1. Great are you, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is your power, and your wisdom is beyond all measure (Ps 48 (47):1; 96 (95):4; 145 (144):3; 147 (146):5). And man longs to praise you—man, who is but a small part of your creation; man, who carries his mortality about with him, carrying the evidence of his sin (See 2 Cor 4:10) and the evidence that you resist the proud (Jas 4:6; 1 Pet 5:5); and still he longs to praise you, this small part of your creation. You stir us to take delight in praising you, for you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

Grant me, Lord, to know and understand (See Ps 119 (118):34) whether to call upon you comes first or to praise you, and whether knowing you comes before calling upon you. But who can call upon you without knowing you? For someone who does not know you might call upon something else in your place.

Or should you rather be called upon so that you may be known? But how are they to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe without a preacher? (Rom 10:14) And those who seek the Lord shall praise him (Ps 22:26 (21:27)), for those who seek him find him (See Matt 7:8; Luke 11:10) and, finding him, will praise him.

I will seek you, Lord, by calling upon you, and call upon you by believing in you, for you have been preached to us. My faith calls upon you, Lord—the faith you gave me, which you breathed into me through the humanity of your Son, through the ministry of your preacher.

2. And how shall I call upon my God, my God and my Lord, since in calling upon him I am surely calling him into myself? What place is there in me for my God to come to—the God who made heaven and earth (2 Chr 2:12; Gen 1:1)? Is there really anything in me, O Lord my God, that can contain you? Or can heaven and earth, which you made and in which you made me, contain you? Or is it that, since nothing that exists could exist without you, whatever exists therefore contains you?

Since I too exist, why do I ask that you come into me—I who would not exist unless you were in me? For I am not in hell now, and yet you are even there; for even if I go down into hell, you are present (Ps 139 (138):8). So I would not exist, my God—I would not exist at all—unless you were in me.

Or rather, would I not fail to exist unless I existed in you, from whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things (See 1 Cor 8:6; Rom 11:36)? Yes, Lord, even so, even so. To what place do I call you, since I am already in you? And from where would you come into me? For where could I go, beyond heaven and earth, that my God might come to me from there—the God who said, I fill heaven and earth (Jer 23:24)?

3. Do heaven and earth, then, contain you, since you fill them? Or do you fill them and still have more to spare, since they cannot contain you?

And where do you pour back whatever is left over of you once heaven and earth are filled? Or have you no need to be contained by anything—you who contain all things—since what you fill, you fill by containing it?

For the vessels that are full of you do not give you stability, since even if they break you are not spilled out. And when you are poured out upon us (See Joel 2:28–29; Acts 2:17–18; Titus 3:6), you do not lie fallen but lift us up; you are not scattered but gather us together. But all that you fill, you fill with the whole of yourself.

Or is it that, since all things cannot contain the whole of you, they contain a part of you—and all of them contain the same part at once?

Or do individual things contain individual parts, the greater things more and the smaller things less? Then is one part of you greater and another smaller? Or are you wholly present everywhere, while no single thing contains the whole of you?

4. What, then, are you, my God? What, I ask, but the Lord God? For who is Lord but the Lord? Or who is God but our God? (Ps 18 (17):31) Most high, most good, most mighty, most omnipotent; most merciful and most just; most hidden and most present; most beautiful and most strong; steadfast yet beyond our grasp; unchanging, yet changing all things; never new, never old, yet making all things new (See Wis 7:27) and bringing the proud to decay without their knowing it (Job 9:5 (LXX); see Augustine, Notes on Job 9); ever acting, ever at rest; gathering in, yet wanting nothing; bearing and filling and protecting; creating and nourishing and bringing to perfection; seeking, though nothing is lacking to you. You love without being inflamed; you are jealous (See Joel 2:18; Zech 1:14; 8:2) yet free of care; you repent (See Gen 6:6–7) without grieving; you are angry (See Exod 4:14) yet remain serene; you change your works without changing your plan; you take back what you find, though you never lost it; never in need, you rejoice in your gains; never grasping, yet you demand interest (See Matt 25:27).

More than the debt is paid to you (See Luke 10:35), so as to put you in debt—yet who has anything that is not yours? You repay debts, though you owe nothing to anyone; you remit debts, and lose nothing.

And what have we said, my God, my life, my holy sweetness? What does anyone say when he speaks of you? Yet woe to those who keep silent about you, for even the eloquent are left mute (See Matt 15:31).

5. Who will grant me to rest in you? Who will grant that you come into my heart and make it drunk, so that I forget my evils (See Jer 44:9) and embrace you, my one and only good? What are you to me? Have mercy, that I may speak. What am I to you, that you command me to love you, and are angry with me if I do not, and threaten me with enormous miseries (See Ps 84 (83):6)? Is it, then, a small misery in itself not to love you? Alas for me! Tell me, in your mercies, O Lord my God, what you are to me. Say to my soul, I am your salvation (Ps 35 (34):3). Say it so that I may hear. See, the ears of my heart are before you, Lord; open them, and say to my soul, I am your salvation. I will run after that voice and lay hold of you. Do not hide your face from me (See Deut 31:17; 32:20); let me die, lest I die, that I may see it.

6. The house of my soul is too narrow for you to come into it: let it be enlarged by you. It is in ruins: rebuild it. It holds things that would offend your eyes: I confess it, I know it. But who will cleanse it? To whom other than you shall I cry: cleanse me from my hidden faults, O Lord, and spare your servant from the faults of others (See Ps 19 (18):12–13)? I believe, and so I speak (Ps 116 (115):10; 2 Cor 4:13).

Lord, you know (Tob 8:9; John 21:15–17). Have I not declared to you my sins against myself, my God, and have you not forgiven the wickedness of my heart (Ps 32 (31):5)? I do not go to law with you (See Job 9:3; Jer 2:29), you who are the truth (See 1 John 5:6); and I have no wish to deceive myself, lest my iniquity lie to itself (See Ps 27 (26):12). So I do not go to law with you, for if you, Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? (Ps 130 (129):3)

7. Yet allow me to speak before your mercy—me, who am but dust and ashes (Job 42:6 (LXX); see The City of God 22.29). Allow me to speak, since it is your mercy I address, and not a man who would mock me. Perhaps you too laugh at me (See Ps 2:4; 37 (36):13; Wis 4:18), but you will turn and have mercy on me (See Jer 12:15). For what is it I want to say, Lord, except that I do not know where I came from when I came into this—shall I call it a mortal life or a living death? I do not know.

And the consolations of your mercies (Ps 94 (93):19) took me up, as I have heard from the parents of my flesh, the one from whom and the one in whom you formed me in time; for I myself do not remember it. So the consolations of human milk received me, though neither my mother nor my nurses filled their own breasts; rather, through them you gave me an infant's nourishment, according to your ordinance and the riches you have laid down to the very depth of things.

You also gave me to want no more than you were giving, and gave those who nursed me the will to give me what you were giving them; for by a well-ordered affection they wanted to give me what they had in abundance from you. For the good I had from them was a good for them too—though it came not from them but through them, since indeed all good things are from you, O God, and from my God comes all my well-being (See 2 Sam 23:5).

This I came to notice only later, as you cried out to me through these very gifts that you bestow within and without. For at that time I knew how to suck, to take contentment in what pleased me, and to cry at anything that hurt my flesh—nothing more.

8. Later I began to smile as well, first in my sleep, and then awake. This was told me about myself, and I believed it, since we see the same in other infants; for I do not remember it of my own self.

And bit by bit I began to perceive where I was, and I wanted to make my wishes known to those who could fulfill them, but I could not, for my wishes were within me while they were outside, and by no sense of theirs could they enter my soul. So I threw my limbs about and made noises, signs resembling my wishes—the few I could manage, such as I could manage—though they were not truly like them.

And when I was not obeyed—either because I was not understood or because it would have harmed me—I grew indignant that my elders would not submit to me, that free persons would not be my servants, and I avenged myself on them by crying.

That infants are like this I have learned from those I have been able to observe; and that I myself was such, my nurses—who did not know it—have shown me more surely than those who did.

9. And see, my infancy is long since dead, yet I am alive. But you, Lord, who live forever and in whom nothing dies—since before the first beginnings of the ages, and before all that can be called "before," you are, and you are God and Lord of all that you have created; with you stand the causes of all unstable things, with you abide the unchanging origins of all changeable things, and the everlasting accounts of all irrational and temporal things live on—tell me, your suppliant, O God; in your mercy tell me, your wretched one: did my infancy succeed some earlier age of mine that had already died? Was it the age I passed within my mother's womb? For of that too something has been told me, and I have myself seen women with child. And what was there before that, my sweetness, my God? Was I anywhere, was I anyone? I have no one to tell me this: neither my father nor my mother could, nor the experience of others, nor my own memory. Do you laugh at me for asking such things, and bid me praise you and confess to you for what I do know?

10. I confess to you, O Lord of heaven and earth (Matt 11:25), giving you praise for my origins and my infancy, which I do not remember. You have granted that a man infer these things about himself from others, and believe much about himself even on the authority of mere women. For I existed and was alive even then, and already, at the close of infancy, I was seeking signs by which to make my feelings known to others.

Where does such a living creature come from, if not from you, Lord? Is anyone the maker of his own self? Or is there some channel drawn from elsewhere through which being and life flow into us, other than your making us (See Ps 100 (99):3), Lord—you for whom to be and to live are not two different things, since to be supremely and to live supremely are one and the same?

For you are supreme, and you do not change (See Mal 3:6); and today does not run its course in you, and yet it does run its course in you, since all these things too are in you (See Rom 11:36)—for they would have no ways of passing by (See Lam 1:12) unless you held them. And since your years do not fail, your years are this present day; and however many of our days and our fathers' days have already passed through your today, from it they took their measures and somehow came to be, and others still will pass and take their measures and somehow come to be. But you are the same (Ps 102 (101):27; Heb 1:12), and all of tomorrow and beyond, and all of yesterday and before, you will make today, you have made today.

What is it to me if someone does not understand? Let him too rejoice and say, What is this? (Exod 13:14; 16:15; Sir 39:26) Let him rejoice even so, and choose to find you by not finding rather than, by finding, to fail to find you.

11. Hear me, O God. Woe to the sins of men! (See Isa 1:4) A man says this, and you have mercy on him, since you made him but did not make the sin in him. Who reminds me of the sin of my infancy—for no one is clean of sin before you, not even an infant whose life on earth is but a single day (Job 14:4–5 (LXX))? Who will remind me? Some tiny child now, perhaps, in whom I see what I do not remember of myself?

What sin, then, did I commit in those days? Was it that I bawled, gaping after the breast? For if I were now to gape in that way—not after the breast, of course, but after food suited to my years—I would be laughed at and quite rightly rebuked. So even then I was doing things that deserved rebuke; but since I could not understand anyone who rebuked me, neither custom nor reason allowed that I be rebuked. For as we grow up we root out and cast away such behavior.

And I have never seen anyone who, in clearing something away, knowingly throws out what is good. Or were these things good for that age—to demand by crying even what would do harm if given; to be fiercely indignant at free persons who would not submit, at one's elders, at the very ones who gave one life, and at many wiser besides who would not obey one's beck and call; and to try one's hardest to strike and hurt them, because one's commands were not obeyed—commands that it would have been ruinous to obey?

So it is the weakness of an infant's limbs that is innocent, not the infant's mind. I myself have seen and known a jealous little one: he could not yet speak, and he glared, pale and bitter-faced, at the child who shared his nurse. Who does not know this? Mothers and nurses say they expiate it by some remedy or other.

Unless, indeed, this too counts as innocence: that where the fountain of milk flows richly and to spare, one will not endure a sharer who is utterly destitute and dependent for life on that one food. Yet these things are indulgently tolerated—not because they are nothing or are slight, but because they will pass away with the years. You may grant as much from the fact that the very same behavior cannot be borne with composure when it is found in someone older.

12. You, therefore, O Lord my God, who gave the infant life and a body—which, as we see, you have furnished with senses, knit together with limbs, graced with a shape, and into which, for its wholeness and well-being, you have implanted all the impulses of a living creature—

you bid me praise you for these things, to confess to you and sing praise to your name, O Most High (Ps 92 (91):1), because you are God almighty and good, even had you made only these things—which no one else can make but you, the One, from whom comes all measure, most beautiful, who give form to all things and by your law set all things in order.

This age, then, Lord—which I do not remember living, about which I have believed others, and which I infer I passed through from watching other infants, however reliable that inference may be—I am reluctant to count as part of this life of mine that I live in this world. For so far as the darkness of my forgetfulness goes, it is on a level with the time I lived in my mother's womb. And if I was conceived in iniquity, and in sins my mother nourished me in her womb (Ps 51 (50):5), then where, I beg you, my God, where, Lord, was I, your servant (Ps 116 (115):16)—where or when was I innocent? But see, I pass over that time; for what have I now to do with it, when I can recall no trace of it?

13. Did I not, advancing from infancy, arrive here at boyhood? Or rather, did boyhood not come into me and succeed my infancy? Yet my infancy did not depart—for where did it go? And still it was no longer there. For I was no longer an infant unable to speak, but already a boy who could talk. This I remember; and only later did I notice how I had learned to speak.

For it was not my elders who taught me, presenting me with words in some fixed order of instruction, as they did a little later with letters; rather, I myself, with the mind you gave me, my God, wanted by groans and various sounds and various movements of my limbs to express the feelings of my heart, so that my will might be obeyed—and yet I could neither express all that I wanted nor make it known to all I wished. I would seize on things with my memory: when people named some object, and at that sound moved their body toward it, I saw and grasped that the thing was called by them by the sound they made when they wanted to point it out. That this was what they meant was made plain by their bodily movements—the natural language, as it were, of all peoples, made with the face and the glance of the eyes, the action of the other limbs, and the tone of voice, which signals the mind's feelings in seeking, keeping, rejecting, or avoiding things.

And so, hearing words again and again in their places in various sentences, I gradually gathered what things they were signs of; and once my mouth had been trained to those signs, I would declare my wishes through them. Thus with those among whom I lived I shared the signs by which we express our wishes, and I entered more deeply into the stormy society of human life, depending on the authority of my parents and the beck and call of my elders.

14. O God, my God, what miseries and mockeries I experienced there, when as a boy it was set before me as right living to obey those who warned me to flourish in this world and to excel in the arts of the tongue, which serve the honor of men and false riches. Then I was sent to school to learn letters, in which—wretch that I was—I had no idea what use there could be. And yet, if I was slow at learning, I was beaten. For this was praised by our elders, and many who had lived this life before us had laid out the toilsome paths we were forced to travel, with labor and sorrow multiplied for the sons of Adam (See Gen 3:16; Sir 40:1).

But we found people who prayed to you, Lord, and we learned from them, perceiving you, as best we could, to be someone great, who could—though not visible to our senses—hear us and come to our aid. For as a boy I began to pray to you, my help and my refuge (Ps 18 (17):2), and in calling upon you I broke the knots of my tongue; and small as I was, with no small feeling I begged you that I might not be beaten at school. And when you did not hear me—which was not counted to me as folly (Ps 22 (21):2)—my beatings were laughed at by my elders, and even by my parents, who wished no harm to befall me; and they were then my great and grievous evil.

15. Is there anyone, Lord, of so great a spirit, cleaving to you with so vast a love—is there, I ask, anyone (for a certain dull-wittedness does as much)—is there, then, one who, by cleaving devoutly to you, is so grandly affected that he reckons the rack and the iron claws and the various torments of that kind (to escape which people throughout all lands entreat you with great fear) as of so little account, loving those who dread them most bitterly, in just the way our parents laughed at the torments we boys suffered from our masters? For we feared them no less, nor did we beg you any less to escape them;

and yet we sinned, by writing or reading or thinking about our lessons less than was required of us. For I did not lack, Lord, memory or talent—which you willed us to have in sufficient measure for that age—but I delighted in play, and I was punished for it by those who were of course doing the very same themselves.

But the trifles of grown men are called business, while children's trifles, though of the same sort, are punished by grown men, and no one pities the children, or the grown men, or both alike. Unless, indeed, some good judge of things would approve of my being beaten because as a boy I played ball, and by that game was hindered from learning quickly the letters with which, as a grown man, I would play more shamefully still. Or was the very man who beat me doing anything different? When he was bested by a fellow teacher in some petty dispute, he was wracked with more bile and envy than I was when beaten by a playmate in a game of ball.

16. And yet I was sinning, O Lord God, you who order and create all natural things, but who only order—and do not create—sins; O Lord my God, I was sinning by acting against the precepts of my parents and those teachers. For I could afterward make good use of the letters they wanted me to learn, whatever their own purpose was. For I was disobedient not because I was choosing something better, but out of love of play, loving the proud victories of contests and the tickling of my ears with false tales, so that they itched all the more hotly, while that same curiosity flashed more and more from my eyes toward the shows and games of grown men—

and those who put on such shows are endowed with a standing so high that nearly everyone wishes the same for their own little ones—whom, nevertheless, they willingly allow to be beaten if those very shows distract them from the studies by which the parents desire them to attain to putting on such shows themselves.

Look upon these things, Lord (Lam 1:9, 11), in mercy, and deliver us (Jer 2:27; Matt 6:13) who now call upon you; deliver also those who do not yet call upon you, that they may call upon you and you may deliver them.

17. For even as a boy I had heard of the eternal life promised to us through the humility of our Lord God, who came down to our pride; and I was already signed with the sign of his cross and seasoned with his salt from the time I came forth from my mother's womb—she who greatly hoped in you. You saw, Lord, when I was still a boy and one day was suddenly burning with a stomach complaint and near to death—you saw, my God, for already you were my guardian (See Job 7:20; Gen 28:15), with what stirring of soul and with what faith I begged for the baptism of your Christ, my God and my Lord, from the devotion of my mother and of the mother of us all, your Church. And the mother of my flesh was thrown into distress—since with a chaste heart, in your faith, she was the more lovingly in labor for my eternal salvation—and in haste she would have seen to it that I was initiated into the saving sacraments and washed clean, confessing you, Lord Jesus, for the forgiveness of sins, had I not at once recovered.

And so my cleansing was put off, as though it were necessary that I be defiled still more (See Rev 22:11) if I should live, on the grounds that after that washing the guilt of sins committed would be greater and more dangerous. So already I believed, and so did she and the whole household, except my father alone—who nevertheless did not overcome in me the claim of my mother's devotion, so as to keep me from believing in Christ, as he himself did not yet believe.

For she was at pains that you, my God, should be my father rather than he; and in this you helped her to prevail over her husband, whom, though the better of the two, she served, because in this too she was of course serving you, who command it.

18. I ask you, my God—I would like to know, if you should so will, with what purpose my baptism was deferred, so that I was not baptized then: was it for my good that the reins of sinning were, as it were, loosened for me? Or were they not loosened? Why then, even now, does this saying about one person and another sound on every side in our ears: "Leave him alone, let him do as he likes; he is not yet baptized"? And yet, where the health of the body is concerned, we do not say, "Let him be wounded still more; he is not yet healed."

How much better, then, had I been healed quickly, and had the diligence of my own people and of myself been directed to this: that the salvation of my soul, once received (See Ps 35 (34):3), should be kept safe under your protection, since you would have given it. Better, indeed.

But how many and how great were the waves of temptation that seemed to be looming after boyhood—my mother already knew them, and she chose to entrust to them the earth from which I would later be shaped, rather than the finished likeness itself.

19. Yet in that very boyhood, about which less was feared for me than about my youth, I did not love letters, and I hated being driven to them; and I was driven to them all the same, and it was done well for me, though I did not do well; for I would not have learned unless compelled. But no one does well against his will, even if what he does is good. Nor did those who drove me do well; rather, it was done well for me by you, my God. For they had no regard for the use to which I would put what they compelled me to learn—beyond the satisfying of the insatiable desires of a wealthy poverty and a disgraceful glory.

But you, for whom the very hairs of our head are numbered (Matt 10:30), used the error of all those who pressed me to learn for my benefit; and my own error, in being unwilling to learn, you used for my punishment—a punishment I did not deserve to escape, tiny boy and great sinner that I was. So out of those who did not do well you did well for me, and out of my own sinning self you justly repaid me (See Ps 142 (141):7). For you have ordained—and so it is—that every disordered soul is its own punishment.

20. But what was the reason I hated Greek letters, in which I was steeped as a small boy? Even now it is not quite clear to me. For I had come to love Latin—not what the first teachers teach, but what those called grammarians teach. Those first lessons, where one learns to read and write and count, I found no less burdensome and punishing than all the Greek. Yet where did this too come from, if not from sin and the vanity of life, by which I was flesh, and a wind that goes and does not return (Ps 78 (77):39)?

For surely those first lessons were the better, because the more reliable—by which there came to be in me, and now is, and I possess, the power both to read whatever I find written and to write myself whatever I wish—than the ones in which I was made to hold in memory the wanderings of some Aeneas, forgetful of my own wanderings, and to weep over Dido dead, who killed herself for love, while all the while I bore with dry eyes, most wretchedly, my own dying away from you amid these things, O God, my life (See John 11:25; 14:6).

21. For what is more wretched than a wretch who does not pity himself, who weeps over the death of Dido, which came about through loving Aeneas, but does not weep over his own death, which came about through not loving you, O God, light of my heart, and bread of the inward mouth of my soul (See John 6:35, 48, 51), and the power that weds my mind and the bosom of my thought?

I did not love you, and I committed fornication away from you (Ps 73 (72):27), and to me as I fornicated there sounded on every side, Well done, well done! (See Ps 35 (34):21) For the friendship of this world is fornication away from you, and "Well done, well done!" is said so that a man may be ashamed if he is not like that.

And over this I did not weep, yet I wept over Dido, who died and followed her end by the sword (Virgil, Aeneid 6.457)—I myself following the lowest of your creatures, having forsaken you, earth going into earth. And if I were forbidden to read these things, I would have grieved that I could not read what made me grieve. Such madness is reckoned more honorable and richer learning than the lessons by which I learned to read and write.

22. But now let my God cry out in my soul, and let your truth tell me: It is not so, it is not so; that earlier teaching is by far the better. For see, I am readier to forget the wanderings of Aeneas and all things of that sort than how to read and write. True, curtains hang at the doorways of the grammar schools—but these signify less the honor of something hidden than the covering over of error. Let those I no longer fear not cry out against me, while I confess to you what my soul desires, my God, and find rest in the rebuke of my evil ways (See Ps 119 (118):101; Jer 18:11; 26:3), that I may love your good ways. Let neither the sellers nor the buyers of grammar cry out against me; for if I put the question to them, whether it is true, as the poet says, that Aeneas once came to Carthage, the less learned will answer that they do not know, and the more learned will even deny that it is true. But if I ask with what letters the name of Aeneas is spelled, all who have learned this will give me the true answer, according to that agreement and convention by which men have settled these signs among themselves. Again, if I ask which of these one could forget with the greater inconvenience to this life—how to read and write, or those poetic fictions—who does not see what anyone would answer who has not utterly forgotten himself?

So I sinned as a boy when I set those empty things, out of love, above these more useful ones—or rather, I hated the one and loved the other. By then "one and one are two, two and two are four" was a hateful chant to me, while the sweetest spectacle of vanity was the wooden horse full of armed men, the burning of Troy, and the very ghost of Creusa (Virgil, Aeneid 2.772).

23. Why, then, did I hate Greek literature too, which sings of such things? For Homer also was skilled at weaving such tales, and is most sweetly vain. Yet to me as a boy he was bitter. I believe Virgil is the same to Greek boys, when they are made to learn him as I was made to learn Homer. The difficulty, plainly—the sheer difficulty of mastering a foreign tongue—sprinkled as if with gall all the sweetness of the Greek storytelling. For I knew none of those words, and I was urgently pressed, with savage terrors and punishments, to learn them.

For there was a time, as an infant, when I knew no Latin either; and yet I learned it simply by paying attention, without any fear or torment, amid the caresses of my nurses, the jokes of those who smiled at me, and the delight of those who played with me. I learned it without the punishing pressure of taskmasters, since my own heart pressed me to bring its conceptions to birth—which it could not have done unless I had learned some words, not from teachers but from people speaking, into whose ears I too gave birth to whatever I felt.

From this it shines out clearly enough that free curiosity has greater power for learning these things than does fearful compulsion. Yet the free flow of the one is checked by the other, under your laws, O God—your laws, from the schoolmasters' canes to the trials of the martyrs—your laws that have power to mix in wholesome bitterness, calling us back to you from the pestilent pleasure by which we drew away from you.

