St. Augustine on knowledge and knowers
With the mind and intellect which you have given them, they [philosophers] investigate these matters [measuring the constellations, tracing the paths of the stars]. They have found out much. Many years beforehand they have predicted eclipses of sun and moon, foretelling the day, the hour, and whether total or partial. And their calculation has not been wrong. It has turned out just as they predicted. They have put the rules which they discovered into books which are read to this day. On this basis prediction can be made of the year, the month of the year, the day of the month, the hour of the day, and what proportion of light will be eclipsed in the case of either sun or moon; and it happens exactly as predicted. People who have no understanding of these things are amazed and stupefied. Those who know are exultant and are admired. Their irreligious pride makes them withdraw from you and eclipse your great light from reaching themselves. They can foresee a future eclipse of the sun, but do not perceive their own eclipse of the present. For they do not in a religious spirit investigate the source of the intelligence with which they research into these matters. Moreover, when they do discover that you are their Maker, they do not give themselves to you so that they may preserve what you have made. They do not slay in sacrifice to you what they have made themselves to be. They do not kill their own pride like high-flying birds, their curiosity like ‘fishes of the sea’ and their sexual indulgence like ‘the beasts of the field’, so that you, God, who are a devouring fire, may consume their mortal concerns and recreate them for immortality.
-Augustine of Hippo (397) Confesssons, Book V, i (4). Trans. by Henry Chadwick (1991). Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 74.
