I need to remember what I cannot comprehend

Books 11-13 of Augustine's Confessions are a meditation on the nature of time and God's work of Creation, and are often left out of modern editions. In the preface to his 1983 translation, E.M. Blaiklock writes,

Book Ten seemed to provide a natural conclusion satisfying to a modern reader. ...The mystical ponderings of the last three books are... quite detachable, and it is even a little difficult to probe the writer's purpose in placing them thus. They seem laboured [sic] in their striving for linkage, and are rather the utterance of the Bishop of Hippo than of the embattled man striving Godwards. We have taken leave to omit them.

Still, Maria Boulding did not omit them in her 1997 translation, and so our congregation's reading group, being fastidious completists, chose her edition of the Confessions from the Vintage Spiritual Classics series. We've been working through those mystical ponderings, and I think I can respectfully disagree with Blaiklock. Throughout the autobiographical Books 1-10, Augustine (prefiguring Proust's Remembrance of Things Past) wrestles with the nature of memory and time before, and as created by, God. A Scripturally-saturated mind such as Augustine's would naturally end up with the days of creation and the text of Genesis 1-2.

Reading between Blaiklock's lines, he seems to be saying that Books 11-13 make rather tough sledding, and with that I can heartily agree. Nonetheless, I recognized myself in this sentence from Book 12.

On reading or hearing the scriptural words some people think of God in the guise of a man, or as some huge being possessed of immense power, who arrived at a sudden new decision to make heaven and earth outside himself, as though located at a distance from him, and made them like two vast solid structures, above and below, within which everything would be contained.

Unintentionally, I create mental images while reading Genesis 1-2, and those images render the events in terms which I can understand. Augustine chastises my hubris by reminding me that what I imagine is almost certainly not exactly what occurred.

I would be the first to argue that the Genesis 1-2 account of Creation is a straightforward historical narrative and is written to be as comprehensible as possible to the average reader or hearer. Nonetheless, I need to remember it records much I simply cannot comprehend, such as the existence of light without prior physical source, or an earth without form and void (once one realizes that a jumbled mass has a form, even if a chaotic one, and is certainly not void), or the relationship of the divine decrees to the simplicity of God's person. As chapter 1 of the Westminster Confession of Faith states, the Scriptures are clear, but sometimes they speak clearly of things which are incomprehensible to us poor creatures.

Augustine's mystical ponderings may be labored and overlong, but they form useful instruction in intellectual humility.