24. Hear, O Lord, my supplication (Ps 61 (60):1); let my soul not faint (See Ps 84 (83):2; 119 (118):81) under your discipline, and let me not faint in confessing to you your acts of mercy (See Ps 107 (106):8, 15, 21, 31), by which you drew me out of all my most evil ways (See 2 Kgs 17:13; 2 Chr 7:14)—that you may grow sweet to me beyond all the seductions I once followed; that I may love you with all my strength and clasp your hand with all my heart; and that you may rescue me from every temptation to the very end (Ps 16 (15):11; 1 Cor 1:8).

For see, you, Lord, my king and my God (Ps 5:2; 44 (43):4)—let whatever useful thing I learned as a boy serve you; let my speaking and writing and reading and counting serve you. For while I was learning empty things, you were giving me discipline, and in those empty things you forgave me the sins of my delights (See Matt 9:5; Mark 2:5, 9; Luke 5:23). For I did learn many useful words in them—but these can be learned in things that are not empty, and that is the safe path on which children should walk.

25. But woe to you, river of human custom! Who will resist you? (Ps 76 (75):7) How long until you run dry? How long will you roll the children of Eve into that great and fearsome sea which even those who have boarded the wood can scarcely cross? Did I not read in you of Jupiter both thundering and committing adultery? Of course he could not do both at once; but it was contrived so that real adultery might have the authority to be imitated, with the false thunder playing the procurer.

But which of those cloaked masters listens with a sober ear to a man crying out from the same dust and saying, Homer invented these things and transferred human matters to the gods; I would rather he had brought divine matters down to us (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.26.65)?

But it is said more truly that he did indeed invent these things, yet by attributing what is divine to depraved men, so that wicked deeds might not be thought wicked, and so that whoever did them might seem to be imitating not lost men but the gods of heaven.

26. And yet, O river of hell, into you the sons of men are flung, with fees paid, so that they may learn these things; and a great affair is made of it when this is done publicly in the forum, in the sight of laws that decree salaries over and above the fees. And you beat against your rocks and roar, saying, "Here words are learned; here is acquired the eloquence most necessary for persuading and for setting forth one's views." As though, indeed, we would not otherwise come to know these words—"shower" and "golden" and "lap" and "deceit" and "the temples of heaven" and the other words written in that passage—had not Terence brought on a worthless youth setting up Jupiter as a model for his own debauchery, as he gazes at a certain picture painted on a wall, where there was this picture: how, they say, Jupiter once sent down into Danaë's lap a golden shower, a trick played upon the woman (Terence, The Eunuch 584–85, 589). And see how he rouses himself to lust, as though under heavenly tutelage:

And what a god! he says. One who shakes the temples of heaven with his mighty thunder. And I, a mere mortal, should not do the same? Indeed I did it, and gladly (Terence, The Eunuch 590–91).

It is not at all the case that these words are learned more conveniently through such filth; rather, through these words that filth is committed more boldly. I do not accuse the words, which are like chosen and precious vessels (See Acts 9:15; Prov 20:15; 1 Pet 2:6), but the wine of error that was poured out for us in them by drunken teachers; and unless we drank it we were beaten, with no leave to appeal to any sober judge. And yet I, my God, in whose sight my remembering is now untroubled, learned these things gladly, and—wretch that I was—took delight in them, and for this I was called a boy of good promise.

27. Allow me, my God, to say something about my own talent, your gift, and on what ravings it was worn away. There was set before me a task quite disturbing to my soul, with the reward of praise and the fear of disgrace or of a beating: to speak the words of Juno, angry and grieving that she could not turn the king of the Teucrians away from Italy (Virgil, Aeneid 1.38)—words I had never heard that Juno said. But we were forced to follow, in our wandering, the tracks of the poets' fictions, and to say in prose something like what the poet had said in verse. And the one won more praise in whom, fittingly to the dignity of the character portrayed, a feeling of anger and grief stood out more lifelike, in words that suitably clothed the thoughts.

What did it profit me, O true life, my God (See John 11:25; 14:6), that my recitation was applauded above many of my own age and fellow students? Is not all that smoke and wind? Was there really nothing else on which my talent and tongue might be exercised? Your praises, Lord, your praises through your Scriptures would have held up the tender shoot of my heart, and it would not have been swept away through the emptiness of trifles, a shameful prey to the birds of the air. For there is more than one way of sacrificing to the rebel angels.

28. But what wonder that I was carried off into vanities in this way, and went outside, away from you, my God, when the men set before me for imitation were such that, if they reported some deed of theirs—not a bad one—with a barbarism or a solecism, they were rebuked and put to shame, but if they recounted their lusts in correct and properly ordered words, richly and ornately (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.4.7), they were praised and gloried in it?

You see these things, Lord, and you keep silent, long-suffering and full of mercy and truth (Ps 103 (102):8; 86 (85):15). Will you keep silent forever? (See Isa 42:14 (LXX)) Even now you draw up out of this monstrous deep the soul that seeks you and thirsts for your delights (See Ps 86 (85):13; 63 (62):1; 42 (41):2), the soul whose heart says to you, I have sought your face; your face, Lord, will I seek (Ps 27 (26):8)—for I was far from your face in a darkened love.

For it is not on foot, or through distances of place, that one goes from you or returns to you. That younger son of yours (See Luke 15:11–32) did not look for horses or chariots or ships, did not fly off on visible wings or make his journey by the bending of a knee, in order to live in a far country and prodigally squander what you had given him as he set out—you, the kind father, kinder still to him when he came back in need. So it is in lustful love, that is, in darkened love; and that is what it is to be far from your face.

29. See, O Lord God—and patiently, as you do, see—how diligently the sons of men observe the conventions of letters and syllables received from earlier speakers, while they neglect the eternal covenants of everlasting salvation received from you; so that a man who holds or teaches those old conventions of sound, if contrary to grammatical rule he drops the aspirate and says ominem for hominem ("man"), gives more offense to men than if, contrary to your precepts, he hates a man, though he himself is a man.

As if any human enemy could be more harmful to him than the hatred itself by which he is provoked against the man; or as if anyone, by persecuting another, lays him waste more grievously than he lays waste his own heart by his enmity. And surely the knowledge of letters lies no deeper within than the conscience written there (See Rom 2:15)—that he is doing to another what he would not wish to suffer himself (See Tob 4:15; Matt 7:12; Luke 6:31).

How hidden you are, dwelling on high (See Isa 33:5) in silence, O God, alone great, by your tireless law scattering punishing blindnesses over unlawful desires—when a man chasing the fame of eloquence, standing before a human judge with a crowd of men around him, pursuing his enemy with the most monstrous hatred, takes the most vigilant care not to say, by a slip of the tongue, inter omines for inter homines ("among men"), yet takes no care lest, by the fury of his mind, he take a man away from among men.

30. As a boy I lay wretched on the threshold of such ways, and this was the wrestling-ground of that arena, where I feared more to commit a barbarism than I took care, if I did commit one, not to envy those who did not. I say this and confess it to you, my God—the things for which I was praised by those whom to please was then, in my eyes, to live honorably.

For I did not see the whirlpool of filth into which I had been cast away from before your eyes (Ps 31 (30):22). For by then what was more foul than I, when I displeased even people like those, deceiving with countless lies my attendant, my teachers, and my parents—out of love of play, a craving to watch worthless shows, and a restless urge to imitate them?

I would even commit thefts from my parents' larder and table, either at the bidding of gluttony or so that I might have something to give the other boys, who would sell me their play—in which they too of course took equal delight—in exchange. In that play, too, I myself, overcome by an empty craving for preeminence, would often hunt for fraudulent victories.

Yet what did I so refuse to suffer, and ferociously denounce if I caught someone at it, as the very thing I was doing to others? And if I was caught and denounced, I preferred to rage rather than to give way. Is this the innocence of childhood? It is not, Lord, it is not—I beg you, my God.

For these are the very things that, as the greater ages succeed one another, pass over from tutors and teachers, from nuts and little balls and pet sparrows, to prefects and kings, to gold and estates and slaves—exactly these same things—just as greater punishments succeed the cane. It was, then, the symbol of humility in a child's small stature that you approved, our king, when you said, to such belongs the kingdom of heaven (Matt 19:14).

31. And yet, Lord, to you, the most excellent and best founder and ruler of the universe, thanks be to our God (2 Cor 2:14; 8:16; Rev 7:10), even had you willed me to be no more than a boy. For I existed even then, I was alive and had sensation, and I took care for my own well-being—a trace of that most hidden unity from which I came; by an inward sense I guarded the wholeness of my senses, and in my small thoughts about small things I took delight in truth. I did not want to be deceived, my memory was vigorous, I was being furnished with speech, I was soothed by friendship, I shunned pain, abjection, and ignorance.

1. I want to recall my past foulnesses and the carnal corruptions of my soul—not because I love them, but that I may love you, my God. It is for love of your love that I do this, going back over my most wicked ways in the bitterness of my remembering, that you may grow sweet to me—a sweetness that does not deceive, a sweetness happy and secure—and that you may gather me up from the scattering in which I was torn to pieces, while, turned away from you, the One, I wasted myself among the many. For there was a time in my youth when I burned to take my fill of things of hell, and I dared to run wild in a tangle of shadowy loves; my comeliness wasted away, and I rotted (See Dan 10:8) before your eyes, pleasing myself and longing to please the eyes of men (See Ps 79 (78):10; 53 (52):6).

2. And what was it that delighted me but to love and to be loved? But the measure was not kept that runs from mind to mind, the bright boundary of friendship; rather, mists steamed up from the muddy concupiscence of the flesh and from the bubbling spring of puberty, and they clouded and darkened my heart, so that the clear weather of love could not be told apart from the fog of lust. The two of them boiled together in confusion and swept my feeble age over the cliffs of desire and plunged it into a whirlpool of disgraceful deeds. Your wrath had grown strong over me, and I did not know it. I had grown deaf from the clanking of the chain of my mortality, the penalty of my soul's pride; and I went farther from you, and you let me be; and I was tossed about and spilled out and ran to waste and boiled over in my fornications, and you kept silent (See Isa 42:14 (LXX)).

O my joy, so slow in coming! You kept silent then, and I went on, farther and farther from you, into more and more barren seeds of sorrows, in proud dejection and restless weariness.

3. Who could have set my misery in measure, and turned to good use the fleeting beauties of these newest things, and fixed limits to their sweetness, so that the tides of my youth might have spent themselves on the shore of marriage—if calm could not be had in them, content with the end of begetting children, as your law prescribes (See Gen 1:28; 1 Cor 7:2), O Lord, you who shape even the offspring of our mortality, able to lay a gentle hand to soften the thorns shut out from your paradise (See Gen 3:18)? For your omnipotence is not far from us, even when we are far from you.

Or at least I should have paid more watchful heed to the sound of your clouds: Such will have trouble in the flesh; but I would spare you (1 Cor 7:28); and, It is good for a man not to touch a woman (1 Cor 7:1); and, The unmarried man is concerned about the things of the Lord, how to please God; but the married man is concerned about the things of the world, how to please his wife (1 Cor 7:32–33).

These voices, then, I would have heard more watchfully, and, made a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven (Matt 19:12), I would have waited more happily for your embraces.

4. But I boiled over, wretch that I was, following the rush of my own current, having forsaken you; I overstepped all your lawful bounds, and did not escape your scourges—for what mortal does? You were always present, mercifully raging, sprinkling the most bitter disappointments over all my unlawful pleasures, that I might seek a pleasure free of disappointment; and where I might find this, I could find nothing but you, Lord, nothing but you, who fashion pain into a precept (Ps 94 (93):20), and who strike that you may heal, and kill us lest we die away from you (See Deut 32:39; Hos 6:2). Where was I, and how far was I exiled from the delights of your house (See Mic 2:9; Luke 15:13, 17), in that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when the madness of unbridled lust—disgraceful in the sight of men, unlawful by your laws—took up its scepter over me, and I gave it my hands entirely? My family took no care to save me from my fall by marriage; their one care was that I should learn to make the finest speech and to persuade by my words.

5. That year my studies had been interrupted: after I was brought back from Madauros, a neighboring town to which I had already begun to travel for the sake of acquiring literature and oratory, the funds for a longer journey to Carthage were being prepared—more by my father's high spirit than by his means, for he was a citizen of Thagaste of quite slender resources. To whom am I telling this? Not to you, my God; but in your presence I tell it to my own kind, to the human race, however small the portion of it that may chance upon these writings of mine. And to what end? So that I, and whoever reads this, may consider out of what depths we must cry to you (See Ps 130 (129):1). And what is nearer to your ears than a confessing heart and a life lived from faith (See Hab 2:4; Rom 1:17; Gal 3:11; Heb 10:38)?

For who did not then extol with praises that man, my father, because beyond the means of his estate he would lay out whatever was needed even for a son traveling far away for the sake of his studies? For many citizens far wealthier took no such trouble for their children; while all the while that same father took no care what sort of person I was growing into for you, or how chaste I was—provided only that I was cultivated in speech, or rather left uncultivated in your tilling, O God, you who are the one true and good Lord of your field (See Matt 13:24–30), which is my heart.

6. But when, in that sixteenth year, with leisure forced on me by domestic necessity, I began to live with my parents, idle from all school, the brambles of lust shot up over my head, and there was no hand to root them out.

On the contrary, when that father of mine saw me at the baths, now growing toward manhood and clothed in restless adolescence, he was as delighted as if he were already longing for grandchildren, and gladly reported it to my mother—glad in that intoxication in which this world has forgotten you, its Creator, and has loved your creature in place of you (See Rom 1:25), drunk on the invisible wine of a will perverse and bent down toward the depths.

But in my mother's heart you had already begun your temple and the beginning of your holy dwelling (See 1 Cor 3:16–17; 6:19; 2 Cor 6:16; Sir 24:14); while he was as yet only a catechumen, and that but recently. And so she started up in pious trepidation and trembling (See 2 Cor 7:15), and, though I was not yet one of the faithful, she nonetheless feared the twisted ways in which those walk who turn their back to you and not their face (Jer 2:27).

9. Theft, surely, your law punishes, Lord—and so does the law written in the hearts of men (See Rom 2:14–15; Exod 20:15; Lev 19:11; Deut 5:19), which not even iniquity itself blots out; for what thief tolerates another thief with composure? Not even a rich one tolerates a thief driven by want. And I chose to commit theft, and did so, compelled by no need unless it were a poverty of justice and a disgust for it, and a glut of iniquity. For I stole something I had in plenty, and far better; nor did I want to enjoy the thing I sought by stealing, but the theft itself and the sin.

There was a pear tree near our vineyard, loaded with fruit that was tempting in neither look nor taste. To shake it down and carry off its fruit, a band of us worthless youths set out late at night—having prolonged our games out of doors, as our pestilent custom was—and we took huge loads from it, not for our own eating, but rather to throw to the pigs; and even if we ate some of it, what we relished was the doing of what was not allowed.

Behold my heart, O God, behold my heart, on which you had mercy in the depths of the abyss. Let my heart now tell you what it was looking for there, that I should be gratuitously evil, with no cause for my malice but malice itself.

It was foul, and I loved it; I loved my own undoing, I loved my falling away—not the thing toward which I was falling, but my falling away itself I loved—a base soul, leaping away from your firm support into ruin (Jdt 4:10; Sir 39:36), seeking nothing through the disgrace but the disgrace itself.

10. Indeed there is beauty in lovely bodies, and in gold and silver and all such things; in the touch of flesh a fitting harmony counts for much; and each of the other senses has its own suited adaptation of bodily things. Temporal honor too, and the power to command and to prevail, have their own splendor, from which also arises the craving for revenge; and yet, in pursuing all these, we must not depart from you, Lord, nor stray from your law. The life, too, that we live here has its own allurement, because of a certain measure of comeliness of its own and its fittingness with all these lowest beauties.

Human friendship, too, is sweet, with its dear bond, because of the unity it makes out of many souls. On account of all these things and their like, sin is committed, when through an immoderate inclination toward these—which are the lowest goods—the better and highest goods are forsaken: you, O Lord our God, and your truth and your law (See Ps 119 (118):42). For these lowest things do have their delights, but not like my God, who made all things; for in him the just man delights, and he is the delight of the upright in heart (See Ps 64 (63):10).

11. And so, when it is asked about a crime why it was done, it is not usually believed unless it appears that there could have been a desire of attaining one of those goods we called the lowest, or a fear of losing it.

For they are beautiful and comely, although, set beside the higher and beatifying goods, they are abject and lowly.

A man has committed murder. Why did he do it? He loved the man's wife, or his estate; or he wanted to rob him for a living; or he was afraid of losing some such thing to him; or, having been injured, he burned to avenge himself. Would he commit murder with no cause, taking delight in the murder itself? Who would believe it?

For even of that senseless and exceedingly cruel man of whom it was said that he was evil and cruel gratuitously, a cause was nonetheless given beforehand: lest, he says, through idleness his hand or his mind should grow sluggish (Sallust, Catiline 16.3).

Ask that too: why so? So that, of course, by that exercise in crime, once the city was seized, he might attain honors, commands, and riches, and be free from the fear of the laws and from the difficulties he faced through the poverty of his estate and the consciousness of his crimes (See Sallust, Catiline 5.5).

So not even Catiline himself loved his own crimes, but surely something else, for the sake of which he was doing them.

12. What was it that I, wretched, loved in you, O theft of mine, O that nocturnal deed of mine in the sixteenth year of my age? For you were not beautiful, since you were a theft. Or are you anything at all, that I should speak to you?

Beautiful were the pears we stole, since they were your creation, O most beautiful of all, Creator of all, O good God (See 2 Macc 1:24; Ambrose, hymn), God the highest good and my true good; beautiful were those pears, but it was not them that my wretched soul desired. For I had an abundance of better ones, and these I plucked only that I might steal. For once plucked I threw them away, having feasted there on iniquity alone, in which I rejoiced and took my pleasure. For even if some of those pears entered my mouth, what gave it savor was the crime.

And now, O Lord my God, I ask what it was that delighted me in the theft; and behold, it has no beauty—not such as is in justice and prudence, nor such as is in the mind of man, and in memory and the senses and the life that gives growth; nor such as the stars are, beautiful and lovely in their places, or the earth and sea, full of offspring that succeed by being born to those that pass away; not even such as is in some defective and shadowy beauty of the deceiving vices.

13. For pride too imitates loftiness, while you are the one God most high above all things (Job 36:22; Ps 78 (77):35).

And what does ambition seek but honors and glory, while you are to be honored above all, the one who alone is glorious forever?

And the cruelty of the powerful wishes to be feared: but who is to be feared except the one God? From his power what can be snatched away or withdrawn—when, or where, or whither, or by whom?

And the caresses of the wanton wish to be loved: but nothing is more caressing than your love, nor is anything loved more wholesomely than your truth, beautiful and shining above all things.

And curiosity seems to court a zeal for knowledge, while you supremely know all things. Ignorance, too, and folly themselves are cloaked under the name of simplicity and innocence, because nothing is found simpler than you. And what is more innocent than you, since it is their own deeds that are the enemies of the wicked?

And sloth seems to long for rest: but what sure rest is there besides the Lord?

Self-indulgence likes to be called fullness and abundance: but you are fullness and the unfailing store of an incorruptible sweetness.

Prodigality casts the shadow of generosity: but you are the most lavish giver of all good things.

Avarice wants to possess much: and you possess all things.

Envy quarrels over excellence: what is more excellent than you?

Anger seeks revenge: who takes revenge more justly than you?

Fear shudders at the unaccustomed and the sudden—at things that threaten what is loved—as it takes precautions for its security: but to you what is unaccustomed? What is sudden? Or who separates from you what you love? Or where is there firm security except with you?

Sadness wastes away over things lost in which desire took its delight, because it would wish nothing to be taken from it, just as nothing can be taken from you.

14. So the soul commits fornication when it is turned away from you and seeks outside you the things it does not find pure and clear until it returns to you. All who put themselves far from you and lift themselves up against you imitate you perversely. But even by thus imitating you they show that you are the Creator of all nature, and that there is therefore nowhere one may withdraw from you altogether.

What, then, did I love in that theft, and in what did I imitate my Lord, even if only in a faulty and perverse way? Did it please me to act against the law, at least by deceit, since I could not by power—so that, a captive, I might mimic a maimed liberty by doing with impunity what was not allowed, a shadowy likeness of omnipotence? See, here is that servant fleeing his master and chasing a shadow (See Job 7:2). O rottenness, O monstrousness of life and abyss of death! Could what was not allowed be pleasing for no other reason than that it was not allowed?

15. What shall I render to the Lord (Ps 116 (115):12), that my memory recalls these things and my soul is not afraid of it? I will love you, Lord, and give you thanks, and confess to your name (See Ps 54 (53):6), because you have forgiven me such great evils and wicked deeds. To your grace I ascribe it, and to your mercy, that you have melted my sins away like ice (See Sir 3:15). To your grace I ascribe also whatever evils I did not do; for what was I not capable of doing, I who loved even a gratuitous crime? And I confess that all have been forgiven me—both the evils I did of my own accord and those that, with you for my guide, I did not do.

Who is there among men who, considering his own weakness, dares to credit his chastity and innocence to his own powers, so as to love you the less, as though he had had less need of your mercy, by which you forgive the sins of those who turn to you (See Ps 51 (50):13)?

For let anyone who, called by you, has followed your voice and shunned the things he reads here as I recall and confess them of myself—let him not laugh at me for being healed, when sick, by the same physician through whose help it was granted to him not to fall sick, or rather to fall less sick; and for that reason let him love you just as much, indeed all the more, because through the one by whom he sees me delivered from such great languors of sin, he sees himself never entangled in such great languors of sin.

16. What fruit did I, wretched, once have in those things (Rom 6:21) that I now blush to recall—above all in that theft, in which I loved the theft itself and nothing else, though it too was nothing, and I the more wretched for it? And yet, alone, I would not have done it (such is my memory of my mind at the time)—alone I would by no means have done it. So there I loved also the fellowship of those with whom I did it. Then did I love nothing other than the theft? Yes, truly, nothing other—for that fellowship too is nothing.

What is the truth of it? Who will teach me, but the one who enlightens my heart (See Sir 2:10) and discerns its shadows? What is it that has come into my mind to ask and discuss and consider? For if I had at that time loved the pears I stole and desired to enjoy them, I could even alone have committed that iniquity—had it been enough—to arrive at my pleasure, and I would not have needed to inflame the itch of my desire by the rubbing together of guilty minds. But since the pleasure for me was not in those pears, it was in the crime itself, which the fellowship of fellow sinners produced.

17. What was that feeling of the soul? Surely it was utterly base, and woe to me (See Job 10:15) who had it. But still, what was it? Who understands his transgressions? (Ps 19 (18):12) It was a laughter, as though the heart were tickled, that we were deceiving those who did not think we were doing these things and who vehemently did not want us to. Why, then, did it delight me that I did not do it alone? Is it because no one easily laughs alone? No one easily, indeed; yet all the same, laughter sometimes overcomes even men alone and by themselves, when no one else is present, if something exceedingly ridiculous meets their senses or their mind.

But that deed I would not have done alone—I would not have done it at all alone. Behold, before you, my God, is the living memory of my soul. Alone I would not have committed that theft, in which what pleased me was not what I stole but the fact that I stole; and to do it alone would have given me no pleasure at all, nor would I have done it.

O friendship too unfriendly, unfathomable seduction of the mind, greed to do harm out of sport and jest, an appetite for another's loss with no desire of gain for myself and no lust for revenge—but when it is said, "Let's go, let's do it," one is ashamed not to be shameless.

18. Who can unravel this most twisted and tangled knot? It is foul; I do not want to look at it, I do not want to see it. I want you, O justice and innocence, beautiful and comely to honorable eyes, and a satisfaction that never sates. With you there is rest indeed, and a life that cannot be troubled. Whoever enters into you enters into the joy of his Lord (Matt 25:21), and will not fear, and will be most well in the Best. I flowed away from you and went astray (Ps 119 (118):176), my God, too far wandering from your stability in my youth, and I became to myself a land of want (See Luke 15:14).

1. I came to Carthage, and a cauldron of shameful loves crackled all about me. I was not yet in love, but I was in love with loving, and out of a more hidden want I hated myself for wanting too little.

I sought what I might love, in love with loving; and I hated safety and a path without snares (See Wis 14:11), for within me there was a hunger from the inner food, you yourself, my God—and by that hunger I was not hungry, but was without any desire for incorruptible nourishment: not because I was full of it, but the emptier I was, the more I loathed it.

