemeral present, the place unseen by the mind and accessible only by the pure willing in the immediate moment. Augustine confesses, “I will pass beyond even that power of mind which is called memory, desiring to reach you by the way through which you can be reached, and to be bonded to you by the way in which it is possible to be bonded.” (194) The presence of God, the entrance into fellowship with Him will abide in the pre-intellectualized present moment of ‘now’. Ultimately, true knowledge of God proves not an intellectual cognition or mental comprehension, but an existential knowledge, a personal relation: the connection of being that abides as an miraculous sustained presence, as incomprehensible as the fleeting present moment, yet as sure and sweet as a lover’s touch. Whole, joyous, steadfast knowledge of God emerges through the personal knowledge of love that believes all things and gives all things to the Beloved. “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you.  . . . You were with me, and I was not with you.” (201)