God and You Only?

“Augustine in his Soliloquies, imagines God asking him what he wants to know, and his reply is: ‘God and the soul.’ ‘Nothing more?’ asks God. ‘Nothing whatever’, says Augustine.

This does not exclude other people and the world; it relativizes them. For there is only one objective absolute, God; and there is only one subjective absolute, yourself. You can never be anyone but yourself, and God can never be anything but God. The whole question of life is the relation between these two absolutes. (‘Religion’ means, literally, ‘yoking or binding relationship’.)

There are only two persons you can never, ever escape, not for one moment, either in time or in eternity: God and yourself. Everything else is relative to these two.

... That is why de Caussade is wise and realistic, not foolish and idealistic, when he says that all we need to do is to ‘Do [your] obvious duty as if nothing in the world existed except God and [you]’ (p. 76). In other words, the key to holiness is, as Brother Lawrence said, simply to ‘practice the presence of God.’ Do everything under the eye of God, that is, under the eye of Absolute, Uncompromising Truth and Love.”

~Peter Kreeft