And for that reason my soul was not in good health, and, covered with sores, it flung itself outward, miserably eager to be scratched by the touch of sensible things. Yet if these had no soul, they would surely not be loved. To love and to be loved was the sweeter to me if I might also enjoy the body of the one who loved me. So I fouled the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, and I clouded its brightness with the hell of lust; and yet, foul and dishonorable as I was, in my overflowing vanity I was eager to be thought elegant and urbane.

I rushed headlong into the love by which I longed to be caught. My God, my mercy (Ps 59 (58):17), with how much gall, in your goodness, you sprinkled that sweetness for me! For I was loved, and I came secretly to the bond of enjoyment, and I was joyfully bound with troublesome bonds, only to be beaten afterward with the burning iron rods (See Ps 2:9; 78 (77):5) of jealousy and suspicions and fears and angers and quarrels (See Gal 5:20).

2. Theatrical shows carried me away, full of images of my own miseries and of tinder for my fire.

Why is it that a man wants to grieve there, watching mournful and tragic things that he himself would not want to suffer? And yet the spectator does want to feel grief from them, and that very grief is his pleasure.

What is this but a pitiable madness? For the more a man is moved by such things, the less healthy he is from such feelings—though when he suffers them himself it is usually called misery, and when he suffers them with others, compassion.

But what sort of compassion, after all, is there in things feigned and staged? For the listener is not called on to help, but only invited to grieve; and he favors the author of those images the more, the more he grieves. And if those calamities of men—whether ancient or false—are so acted that the spectator does not grieve, he goes away disgusted and faultfinding; but if he grieves, he stays intent and weeps with joy.

3. So tears and sorrows are loved. Surely every man wants to rejoice. Or is it that, while no one likes to be miserable, one does like to be compassionate—and since this cannot be without grief, is it for this one reason alone that sorrows are loved?

This too is from that spring of friendship. But where does it go? Where does it flow? Why does it run down into a torrent of boiling pitch, the monstrous surges of foul lusts, into which it is itself changed and turned, by its own choice twisted away and cast down from heavenly serenity?

Is compassion, then, to be rejected? By no means. So let sorrows sometimes be loved. But beware uncleanness, O my soul, under the guardianship of my God, the God of our fathers, to be praised and exalted above all forever (See Dan 3:52–55)—beware uncleanness.

For even now I do not fail to feel compassion; but then, in the theaters, I rejoiced with lovers when they wickedly enjoyed one another, although they were doing this only in the make-believe of a show; and when they lost one another, I grew sad, as if in compassion; and yet in both I took delight.

But now I have more pity for one who rejoices in wickedness than for one who suffers, as it were, hard usage by the loss of some ruinous pleasure or the forfeit of a wretched happiness. This, surely, is the truer compassion; but in it grief gives no delight.

For although one who grieves for the wretched is approved for the office of love, still anyone who is genuinely compassionate would prefer that there be nothing to grieve over.

For if there were a malevolent benevolence—which cannot be—then one who truly and sincerely felt compassion could wish that there be wretched people, so that he might pity them.

Some sorrow, therefore, may be approved; none is to be loved. For this is how you, O Lord God, who love souls, feel compassion—far more purely and incorruptibly than we, since you are wounded by no sorrow. And who is sufficient for these things? (2 Cor 2:16)

4. But I then, wretch that I was, loved to grieve, and I sought something to grieve over, when, in another's misery—a feigned and theatrical misery—the actor's performance pleased me the more and drew me the more strongly, the more it wrung tears from me. What wonder that I, an unhappy sheep (See Virgil, Eclogues 3.3) straying from your flock (See Matt 18:12; Luke 15:4; Ps 119 (118):176; 1 Pet 2:25) and impatient of your keeping, was disfigured by a foul mange (See Lev 22:22)?

And from this came my loves of sorrows—not such as would pierce me deeply (for I did not love to suffer such things as I loved to watch), but such as, heard and feigned, would scratch me as on the surface; yet, like the nails of those who scratch, a burning swelling and corruption and horrid pus followed after. Such was my life—was it any life at all, my God?

5. And your faithful mercy hovered over me from afar. Into what great iniquities did I waste away! I followed a sacrilegious curiosity, so that, deserting you, it might bring me down to the treacherous depths and the beguiling services of demons, to whom I sacrificed (See Deut 32:17; 1 Cor 10:20) my evil deeds; and in all of it you scourged me (See Ps 73 (72):14)!

I even dared, amid the celebration of your solemnities, within the walls of your church, to lust and to set about the business of procuring the fruits of death (See Rom 7:5); for which you struck me with grave punishments, though nothing compared to my guilt, O you my exceedingly great mercy, my God, my refuge (Ps 59 (58):18; 144 (143):2) from the terrible powers that do harm, among whom I wandered with stiff neck, withdrawing far from you, loving my own ways and not yours, loving a fugitive liberty.

7. Among such men, at that feeble age, I was learning books of eloquence, in which I longed to excel for a damnable and windy end, in the joys of human vanity; and following the usual order of study, I had come to a book of a certain Cicero, whose tongue nearly everyone admires, though not so his heart. But that book of his contains an exhortation to philosophy, and is called the Hortensius.

That book, indeed, changed my affections, and changed my prayers to you yourself, Lord, and made my vows and desires other than they had been. Suddenly every empty hope grew worthless to me, and with an incredible burning of heart I longed for the immortality of wisdom, and I began to rise up that I might return to you (See Luke 15:18–20).

For it was not to sharpen my tongue—which is what I seemed to be buying with my mother's payments, since I was in my nineteenth year, my father having died two years before—it was not, then, to sharpen my tongue that I applied that book; it had won me over not by its manner of speaking, but by what it said.

8. How I burned, my God, how I burned to fly back from earthly things to you, and I did not know what you were doing with me! For with you is wisdom (Job 12:13, 16). But the love of wisdom has the Greek name "philosophy," with which those writings set me on fire. There are some who seduce by way of philosophy, coloring and rouging their errors with a great and flattering and honorable name; and nearly all who in those times and before were of that sort are marked and pointed out in that book; and there is made plain that saving warning of your Spirit through your good and devout servant: See that no one deceives you through philosophy and empty seduction, according to the tradition of men, according to the elements of this world, and not according to Christ; for in him dwells all the fullness of the godhead bodily (Col 2:8–9).

And I at that time—you know (Tob 3:16; 8:9; Ps 69 (68):5; John 21:15–16), light of my heart—since these apostolic words were not yet known to me, took delight in that exhortation on this account alone: that it stirred me, kindled me, and set me ablaze to love and seek and attain and hold and embrace with all my strength not this or that sect, but wisdom itself, whatever it might be. And one thing only checked me in so great a blaze—that the name of Christ was not there. For this name, according to your mercy, Lord (Ps 25 (24):7), this name of my Savior, your Son, my tender heart had devoutly drunk in with my mother's very milk and held deep within; and whatever lacked this name, however learned and polished and truthful, could not wholly carry me away.

9. And so I resolved to turn my attention to the holy Scriptures and to see what they were like. And behold, I see a thing not grasped by the proud, nor laid bare to children (See Jas 4:6; 1 Pet 5:5), but lowly in its gait, lofty in its advance, and veiled in mysteries; and I was not such as could enter into it or bend my neck to its steps.

For I did not feel, when I turned my attention to that Scripture, as I now speak; rather, it seemed to me unworthy to be compared with the dignity of Cicero. For my swelling pride recoiled from its manner, and my sharp gaze did not penetrate its inner parts (See Prov 7:27). Yet it was the kind of thing that grows up with little ones; but I disdained to be a little one (See Matt 18:3), and, puffed up with pride, I seemed to myself a grown man.

10. And so I fell in among men proudly raving, exceedingly carnal and wordy, in whose mouths were the snares of the devil (See 1 Tim 3:7; 6:9; 2 Tim 2:26) and a birdlime compounded by mixing together the syllables of your name, and of the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Paraclete, our comforter, the Holy Spirit (See John 14:26). These names did not leave their mouths (See Josh 1:8), but only as far as the sound and the rattle of the tongue; for the rest, their heart was empty of truth.

And they kept saying, "Truth, truth," and said it to me often, and nowhere was it in them; rather, they spoke falsehoods—not only about you, who truly are Truth (See John 14:6; Col 2:8), but even about these elements of this world, your creation, concerning which I ought to have passed beyond even the philosophers who spoke true things, for love of you, my Father, supremely good, beauty of all things beautiful.

O Truth, Truth, how inwardly even then did the very marrow of my mind sigh for you, while they sounded your name to me often and in manifold ways, with the voice alone and in many huge books! And these were the dishes on which, while I hungered for you, they served me, in your place, the sun and the moon—your beautiful works, but works of yours all the same, not you yourself, nor even your first works. For your spiritual works come before these bodily ones, however shining and heavenly.

But I hungered and thirsted (See Matt 5:6; 1 Cor 4:11) not even for those prior works, but for you yourself, O Truth, in whom there is no change, nor shadow of alteration (Jas 1:17). And still they set before me, on those dishes, splendid phantasms—better than which it would have been to love this very sun, at least real to these eyes, than those false things that deceived the mind through the eyes.

And yet, because I supposed them to be you, I ate—not greedily, indeed, for you did not taste in my mouth as you are (nor were you those empty figments), nor was I nourished by them, but rather drained the more. Food in dreams is exactly like the food of waking men, yet sleepers are not nourished by it: for they are asleep.

But those things were in no way like you, as you have now spoken to me, because they were bodily phantasms, false bodies; more certain than these are the real bodies that we see with the eye of the flesh, whether heavenly or earthly. We see these along with the beasts and the birds, and they are more certain than when we imagine them.

And again, we imagine them more certainly than, from them, we conjecture other things greater and infinite, which have no existence at all. On such empty things was I then fed, and was not fed.

But you, my love, for whom I faint (See Ps 119 (118):81) that I may be strong (See 2 Cor 12:10), are neither those bodies that we see, though in heaven, nor those that we do not see there, because you founded them and do not hold them among your highest works. How far, then, are you from those phantasms of mine, the phantasms of bodies that do not exist at all!

More certain than these are the images of those bodies that do exist; and more certain than the images are the bodies themselves, which, even so, you are not. Nor are you the soul, which is the life of bodies (and so the life of bodies is better and more certain than the bodies); but you are the life of souls, the life of lives, living of your own self, and you do not change (See Mal 3:6), O life of my soul (See Prov 3:22).

11. Where, then, were you to me at that time, and how far away? Far indeed was I wandering, an exile from you, and barred even from the husks of the pigs that I fed with husks (See Luke 15:16). For how much better were the fables of the grammarians and poets than those traps!

For verse and song, and "Medea flying," (See Pacuvius, frag. 397) are surely more useful than the five elements, disguised in various ways on account of the five caves of darkness—which have no existence at all and slay the one who believes in them.

For verse and song I can even turn to real nourishment; but as for "Medea flying," though I would chant it, I did not assert it, and though I heard it chanted, I did not believe it. But those other things I did believe. Woe, woe!

By what steps was I led down into the depths of hell (See Prov 9:18), toiling and seething for want of truth—since I sought you, my God (for to you I confess, who had mercy on me even when I did not yet confess), I sought you not according to the understanding of the mind, by which you willed me to surpass the beasts, but according to the sense of the flesh! But you were more inward than my inmost self, and higher than my highest.

I had stumbled upon that bold woman, devoid of prudence, the riddle of Solomon, sitting on a stool at the door and saying, Eat hidden bread gladly, and drink sweet stolen water (Prov 9:17). She seduced me, because she found me dwelling abroad in the eye of my flesh and chewing over within myself such things as I had devoured through it.

12. For I did not know that other reality, which truly is, and I was as if shrewdly moved to side with those foolish deceivers when they asked me where evil comes from, and whether God is bounded by a bodily form and has hair and nails, and whether those were to be reckoned righteous who had many wives at once, and killed men, and offered sacrifices of animals.

Ignorant of these matters, I was troubled, and, withdrawing from the truth, I seemed to myself to be going toward it, because I did not yet know that evil is nothing but the privation of good, down to that which is not at all. How was I to see this, whose seeing reached, with the eyes, only as far as body, and, with the mind, only as far as a phantasm?

And I did not know that God is a spirit (See John 4:24), who has no members extended in length and breadth, and whose being is not a mass; for a mass is less in a part than in its whole, and even if it be infinite, it is less in any part bounded by a fixed space than throughout the infinite, and is not wholly everywhere, as a spirit is, as God is.

And what it was in us according to which we are, and are rightly said in Scripture to be in the image of God (Gen 1:27), I was utterly ignorant.

13. And I did not know the true inner justice, which judges not from custom but from the most upright law of God almighty—the law by which the morals of regions and days were shaped to suit those regions and days, while the law itself was everywhere and always the same, not one thing in one place and another elsewhere, nor one thing at one time and otherwise at another;

according to which Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses and David, and all those praised by the mouth of God, were righteous—though they are judged unrighteous by the ignorant, who judge by a human day (1 Cor 4:3) and measure all the morals of the human race by the standard of their own.

It is as if someone ignorant of armor, of what is fitted to which limb, should want the head covered with a greave and the foot shod with a helmet, and then grumble that they do not fit well;

or as if, on a single day when a court recess has been declared from the afternoon hours, someone should be annoyed that he is not allowed to put goods up for sale, because it was allowed in the morning;

or as if, in one house, he should see something handled by one servant which the one who serves the cups is not permitted to do, or something done behind the stalls which is forbidden before the table, and should be indignant that, though it is one dwelling and one household, the same thing is not granted everywhere and to everyone.

Such are those who are indignant when they hear that something was permitted to the righteous in that earlier age which is not permitted to the righteous in this one, and that God commanded one thing to those and another to these for reasons belonging to the times, although both served the same justice;

while in one man, and in one day, and in one house, they see that one thing suits one limb and another another, that what was allowed a while ago is not allowed after an hour, and that something is permitted or commanded in that corner which is forbidden and punished in the one next to it.

Is justice, then, variable and changeable (See Virgil, Aeneid 4.569)? No—but the times over which it presides do not run all alike; for they are times. But men, whose life on earth is short (See Wis 15:9; Job 14:1, 5), because they cannot by their senses connect the causes of earlier ages and of other nations, which they have not experienced, with those they have experienced—while in one body, or day, or house they can easily see what suits which limb, which moment, which parts or persons—take offense at the former, but submit to the latter.

14. These things I then did not know, and did not notice, and they struck my eyes on every side, and I did not see.

I would sing songs, and I was not allowed to place just any foot anywhere, but in one meter one way and in another differently, and even in some single verse not the same foot in every place; and the very art by which I sang did not have one rule in one place and another elsewhere, but all its rules together at once.

And I did not perceive that the justice which good and holy men served held, far more excellently and sublimely, all that it prescribes together at once, and is in no part varied, and yet, at various times, did not distribute everything at once, but apportioned and prescribed what was proper to each.

And, blind, I blamed the devout fathers, not only for using present things as God commanded and inspired, but also for foretelling things to come as God revealed them.

15. Is it ever, or anywhere, unjust to love God with the whole heart and with the whole soul and with the whole mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:30, 33; Matt 22:37, 39; Luke 10:27)? Therefore disgraceful deeds that are against nature are everywhere and always to be detested and punished, such as those of the men of Sodom were. Even if all nations should do them, they would be held guilty of the same crime by the divine law, which did not make men so as to use one another in that way. For the very fellowship that ought to be between us and God is violated when that same nature, of which he is the author, is polluted by the perversity of lust.

But deeds that are disgraceful against the customs of men are to be avoided according to the diversity of customs, so that an agreement established among themselves by a city or nation, whether by custom or by law, may not be violated by the lust of any citizen or stranger. For any part that does not harmonize with its whole is base.

But when God commands something against the custom or compact of any people, even if it has never been done there, it must be done; and if it was neglected, it must be restored; and if it had not been established, it must be established.

For if a king is permitted, in the city over which he reigns, to command something that neither anyone before him nor he himself had ever commanded, and obeying him is not against the fellowship of his city—indeed, not to obey him is against that fellowship (for it is a general compact of human society to obey one's kings)—how much more must God, the Ruler of all his creation, be served without hesitation in whatever he commands! For just as among the powers of human society the greater power is set above the lesser to be obeyed, so is God above all.

16. Likewise in crimes, where there is a lust to do harm, whether by insult or by injury, and either of these for the sake of revenge, as an enemy against an enemy;

or to obtain some advantage outside oneself, as a robber against a traveler; or to avoid an evil, as against one who is feared;

or out of envy, as a more wretched man against a happier one, or one prosperous in some respect against one whom he fears to be made his equal, or grieves to be already his equal;

or for the sole pleasure of another's harm, as the spectators of gladiators, or the mockers and scoffers of anyone at all.

These are the chief kinds of iniquity, which sprout from the lust of domineering, of looking, and of sensual feeling (See 1 John 2:16)—from one, or two of them, or all together; and men live evilly against the three and the seven, the psaltery of ten strings (See Ps 33 (32):2; 144 (143):9), your Decalogue, O God most high (See Ps 9:2; 92 (91):1) and most sweet.

But what disgraceful deeds can there be against you, who cannot be corrupted? Or what crimes against you, who cannot be harmed? But you avenge what men perpetrate against themselves, because even when they sin against you, they act impiously against their own souls, and their iniquity lies to itself (See Ps 27 (26):12)—whether by corrupting and perverting their nature, which you made and ordered, or by using immoderately things allowed, or by blazing after things not allowed, in that use which is against nature (Rom 1:26);

or they are held guilty when they rage in mind and word against you, and kick against the goad (See Acts 9:5; 26:14); or when, the bounds of human society broken, they take bold delight in private leagues or feuds, according as anything has pleased or offended them. And these things are done when you are forsaken, O fountain of life (See Jer 2:13), the one and true Creator and ruler of the universe, and when, by private pride, a single false thing is loved in a part.

And so, by humble devotion we return to you, and you cleanse us from evil custom, and are merciful to the sins (See Ps 78 (77):38) of those who confess, and you hear the groaning of the prisoners (Ps 102 (101):20) and loose us from the bonds we have made for ourselves—if only we no longer lift up against you the horns (See Ps 75 (74):4–5) of a false liberty, through avarice to have more and the risk of losing all, by loving our own private good more than you, the good of all.

17. But amid disgraceful deeds and crimes and so many iniquities, there are the sins of those making progress, which, by those who judge well, are both blamed by the rule of perfection and praised in the hope of harvest, like the blade of standing grain.

And there are some things like a disgraceful deed or a crime, and yet they are not sins, because they offend neither you, our Lord God, nor the social fellowship—as when something is procured for the use of life, suited to the time (though it is uncertain whether out of a lust for having), or is punished out of zeal to correct, by an ordered authority (and it is uncertain whether out of a lust to do harm).

Many deeds, therefore, that would seem to men to deserve disapproval are approved by your testimony, and many praised by men are condemned with you as witness—since often the appearance of a deed is one thing, and the mind of the doer and the hidden articulation of the moment are another.

But when you suddenly command something unusual and unforeseen, even if you once forbade it, though for the time you conceal the reason for your command, and though it be against the compact of some men's society—who can doubt that it must be done, since that society of men is just which serves you? But blessed are those who know that you have commanded it. For all things are done by those who serve you either to display what the present need requires, or to foretell things to come.

18. Not knowing these things, I mocked those holy servants and prophets of yours. And what was I doing in mocking them, but earning your mockery of me, as little by little I was led on to such trifles that I believed a fig wept when it was plucked, and its mother, the tree, with milky tears?

Yet if some holy one—by another's crime, of course, not his own—should eat that fig once it was plucked, he would mingle it with his vitals and breathe out from it angels; indeed, he would belch out particles of God by groaning in prayer—particles of the most high and true God which would have stayed bound in that fruit, had they not been released by the tooth and belly of an "elect" holy one.

And I, wretched, believed that more mercy was owed (See Rom 9:15) to the fruits of the earth than to the human beings for whose sake they are born. For if anyone hungry, who was not a Manichee, were to ask for a morsel, it seemed the mouthful deserved to be condemned, as it were, to capital punishment, if it were given to him.

19. And you sent your hand from on high (See Ps 144 (143):7), and you drew my soul (Ps 86 (85):13) out of this deep darkness, when my mother, your faithful one, wept for me to you more than mothers weep over bodily deaths. For by the faith and the spirit (See Gal 5:5) that she had from you, she saw my death; and you heard her, Lord. You heard her, and did not despise her tears, when, streaming down, they watered the ground beneath her eyes in every place of her prayer: you heard her.

For whence came that dream by which you consoled her, so that she agreed to live with me and to share the same table in the house?—which she had begun to refuse, turning away from and detesting the blasphemies of my error.

For she saw herself standing on a certain wooden rule, and a radiant youth coming to her, cheerful and smiling upon her, while she was mournful and worn down with grief (See Lam 1:13). When he asked her the reasons for her sadness and her daily tears—asking, as is the way, to teach, not to learn—and she answered that she was lamenting my perdition, he bade her be at ease, and advised her to look and see (See Lam 1:12) that where she was, there was I also. And when she looked, she saw me standing beside her on the same rule.

Whence came this, except that your ears were turned to her heart (See Ps 10:17 (9:38)), O you good and almighty one, who so care for each one of us as though you cared for him alone, and so for all as for each?

20. And whence also came this: that when she had told me the vision, and I tried to twist it to mean that she rather should not despair of one day being what I was, she said at once, without any hesitation, "No—for it was not said to me, 'Where he is, there shall you be also,' but, 'Where you are, there shall he be also.'" I confess to you, Lord, my remembrance—so far as I recall it, and I have often spoken of it—that I was more moved by that answer of yours, given through my watchful mother (who was not troubled by the falsity of so plausible an interpretation, and so quickly saw what was to be seen, which I certainly had not seen before she said it), than by the dream itself, by which the joy of that devout woman, to come so long afterward, was foretold so long before for the consolation of her present anxiety.

For nearly nine years followed, in which I wallowed in the deep mire (Ps 69 (68):2) and the darkness of falsehood, often trying to rise but being dashed down the harder; while all the while that chaste, devout, and sober widow (See Titus 2:5)—such as you love—now indeed more cheerful in hope, but no less unflagging in weeping and groaning, did not cease at every hour of her prayers to lament over me to you; and her prayers entered into your presence (Ps 88 (87):2), and yet you still let me go on being rolled and wrapped about in that darkness.

21. And meanwhile you gave another answer, which I recall. For I pass over many things, because I hasten to those that more press me to confess to you, and many I do not remember. You gave, then, another answer through your priest, a certain bishop nourished in the Church and well exercised in your books.

When that woman begged him to deign to talk with me, and to refute my errors and unteach me evil and teach me good (for he used to do this, when he chanced to find people fit for it), he refused—wisely indeed, as I afterward understood. For he answered that I was as yet unteachable, because I was puffed up with the novelty of that heresy and had already unsettled many untrained people with some petty little questions, as she had told him. "But," he said, "let him be where he is. Only pray to the Lord for him; he will himself, by reading, discover what that error is and how great its impiety."

At the same time he told her that he too, as a small boy, had been handed over by his seduced mother to the Manichees, and had not only read but even copied out almost all their books; and it had become clear to him, with no one arguing against him or convincing him, how greatly that sect was to be fled: and so he had fled it.

When he had said this, and she would not be content, but pressed the more with entreaties and abundant tears, that he would see me and discuss things with me, he, now a little vexed with weariness, said, "Go away from me; as you live, it cannot be that the son of these tears should perish." Which words she often recalled, in her conversations with me, that she had taken as though they had sounded from heaven.

1. Through that same span of nine years, from my nineteenth year of age to my twenty-eighth, we were seduced and we seduced others, deceived and deceiving, amid various desires—openly through the teachings they call liberal, and secretly under the false name of religion: here proud, there superstitious, everywhere vain. On the one side pursuing the emptiness of popular glory, even to the applause of the theaters and contests in verse and the struggle for crowns of straw and the follies of the shows and the intemperance of lusts; on the other side seeking to be cleansed of these defilements by carrying food to those who were called the "elect" and "holy," from which, in the workshop of their belly, they might fashion for us angels and gods, through whom we should be set free. And these things I pursued and did, together with my friends, deceived through me and with me.

Let the arrogant laugh at me, those not yet wholesomely struck down and broken by you, my God; but let me confess to you my disgraces to your praise (Ps 106 (105):47). Allow me, I beg, and grant me to range, with present memory, over the past windings of my error, and to offer you a sacrifice of jubilation (Ps 27 (26):6). For what am I to myself without you, but a guide over a precipice? Or what am I, when all is well with me, but one suckling your milk (See Deut 33:19; Isa 60:16), or enjoying you, the food that does not perish (See John 6:27)? And what is any man, any man at all, seeing that he is but a man? Let the strong and the mighty laugh at us; but we, the weak and the needy (See Ps 74 (73):21), let us confess to you.

