City of God

I've been hors de combat with the flu this week, but maybe I can return to the front lines now even though I am being distracted by a young woman suckling her child. I don't find that at all offensive and mother needn't be so discreet to cover herself. Both mother and infant are very attractive and give unmistakeable signs of intelligence and alertness. And yes, they're white. Wish I was less shy as I would very much like to take their picture. So glad to see them reproduce.
So today, with the main legacy of that vicious and unmannerly virus is a set of ribs that feel as if Mike Tyson has been practicing his left and right hooks, my initial act after returning to consciousness and being out and abroad was to purchase a copy of Augustine's City of God. It's one of those tomes I always knew I would have to read and dreading it. Three factors conspired together to make this the moment: first, it was 20% off, second I had the requisite $20 in my pocket, and lastly the first paragraph my eyes fell on after opening it up at a random page which said, "Now if wisdom is identical with god, by whom all things wer made, as we are assured by divine authority and divine truth, then the true philosopher is a lover of god." This is from the beginning of Book VIII on Natural theology, so in the next paragraph he explains that theology signifies reasoning or discussion about the Divinity,
The first thing that catches the attention is that while he is speaking about something known through faith he wants to reason about it. Although he was a Latin speaker from North Africa and could not read Greek, this is an entirely Greek thought. Faith is there, certainly, but in reason, not a deity. I take this to mean that he largely equated reason with the deity, to be an aspect of it...that wisdom is identical with God. His idea of Natural Theology apparently comes from Varro (about whom I know nothing) who would "extend his 'natural' theology as far as the visible world, or the World-Soul, but no further."
With such a discussion leaping off the first page I looked at, how could I resist plunking down my 20 bucks?