'ut viderem esse'

Latin Learning Latin
1

The following is an excerpt from Augustine’s Confessions:

Tu es deus meus, tibi suspiro die ac nocte. et cum te primum cognovi, tu assumsisti me, ut viderem esse, quod viderem, et nondum me esse, qui viderem. et reverberasti infirmitatem aspectus mei, radians in
me vehementer, et contremui amore et horrore: et inveni longe me esse a te in regione dissimilitudinis, tamquam audirem vocem tuam de excelso…

What I don’t understand, is the use of ‘esse’:

  1. Why is there ‘ut viderem esse’? Is this a special sentence structure? Why not simply using ‘ut viderem’?
  2. Why is it ‘nondum me esse’?
  3. ‘et inveni longe me esse a te in regione dissimilitudinis’: how should I translate this?

Thanks a lot!

2

Well, one would have to write a commentary (although there is one on line). St. Augustine, before his conversion, lived a sinful life not only because of fornication but even more because he considered God to be a body, like he was. God takes him up so that he may see that he was what he was seeing around him (i.e., finite) and not yet capable of seeing the Truth, of contemplating God. So, because of his carnal and spiritual sins, Augustine was alienated from God (Augustine was influenced by neo-platonic thought in this, although he was an orthodox christian). Thanks to God’s intervention, he found he was very different from God.