2. In those years I taught the art of rhetoric, and, overcome by greed, I sold a victorious loquacity. Yet I preferred, Lord, you know (Tob 8:9; John 21:15–16), to have good pupils, as they are called good; and without guile I taught them their wiles—not the wiles they would use against the life of the innocent, but sometimes for the life of the guilty.

And, O God, from afar you saw me stumbling on slippery ground, and amid much smoke flickering (See Isa 42:3; Matt 12:20) a spark of the good faith which I showed, in that teaching, to those who loved vanity and sought a lie (Ps 4:2)—I, their companion.

In those years I had one woman, known to me not in what is called lawful marriage, but one whom my wandering ardor, devoid of prudence, had tracked down—yet one only, keeping faith with her bed as well. With her I learned by my own example the difference between the measure of the marriage covenant, made for the sake of begetting, and the bargain of a lustful love, where offspring is born even against one's wish—though, once born, it compels itself to be loved.

3. I recall, too, that when I had decided to enter a contest of theatrical verse, some soothsayer sent to ask me what I would pay him to win; but I, detesting and abhorring those foul rites, answered that not even if the crown were of immortal gold would I allow a fly to be killed for my victory. For he was going to kill living creatures in his sacrifices, and by those honors to invite the demons, as it seemed, to vote for me.

But this evil too I rejected not out of chastity toward you, O God of my heart (Ps 73 (72):26). For I did not know how to love you, I who did not know how to conceive of anything but bodily splendors. And does not a soul, sighing after such figments, commit fornication away from you (Ps 73 (72):27), and trust in falsehoods and feed the winds (Prov 10:4 (LXX))? Yet I would not, of course, have sacrifices offered to demons for me—while by that very superstition I was sacrificing myself to them. For what is it to feed the winds but to feed the demons themselves, that is, by going astray to become their pleasure and their mockery?

4. And so I did not cease openly to consult those impostors whom they call astrologers, on the grounds that they used, as it were, no sacrifice and directed no prayers to any spirit for the sake of divination. Yet true Christian piety consistently rejects and condemns this.

For it is good to confess to you, Lord (Ps 92 (91):1), and to say, Have mercy on me; heal my soul, for I have sinned against you (Ps 41 (40):4), and not to abuse your indulgence as a license to sin, but to remember the Lord's words: Behold, you have been made whole; sin no more, lest something worse befall you (John 5:14). All this wholesome teaching they try to kill when they say, "The cause of your sinning is fixed for you from heaven," and, "Venus did this, or Saturn, or Mars"—so that man, flesh and blood (Matt 16:17; 1 Cor 15:50) and proud rottenness, may be without blame, while the blame falls instead on the Creator and orderer of heaven and the stars. And who is this but our God, the sweetness and source of justice, who will render to each according to his works (Ps 62 (61):12; Matt 16:27; Rom 2:6), and who do not despise a contrite and humbled heart (Ps 51 (50):17)?

5. There was at that time a shrewd man, most skilled in the art of medicine and most renowned in it, who as proconsul had with his own hand placed that contest-crown on my unsound head—but not as a physician. For of that disease the healer is you, who resist the proud, but give grace to the humble (Jas 4:6; 1 Pet 5:5).

And yet, even through that old man, did you fail me, or cease to heal my soul? For when I had become more familiar with him, and clung steadily and fixedly to his conversations (for they were pleasant and weighty, lively in their thoughts though without ornament of words), and he learned from my talk that I was devoted to the books of the horoscope-casters,

he warned me, kindly and as a father, to throw them away, and not to waste on that vanity the care and effort needed for useful things—saying that he himself had so learned that art that in his early years he had wanted to make its profession the means by which he would earn his living; and if he had understood Hippocrates, he could surely have understood those writings too;

and yet, he said, he had afterward abandoned them and taken up medicine for no other reason than that he had found them utterly false, and, being a serious man, was unwilling to seek his living by deceiving people. "But you," he said, "who have rhetoric to support yourself among men, pursue this deception by free choice, not from any need of household means. All the more, then, ought you to believe me about it, who labored to learn it as perfectly as I wished to live by it alone."

When I asked him what, then, was the reason why many true things were foretold from it, he answered, as best he could, that the force of chance, diffused everywhere throughout the nature of things, brought this about.

For if, when someone happens to consult the pages of some poet who is singing and intending something far different, a verse often comes out wonderfully in tune with the matter at hand, it was no wonder, he said, if from the human soul, by some higher instinct not knowing what was happening within it, there should sound—not by art but by chance—something that chimed with the affairs and deeds of the inquirer.

6. And this, indeed, you procured for me from him, or through him, and you sketched in my memory what I should afterward search out for myself. But at that time neither he, nor my dearest Nebridius—a young man very good and very chaste, who mocked that whole kind of divination—could persuade me to throw these things away, since the authority of their authors moved me the more, and I had not yet found any certain proof, such as I sought, by which it might appear to me without ambiguity that the true things said by those consulted were said by luck or chance, and not by the art of inspecting the stars.

7. In those years, when I first began to teach in the town where I was born, I had won a friend, too dear to me through a shared zeal for studies—my own age, and like me in the flower of youth. As a boy he had grown up with me, and we had gone to school together and played together. But he was not yet a friend in this way—nor even then in the way true friendship is—for friendship is not true unless you bind it fast between those who cleave to you by the love poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who is given to us (Rom 5:5).

Yet it was sweet to us, ripened in the fervor of like studies. For I had bent him away from the true faith—which, as a youth, he did not hold genuinely and deeply—toward those superstitious and ruinous fables on account of which my mother wept for me. Already that man was wandering in mind with me, and my soul could not be without him.

And behold, you, pressing close on the back of your fugitives, God of vengeance (Ps 94 (93):1) and fountain of mercies at once, who turn us to yourself in wondrous ways (See Ps 51 (50):15)—behold, you took that man out of this life when he had scarcely completed a year in my friendship, a friendship sweeter to me than all the sweetnesses of that life of mine.

8. Who can recount your praises (See Ps 106 (105):2) for what he has experienced in his own single self? What did you do then, my God, and how unsearchable is the abyss of your judgments (See Ps 36 (35):6; Rom 11:33)?

For when he was struggling with fevers, he lay a long time senseless in a deathly sweat; and when he was despaired of, he was baptized without knowing it—while I cared nothing, presuming that his soul would retain rather what it had received from me than what was done in his unconscious body.

But it was far otherwise. For he recovered and was made well; and at once, as soon as I could speak with him (and I could as soon as he could, since I did not leave his side, and we hung too much on each other), I tried to joke with him, as though he too would join me in mocking the baptism he had received while utterly absent in mind and sense. But he had by now learned that he had received it. And he shuddered at me as at an enemy, and with a wonderful and sudden freedom warned me that, if I wished to be his friend, I should stop saying such things to him.

But I, dumbfounded and disturbed, put off all my feelings until he should first grow strong and be fit in health and vigor, so that I might deal with him as I wished. But he was snatched away from my madness, to be kept safe with you for my consolation: a few days later, in my absence, the fevers returned, and he died.

9. By that grief my heart was darkened (See Lam 5:17), and whatever I looked upon was death. My homeland was a torment to me, and my father's house a strange unhappiness; and whatever I had shared with him had turned, without him, into a monstrous torture. My eyes sought him everywhere, and he was not given to them; and I hated all things, because they did not hold him, nor could they now say to me, "Look, he is coming," as they did when he was alive and absent. I had become a great riddle to myself, and I questioned my soul, why it was sad and why it troubled me so greatly, and it had nothing to answer me. And if I said, "Hope in God," (See Ps 42 (41):5, 11; 43 (42):5) it rightly did not obey, because the man it had lost, most dear, was truer and better than the phantasm in which it was bidden to hope. Weeping alone was sweet to me, and it succeeded my friend in the delights of my soul (Ps 139 (138):11; see Prov 29:17).

10. And now, Lord, those things have passed, and with time my wound has been soothed. May I hear from you, who are the truth (See John 14:6), and put the ear of my heart to your mouth, that you may tell me why weeping is sweet to the wretched? Have you, though present everywhere, cast our misery far from you—do you abide in yourself, while we are tossed about in trials (See Wis 7:27)? And yet, unless we wept into your ears, nothing would remain of our hope.

Whence, then, is the sweet fruit gathered from the bitterness of life—to groan and weep and sigh and complain? Is this what is sweet in it, that we hope you hear us? This is rightly so in prayers, for they have a longing to reach you. But was it so in the grief over a thing lost, and the mourning in which I was then wrapped? For I did not hope he would come back to life, nor did I beg this with my tears; I only grieved and wept. For I was wretched, and I had lost my joy. Or is weeping itself a bitter thing, and does it please us only out of a distaste for the things we once enjoyed, when we now shrink from them?

11. But why do I speak of these things? For now is not the time to ask questions, but to confess to you. I was wretched; and wretched is every soul bound by friendship for mortal things, and torn apart when it loses them, and then it feels the misery by which it is wretched even before it loses them. Such was I at that time, and I wept most bitterly and found rest in bitterness (Job 3:20; 23:2; Isa 38:15).

So wretched was I that I held that wretched life itself dearer than my friend. For though I wished to change it, I would yet have been less willing to lose it than to lose him; and I do not know whether I would even have been willing to lose it for him, as is told—if it is not invented—of Orestes and Pylades, who wished to die for each other, or both together, since for them not to live together was worse than death.

But in me there had arisen some feeling quite contrary to this, and there was in me a most grievous weariness of living and a fear of dying. I believe that the more I loved him, the more I hated and feared, as a most cruel enemy, the death that had taken him from me; and I thought it would suddenly consume all men, since it had been able to take him. Such, I remember, was my whole condition.

Behold my heart, my God, behold within it; see, for I remember, my hope (Ps 71 (70):5), you who cleanse me from the uncleanness of such affections, directing my eyes to you and plucking my feet out of the snare (Ps 25 (24):15).

For I wondered that other mortals lived, since he, whom I had loved as though he would never die, was dead; and I wondered the more that I, who was a second self to him, lived while he was dead. Well did someone say of his friend that he was "the half of his soul" (Cf. Horace, Odes 1.3.8). For I felt that my soul and his soul had been one soul in two bodies; and therefore life was a horror to me, because I did not want to live as a half; and perhaps it was for this that I feared to die—lest he whom I had loved so dearly should wholly die.

12. O madness that knows not how to love human beings as human beings! O foolish man, then bearing the human lot without measure! Such was I then. And so I seethed, I sighed, I wept, I was troubled; there was no rest, no counsel. For I bore about a soul cut to pieces and bloodied, impatient of being borne by me, and I found nowhere to lay it down. Not in pleasant groves, not in games and songs, nor in sweet-smelling places, nor in lavish banquets, nor in the pleasure of couch and bed, nor, finally, in books and poems did it find rest. All things were a horror, even the light itself; and whatever was not what he was, was hateful and odious, except groaning and tears—for in these alone was there a little rest.

But when my soul was drawn away from these, it loaded me with a great burden of misery. To you, Lord, it should have been lifted up (Ps 25 (24):1) to be healed, I knew; but I was neither willing nor able, all the more because, when I thought of you, you were to me nothing solid and firm.

For it was not you, but an empty phantasm, and my own error was my god. If I tried to set my soul down there, to rest, it slipped through the void and fell back again upon me; and I remained to myself an unhappy place, where I could neither stay nor depart. For where could my heart flee from my heart? Where could I flee from myself? Where would I not follow myself?

And yet I fled from my homeland (Cf. Ps 139 (138):7). For my eyes sought him less where they were not used to seeing him; and from the town of Thagaste I came to Carthage.

13. Times are not empty, nor do they roll idly through our senses: they work wondrous works in the mind. Behold, they came and went from day to day (Ps 61 (60):8; 96 (95):2; Sir 5:8; Isa 58:2; 2 Cor 4:16), and by coming and going they sowed in me other hopes and other memories, and little by little they patched me up with former kinds of delights, before which that grief of mine gave way; yet there succeeded it not indeed other griefs, but the causes of other griefs. For whence had that grief penetrated me so easily and so deeply, except that I had poured out my soul upon the sand (A proverbial expression) by loving a man bound to die as though he would not die? What restored and revived me most were the consolations of other friends, with whom I loved what I loved in place of you; and this was a vast fable and a long lie, by whose adulterous rubbing our mind, itching in its ears (Cf. 2 Tim 4:3–4), was corrupted. But that fable did not die in me, if one of my friends died.

There were other things in them that more fully captured my mind: to converse and laugh together and do kindnesses for one another in turn; to read sweet-spoken books together; to jest together and to show one another respect; to disagree at times without ill will, as a man does with himself, and by that rarest of disagreements to season our many agreements;

to teach one another something or learn from one another; to long for the absent with vexation, and to welcome the coming with joy. By these and like signs, proceeding from the heart of those who love and are loved in return, through the mouth, the tongue, the eyes, and a thousand most pleasing gestures, our minds were fused as if by kindling, and out of many were made one.

14. This is what is loved in friends, and so loved that a man's conscience holds itself guilty if he does not love one who loves him, or does not love in return one who loves him, seeking nothing from his body beyond the signs of goodwill.

Hence that mourning if anyone dies, and the darkness of sorrows, and the heart drenched, its sweetness turned to bitterness, and, from the lost life of the dying, the death of the living.

Blessed is he who loves you, and his friend in you, and his enemy for your sake (Cf. Tob 13:18; Matt 5:44; Luke 6:27). For he alone loses no one dear, to whom all are dear in the One who is not lost. And who is this but our God, the God who made heaven and earth (Gen 1:1) and fills them (Cf. Jer 23:24)—for by filling them he made them?

No one loses you, except one who forsakes you; and because he forsakes you, where does he go, or where does he flee (Cf. Ps 139 (138):7), but from you the appeased to you the angered? For where does he not find your law in his own punishment? And your law is truth (Ps 119 (118):142), and you are the Truth (Cf. John 14:6).

15. God of hosts, turn us, and show us your face, and we shall be saved (Ps 80 (79):7). For wherever the soul of man turns, it is fixed upon sorrows anywhere but in you, even though it is fixed on beautiful things outside you and outside itself. Yet these would be nothing, were they not from you. They rise and set, and by rising they begin, as it were, to be, and they grow that they may reach perfection, and once perfected they grow old and perish: and not all grow old, but all perish.

So when they rise and tend toward being, the more quickly they grow toward being, the more they hasten toward not being. Such is their measure. So much have you given them, because they are parts of things that do not all exist at once, but by passing away and succeeding they all enact the whole of which they are parts. So too is our speech accomplished, through sounding signs. For the speech would not be whole unless one word passed away, once it had sounded its parts, so that another might succeed it.

16. Do not be vain, my soul, and do not let the ear of your heart grow deaf with the din of your vanity. Hear, you also: the Word himself cries out to you to return, and there is the place of untroubled rest, where love is not forsaken, if it does not itself forsake. Behold, those things depart, that others may succeed them, and the lowest universe is made up of all its parts.

"Do I depart anywhere?" says the Word of God. There fix your dwelling (Cf. John 14:23); there entrust whatever you have from there, my soul, weary at least of deceits. Entrust to the Truth whatever you have from the Truth, and you will lose nothing; and your rotting parts will flower again, and all your sicknesses will be healed, and your fleeting things will be reshaped and renewed (Cf. Ps 103 (102):3, 5; Matt 4:23) and bound fast to you, and they will not set you down where they descend, but will stand with you and abide before God, who stands and abides forever (Cf. Ps 102 (101):12, 27; Heb 1:11; 1 Pet 1:23).

17. Why do you walk perversely after your flesh? Let it rather follow you, now that you are converted. Whatever you perceive through it is in part, and you do not know the whole of which these are parts, and yet they delight you. But if the sense of your flesh were fit to grasp the whole, and had not itself, as part of your punishment, received a just measure within a part of the universe, you would wish that whatever exists in the present should pass away, so that the whole might please you more. For what we say, too, you hear through the same sense of the flesh, and you certainly do not want the syllables to stand still, but to fly past, so that others may come and you may hear the whole.

So always, with all things of which some one thing is composed (and the things of which it is composed do not all exist at once), the whole gives more delight than the single parts, if all can be perceived. But far better than these is he who made all things, and he is our God (Ps 100 (99):3), and he does not depart, because nothing succeeds him.

18. If bodies please you, praise God for them (Ps 145 (144):2), and turn your love back upon their craftsman, lest in the things that please you, you yourself displease.

If souls please you, let them be loved in God; for they too are changeable, and only when fixed in him are they made stable—otherwise they would go and perish. In him, then, let them be loved, and carry off to him with you whatever souls you can, and say to them:

Tell them these things, that they may weep in the valley of weeping (Ps 84 (83):7), and so carry them off with you to God, because you say these things to them by his Spirit, if you say them burning with the fire of love.

20. These things I did not then know, and I loved the lower beauties, and I was going down into the depths (Cf. Isa 31:6), and I would say to my friends: "Do we love anything but the beautiful? What, then, is the beautiful? And what is beauty? What is it that allures us and binds us to the things we love? For unless there were in them a comeliness and a form, they would in no way move us toward themselves."

And I noticed and saw that in bodies themselves there is one thing that is, as it were, a whole, and therefore beautiful, and another that is becoming because it is aptly fitted to something else, as a part of the body to its whole, or a shoe to the foot, and the like. And this consideration welled up in my mind from the depths of my heart, and I wrote books On the Beautiful and the Fitting—two, I think, or three; you know, O God (Ps 69 (68):6), for it has slipped from me. For we do not have them; they have strayed from us, I know not how.

21. But what was it that moved me, O Lord my God, to write those books to Hierius, an orator of the city of Rome? Him I did not know by face, but I had come to love the man for the fame of his learning, which was bright; and I had heard some words of his, and they had pleased me.

But he pleased me more because he pleased others, and they extolled him with praises, astonished that from a Syrian, first taught in Greek eloquence, there had afterward come forth a wonderful speaker in Latin too, and one most knowledgeable in matters pertaining to the study of wisdom.

A man is praised and loved while absent. Does that love enter the heart of the hearer from the mouth of the one who praises? Far from it; rather, one lover is kindled by another.

For from this is one loved who is praised, when he is believed to be extolled by the heart of the praiser without deceit—that is, when one who loves him praises him.

22. For so I then loved men by the judgment of men, not by yours, my God, in whom no one is deceived.

Yet why was it not as one loves a famous charioteer, or a hunter renowned in popular favor, but far otherwise, and gravely, and just as I would wish to be praised myself?

For I would not wish to be praised and loved as actors are—though I myself praised and loved them—but I would choose to be hidden rather than so known, and even to be held in hatred rather than so loved.

Where are these weights of various and diverse loves distributed in one soul? What is it that I love in another, which, again, unless I hated it, I would not detest and repel from myself, since both of us are men? For it is not as a good horse is loved by one who would not want to be a horse, even if he could—the same cannot be said of an actor, who shares our nature. Do I, then, love in a man what I hate to be, since I am a man? Man himself is a great deep, whose very hairs you, Lord, have numbered (Cf. Matt 10:30), and they are not lessened in you; and yet his hairs are more easily numbered than his affections and the movements of his heart.

23. But that rhetorician was of the kind I so loved that I wished to be such myself; and I went astray through conceit and was carried about by every wind (Eph 4:14), and was steered by you most secretly. And how do I know, and how do I confess to you with certainty, that I had loved him more in the love of those who praised him than in the very things for which he was praised?

Because if those same people, instead of praising him, were to disparage him, and were to tell of those very same things while disparaging and scorning them, I would not have been kindled and roused over him—and surely the things would be no different, nor the man himself other, but only the feeling of those who told of them. See where the weak soul lies, not yet cleaving to the solidity of truth. Just as the breezes of tongues blow from the breasts of those who opine, so it is carried and turned, twisted and twisted back; and the light is clouded over for it, and the truth is not discerned. And behold, it is before us.

And it was a great thing to me if my discourse and my studies should become known to that man; for if he approved them, I would blaze the more, but if he disapproved, my empty heart, void of your solidity, would be wounded. And yet that "beautiful and fitting," about which I had written to him, I gladly turned over in my mind before the face of my contemplation, and marveled at it with no one to praise it with me.

24. But I did not yet see the hinge of so great a matter in your art, O almighty, who alone do wondrous things (Ps 72 (71):18; 136 (135):4); and my mind moved among bodily forms, and I defined and distinguished "the beautiful" as that which is so in itself, and "the fitting" as that which is becoming through being accommodated to something else, and I built this up with bodily examples. And I turned to the nature of the soul, but the false opinion I held about spiritual things would not let me discern the truth.

And the very force of the truth struck my eyes, yet I turned my quivering mind away from the incorporeal thing toward lines and colors and swelling magnitudes; and because I could not see these in the soul, I thought I could not see the soul.

And whereas in virtue I loved peace, and in viciousness I hated discord, in the one I noted a unity, in the other a kind of division; and in that unity the rational mind seemed to me to consist, and the nature of truth and of the highest good; while in that division I, wretched, supposed there was some substance of irrational life and the nature of the highest evil—which would not only be a substance, but would altogether be life, and yet would not be from you, my God, from whom are all things (1 Cor 8:6; Rom 11:36).

And the former I called a monad, as a mind without any sex, and the latter a dyad—anger in crimes, lust in disgraceful deeds—not knowing what I was saying. For I had neither known nor learned that evil is no substance, nor that our mind itself is not the highest and unchangeable good.

25. For just as crimes occur if that movement of the soul in which there is impulse is vicious, and flings itself about insolently and turbulently; and disgraceful deeds occur if that affection of the soul by which carnal pleasures are drained is immoderate—so do errors and false opinions contaminate life, if the rational mind itself is vicious. Such was it in me then, when I did not know that it must be lit by another light to be a partaker of truth, since it is not itself the nature of truth: for you will light my lamp, O Lord; my God, you will lighten my darkness (Ps 18 (17):28), and of your fullness we have all received (John 1:16). For you are the true light that enlightens every man coming into this world (John 1:9), because in you there is no change, nor shadow of alteration (Jas 1:17).

26. But I strove toward you, and was repelled by you (Cf. Ps 42 (41):2), that I might taste death (Cf. Matt 16:28; Mark 8:39), because you resist the proud (Jas 4:6; 1 Pet 5:5). And what is prouder than that I should assert, with astonishing madness, that I was by nature what you are? For whereas I was changeable—and this was plain to me, since I desired to be wise precisely in order to become better from worse—I yet preferred to think you also changeable, rather than that I was not what you are.

And so I was repelled, and you resisted my windy neck, and I imagined bodily forms; and, flesh myself, I accused the flesh; and, a wind that goes and does not yet return (Ps 78 (77):39), I did not return to you, but in my going I walked among things that are not—neither in you, nor in me, nor in body—things not created for me by your truth, but feigned by my vanity out of body. And I would say to your little faithful ones, my fellow citizens, from whom I was unknowingly an exile, I would say to them, chattering and foolish: "Why, then, does the soul err, which God made?"

But I was unwilling to be told: "Why, then, does God err?" And I contended rather that your unchangeable substance erred under compulsion, than confessed that my own changeable substance had gone astray of its own accord, and erred as its punishment.

27. And I was perhaps twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age when I wrote those volumes, turning over within me bodily figments that clamored in the ears of my heart—which I was straining, O sweet truth, toward your inner melody, as I thought about the beautiful and the fitting, and longed to stand and hear you and rejoice with joy at the bridegroom's voice (John 3:29); and I could not, because I was dragged outside by the voices of my error, and by the weight of my pride I fell into the depths. For you did not give to my hearing joy and gladness, nor did the bones exult that had not been humbled (Ps 51 (50):8).

28. And what did it profit me that, at about the age of twenty, when there came into my hands a certain work of Aristotle's which they call the Ten Categories (at whose very name the Carthaginian rhetorician, my teacher, and others who were held to be learned, would puff out their cheeks with conceit, so that I hung agape as if upon some great and divine thing), I read it on my own and understood it?

When I compared it with those who said that they had scarcely understood it even with the most learned masters—not merely speaking, but drawing many things in the dust—they could tell me nothing about it other than what I had come to know by reading it on my own;

and the categories seemed to me to speak clearly enough about substances, such as a man is, and about what is in them—such as the figure of a man, what sort it is, and his stature, how many feet tall he is; and kinship, whose brother he is; or where he is placed, or when he was born; whether he stands or sits; whether he is shod or armed; or whether he is doing something or having something done to him—and all the countless things that are found in these nine classes, of which I have given some examples, or in the class of substance itself.

