The Rainbow of His Will

Here, a counterpoint to Charles Altieri (one "encounters the ultimate nothingness or absence of meaning, which is perhaps the result of all pursuits of sheer lucidity."). Augustine has a long intellectual conversation with his dying mother and undergoes a transforming epiphany, recorded in Confessions:

“If fleshly importuning were to fall silent, silent all shapes of earth, sea, air; silent the celestial poles; silent the soul, moving (oblivious of self) beyond the self; silent, as well, all dreams and shallow visions, all words and other signs, silent everything that passes away, all those things that say, if one listens, ‘We did not make ourselves, He made us who never passes away’; if, after saying this, they too were silent, though alerting us to hear the One who made them; and if He should speak, no longer through them but by Himself, for us to hear His word not as that is relayed by human tongue or angel’s voice, not in cloudy thunder or confused meditation, but if we harkened to Him we love in other things without those other things (as even now we strain upward and, in a mind’s blink, touch the ageless wisdom that outlasts all things else), and if this were made constant, all lesser vision falling away before it, so that this alone held the universe in its grip, in its enfoldment and its glad hidden depths, and eternal life resembled this moment of wisdom that we sigh to be losing—would that not be what is meant by the words ‘Enter the joy of your God’?—a joy that will be ours when?—only when all things rise (though not all are changed)?”