29. What did this profit me, when it even did me harm—when, thinking that whatever exists at all was comprehended under those ten predicaments, I tried to understand you also, my God, wonderfully simple and unchangeable, as if you too were a subject of your greatness or beauty, so that these were in you as in a subject, as in a body—whereas your greatness and your beauty are you yourself, while a body is not great and beautiful by the fact that it is a body, since, even if it were less great and less beautiful, it would nonetheless be a body?

For it was falsehood that I thought about you, not truth—figments of my misery, not the firm supports of your blessedness. For you had commanded, and so it was done in me, that the earth should bring forth thorns and thistles for me, and that with toil I should come to my bread (Gen 3:18–19).

30. And what did it profit me that I—then the most worthless slave of evil desires—read by myself and understood all the books of the arts they call liberal, whatever I was able to read? And I took joy in them, and did not know whence came whatever was true and certain in them. For I had my back to the light, and my face toward the things that are lit; and so my face itself, by which I saw the things lit, was not lit. Whatever I understood, without great difficulty and with no man to teach me, of the art of speaking and reasoning, of the dimensions of figures, of music, and of numbers—you know, O Lord my God (Tob 3:16; Ps 69 (68):6)—for both quickness of understanding and keenness of discernment are your gift.

But from them I offered you no sacrifice (Cf. Ps 54 (53):8). And so they availed me not for use but rather for ruin, since I was at pains to have so good a part of my substance in my own power, and did not keep my strength for you (Ps 59 (58):10), but set out away from you into a far country, to squander it on harlot desires (Luke 15:13). For what did a good thing profit me, when I did not use it well? For I did not perceive that those arts are understood with great difficulty even by the studious and able, until I tried to expound them to such people, and the most excellent among them was reckoned the one who could follow me, as I expounded, no more slowly than the rest.

31. But what did this profit me, when I thought that you, Lord God, the Truth, were a luminous and immense body, and I a fragment of that body? Excessive perversity! But such was I; nor do I blush, my God, to confess to you your mercies upon me (Cf. Ps 107 (106):8, 15, 21, 31), and to call upon you—I who did not blush then to profess my blasphemies to men, and to bark against you (Cf. Jdt 11:15).

What, then, did it profit me at that time that my mind, nimble through those disciplines, unraveled so many most knotty books with no aid of human teaching, while in the teaching of piety I was erring with a base and sacrilegious foulness?

Or how did it harm your little ones to have a far slower mind, since they did not withdraw far from you, so that in the nest of your Church they might safely grow their feathers and nourish the wings of love with the food of a sound faith (Cf. Ps 84 (83):4; Job 39:26)?

1. Receive the sacrifice of my confessions (Cf. Ps 51 (50):19) from the hand of my tongue (Cf. Prov 18:21), which you formed and stirred up to confess to your name (Ps 54 (53):8); and heal all my bones, and let them say: Lord, who is like you? (Cf. Ps 6:2; 35 (34):10) For one who confesses to you does not teach you what is happening within him, since a closed heart does not shut out your eye, nor does the hardness of men repel your hand; but you melt it when you will, whether in mercy or in punishment, and there is no one who can hide from your heat (Ps 19 (18):7).

But let my soul praise you (Ps 119 (118):175; 145 (144):2), that it may love you, and let it confess to you your mercies (Cf. Ps 107 (106):8, 15, 21, 31), that it may praise you. Your whole creation does not cease, nor is it silent, in your praises: not every spirit (Cf. Ps 150:6), through a mouth turned toward you (Cf. Ps 51 (50):15); not the animals and bodily things, through the mouth of those who consider them—

so that our soul may rise up to you from its weariness, leaning on the things you have made, and passing through to you, who made them wonderfully (Cf. Ps 72 (71):18; 136 (135):4); and there is refreshment and true strength.

2. Let the restless and the unjust go, and flee (Ps 139 (138):7) from you. You see them and distinguish the shadows, and behold, all things are beautiful with them, while they themselves are base. And what harm have they done you? Or in what have they dishonored your rule, just and whole from the heavens down to the last things? For where did they flee, when they fled from your face? Or where do you not find them?

But they fled so as not to see you seeing them, and, blinded, to stumble against you (Cf. Rom 11:7–11) (since you forsake nothing of the things you have made (Cf. Wis 11:25))—that the unjust might stumble against you and be justly afflicted, withdrawing themselves from your gentleness and stumbling against your uprightness and falling upon your roughness. Plainly they do not know that you are everywhere, whom no place circumscribes, and that you alone are present even to those who make themselves far from you.

And where was I, when I sought you? You were before me, but I had departed even from myself, and could not find myself—much less you!

3. I will speak out, in the sight of my God, of that twenty-ninth year of my age.

A certain bishop of the Manichees had already come to Carthage, Faustus by name, a great snare of the devil (Cf. 1 Tim 3:7; 6:9; 2 Tim 2:26), and many were entangled in it through the allurement of his smooth speech. This I now praised, indeed, yet I distinguished it from the truth of the things I was eager to learn; nor did I look at the kind of dish his speech was, but at what knowledge that Faustus, famous among them, would set before me to eat. For report had gone before him to me, that he was most skilled in all the honorable disciplines, and outstandingly learned in the liberal arts.

And since I had read much of the philosophers and held it committed to memory, I compared some of it with those long fables of the Manichees; and what those men said seemed to me the more probable—those who had power enough to judge of this passing world, though they did not at all find its Lord (Wis 13:9).

For you are great, Lord, and you look upon the lowly, but the lofty you know from afar (Ps 138 (137):6); nor do you draw near except to the contrite of heart (Ps 34 (33):19); nor are you found by the proud, even if by their curious skill they number the stars and the sand and measure out the starry tracts and trace the paths of the heavenly bodies.

7. Surely, O Lord God of truth (Ps 31 (30):6), does whoever knows these things thereby please you? For unhappy is the man who knows all those things but does not know you; while blessed is the one who knows you, even if he does not know them. And whoever knows both you and them is not the more blessed on their account, but is blessed on account of you alone, if, knowing you, he glorifies you as God and gives thanks, and does not become vain in his thoughts (Cf. Rom 1:21).

For just as a man who knows how to possess a tree, and gives you thanks for the use of it—though he does not know how many cubits high it is, or how wide its spread—is better than one who measures it and counts all its branches, but neither possesses it nor knows or loves its Creator; so the faithful man, to whom the whole world of riches belongs (Prov 17:6 (LXX)), and who, as having nothing, yet possesses all things (Cf. 2 Cor 6:10) by cleaving to you, whom all things serve—though he does not so much as know the circlings of the Great Bear—it is foolish to doubt that he is surely better than one who measures the heaven and numbers the stars and weighs the elements, but neglects you, who have ordered all things in measure and number and weight (Wis 11:21).

8. But still, who asked that some Mani or other should write these things too, without skill in which piety could be learned? For you have said to man: Behold, piety is wisdom (Job 28:28 (LXX)). Of this he could be ignorant, even if he knew those things perfectly; but these things, since he did not know them, yet most impudently dared to teach, he could in no way know that. For it is vanity to profess these worldly things even when they are known, but it is piety to confess to you.

Hence that wanderer spoke much on these matters, so that, convicted by those who had truly learned them, it might be plainly known what his understanding was in other, more hidden matters. For he did not wish to be esteemed of small account, but tried to persuade men that the Holy Spirit, the comforter and enricher of your faithful, was personally in him with plenary authority.

And so, when he was caught having said false things about the heaven and the stars and the movements of the sun and moon—though these do not pertain to the teaching of religion—still it would be sufficiently evident that his attempts had been sacrilegious, since he spoke of things not only unknown but even false, with so insane a vanity of pride that he strove to attribute them to himself as to a divine person.

9. For when I hear that some Christian brother or other is ignorant of these things, and holds one thing for another, I look patiently on the man as he opines, and I do not see it harm him—provided he believes nothing unworthy of you, Lord, Creator of all (Cf. 2 Macc 1:24)—if perchance he is ignorant of the position and disposition of bodily creation.

But it does harm him if he supposes this pertains to the very form of the teaching of piety, and dares too obstinately to affirm what he does not know. Yet even such weakness, in the cradle of faith, is borne up by love, the mother, until the new man rises up (Cf. Eph 4:24) into a perfect man, and can no longer be carried about by every wind of doctrine (Eph 4:13–14).

But in the case of one who—as teacher, author, leader, and chief of those to whom he urged these things—dared to act so that those who followed him should think they were following not just any man, but your Holy Spirit, who would not judge that such madness, once he was convicted of having said false things, ought to be detested and cast far away?

But still I had not yet clearly found out whether the alternations of longer and shorter days and nights, and of night and day themselves, and the eclipses of the lights, and whatever of the sort I had read in other books, could also be explained according to his words—so that, if perchance it could, it would remain uncertain to me whether the matter stood this way or that, but I would set his authority before my faith on account of his reputed holiness.

10. And for nearly those same nine years, during which I listened to them with a wandering mind, I awaited the coming of this Faustus with too eager a longing.

For the rest of them, whom I happened to come upon, who failed at the questions I raised about such matters, kept promising me this man, by whose coming and conferred conversation these things—and any greater ones I might happen to ask—would most easily and most clearly be resolved for me.

So when he came, I found a man pleasant and agreeable in his words, and prattling much more sweetly the very things they are accustomed to say. But what was the most elegant cupbearer of precious cups to my thirst? My ears were already sated with such things, nor did they seem to me the better for being better said, nor the truer for being eloquent, nor the soul wise because the face was fitting and the speech comely. But those who promised him to me were no good judges of things, and so to them he seemed prudent and wise, because he delighted them as he spoke. Yet I sensed that there is another kind of men who hold even truth suspect, and will not rest content with it, if it is set forth in polished and copious speech.

But my God had already taught me by wonderful and hidden ways—and I believe that you taught me, because it is true, and there is no other teacher of the truth but you, wherever and from whatever source it shines forth. By now, then, I had learned from you that nothing should seem true because it is said eloquently, nor false because the signs of the lips sound clumsily; and again, nothing true because it is uttered without polish, nor false because the speech is splendid; but that wisdom and folly are like foods useful and useless, while words ornate and unadorned are like vessels city-made and country-made, and either kind of food can be served in either.

11. And so my eagerness, with which I had so long awaited that man, was indeed delighted by the movement and feeling of him as he disputed, and by his fitting words, ready at hand to clothe his thoughts. I was delighted, and along with many—or even more than many—I praised and extolled him; but I was vexed that, in the crowd of his hearers, I was not permitted to press my own questions upon him and share them with him, conferring familiarly and giving and receiving discourse. When I was able to do this, and began, with my friends, to engage his ears at a time when it was not unfitting to discuss things by turns, and I put forward some things that troubled me, I found the man, first of all, unversed in the liberal disciplines except grammar, and that only in the ordinary way. And because he had read some orations of Cicero, and a very few books of Seneca, and some of the poets, and whatever volumes of his own sect were written in Latin and in good order, and because he had daily practice in speaking, he had a supply of eloquence, which was made the more acceptable and seductive by the governance of his talent and a certain natural charm.

Is it not so, as I recall it, O Lord my God, judge of my conscience? Before you are my heart (Cf. Acts 8:21; Num 10:9) and my memory—you who were then guiding me by the hidden secret of your providence, and were already setting my dishonorable errors before my face (Cf. Ps 50 (49):21), that I might see them and hate them.

12. For after it became plain enough to me that he was unskilled in the arts in which I had thought him to excel, I began to despair of his being able to open up and resolve for me the things that troubled me—of which, indeed, a man might be ignorant and still hold the truth of piety, but only if he were not a Manichee.

For their books are full of the longest fables about the heaven and the stars and the sun and the moon; and I no longer thought that he could explain to me with subtlety—which was just what I desired—whether, when the reckonings of numbers I had read elsewhere were compared, things were rather as the Manichees' books held, or whether at least an equal account could be given from them.

Yet when I brought these things forward to be considered and discussed, he, quite modestly, did not even dare to take up that burden. For he knew that he did not know these things, and he was not ashamed to confess it. He was not of the sort I had endured in many a talkative man, who tried to teach me these things and said nothing. This man had a heart, though not right toward you (Ps 78 (77):37; Acts 8:21), yet not too incautious toward himself. He was not altogether ignorant of his own ignorance, and would not, by rash disputing, hem himself into a corner from which there would be no way out and no easy return. And for this too he pleased me the more. For the restraint of a confessing mind is more beautiful than the things I desired to know. And such I found him in all the more difficult and subtle questions.

13. And so, my zeal, which I had bent upon the writings of Mani, being broken, and despairing the more of their other teachers, since in the many things that troubled me that famous man had shown himself such as he did,

I began to spend time with him for the sake of his own zeal, with which he was aflame for the very literature that I, then already a rhetorician, was teaching to the young men of Carthage; and to read with him either what he desired to hear, or what I judged suited to such a talent.

But my whole effort, by which I had resolved to advance in that sect, utterly collapsed once I had come to know the man—not so that I separated from them altogether, but, as though finding nothing better than the thing into which I had somehow plunged, I resolved to be content with it for the time, unless perhaps something more to be chosen should shine forth.

So that Faustus, who to many had been a snare of death (Cf. Ps 18 (17):6; Prov 21:6), had now begun, neither willing nor knowing it, to loosen the snare in which I had been caught. For your hands, my God, in the hidden depths of your providence did not forsake my soul; and from the blood of my mother's heart, through her tears, sacrifice was offered to you for me day and night, and you dealt with me in wonderful ways (Cf. Joel 2:26). You did that, my God; for a man's steps are directed by the Lord, and he will choose his way (Ps 37 (36):23). Or what provision of salvation is there, apart from your hand remaking what you have made?

14. You dealt with me, then, so that I was persuaded to go to Rome and to teach there, rather than at Carthage, what I was teaching. And how I was persuaded of this, I will not pass over confessing to you, because in these things too your most profound depths and your most present mercy toward us must be pondered and proclaimed. I did not want to go to Rome because greater gains and greater dignity were promised me by the friends who urged it (although these things too were drawing my mind at the time), but the chief and almost the only cause was that I heard that young men studied there more quietly and were kept in order by a more disciplined restraint, so that they would not rush riotously and shamelessly into the school of a master they do not attend, nor be admitted at all unless he permitted it.

At Carthage, on the contrary, the license of the students is foul and intemperate: they break in shamelessly and, with almost frenzied faces, disturb the order that each master has established for his pupils' progress.

They do many injurious things, with astonishing stupidity, deserving punishment by the laws, were not custom their patroness—showing them all the more wretched in that they do, as though it were now lawful, what by your eternal law will never be lawful; and they think they act with impunity, when they are punished by the very blindness of their acting, and suffer incomparably worse things than they do.

So the manners which, as a student, I had refused to make my own, I was forced, as a teacher, to endure in others; and therefore it pleased me to go where all who knew indicated that such things were not done.

But in truth you, my hope and my portion in the land of the living (Ps 142 (141):6), were applying goads at Carthage, that I might be torn from there, for the salvation of my soul (Cf. Ps 35 (34):3), and were setting before me at Rome allurements by which I might be drawn—through men who love a dead life, here doing insane things, there promising vain ones; and to set my steps straight (Ps 40 (39):3) you secretly used both their perversity and my own. For those who disturbed my quiet were blind with a foul madness, and those who invited me elsewhere savored of the earth (Cf. Phil 3:19); while I, who here detested true misery, there sought a false felicity.

16. And behold, there I was received by the scourge of bodily sickness, and I was already going down to hell (Cf. Job 7:9), bearing all the evils I had committed against you, and against myself, and against others—many and grievous, over and above the bond of original sin, by which we all die in Adam (1 Cor 15:22). For you had forgiven me none of them in Christ, nor had he by his cross undone the enmities (Cf. Eph 2:16) that I had contracted with you by my sins. For how could he undo them on the cross of a phantasm, which is what I had believed him to be? As false, then, as the death of his flesh seemed to me, so true was the death of my soul; and as true as the death of his flesh was, so false was the life of my soul, which did not believe it. And as the fevers grew worse, I was already going and perishing. For where would I have gone, if I had then departed hence, but into the fire (Matt 25:41) and the torments worthy of my deeds, in the truth of your order?

And she did not know this, and yet she was praying for me, though absent. But you, present everywhere, heard her where she was, and had mercy on me where I was, so that I recovered the health of my body, though still mad in my sacrilegious heart. For not even in so great a peril did I desire your baptism; and I was better as a boy, when I begged for it from my mother's devotion, as I have already recalled and confessed (Cf. 1.11.17 above).

But I had grown up to my own disgrace, and, mad, I mocked the counsels of your medicine—you who did not let me, such as I was, die twice.

If my mother's heart had been struck with that wound, it would never have been healed. For I do not sufficiently express what feeling she had toward me, and with how much greater anguish she was in labor with me in the spirit than when she had borne me in the flesh (Cf. Gal 4:19).

17. I do not see, then, how she would have been healed, if such a death of mine had pierced through the vitals of her love. And where would there have been those great and frequent prayers, without intermission (1 Thess 5:17)? Nowhere but with you. But would you, God of mercies (Cf. 2 Cor 1:3), despise the contrite and humbled heart (Ps 51 (50):17) of a chaste and sober widow, generous in almsgiving, dutiful and serving your holy ones, letting no day pass without an offering at your altar, coming twice a day, morning and evening, to your church without any intermission—not for vain fables and old wives' chatter, but that she might hear you in your discourses, and you her in her prayers (Cf. 1 Tim 5:10; 4:7; Titus 2:5)?

Could you despise and repel from your help the tears of such a one, with which she begged of you not gold and silver, nor any changeable or fleeting good, but the salvation of her son's soul (Cf. Sir 30:15)—you, by whose gift she was such? By no means, Lord; rather, you were present and heard her, and did things in the order in which you had predestined them to be done. Far be it that you should have deceived her in those visions and answers of yours, which I have already recalled (Cf. 3.11.19–20 above), and others I have not recalled, which she held in her faithful heart, and, ever praying, urged upon you as though they were your own signed bonds (Cf. Col 2:14). For you deign—since your mercy endures forever (Ps 118 (117):1; 138 (137):8)—to become a debtor by your promises even to those to whom you forgive all debts (Cf. Matt 18:32).

18. You restored me, then, from that sickness, and made whole the son of your handmaid (Ps 116 (115):16)—for the time, in body—that there might be one to whom you would give a better and surer health.

And even then, at Rome, I was joined to those false and deceiving "holy ones"—not only to their hearers, of whose number was also the man in whose house I had fallen sick and recovered, but even to those whom they call the "elect." For it still seemed to me that it is not we who sin, but some other nature in us that sins; and it delighted my pride to be beyond fault, and, when I had done some evil, not to confess that I had done it, so that you might heal my soul, since it had sinned against you (Ps 41 (40):4); but I loved to excuse myself, and to accuse some other thing that was with me and yet was not I.

But in truth I was the whole of it, and my impiety had divided me against myself (Cf. Matt 12:26); and that sin was the more incurable by which I judged myself not to be a sinner; and it was an execrable iniquity to prefer that you, O God almighty (Gen 17:1), should be overcome in me to my ruin, rather than that I should be overcome by you to my salvation.

You had not yet set a guard over my mouth and a door of restraint about my lips, that my heart might not turn aside to evil words, to make excuses for sins with men who work iniquity; and so I was still keeping company with their elect (Ps 141 (140):3–4)—yet by now despairing that I could make progress in that false doctrine, and the very things with which I had resolved to be content if I found nothing better, I now held more loosely and carelessly.

21. Next, I did not think that the things they had found fault with in your Scriptures could be defended; yet at times I sincerely desired to confer on each point with someone most learned in those books, and to test what he thought about them. For already the discourses of a certain Elpidius, who spoke and disputed face to face against those same Manichees, had begun to move me even at Carthage, when he brought forward from the Scriptures things not easily resisted.

And the answer of those men seemed to me feeble—an answer which, indeed, they did not readily produce in public, but only more secretly to us, when they said that the Scriptures of the New Testament had been falsified by some persons or other, who wished to graft the law of the Jews onto the Christian faith; yet they themselves brought forward no uncorrupted copies.

But it was chiefly those masses, as I thought of bodily things, that captured and, as it were, choked and oppressed me; gasping beneath them, I could not breathe the pure and simple air of your truth.

These too my heart hated, though not with a perfect hatred (Ps 139 (138):22). For perhaps I hated them more for what I was going to suffer from them than for the unlawful things they did to anyone at all.

Yet surely such people are base, and they commit fornication away from you (Ps 73 (72):27) by loving the fleeting mockeries of the times and the muddy gain that defiles the hand when it is grasped, and by embracing the fleeing world and despising you who abide, and call back, and forgive the human soul, that harlot, when she returns to you.

And now I hate such crooked and distorted men, though I love them as needing to be corrected, so that they may prefer to money the very teaching they learn, and to that teaching, you, God, the truth and the abundance of a sure good and the chastest peace.

But then I was more unwilling to endure them as evil for my own sake than I was willing that they should become good for your sake.

Augustine, sent to Milan, was received as a father by Bishop Ambrose

I myself made application, through those very men drunk with Manichean vanities (to be rid of whom I was going—though neither they nor I knew it), that, a set speech being delivered, the prefect Symmachus, finding me approved, might send me.

And I came to Milan, to Bishop Ambrose, known throughout the world among the best, your devout worshiper, whose eloquent words then strenuously dispensed to your people the fatness of your wheat (Cf. Ps 81 (80):17; 147:14) and the gladness of oil (Cf. Ps 45 (44):8) and the sober intoxication of your wine (Cf. Ambrose, hymn; Ps 4:8). To him I was led by you, unknowing, that through him I might be led, knowing, to you.

That man of God (Cf. 2 Kgs 1:9–13; 1 Tim 6:11; 2 Tim 3:17) received me in a fatherly way, and as a bishop should, was well pleased at my coming as a stranger. And I began to love him, not at first indeed as a teacher of the truth—which I utterly despaired of finding in your Church—but simply as a man kind to me. And I listened attentively as he disputed before the people, not with the intention I ought to have had, but as if testing his eloquence, whether it matched its fame, or flowed greater or less than was reported; and I hung upon his words intent, but stood by as one careless and contemptuous of the matter, and was delighted by the sweetness of his speech—

more learned, indeed, yet less cheering and soothing than that of Faustus, as far as the manner of speaking goes. But of the matters themselves there is no comparison; for the one was wandering away through Manichean deceits, while the other was teaching salvation most wholesomely. But salvation is far from sinners (Ps 119 (118):155), such as I then was; and yet I was drawing nearer, little by little and unknowing.

Chapter 14

24. For although I did not trouble to learn what he was saying, but only to hear how he said it (this empty care had remained with me, despairing that a way to you lay open to man), there came into my mind, together with the words I loved, the matters too that I was neglecting. For I could not separate them. And while I opened my heart to take in how eloquently he spoke, there entered equally how truly he spoke—by degrees, indeed.

For first these things too began to seem to me capable of being defended; and the catholic faith, on whose behalf I had thought nothing could be said against the assailing Manichees, I now judged could be asserted without shame—especially after I had heard one and another, and more than once, of the riddles of the old writings solved, where, when I took them according to the letter, I was slain (Cf. 2 Cor 3:6).

And so, many passages of those books being expounded spiritually, I now reproved that despair of mine—at least the one by which I had believed that the Law and the Prophets (Cf. Matt 5:17; 7:12; Luke 16:16) could in no way be withstood against those who detested and mocked them. Yet I did not therefore feel that the catholic way was to be held, because it too could have its learned defenders, who would copiously and not absurdly refute objections; nor that what I held was therefore to be condemned, because the cases of the two sides were made equal. For the catholic faith did not seem to me vanquished, yet did not yet appear victorious either.

25. Then indeed I strenuously bent my mind, to see whether by any means I could, by some certain proofs, convict the Manichees of falsity. If only I could have conceived a spiritual substance, at once all those contrivances would have been undone and cast out of my mind; but I could not. Nevertheless, concerning the very body of this world and all nature that the sense of the flesh could reach, the more I considered and compared, the more I judged that most of the philosophers had held far more probable views. And so, doubting of all things in the manner of the Academics, as they are supposed to do, and wavering among all things, I resolved that the Manichees were indeed to be left—not thinking that, in that very time of my doubting, I ought to remain in that sect, to which I now preferred some of the philosophers; to which philosophers, however, because they were without the saving name of Christ, I altogether refused to entrust the healing of my soul's sickness (Cf. Matt 9:35; Luke 9:1). I resolved, therefore, to be a catechumen in the catholic Church, commended to me by my parents, until something certain should shine forth by which I might direct my course.

1. My hope from my youth (Ps 71 (70):5), where were you to me, and where had you withdrawn (Cf. Ps 10:1 (9:22))? Had you not made me, and set me apart from the beasts of the field, and made me wiser than the birds of the air? And I was walking through darkness and on slippery ground (Cf. Ps 35 (34):6; Isa 50:10), and I sought you outside myself, and did not find the God of my heart (Ps 73 (72):26); and I had come into the depths of the sea (Ps 68 (67):23), and I distrusted and despaired of finding the truth.

By now my mother had come to me, strong in piety, following me by land and sea, and secure in you amid all dangers. For even through the perils of the sea she comforted the very sailors—by whom inexperienced travelers of the deep are usually comforted when they are alarmed—promising them safe arrival, because you had promised her this in a vision (Cf. Acts 27:20–24).

And she found me in grave peril, through my despair of tracking down the truth; but when I told her that I was no longer a Manichee, though not yet a catholic Christian, she did not leap up for joy as though she had heard something unexpected, since she was already secure about that part of my misery in which she wept for me to you as one dead but to be raised, and offered me on the bier of her thought, that you might say to the widow's son, Young man, I say to you, arise (Luke 7:12–15), and he should revive and begin to speak, and you should give him back to his mother.

So her heart was shaken by no turbulent exultation when she heard that so great a part was already done of what she daily wept to you that it might be done—that I had not yet attained the truth, but was already rescued from falsehood. Indeed, because she was certain that you, who had promised the whole, would give what remained, she answered me most calmly, and with a heart full of confidence, that she believed in Christ that, before she departed from this life, she would see me a faithful catholic.

This she said to me. But to you, fountain of mercies, she poured out denser prayers and tears, that you would hasten your help (Cf. Ps 38 (37):22; 70 (69):1) and lighten my darkness (Ps 18 (17):28); and she ran the more eagerly to the church and hung upon Ambrose's lips, to the fountain of water springing up to eternal life (John 4:14). For she loved that man like an angel of God (Gal 4:14), because she had learned that it was through him that I had meanwhile been brought to that wavering hesitation through which she was certain I would pass from sickness to health, with a sharper danger intervening—as it were, the crisis the physicians call "critical."

2. And so, when she had brought to the memorials of the saints, as she used to do in Africa, porridge and bread and wine, and was forbidden by the doorkeeper, as soon as she learned that the bishop had prohibited this, she embraced it so devoutly and obediently that I myself wondered how easily she became an accuser of her own custom rather than a disputer of his prohibition.

For wine-bibbing did not besiege her spirit, nor did a love of wine provoke her to hatred of the truth, as it does many men and women, who grow queasy at a song of sobriety as drunkards do at a watered draught;

but she, when she had brought her basket with the festal foods to be tasted and then given away, would set out no more than a single little cup, watered to suit her own quite sober palate, from which she would take a sip for courtesy's sake; and if there were many memorials of the dead that seemed to be honored in that way, she carried around that same single cup to set down everywhere, and shared it—by now not only most watered but most tepid—in tiny sips with those present; for she sought devotion there, not pleasure.

And so, when she found that it had been forbidden by that renowned preacher and bishop of devotion, that these things should be done even by those who did them soberly—lest any occasion of gorging be given to drunkards, and because those rites, like funeral feasts, were most like the superstition of the pagans—she most gladly abstained;

and instead of a basket full of earthly fruits, she had learned to bring to the memorials of the martyrs a breast full of purer prayers, so as both to give what she could to the needy, and that the communion of the Lord's Body might be celebrated there, in imitation of whose passion the martyrs were sacrificed and crowned.

But still it seems to me, O Lord my God (and so my heart stands in your sight (Ps 19 (18):14) on this matter), that perhaps my mother would not easily have yielded about cutting off this custom, had it been forbidden by another whom she did not love as she loved Ambrose.

She loved him most of all for the sake of my salvation; and he loved her for her most religious manner of life, by which, fervent in spirit (Acts 18:25; cf. Rom 12:11), she frequented the church in good works (1 Tim 6:18; 5:10)—so that often, when he saw me, he would break out in praise of her, congratulating me that I had such a mother, not knowing what sort of son she had, who doubted of all these things and did not think the way of life (Ps 16 (15):11) could be found at all.

3. And now I no longer groaned in prayer that you would help me, but my mind was intent on seeking and restless for disputing; and I thought Ambrose himself a happy man by the world's reckoning, since such great powers honored him: only his celibacy seemed to me burdensome. But what hope he bore, and what struggle he had against the temptations of his very eminence, and what solace in adversity, and the hidden mouth that was in his heart—what savory joys he chewed over from your bread—I could neither conjecture nor had I experienced.

Nor did he know my own seethings, or the pit of my danger. For I could not ask him what I wished, as I wished, since crowds of busy men, to whose infirmities he ministered, shut me off from his ear and mouth. And when he was not with them—which was a very small space of time—he refreshed either his body with necessary sustenance or his mind with reading. But when he read, his eyes were drawn over the pages and his heart searched out the sense, while his voice and tongue were at rest.

Often, when we were present—for no one was forbidden to enter, nor was it the custom for anyone coming to be announced to him—we saw him reading silently, and never otherwise; and after sitting in long silence (for who would dare to be a burden to one so intent?) we would depart, and we guessed that in that small time he gained for repairing his mind, free from the din of others' affairs, he did not wish to be called away to anything else;

and perhaps he was being careful lest, if the author he was reading had put anything obscurely, an attentive and intent listener would require him to expound it, or to discuss some more difficult questions, and so, with time spent on this work, he would get through fewer volumes than he wished—though the preservation of his voice, which was very easily strained, could also be a juster cause of reading silently. But with whatever intention he did it, that man certainly did it for a good one.

4. But certainly no opportunity was given me to inquire as I desired of that most holy oracle of yours, his breast, except when something was to be briefly heard. Those seethings of mine required him quite at leisure, to have them poured out to him, and never found him so. And indeed I heard him every Lord's Day rightly handling the word of truth (2 Tim 2:15) among the people, and I was more and more confirmed that all the knots of the cunning calumnies which those deceivers of ours wove against the divine Books could be untied.

But when I also found that man, made by you to your image (Gen 9:6; 1:26–27), was not so understood by your spiritual sons, whom you have regenerated of the catholic mother through grace, as to believe and think him bounded by the form of a human body—although how a spiritual substance might be, I had not even faintly or in a riddle conjectured (1 Cor 13:12)—yet, rejoicing, I blushed that for so many years I had barked not against the catholic faith, but against the figments of carnal thoughts. For I had been rash and impious in this, that what I ought to have said by way of inquiry, I had said by way of accusation.

For you, most high (Ps 9:2; 92 (91):1) and most near, most hidden and most present, who have no members some greater and some smaller, but are wholly everywhere and nowhere in place, are surely not this bodily form; and yet you made man to your image, and behold, he, from head to foot, is in place.

5. Since, then, I did not know how this image of yours could subsist, I should have knocked (Cf. Matt 7:7–8; Luke 11:9–10) and proposed the question how it was to be believed, not insultingly opposed it as though it were so believed.

So much the sharper, then, was the care that gnawed my inmost being—what I might hold for certain—the more I was ashamed that I had been so long deluded and deceived by the promise of certainties, and, with childish error and animosity, had prattled so many uncertain things as though they were certain.

For that they were false became clear to me later. Yet it was certain that they were uncertain, and that I had at one time held them for certain, when with blind contentions I accused your catholic Church—which, though I had not yet found that she taught the truth, I now saw at least did not teach the things of which I gravely accused her.

And so I was confounded and turned about, and I rejoiced, my God, that the one Church, the body of your only Son (Cf. Col 1:18, 24), in which the name of Christ had been set upon me as an infant, did not savor of infantile trifles, nor held this in her sound doctrine: to cram you, the Creator of all, into a space of place—however high and ample, yet on every side bounded—by the figure of human members.

6. I rejoiced also that the old writings of the Law and the Prophets (Cf. Matt 5:17; 7:12; Luke 16:16) were now set before me to be read with a different eye than that with which they had earlier seemed absurd, when I found fault with your holy ones as thinking so, though in truth they did not think so. And I gladly heard Ambrose, in his sermons to the people, often commending this as a rule most diligently: the letter kills, but the spirit gives life (2 Cor 3:6), when, removing the mystical veil, he opened spiritually those things which, taken to the letter, seemed to teach perversity—saying nothing that offended me, though he said things whose truth I did not yet know.

For I held my heart back from all assent, fearing a headlong fall, and I was the more killed by hanging in suspense. For I wanted to be made as certain of the things I did not see as I was certain that seven and three are ten. For I was not so insane as to think that even this could not be comprehended; but as this, so I desired the rest—whether bodily things, which were not present to my senses, or spiritual things, of which I knew no way to think except bodily.

And I could have been healed by believing, so that the cleansed gaze of my mind might be directed in some way toward your truth, which abides forever (Cf. Ps 117 (116):2) and fails in nothing; but, as it usually happens that one who has tried a bad physician is afraid to trust himself even to a good one, so was the health of my soul, which could in no way be healed except by believing, and yet refused to be cured lest it believe falsehoods, resisting your hands (Cf. Dan 4:32; Ps 16 (15):8), you who have compounded the medicines of faith and sprinkled them over the diseases of the world, and given them so great an authority.

7. From this, too, now preferring the catholic teaching, I felt that there it was more modestly and least deceitfully commanded that what was not demonstrated should be believed (whether there was something, though to someone it perhaps could not be demonstrated, or whether there was not even anything that could be),

than that, there among the Manichees, credulity should be mocked by a rash promise of knowledge, and afterward so many most fabulous and absurd things commanded to be believed, because they could not be demonstrated.

Then, little by little, you, Lord, handling and composing my heart with a most gentle and merciful hand, persuaded me—when I considered how innumerable were the things I believed which I had not seen, nor had been present when they were done, such as so many things in the history of the nations, so many things about places and cities I had not seen, so many things about friends, so many about physicians, so many about ever so many other men, which, unless believed, we should do nothing at all in this life—

and lastly, how unshakably fixed in faith I held from what parents I had sprung, which I could not know unless I had believed by hearing—you persuaded me that it was not those who believed your Books, which you have established with such authority among almost all nations, but those who did not believe them, who were to be blamed,

and that those were not to be listened to who might perhaps say to me, "How do you know that those Books were ministered to the human race by the Spirit of the one true and most truthful God?"

For this very thing was most of all to be believed, since no pugnacity of calumnious questions—among the many philosophers I had read, conflicting with one another—could ever wrest from me the belief that you exist, whatever you might be (which I did not know), and that the governance of human affairs belongs to you (Cf. Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 1.1.2).

8. But this I believed sometimes more robustly, sometimes more faintly; yet I always believed both that you exist and that you have care of us, even though I did not know either what was to be thought about your substance, or what way led or led back to you. And so, since we were too weak to find the truth by clear reasoning, and for this reason needed the authority of the Holy Scriptures, I had now begun to believe that in no way would you have granted such excellent authority to that Scripture throughout all the world, unless you had willed both that you should be believed through it, and that you should be sought through it.

For now, when I had heard many things in those writings expounded plausibly, I referred the absurdity that used to offend me there to the depth of the mysteries; and that authority appeared to me the more venerable and the more worthy of a sacrosanct faith, in that, while it was open to all for reading, it yet preserved the dignity of its secret in a more profound understanding—offering itself to all in the plainest words and the humblest kind of speech, and yet exercising the attention of those who are not light of heart (Cf. Sir 19:4)—so that it might receive all in its popular bosom, and through narrow openings pass a few through to you (Cf. Matt 7:13–14), yet far more than if it did not stand out with so high a peak of authority, nor draw the crowds into the bosom of holy humility.

I pondered these things, and you were present to me; I sighed, and you heard me; I wavered, and you steered me; I went along the broad way of the world (Cf. Matt 7:13), and you did not forsake me.

9. I gaped after honors, gains, marriage, and you laughed at me (Cf. Ps 2:4; 37 (36):13; Wis 4:18). In those desires I suffered most bitter difficulties, the more graciously by you, the less you let what was not you grow sweet to me. Look at my heart, Lord (Lam 1:9, 11), you who willed that I should recall this and confess it to you. Now let my soul cleave to you (Cf. Ps 63 (62):8), whom you have stripped from the glue of death so tenacious. How wretched it was! And you pricked the feeling of its wound, that, leaving all things, it might turn to you (Cf. Ps 51 (50):13), who are over all things (Rom 9:5) and without whom all things would be nothing—that it might turn and be healed (Cf. Isa 6:10; Matt 13:15).

How wretched, then, I was; and how you dealt with me, that I might feel my misery, on that day when, as I was preparing to recite praises of the emperor, in which I would tell many lies and, lying, be applauded by those who knew I lied—and my heart panted with these cares and seethed with the fevers of consuming thoughts—as I passed through a certain street of Milan, I noticed a poor beggar, by now full, I suppose, joking and merry. And I groaned, and spoke with the friends who were with me of the many sorrows of our madnesses, because in all such efforts of ours, such as I was then laboring at—dragging the burden of my unhappiness under the goads of desire, and by dragging making it heavier—we wished for nothing else but to arrive at a carefree gladness, where that beggar had already gone before us, and we perhaps would never come. For what he had already attained with a few little begged coins, I was scheming for by such toilsome windings and roundabout ways: namely, the gladness of a temporal felicity.

For he did not have true joy; but I, with those ambitions, was seeking one far more false. And surely he was glad, while I was anxious; he was carefree, I was trembling. And if anyone asked me whether I would rather exult or fear, I would answer, "Exult"; but again, if he asked whether I would rather be such as he was, or such as I then was, I would choose myself, worn out with cares and fears—but out of perversity; was it out of truth?

For I ought not to have preferred myself to him because I was more learned, since I took no joy from that, but only sought to please men by it—not to teach them, but only to please. And for this reason you too were breaking my bones (Ps 42 (41):10) with the rod of your discipline (Cf. Ps 23 (22):4).

10. Let them depart, then, from my soul (Cf. Jer 6:8) who say to it: "It matters from what source one rejoices. That beggar rejoiced in his drunkenness; you desired to rejoice in glory." What glory, Lord? One that is not in you. For just as it was no true joy, so neither was that true glory, and it twisted my mind the more. And he would that very night digest his drunkenness, while I had slept and risen with mine, and was to sleep and rise again (Cf. Matt 9:24–25)—see how many days!

It does matter, indeed, from what source one rejoices, I know; and the joy of a faithful hope stands incomparably apart from that vanity. But even then there was a distance between us: for he was without doubt the happier—not only because he was steeped in cheerfulness while I was disemboweled with cares, but also because he had got his wine by wishing people well, while I was seeking conceit by lying.

I said many things to this effect to my dear ones at that time, and often I noticed in them how it was with me, and I found it ill with me, and grieved, and doubled the very ill; and if anything prosperous had smiled on me, it wearied me to grasp it, because almost before it was held it flew away.

11. We groaned together, those of us who lived as friends together; and most of all, and most intimately, I talked of these things with Alypius and Nebridius. Of these, Alypius was born of the same town as I, of parents who were leading men of the municipality, younger than I. For he had studied under me, both when I began to teach in our town and afterward at Carthage; and he loved me much, because I seemed to him good and learned, and I loved him for the great natural bent toward virtue which, at no great age, stood out plainly enough.

Yet the whirlpool of Carthaginian morals, in which the trifling shows seethe, had swallowed him into a madness for the circus games. But while he was being wretchedly tossed in it, and I, professing rhetoric there, was conducting a public school, he was not yet hearing me as his teacher, because of a certain quarrel that had arisen between me and his father. And I had learned that he loved the circus ruinously, and I was gravely distressed, because he seemed about to lose—or even to have already lost—so great a hope.

But there was no means of warning him and recalling him by some restraint, neither the goodwill of friendship nor the right of a teacher. For I thought he felt about me as his father did; but he was not so. And so, setting aside his father's wish in this matter, he began to greet me, coming into my lecture-room, hearing something, and going away.

12. But it had slipped from my memory to deal with him, lest by a blind and headlong zeal for empty games he should destroy so good a talent. But you, Lord, who preside over the helm of all you have created, had not forgotten him, who was to be among your sons a bishop of your sacrament; and, that his correction might be openly ascribed to you, you worked it through me indeed, but unknowing. For one day, as I sat in my usual place and my pupils were present before me, he came, greeted me, sat down, and bent his mind to what was being treated.

And it happened that the text in hand was one which, while I expounded it, a comparison with the circus games seemed opportune to bring in, to make what I was insinuating both more pleasant and plainer, with a biting mockery of those whom that madness had taken captive. You know, our God (Ps 69 (68):6), that I was not then thinking of curing Alypius of that plague.

But he seized it to himself, and believed I had said it only for his sake; and what another would have taken as a reason to be angry with me, that honest young man took as a reason to be angry with himself, and to love me the more ardently. For you had said long ago, and woven it into your Scriptures: Rebuke a wise man, and he will love you (Prov 9:8). But I had not rebuked him; rather, using all, both the knowing and the unknowing, in the order which you know (and that order is just), out of my heart and tongue you made burning coals (Cf. Ezek 1:13), by which you might cauterize and heal the mind of good hope as it wasted away (Cf. Isa 6:6–7).

Let him be silent of your praises who does not consider your mercies, which confess to you out of my marrow (Cf. Ps 107 (106):8, 15, 21, 31). For indeed, after those words, he flung himself out of that pit so deep, into which he was gladly sinking and being blinded with a wondrous pleasure; and he shook his mind with a strong temperance, and all the filth of the circus games sprang away from him, and he went there no more.

Then he prevailed over his reluctant father, that he might have me as his teacher: the father yielded and gave consent. And beginning to hear me again, he was wrapped up with me in that superstition, loving in the Manichees the ostentation of continence, which he thought true and genuine. But it was a senseless and seductive thing, snaring precious souls (Cf. Prov 6:26) that did not yet know how to touch the height of virtue, and were easily deceived by the surface—the surface of a shadowed and counterfeit virtue.

13. Not, indeed, abandoning the earthly way enchanted upon him by his parents, he had gone ahead to Rome to study law; and there he was carried away, with an incredible eagerness and incredibly, by the craze for gladiatorial shows.

For when he was turning away from and detesting such things, certain of his friends and fellow students, meeting him by chance as they returned from dinner, with a friendly violence dragged him—vehemently refusing and resisting—into the amphitheater, on a day of those cruel and deadly games, while he said this: "Though you drag my body to that place and set it there, can you fasten my mind and my eyes on those shows? I shall be there, then, absent, and so I shall overcome both you and them."

Hearing this, they nonetheless brought him along with them, perhaps desiring to test this very thing, whether he could do it. When they had come and taken what seats they could, everything was seething with the most savage pleasures.

He, closing the doors of his eyes, forbade his mind to go forth into such evils. And would that he had stopped his ears too! For at a certain turn of the fight, when a huge shout of the whole crowd struck him violently, overcome by curiosity, and as if prepared to despise and overcome whatever it might be even when seen, he opened his eyes, and was struck with a graver wound in his soul than the man he longed to look at was in his body,

and he fell more wretchedly than that man at whose fall the shout arose—a shout that entered through his ears and unlocked his eyes, so that there might be a way to strike and cast down a mind still bold rather than strong, and the weaker for this, that it had presumed upon itself, when it ought to have presumed upon you (Cf. Jdt 6:15).

For as soon as he saw that blood, he drank in cruelty along with it, and did not turn away, but fixed his gaze and drank in the frenzy, and did not know it, and delighted in the wickedness of the contest, and was made drunk with the bloody pleasure. And he was no longer the man who had come, but one of the crowd to which he had come, and a true companion of those who had brought him. Why say more? He watched, he shouted, he caught fire, he carried away from there a madness by which he would be goaded to return—not only with those by whom he had first been dragged, but even ahead of them, and dragging others.

And yet from there, with a most strong and most merciful hand, you plucked him out, and taught him to have confidence not in himself but in you (Cf. Prov 3:5; Isa 57:13)—but long afterward.

14. Yet this too was now being stored up in his memory for a future medicine. For that other thing as well—that when he was still studying, by now hearing me at Carthage, and was thinking at midday in the forum about what he was to recite, as students are wont to practice, you allowed him to be seized by the guards of the forum as a thief—I do not think you permitted, our God, for any other reason than that the man who was to be so great might already begin to learn how a man is not lightly, in judging cases, to be condemned by another through rash credulity.

For he was walking alone before the tribunal with his tablets and stylus, when behold, a certain young man of the student set, a real thief, secretly bringing an axe, entered—Alypius not noticing—up to the leaden gratings that overhang the silversmiths' street, and began to cut the lead. At the sound of the axe the silversmiths below muttered, and sent men to seize whomever they might find. He, hearing their voices, dropped the tool and made off, fearing to be caught with it. But Alypius, who had not seen him enter, became aware of him going out, and quickly saw him departing; and wishing to know the reason, he entered the place, and found the axe, and stood considering and wondering at it, when behold, those who had been sent find him alone, holding the iron at whose sound they had been roused; they seize him, drag him off, and, the tenants of the forum being gathered, they boast that they have caught a thief red-handed; and from there he was being led off to be handed over to the courts.

15. But thus far was he to be taught. For at once, Lord, you came to the aid of his innocence, of which you alone were the witness (Cf. Wis 1:6; Jer 29:23). For as he was being led off either to prison or to punishment, a certain architect met them, who had the chief charge of the public buildings. They were glad to have met him especially, since he was the one to whom they used to come under suspicion of things stolen that had gone missing from the forum, as if now at last he might learn by whom these things were done.

But the man had often seen Alypius at the house of a certain senator, to whom he used to come to pay his respects; and recognizing him at once, he took him by the hand, drew him aside from the crowds, and, asking the cause of so great an evil, heard what had happened, and ordered all the rioters who were present, snarling threateningly, to come with him.

And they came to the house of that young man who had committed the deed. Now there was a boy before the door, so small that, fearing nothing thereby for his master, he could easily disclose the whole; for he had been with him in the forum as his attendant. When Alypius recalled this, he told the architect; and the architect showed the axe to the boy, asking him whose it was. He at once said, "Ours"; then, being questioned, he disclosed the rest.

So, the case being transferred to that house, and the crowds confounded who had already begun to triumph over him, the future steward of your word and examiner of many cases in your Church departed more experienced and better instructed.

16. This man, then, I had found at Rome, and he clung to me with the strongest bond, and set out with me to Milan, both that he might not desert me and that he might do something with the law he had learned—more to satisfy his parents' wish than his own. And he had now three times sat as assessor, with a continence that astonished the rest, while he himself rather marveled at those who would prefer gold to innocence.

His character was tested, too, not only by the allurement of greed but also by the goad of fear. At Rome he was assessor to the count of the Italian treasury. There was at that time a certain most powerful senator, by whose benefits many were bound and to whose terror many were subject. He wished, by the customary license of his power, to have something allowed him that was unlawful by the laws; Alypius resisted. A reward was promised; he laughed at it in his heart. Threats were held out; he trod them underfoot—while all marveled at so unusual a soul, which neither desired as a friend nor dreaded as an enemy a man so great, and celebrated with vast fame for his countless ways of helping and harming.

But the very judge whose counselor he was, although he too did not wish it done, yet did not openly refuse, but, transferring the matter onto Alypius, asserted that he was not permitted by him—since in truth, if the judge had done it, Alypius would have withdrawn.

By this one thing alone was he almost enticed, through his love of literature: that he might have manuscripts copied for himself at praetorian prices. But, having consulted justice, he turned his deliberation to the better, judging the equity that forbade more useful than the power that permitted. This is a small thing; but he who is faithful in a little is faithful also in much (Luke 16:10); nor will that be void in any way which proceeded from the mouth of your truth (Cf. John 8:40; 1:14): If you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will entrust to you what is true? And if you have not been faithful in what is another's, who will give you what is your own? (Luke 16:11–12)

Such was the man who then clung to me, and wavered with me in counsel as to what manner of life was to be held.

18. And I marveled most of all, busily recalling how long a time it was from the nineteenth year of my age, in which I had begun to burn with zeal for wisdom, resolving, once it was found, to leave behind all the empty hopes of vain desires and the lying madnesses (Cf. Ps 40 (39):5). And behold, I was now bearing my thirtieth year, stuck in the same mire through a greed for enjoying things present, which were fleeing and scattering me, while I said, "Tomorrow I shall find it; behold, it will appear plainly, and I shall hold it; behold, Faustus will come and explain everything.

"O great men, the Academics! Nothing for the conduct of life can be grasped as certain (Cf. Cicero, Academica 2.6.18; 2.10.31). No—let us seek the more diligently, and not despair. Behold, the things in the Church's books that seemed absurd are now not absurd, and can be understood otherwise and honorably. I will fix my feet on that step where, as a boy, I was placed by my parents, until the clear truth be found.

"But where shall it be sought? When shall it be sought? Ambrose has no leisure; there is no leisure for reading. Where do we look for the very manuscripts? From where, or when, do we obtain them? From whom do we get them?

"Let times be appointed, let hours be apportioned, for the health of the soul (Cf. Ps 35 (34):3). A great hope has arisen: the catholic faith does not teach what we thought, and vainly accused. Its learned ones count it a sin to believe God bounded by the figure of a human body. And do we hesitate to knock, that the rest may be opened (Cf. Matt 7:7–8; Luke 11:9–10)? The forenoon hours my pupils occupy; what do we do with the rest? Why do we not do this?

"But when do we pay our respects to our greater friends, whose support we need? When do we prepare what the students buy? When do we restore ourselves, relaxing the mind from the strain of cares?"

19. "Let all things perish, and let us dismiss these vain and empty things; let us betake ourselves to the search for truth alone. Life is wretched, death is uncertain; it may steal upon us suddenly: how shall we depart hence? And where are we to learn what here we have neglected? Or rather, must we not pay the penalties of this neglect?

"What if death itself cuts off and ends all care, together with feeling? This too, then, must be inquired into.

"But far be it that it should be so. It is not in vain, not empty, that so eminent a height of the authority of the Christian faith is spread throughout the whole world. Never would such great things be done for us divinely, if with the death of the body the life of the soul were also consumed. Why, then, do we delay to abandon the hope of the world and betake ourselves wholly to seeking God and the happy life?

"But wait: these things too are pleasant; they have no small sweetness of their own; the attention must not easily be cut off from them, because it is shameful to return to them again. See, how much it is, that some honor be obtained. And what more is to be desired in these things? There is a supply of greater friends: if nothing else, and we hurry hard, a governorship may be granted. And a wife must be taken with some money, lest she burden our expense, and that will be the limit of desire. Many great men, most worthy of imitation, have given themselves to the study of wisdom together with wives."

20. While I said these things, and these winds shifted and drove my heart this way and that, the times passed on, and I was slow to turn to the Lord, and put off from day to day (Sir 5:8) living in you, and did not put off dying daily in myself; loving the happy life, I feared it in its own seat, and, fleeing from it, I sought it.

For I thought I should be too wretched if I were deprived of a woman's embraces, and I did not think of the medicine of your mercy (Cf. Matt 7:7–8; Luke 11:9–10) to heal that very weakness, because I had not tried it, and believed continence to be a matter of one's own strength, of which I was not conscious in myself—being so foolish that I did not know that, as it is written, no one can be continent unless you grant it (Cf. Wis 8:21). And you would surely have granted it, if with an inward groan I had knocked at your ears (Cf. Matt 7:7–8; Luke 11:9–10), and with solid faith had cast my care upon you (Cf. Ps 55 (54):22).

21. Alypius, indeed, kept holding me back from taking a wife, chanting that in no way could we live together in carefree leisure in the love of wisdom, as we had long desired, if I did so. For he himself was even then most chaste in that matter, so that it was a wonder—since at the entrance of his youth he had taken some experience of intercourse, but had not clung to it, but rather grieved over it and despised it, and from then on lived most continently.

But I resisted him with the examples of those who, married, had cultivated wisdom and deserved well of God (Cf. Heb 13:16), and had kept faith with their friends and loved them. From the greatness of soul of these men I was far indeed; and, bound by the disease of the flesh, with its deadly sweetness I dragged my chain, afraid to be loosed, and—as if my wound had been struck—I repelled the words of one counseling me well, as the hand of one loosing my bonds. Moreover, through me the serpent spoke (Cf. Gen 3:1) to Alypius too, weaving and scattering through my tongue sweet snares in his path (Cf. Ps 142 (141):4), in which his honorable and unfettered feet might be entangled.

22. For when he marveled that I, whom he esteemed not slightly, should so stick to the birdlime of that pleasure as to affirm, whenever we discussed it between us, that I could in no way lead a celibate life—and when, seeing him marvel, I defended myself by saying that there was a great difference between what he had taken hastily and by stealth, which he now scarcely even remembered and therefore easily despised without any trouble, and the delights of my habit, to which, if the honorable name of marriage were added, he ought not to wonder why I could not despise that life—he too began to desire marriage, in no way overcome by the lust of such pleasure, but by curiosity.

For he said that he wanted to know what that thing was, without which my life, which so pleased him, seemed to me not life but a punishment. For his mind, free from that bond, was astonished at my servitude; and by its astonishment it was going on into a desire of trying it, and would come into the experience itself, and from there perhaps would fall into that very servitude at which he was astonished—since he was willing to make a covenant with death (Cf. Isa 28:18), and he who loves danger will fall into it (Sir 3:27).

For neither of us was drawn, except slightly, by whatever marital honor there is in the office of governing a marriage and rearing children. But in great part, and vehemently, the habit of sating an insatiable concupiscence held me captive and tormented, while astonishment was dragging him along to be captured.

Such we were, until you, O Most High (Ps 9:2; 92 (91):1), not forsaking our dust, in mercy came to the aid of us wretched ones in wonderful and hidden ways.

23. And I was pressed unrelentingly to take a wife. Already I was asking, already it was being promised, my mother especially taking pains, so that, once married, the saving baptism might wash me—for which she rejoiced to see me being fitted day by day, and noticed that her vows and your promises were being fulfilled in my faith. And although, both at my request and out of her own strong desire, she daily beseeched you with a great cry of her heart to show her something through a vision about my future marriage, you never willed it.

And she saw certain vain and fantastic things, such as the press of the human spirit, busy about this matter, forced up; and she told them to me, not with the confidence she usually had when you showed her things, but despising them. For she said that she could discern, by some savor she could not put into words, the difference between you revealing and her own soul dreaming.

Yet the matter was pressed on, and the girl was asked for, whose age was nearly two years short of marriageable; and because she was pleasing, she was waited for.

24. And many of us friends had turned it over in mind, and, conferring and detesting the turbulent troubles of human life, had almost settled to live apart from the crowds at leisure—planning that leisure thus: that whatever we could have, we would bring into a common store, and out of all make one household,

so that, through the sincerity of friendship, there should not be one thing belonging to this man and another to that, but what was made out of all should be one, and the whole belong to each, and all things to all,

since it seemed to us that there could be perhaps ten men in the same fellowship; and there were among us some very rich men, especially Romanianus, our townsman, whom heavy storms of his own affairs had then drawn to court, most intimate with me from my earliest years. He pressed this matter most of all, and had great authority in urging it, because his ample wealth far surpassed the rest.

And it had pleased us that two each year, like magistrates, should see to all that was needed, while the rest were at rest. But after it began to be considered whether the little wives—whom some of us already had, and we others wished to have—would allow this, that whole plan, which we were forming so well, fell to pieces in our hands, and was broken and cast aside. From there it was back to sighs and groans, and our steps to following the broad and beaten ways of the world (Cf. Matt 7:13); for many were the thoughts in our heart (Prov 19:21), but your counsel abides forever (Ps 33 (32):11). By that counsel you laughed at ours, and prepared your own for us, ready to give us food in due season, and to open your hand and fill our souls with blessing (Ps 145 (144):15–16).

25. Meanwhile my sins were being multiplied (Cf. Sir 23:3), and when she with whom I was accustomed to share my bed was torn from my side as a hindrance to marriage, my heart, where it clung to her, was cut and wounded, and trailed blood. And she had returned to Africa, vowing to you that she would know no other man (Cf. Luke 1:34), leaving with me the natural son I had had by her.

But I, unhappy, no imitator of a woman, impatient of delay—since it was only after two years that I was to receive the girl I sought—because I was no lover of marriage but a slave of lust, procured another woman, no wife of course, so that, as it were, the disease of my soul might be sustained and carried on, whole or even increased, under the escort of an enduring habit, into the kingdom of marriage.

Nor was that wound of mine healed which had been made by the cutting away of my former companion; but after the burning and the sharpest pain it festered, and pained, as it were, the more coldly, but the more hopelessly.

26. To you be praise, to you be glory (Cf. 1 Chr 29:11), fountain of mercies! I was becoming more wretched, and you nearer. Already, again and again, your right hand was at hand to snatch me from the mire (Ps 40 (39):3) and wash me away, and I did not know it. Nor did anything call me back from a deeper whirlpool of carnal pleasures except the fear of death and of your judgment to come, which, through various opinions indeed, yet never departed from my breast.

And I disputed with my friends Alypius and Nebridius about the ends of good and evil (Cf. Cicero, On the Ends of Goods and Evils 1.17.55). Epicurus would have carried off the palm in my mind, had I not believed that after death there remains life for the soul, and the consequences of merit—which Epicurus refused to believe.

And I asked: if we were immortal, and lived in perpetual bodily pleasure with no fear of losing it, why should we not be happy, or what else should we seek?—not knowing that this very thing belonged to great misery: that, so sunk and blind, I could not conceive the light of integrity and of a beauty to be embraced for its own sake, which the eye of the flesh does not see, and which is seen from within.

Nor did I, wretched, consider from what vein it flowed to me that even these foul things I yet discussed sweetly with friends, and could not be happy without friends—even according to the sense I then had—amid however great an abundance of carnal pleasures. These friends, surely, I loved freely, and freely I felt myself loved by them in turn.

O twisting ways! Woe to the audacious soul (Isa 3:9) that hoped, if it withdrew from you, it would have something better! It turned and turned again, onto its back and sides and belly, and all was hard, and you alone are rest. And behold, you are at hand (Ps 139 (138):8), and you free us from our wretched errors, and set us on your way (Cf. Ps 32 (31):8), and console us, and say: "Run (Cf. 1 Cor 9:24), I will carry you (Isa 46:4), and I will bring you through, and there too I will carry you."

1. By now my evil and wicked youth was dead, and I was passing into young manhood; and the older I was in age, the baser in vanity, since I could not conceive any substance except such as is wont to be seen through these eyes.

I did not think of you, God, in the figure of a human body, from the time I began to hear anything of wisdom; this I always fled, and I rejoiced to have found it in the faith of our spiritual mother, your catholic Church. But what else to think of you did not occur to me. And I, a man, and such a man, tried to think of you, the supreme and only and true God (John 17:3);

and with all my marrow I believed you incorruptible and inviolable and unchangeable, because, though not knowing whence or how, I yet plainly saw and was certain that what can be corrupted is worse than what cannot, and what cannot be violated I unhesitatingly set before the violable, and what suffers no change is better than what can be changed.

My heart cried out violently (Cf. Lam 2:18) against all my phantasms, and with this one blow I tried to drive away the swarm of uncleanness fluttering about the gaze of my mind; and scarcely was it dispersed when, in the twinkling of an eye (1 Cor 15:52), behold, it was massed together again, and rushed upon my sight and clouded it, so that, although not in the form of a human body, I was yet forced to think of something bodily, set through spaces of place—whether infused into the world, or even diffused through the infinite outside the world;

even that incorruptible and inviolable and unchangeable thing, which I set before the corruptible and violable and changeable—since whatever I deprived of such spaces seemed to me to be nothing, but utterly nothing, not even a void: as if, when a body is taken away from a place, the place should remain emptied of every body, earthly and watery and airy and heavenly, yet still be an empty place, a kind of spacious nothing.

2. I therefore, gross of heart (Cf. Matt 13:15; Acts 28:27), and not even clear to myself, thought that whatever was not stretched or diffused or massed or swollen through some extent of space, or did not or could not take on something of the kind, was nothing whatever. For over such forms as my eyes are wont to range, my heart ranged in such images; and I did not see that this very attention, by which I formed those images, was not anything of the kind—and yet it could not have formed them unless it were something great.

So too I thought of you, life of my life, as vast through infinite spaces, penetrating on every side the whole mass of the world, and beyond it, on all sides, through the immeasurable without end; so that the earth should have you, the heaven should have you, all things should have you, and they should be bounded in you, but you nowhere. For just as the body of this air, the air that is above the earth, does not block the light of the sun from passing through it—penetrating it, not by breaking or cutting it, but by filling it wholly—so I thought the body not only of heaven and air and sea but also of earth pervious to you, and penetrable in all its greatest and least parts, to receive your presence, which by a hidden inspiration, within and without, administers all things that you have created.

So I conjectured, because I could not think otherwise; for it was false. For in that way a greater part of the earth would have a greater part of you, and a lesser a lesser; and so all things would be full of you in such a way that the body of an elephant would hold more of you than that of a sparrow, by as much as it was larger than it and occupied a larger place; and so, piece by piece, you would make your parts present to the parts of the world—great parts to great, small to small. But it is not so. But you had not yet lightened my darkness (Ps 18 (17):28).

3. It was enough for me, Lord, against those deceived deceivers and speechless chatterers (Cf. Matt 15:31) (since your word did not sound from them)—enough, then, was that which Nebridius had long been wont to propose, from as far back as Carthage, and by which all of us who heard it were shaken: what would that nation of darkness of theirs, which they are wont to set against you out of an opposing mass, have done to you, if you had refused to fight with it?

For if it were answered that it would have done you some harm, then you would be violable and corruptible. But if it were said that it could do you no harm, then no cause would be brought for fighting—

and for fighting in such a way that some portion of you, and a member of you, or an offspring of your very substance, should be mingled with hostile powers and natures not created by you, and be corrupted and changed by them so far for the worse that it was turned from blessedness into misery, and needed help by which it might be rescued and cleansed—

and that this is the soul, to which your word, itself enslaved, would come to aid as free, and as pure to it defiled, and as whole to it corrupted; but itself corruptible too, since it is of one and the same substance.

And so, if they said that you—whatever you are, that is, your substance by which you exist—are incorruptible, then all those things were false and execrable; but if they said you are corruptible, that itself was already false, and to be abominated at the first utterance.

Enough, then, was this against those men, to be utterly vomited out from the oppression of the breast, because they had no way out without a horrible sacrilege of heart and tongue, in thinking such things of you and speaking them.

4. But I too, although I said and firmly held that our God, the true God, is uncontaminable and unconvertible and in no part changeable—you who made not only our souls but also our bodies, and not only our souls and bodies but all souls and all things—yet did not hold an unfolded and disentangled cause of evil. Whatever it might be, however, I saw that it must be sought in such a way that I should not, through it, be constrained to believe the unchangeable God changeable, lest I myself become the very thing I was seeking. And so I sought it free from care, and certain that what those men said was not true, whom I fled with all my soul, because I saw that, in asking whence evil came, they were filled with malice (Cf. Sir 9:3; Rom 1:29), by which they supposed that your substance rather suffered evil than that their own did evil.

5. And I bent myself to discern what I had heard—that the free choice of the will is the cause of our doing evil, and your just judgment (Ps 119 (118):137) the cause of our suffering it—and I could not discern it clearly. And so, trying to draw the gaze of my mind up out of the deep, I was plunged back again; and often trying, I was plunged back again and again. For it raised me toward your light, that I knew I had a will as surely as I knew I was alive. And so, when I willed or did not will anything, I was most certain that it was no one but myself who willed and did not will; and there, I was now coming to perceive, was the cause of my sin. But what I did unwillingly, I saw that I rather suffered than did, and I judged it to be not fault but punishment—by which, thinking you just, I quickly confessed I was not unjustly chastised.

But again I said: "Who made me? Was it not my God, not only good, but goodness itself? Whence, then, comes it that I will evil and refuse good, so that there is a reason why I should justly pay penalties? Who put this in me, and grafted into me this nursery of bitterness (Cf. Heb 12:15), when I was wholly made by my most sweet God? If the devil is the author, whence is the devil himself? But if he too, by a perverse will, was made a devil from a good angel, whence, again, is the evil will in him by which he became a devil, when the whole angel had been made by a most good Creator?"

By these thoughts I was again pressed down and choked, but not dragged down to that hell of error where no one confesses to you (Cf. Ps 6:5), while you are thought rather to suffer evil than man to do it.

6. For I strove to find the rest in the same way as I had already found that the incorruptible is better than the corruptible; and so I confessed that you, whatever you were, were incorruptible. For no soul ever could, or ever will be able to, think of anything better than you, who are the supreme and best good. But since, most truly and most certainly, the incorruptible is to be set before the corruptible—as I already set it—I could now in thought reach something better than my God, unless you were incorruptible.

Where, then, I saw the incorruptible to be preferred to the corruptible, there I ought to have sought you, and thence to take note where evil is—that is, whence comes that very corruption by which your substance can in no way be violated. For corruption in no way at all violates our God: by no will, by no necessity, by no unforeseen chance, since he himself is God, and what he wills for himself is good, and he himself is that same good; but to be corrupted is not good. Nor are you forced unwilling to anything, because your will is not greater than your power. It would be greater, if you yourself were greater than yourself: for the will and the power of God are God himself. And what is unforeseen to you, who know all things? And no nature is, except because you know it. And why do we say many things about why the substance which is God is not corruptible, when, if it were so, it would not be God?

7. And I sought whence evil is, and I sought it badly, and in my very search I did not see the evil. And I set in the sight of my spirit (Ps 16 (15):8) the whole creation, whatever in it we can discern—such as earth and sea and air and stars and trees and mortal animals—and whatever in it we do not see, such as the firmament of heaven above, and all the angels and all its spiritual beings; but these too, as if they were bodies, my imagination set in places, place by place. And I made one great mass of your creation, distinguished by kinds of bodies—whether they really were bodies, or those I myself had feigned in place of spirits—and I made it great, not as great as it was (which I could not know), but as great as I pleased, yet on every side finite; but you, Lord, I supposed surrounding and penetrating it on every side, but everywhere infinite—as if there were a sea everywhere and on every side, through the immeasurable, an infinite sea, and only sea, and it had within it some sponge, however great, but finite all the same, and that sponge would be filled in its every part from the immeasurable sea;

so I supposed your finite creation full of you the infinite, and I said: "Behold God, and behold what God has created; and God is good, mightily and by far surpassing these; but still, being good, he created good things; and see how he surrounds and fills them. Where, then, is evil, and whence, and by what way did it creep in here? What is its root, and what its seed? Or does it not exist at all? Why, then, do we fear and beware of what does not exist? Or if we fear it in vain, surely that very fear is an evil, by which the heart is goaded and tortured for nothing—and an evil so much the graver as there is nothing we should fear, and yet we fear. Therefore, either there is an evil that we fear, or the very fact that we fear is the evil."

"Whence, then, is it, since God, being good, made all these good things (Cf. Gen 1:31)? The greater and supreme good, indeed, made lesser goods; but still both the creating and the created are all good. Whence is evil? Or was there some evil matter from which he made them, and he formed and ordered it, yet left something in it which he did not turn into good? But why this? Was he powerless to turn and change the whole, so that no evil should remain, when he is omnipotent?"

"Finally, why did he will to make anything from it, and not rather, by that same omnipotence, bring it about that it should not exist at all? Or could it indeed exist against his will? Or if it were eternal, why did he allow it to exist so long, through infinite spaces of time backward, and only so long after was pleased to make something from it? Or, if he suddenly willed to do something, would not the Omnipotent rather have brought this about: that it should not exist, and that he himself alone should be the whole, the true and supreme and infinite good?"

"Or, if it was not well that he who was good should not also fashion and found something good, then, that evil matter being removed and reduced to nothing, might he not himself have established the good matter from which he would create all things? For he would not be omnipotent, if he could not found something good unless aided by a matter which he had not himself founded."

Such things I turned over in my wretched breast, weighed down with the most gnawing cares from the fear of death and the truth not found; yet steadfastly there clung in my heart, in the catholic Church, the faith of your Christ, our Lord and Savior (2 Pet 2:20)—in many respects still unformed, and fluctuating outside the norm of doctrine, but yet my mind did not leave it, and day by day drank it in more and more.

8. By now I had also rejected the lying divinations and impious ravings of the astrologers. Let your mercies confess to you for this too, my God, out of the inmost depths of my soul (Ps 107 (106):8, 15, 21, 31)! For you, you altogether (for who else calls us back from the death of all error but the life that knows not how to die, and the wisdom that enlightens minds in need, itself needing no light, by which the world is administered down to the fluttering leaves of the trees?)—

you provided for my obstinacy, by which I struggled against Vindicianus, the shrewd old man, and Nebridius, the young man of wonderful soul—the one vehemently affirming, the other saying with some doubt, indeed, but yet often, that there is no such art of foreseeing the future, but that men's conjectures often have the force of chance, and that, by saying many things, many that are to come are said, though unknown to those who say them, who hit upon them by not keeping silent. You provided, then, a friend who was no lazy consulter of the astrologers, nor well versed in those writings, but, as I said, a curious consulter, and yet one who knew a certain thing which he said he had heard from his father—how much it availed to overthrow the credit of that art, he did not know.

This man, then, by name Firminus, liberally educated and polished in eloquence, when he consulted me as his dearest friend about certain of his affairs, in which his worldly hope had swelled—as to what seemed to me according to his "constellations," as they call them—I, who had now begun to be turned to Nebridius's opinion on this matter, did not indeed refuse to conjecture and say what occurred to me as I wavered, but yet added that I was now nearly persuaded that those things were ridiculous and empty,

whereupon he told me that his father had been most curious about such books, and had had a friend equally pursuing them along with him. By equal zeal and comparison they fanned into those trifles the fire of their hearts, so that they would observe the moments of birth even of dumb animals, if any were born in their house, and note the position of the heavens at them, from which to gather, as it were, the experiments of that art.

And so he said he had heard from his father that, when Firminus's mother was pregnant, a certain maidservant of that paternal friend was likewise growing big in the womb. This could not be hidden from her master, who took care to know the births even of his dogs with the most exact diligence; and so it came about that, when the one for his wife and the other for his maidservant counted the days and hours and the smaller fractions of the hours with the most careful observation, both were delivered at the same time, so that both were forced to cast the same constellations down to the same minutes—the one for his son, the other for his little slave.

For when the women began to be in labor, they each indicated to the other what was being done in his own house, and had prepared messengers to send to one another, so that the birth of what was being delivered might be announced to each as soon as it happened; and that it should be announced at once, they had easily arranged, each in his own domain. And so, he said, those who were sent by the one and the other met each other at so equal an interval from the two houses that neither of them could note any different position of the stars or any different fractions of the moments.

And yet Firminus, born in an ample station among his own, ran the whiter ways of the world, was increased in riches, raised in honors; while that slave, the yoke of his condition in no way relaxed, served his masters—as the man who knew him related.

9. When I had heard and believed these things—for such was the manner of his telling—all that resistance of mine collapsed and dissolved. And first I tried to call Firminus himself back from that curiosity, by saying that, on inspecting his constellations, in order to pronounce truly I ought certainly to have seen there that his parents were among the leading men of their people, a noble family of his own city, freeborn rank, an honorable upbringing, and liberal learning.

But if that slave had consulted me from the same constellations (since they were his own as well), so that I might bring out true things for him too, I ought again to have seen there a most abject family, a servile condition, and the rest, far removed from the former and far apart from it.

Whence, then, would it come that, inspecting the same things, I should say different things, if I spoke truly (whereas, if I said the same things, I should speak falsely)? From this I gathered most certainly that what was said truly upon inspecting the constellations was said not by art but by chance; and what was said falsely, not by lack of skill in the art, but by the lie of chance.

10. Having gained this approach, I myself, ruminating on such things, lest any of those same ravers who follow such gain—whom I now longed at once to attack and to refute with mockery—should so resist me, as if either Firminus had told me, or his father him, falsehoods, turned my consideration to those who are born twins, most of whom are poured from the womb so close after one another that the small interval of time between them—however great a force they contend it has in the nature of things—cannot be gathered by human observation, and can in no way be marked in the figures which the astrologer is to inspect in order to pronounce the truth.

And they will not be true, because, inspecting the same figures, he ought to have said the same things about Esau and about Jacob; but the same things did not befall them both. So he would say false things; or, if he said true things, he would not say the same things—yet he would be inspecting the same figures. Not by art, then, but by chance, would he say true things.

For you, Lord, most just governor of the universe, while both those who consult and those consulted know it not, act by a hidden instinct, so that, when anyone consults, he hears what he ought to hear, by the hidden merits of souls, out of the abyss of your just judgment (Cf. Ps 36 (35):6). To which let no man say, "What is this?" (Exod 13:14; 16:15; Sir 39:26) "Why this?" Let him not say it, let him not say it; for he is a man.

11. And so by now, my helper (Ps 19 (18):14; 59 (58):17), you had loosed me from those bonds; and I sought whence evil is, and there was no way out. But you did not let me be carried away by any waves of thought from that faith by which I believed both that you exist, and that your substance is unchangeable, and that there is care and judgment of yours over men, and that in Christ, your Son, our Lord, and in the Holy Scriptures, which the authority of your catholic Church commended, you had set the way of human salvation to that life which is to be after this death. These things, then, being kept safe and unshakably strengthened in my mind, I sought, seething, whence evil is.

What torments of my heart in travail, what groans, my God! And there were your ears, though I knew it not. And when in silence I sought strongly, the silent contritions of my soul were great voices to your mercy. You knew what I suffered, and no man did. For how little was it that was distilled through my tongue into the ears of my most intimate friends! Did the whole tumult of my soul, for which neither time nor my mouth sufficed, sound to them? Yet the whole went into your hearing—the whole that I roared from the groaning of my heart, and my desire was before you, and the light of my eyes was not with me (Ps 38 (37):9–11). For it was within, and I was without; nor was it in place. But I was attending to the things contained in places, and there I found no place to rest, nor did they receive me so that I might say, "It is enough," and, "It is well," nor did they let me return where it might be well enough with me.

For I was higher than these, but lower than you; and you were my true joy, I being subject to you, and you had subjected to me the things you created below me (Cf. Gen 1:28). And this was the right balance and the middle region of my health: that I should remain in your image (Gen 1:26–27), and, serving you, have dominion over the body. But when I rose proudly against you, and ran against the Lord with the thick neck of my shield (Job 15:26 (LXX)), even these lowest things were made above me, and pressed me down, and nowhere was there relief or breathing-space.

They met me on every side, heaped and massed together as I looked; and as I thought, the images of bodies set themselves against me as I tried to return, as if it were said, "Where are you going, unworthy and foul?" And these things had grown out of my wound, because you humbled the proud like one wounded (Ps 89 (88):11), and by my swelling I was separated from you, and my too-bloated face closed my eyes.

12. But you, Lord, abide forever (Ps 102 (101):12), and you are not angry with us forever (Ps 85 (84):5), since you have had mercy on dust and ashes (Cf. Sir 17:31), and it pleased you in your sight (Ps 19 (18):14; Dan 3:40) to reform my deformities. And by inward goads you stirred me, that I might be impatient until you were made certain to me through the inward gaze. And my swelling subsided under the hidden hand of your medicine, and the gaze of my mind, confused and darkened, was healed day by day (Cf. Ps 61 (60):8; 2 Cor 4:16) by the stinging salve of wholesome pains.

13. And first, willing to show me how you resist the proud, but give grace to the humble (Jas 4:6; 1 Pet 5:5), and with how great a mercy the way of humility was shown to men—that your Word was made flesh and dwelt among men (John 1:14)—you procured for me, through a certain man swollen with a most monstrous conceit, certain books of the Platonists, translated from the Greek tongue into Latin.

And there I read—not indeed in these words, but this very same thing, urged by many and manifold reasonings—that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; the same was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was made nothing that was made; in him is life, and the life was the light of men; and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it; and that the soul of man, although it bears witness of the light, is yet not itself the light, but the Word, God, is the true light that enlightens every man coming into this world; and that he was in this world, and the world was made through him, and the world did not know him. But that he came unto his own, and his own did not receive him; but to as many as received him he gave power to become sons of God, to those who believe in his name (John 1:1–12)—that I did not read there.

14. Again, I read there that the Word, God, was born not of flesh, not of blood, nor of the will of man, nor of the will of the flesh, but of God; but that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:13–14)—that I did not read there. For I traced out in those writings, said variously and in many ways, that the Son was in the form of the Father, and did not think it robbery to be equal with God, because by nature he is that very thing; but that he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, made in the likeness of men, and found in fashion as a man; he humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the cross; wherefore God exalted him from the dead and gave him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that the Lord Jesus is in the glory of God the Father (Phil 2:6–11)—those books do not have.

For that before all times and above all times your only-begotten Son abides unchangeably, coeternal with you, and that souls receive of his fullness (John 1:16) that they may be blessed, and that by participation in the wisdom abiding in itself (Cf. Wis 7:27) they are renewed that they may be wise—that is there; but that in due time he died for the ungodly (Rom 5:6), and that you did not spare your only Son, but delivered him up for us all (Rom 8:32)—that is not there. For you hid these things from the wise and revealed them to little ones (Matt 11:25), that those who labor and are burdened might come to him, and he might refresh them, since he is gentle and humble of heart (Matt 11:28–29), and he directs the meek in judgment and teaches the gentle his ways (Ps 25 (24):9), seeing our humility and our toil, and forgiving all our sins (Ps 25 (24):18). But those who, lifted up as on the buskin of a loftier teaching, do not hear him saying, Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls (Matt 11:29)—even if they know God, they do not glorify him as God or give thanks, but become vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart is darkened; saying that they are wise, they became fools (Rom 1:21–22).

15. And therefore I read there also that the glory of your incorruption was changed into idols and various images, into the likeness of the image of corruptible man, and of birds and four-footed beasts and serpents (Rom 1:23)—namely, that Egyptian food for which Esau lost his birthright (Cf. Gen 25:33–34); since the firstborn people honored a four-footed head in your place (Cf. Exod 32:1–6), turned in heart toward Egypt (Acts 7:39), and bowing down your image, their own soul (Cf. Ps 57 (56):7), before the image of a calf that eats hay (Ps 106 (105):20).

I found these things there, and I did not eat. For it pleased you, Lord, to take away the reproach (Ps 119 (118):22) of his lessening from Jacob, that the elder should serve the younger (Gen 25:23; cf. Rom 9:12), and you called the gentiles into your inheritance (Ps 79 (78):1). And I had come to you from the gentiles, and I fixed my attention on the gold which you willed your people to carry off from Egypt (Cf. Exod 3:22; 11:2), since it was yours, wherever it was. And you said to the Athenians, through your Apostle, that in you we live and move and have our being, as also certain of their own have said (Acts 17:28); and surely those books were from there. And I did not attend to the idols of the Egyptians, whom they served with your gold, who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator (Rom 1:25).

16. And admonished from there to return to myself, I entered into my inmost being, with you as my guide; and I was able, because you had become my helper (Ps 30 (29):11). I entered, and saw, with the eye of my soul such as it was, above that same eye of my soul, above my mind, an unchangeable light—not this common light, visible to all flesh, nor, as it were, a greater one of the same kind, as though it should shine far more brightly and fill all things with its greatness. Not such was that light, but other, far other than all these. Nor was it above my mind as oil is above water, or as heaven above earth; but higher, because it made me, and I lower, because made by it. He who knows the truth knows it, and he who knows it knows eternity. Love knows it.

O eternal truth, and true love, and dear eternity! You are my God (Ps 42 (41):2); to you I sigh day and night (Cf. Ps 1:2; Jer 9:1). And when I first knew you, you took me up (Cf. Ps 27 (26):10), that I might see there was something to see, and that I was not yet one who could see it. And you beat back the weakness of my gaze, blazing upon me vehemently, and I trembled with love and dread; and I found myself to be far from you, in the region of unlikeness (Cf. Luke 15:13), as if I heard your voice from on high (Cf. Jer 31:15): "I am the food of the grown; grow, and you shall eat me. Nor shall you change me into yourself, like the food of your flesh, but you shall be changed into me." And I knew that for iniquity you chastise man, and you made my soul waste away like a spider's web (Ps 39 (38):12); and I said, "Is truth, then, nothing, since it is diffused neither through finite nor through infinite spaces of place?" And you cried from afar (Cf. Luke 15:13, 20): "No—rather, I am who I am (Exod 3:14)."

And I heard, as one hears in the heart, and there was no way at all left for me to doubt; and I would more easily doubt that I am alive than that there is not truth, which is understood and seen through the things that are made (Rom 1:20).

17. And I looked upon the other things below you, and I saw that they neither altogether are, nor altogether are not: they are, indeed, since they are from you; but they are not, since they are not what you are. For that truly is which abides unchangeably. But for me it is good to cleave to God (Ps 73 (72):28), because if I shall not abide in him, neither shall I be able to abide in myself. But he, abiding in himself, makes all things new (Wis 7:27); and you are my Lord, since you have no need of my goods (Ps 16 (15):2).

18. And it was made manifest to me that the things which are corrupted are good—things which could not be corrupted either if they were supreme goods, or unless they were goods: for if they were supreme goods, they would be incorruptible; but if they were no goods at all, there would be nothing in them to be corrupted. For corruption does harm, and unless it lessened the good, it would do no harm. Therefore, either corruption does no harm—which cannot be—or, what is most certain, all things that are corrupted are deprived of good.

But if they shall be deprived of all good, they will not exist at all. For if they shall exist and can no longer be corrupted, they will be better, because they will abide incorruptibly. And what is more monstrous than to say that things, having lost all good, are made better? Therefore, if they shall be deprived of all good, they will be nothing at all; therefore, as long as they exist, they are good.

Therefore whatever things exist are good; and that evil whose source I sought is not a substance, because, if it were a substance, it would be good. For either it would be an incorruptible substance—a great good, surely—or a corruptible substance, which, unless it were good, could not be corrupted.

And so I saw, and it was made manifest to me, that you made all things good, and that there are no substances at all which you did not make. And because you did not make all things equal, therefore all things exist: because each thing is good, and all things together are very good, since our God made all things very good (Gen 1:31).

19. And to you there is no evil at all—not only to you, but to your whole creation either, because outside you there is nothing that could break in and corrupt the order you imposed on it. But in its parts, certain things, because they do not agree with certain others, are thought evil; and those same things agree with others, and are good, and are good in themselves. And all these things that do not agree with one another agree with the lower part of things, which we call earth, having its own cloudy and windy sky suited to it.

And far be it that I should now say, "Let these things not exist," because, even if I saw these things alone, I would indeed desire better ones, but even for these alone I ought to praise you—since you are shown to be praiseworthy by the dragons from the earth, and all deeps; fire, hail, snow, ice, the storm-wind that does your word; the mountains and all hills, the fruit trees and all cedars; the beasts and all cattle, creeping things and winged birds; the kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all judges of the earth; young men and maidens, the old with the younger—let them praise your name (Ps 148:7–12).

But since they praise you also from the heavens, let them praise you, our God, in the heights: all your angels, all your powers, sun and moon, all the stars and light, the heavens of heavens, and the waters that are above the heavens—let them praise your name (Ps 148:1–5). I no longer desired better things, because I conceived all things; and the higher I judged better than the lower, indeed, but by a sounder judgment I weighed all things together as better than the higher alone.

20. There is no health (Ps 38 (37):3, 7) in those to whom something of your creation is displeasing—as there was none in me, when many things you made were displeasing to me. And because my soul did not dare that my God should be displeasing to it, it refused to count as yours whatever was displeasing to it. And from there it had gone off into the opinion of two substances, and found no rest, and spoke things not its own.

And returning from there, it had made itself a God through the infinite spaces of all places, and had supposed him to be you, and had set him in its heart, and had again become the temple of its own idol (Cf. 2 Cor 6:16), abominable to you. But after you cherished the head of one who knew it not, and closed my eyes, lest they see vanity (Ps 119 (118):37), I ceased a little from myself, and my madness was lulled to sleep; and I awoke in you, and saw you infinite in another way—and that sight was not drawn from the flesh.

21. And I looked back on other things, and saw that they owe it to you that they exist, and that all are bounded in you, but in another way—not as in a place, but because you are the all-holding one, holding all in your hand by truth; and all things are true insofar as they exist, nor is anything falsehood, except when what is not is thought to be.

And I saw that not only do all things agree with their own places, but also with their own times; and that you, who alone are eternal, did not begin to work after innumerable spaces of time, since all spaces of time, both those that have passed and those that will pass, would neither go nor come unless you were working and abiding.

22. And I felt, by experience, that it was no wonder that bread which is pleasant to a healthy palate is a torment to one not healthy, and that light, lovely to sound eyes, is hateful to sick ones. And your justice is displeasing to the wicked—much more so the viper and the little worm, which you created good, fitted to the lower parts of your creation, to which the wicked themselves are fitted, the more unlike they are to you; but they are fitted to the higher parts, the more like to you they become.

And I asked what iniquity is, and I found it to be no substance, but a perversity of will, turned aside from the supreme substance, you, O God, toward the lowest things—casting away its inmost parts (Cf. Sir 10:9) and swelling outward.

23. And I marveled that I now loved you, and not a phantasm in your place; and I did not stand to enjoy my God, but was caught up to you by your beauty, and soon torn away from you by my own weight, and fell back with a groan into these lower things; and that weight was carnal habit. Yet the memory of you remained with me, and in no way did I doubt that there was one to whom I should cleave—but that I was not yet one who could cleave, since the body that is corrupted weighs down the soul, and the earthly dwelling presses down the mind that ponders many things (Wis 9:15); and I was most certain that your invisible things, from the creation of the world, are understood and seen through the things that are made—your everlasting power also and divinity (Rom 1:20).

For, seeking whence I approved the beauty of bodies, whether heavenly or earthly, and what was at hand to me as I judged soundly about changeable things and said, "This ought to be so, that not so"—seeking, then, whence I judged, when I so judged, I had found the unchangeable and true eternity of truth above my changeable mind.

And so, step by step, from bodies to the soul that perceives through the body, and from there to its inner power, to which the body's sense announces external things—and as far as the beasts can go—

and from there again to the reasoning power, to which what is taken from the bodily senses is referred to be judged; which, finding itself too to be changeable in me, raised itself to its own understanding, and drew my thought away from habit (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.16.38), withdrawing itself from the contradicting crowds of phantasms,

that it might find by what light it was sprinkled, when, without any doubt, it cried out that the unchangeable is to be preferred to the changeable—whence it knew the unchangeable itself (for unless it knew it in some way, it would in no way set it with certainty before the changeable)—and it arrived at That Which Is, in the stroke of a trembling glance.

Then indeed I beheld your invisible things, understood through the things that are made; but I was not able to fix my gaze, and, my weakness being beaten back, I was returned to my usual ways, carrying with me nothing but a loving memory and, as it were, a longing for what I had smelled but could not yet eat.

24. And I sought a way of gaining the strength that would be fit for enjoying you, and I did not find it, until I embraced the mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Tim 2:5), who is over all things, God blessed forever (Rom 9:5), calling and saying, I am the Way and the Truth and the Life (John 14:6), and mingling with flesh the food which I was too weak to take—since the Word was made flesh (John 1:14), that your Wisdom, through which you created all things, might become milk for our infancy.

For I did not hold fast my God, the humble Jesus, being humble myself, nor did I know what his weakness had to teach. For your Word, the eternal truth, towering above the higher parts of your creation, raises up to itself those who are subject; but in the lower parts it built itself a humble house (Prov 9:1) of our clay, by which to bring down from themselves those who were to be made subject, and to draw them across to itself, healing their swelling and nourishing their love—lest, through confidence in themselves, they go farther off, but rather grow weak, seeing before their feet the Godhead made weak by sharing our coat of skin (Cf. Gen 3:21), and, wearied, throw themselves down upon it, while it, rising, lifts them up.

25. But I thought otherwise, and felt about my Lord Christ only as much as about a man of surpassing wisdom, to whom none could be equal—especially because, wondrously born of a Virgin, he seemed to have merited so great an authority of teaching, as an example of despising temporal things for the sake of attaining immortality, by his care for us. But what mystery the Word made flesh (John 1:14) held, I could not so much as suspect.

I had learned only this much from what was handed down in writing about him—that he ate and drank, slept, walked, was glad, was saddened, conversed—that that flesh did not cleave to your Word except along with a human soul and mind. Everyone knows this who knows the unchangeableness of your Word, which I now knew as far as I could, nor did I doubt about it at all.

For now to move the members of the body by will, now not to move them; now to be moved by some feeling, now not; now to utter wise sentences through signs, now to be silent—these are proper to the changeableness of soul and mind. And if these things had been written falsely of him, all the rest too would be imperiled by the lie, nor would any saving faith for the human race remain in those writings. Since, therefore, they were written truly, I acknowledged a whole man in Christ—not only the body of a man, or, with the body, a soul without mind, but the very man; and I judged him to be set before others, not as the person of truth, but by some great excellence of human nature and a more perfect participation in wisdom.

But Alypius supposed that the catholic belief was that God was so clothed with flesh that in Christ there was nothing besides God and flesh; he did not think that a human soul and mind were preached in him. And because he firmly held it well persuaded that the things handed down to memory about him could not be done without a living and rational creature, he was the more sluggish in moving toward the Christian faith itself. But afterward, learning that this was the error of the Apollinarist heretics, he rejoiced with the catholic faith and was brought into accord with it.

But I confess that I learned somewhat later, in the matter of the Word made flesh, how the catholic truth is distinguished from the falsehood of Photinus. For the rejection of heretics makes it stand out what your Church holds, and what sound doctrine has (Cf. 2 Tim 4:3; Titus 1:9; 2:1). For there had to be heresies also, that the approved (1 Cor 11:19) might be made manifest among the weak.

26. But then, having read those books of the Platonists, after I had been admonished from them to seek incorporeal truth, I beheld your invisible things, understood through the things that are made (Rom 1:20), and, being repulsed, I perceived what, through the darkness of my soul, I was not allowed to contemplate—

certain that you exist, and that you are infinite, yet not diffused through finite or infinite places, and that you truly are, who are ever the same (Cf. Ps 102 (101):27; Heb 1:12), in no part and by no motion other or otherwise, while all other things are from you (Cf. Rom 11:36), by this one most firm proof: that they exist. Of these things I was indeed certain, yet too weak to enjoy you.

I prattled plainly as though expert; and unless I had sought your way in Christ our Savior (Titus 1:4), I would have been not expert but extinct. For I had now begun to wish to seem wise, full of my punishment, and I did not weep; rather, I was even puffed up with knowledge. For where was that love which builds upon the foundation of humility, which is Christ Jesus (Cf. 1 Cor 8:1; 3:11)? Or when would those books teach me it? Into them, I believe, you willed me to fall before I considered your Scriptures, that it might be imprinted on my memory how I was affected by them, and that, when afterward I had been made gentle by your books, and my wounds were handled by your healing fingers, I might discern and distinguish what difference there is between presumption and confession—between those who see whither they must go but do not see the way, and the way that leads to the beatific homeland, not only to be beheld but to be dwelt in.

For if I had first been formed by your holy Writings, and you had grown sweet to me in familiarity with them, and afterward I had fallen upon those volumes, perhaps they would either have snatched me from the solid ground of devotion, or, if I had persisted in the wholesome affection I had drunk in, I might have thought that it could be conceived from those books too, if anyone had learned them alone.

27. And so I most eagerly seized the venerable pen of your Spirit, and before all the apostle Paul; and those questions vanished, in which the text of his discourse once seemed to me to contradict itself and not to agree with the testimonies of the Law and the Prophets (Cf. Matt 5:17; 7:12; Luke 16:16); and the one face of those chaste eloquences (Cf. Ps 12 (11):6) appeared to me, and I learned to exult with trembling (Ps 2:11).

And I began, and found that whatever truth I had read there was here said with the commendation of your grace—that he who sees should not so glory as if he had not received not only what he sees, but even the power to see (for what does he have that he has not received? (Cf. 1 Cor 4:7))—and that he should not only be admonished to see you, who are ever the same (Cf. Ps 102 (101):27; Heb 1:12), but also be healed to hold you,

and that he who cannot see from afar may yet walk the way by which he may come and see and hold; for although a man delights in the law of God according to the inner man, what shall he do about another law in his members, warring against the law of his mind and leading him captive in the law of sin which is in his members (Rom 7:22–23)? For you are just, O Lord; but we have sinned, have done wickedly (Dan 3:27, 29; Ps 119 (118):137), have acted impiously, and your hand has grown heavy upon us (Ps 32 (31):4), and we have been justly handed over to the ancient sinner, the lord of death, because he persuaded our will into the likeness of his own will, by which he did not stand in your truth (John 8:44).

What shall wretched man do? Who shall free him from the body of this death, but your grace, through Jesus Christ our Lord (Rom 7:24–25), whom you begot coeternal and created in the beginning of your ways (Prov 8:22), in whom the prince of this world (John 14:30) found nothing worthy of death (Cf. Luke 23:14–15), yet killed him—and the bond that was against us was canceled (Col 2:14)?

These things those writings do not have. Those pages do not have the face of this devotion, the tears of confession, your sacrifice, a troubled spirit, a contrite and humbled heart (Ps 51 (50):17), the salvation of a people, the bride, the city (Rev 21:2), the pledge of the Holy Spirit (2 Cor 5:5), the cup of our ransom. No one there sings: Shall not my soul be subject to God? For from him is my salvation; for he himself is my God and my salvation, my upholder; I shall be moved no more (Ps 62 (61):1–2). No one there hears him calling: Come to me, you who labor. They disdain to learn from him, since he is gentle and humble of heart (Matt 11:28–29). For you hid these things from the wise and prudent, and revealed them to little ones (Matt 11:25).

And it is one thing, from a wooded summit, to see the homeland of peace (Cf. Deut 32:49) and not find the way to it, and to struggle in vain over trackless places, beset and waylaid by fugitive deserters with their prince, the lion and the dragon (Cf. Ps 91 (90):13); and another to hold to the way that leads there, fortified by the care of the heavenly Commander, where those who deserted the heavenly army do not lie in wait as robbers—for they avoid it like a punishment.

These things were sinking wondrously into my vitals as I read the least of your apostles (Cf. 1 Cor 15:9), and I had considered your works and was afraid (Cf. Hab 3:2).

1. My God, let me remember, in thanksgiving to you, and confess your mercies upon me (Cf. Ps 86 (85):13). Let my bones be steeped in your love, and say: Lord, who is like you? (Ps 35 (34):10) You have burst my bonds: I will sacrifice to you a sacrifice of praise (Ps 116 (115):16–17). How you burst them, I will tell; and all who adore you will say, when they hear these things: Blessed be the Lord (Ps 72 (71):18), in heaven and on earth (Ps 135 (134):6); great and wonderful is his name (Ps 76 (75):1; 8:1).

Your words had clung fast in my vitals, and on every side I was hedged about by you (Cf. Isa 29:2). Of your eternal life I was certain, although I had seen it in a riddle and as through a mirror (1 Cor 13:12); yet all doubt about the incorruptible substance—that from it is every substance—had been taken from me, and I desired not to be more certain of you, but more steadfast in you.

But concerning my temporal life all things were wavering, and my heart had to be cleansed of the old leaven (Cf. 1 Cor 5:7–8); and the Way itself, the Savior, pleased me, but as yet it irked me to go through its narrows (Cf. John 14:6; Matt 7:14).

And you put into my mind, and it seemed good in my sight (Ps 16 (15):8), to go to Simplicianus, who seemed to me a good servant of yours, and your grace shone in him. I had heard, too, that from his youth he had lived most devoutly to you; and by now he had grown old, and in so long a life, in so good a zeal for following your way, he seemed to me to have experienced much and learned much—and truly so it was. Whence I wished that he would bring out to me, as I conferred my seethings with him, what was the fitting manner, for one affected as I was, of walking in your way (Cf. Ps 128 (127):1).

2. For I saw the Church full, and one went this way, another that (Cf. 1 Cor 7:7). But it displeased me, what I was doing in the world, and it was a great burden to me, now that the desires no longer inflamed me, as they used to, with the hope of honor and money, to bear that servitude so heavy.

For those things no longer delighted me, before your sweetness and the beauty of your house, which I loved (Ps 26 (25):8); but I was still tenaciously bound by a woman; nor did the Apostle forbid me to marry, though he exhorted to a better state, wishing most of all that all men be as he himself was (Cf. 1 Cor 7:7, 26–38). But I, the weaker, was choosing the softer place, and for this one thing I was tossed languid in the rest, fainting with withering cares, because in the other matters too, which I was unwilling to suffer, I was forced to conform to married life, to which, being given over, I was bound. I had heard from the mouth of truth (Cf. John 8:40; 1:14) that there are eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven; but let him who can receive it, he says, receive it (Matt 19:12).

Vain indeed are all men in whom there is no knowledge of God, and who, from the good things that are seen, could not find out him who is (Wis 13:1). But I was no longer in that vanity; I had transcended it, and, with all creation bearing witness, I had found you, our Creator, and your Word, God with you, and one God with you, through which you created all things (Cf. John 1:1–3).

And there is another kind of the impious, who, knowing God, did not glorify him as God or give thanks (Rom 1:21). Into this too I had fallen, and your right hand took me up (Ps 18 (17):35), and, taking me from there, set me where I might recover; for you said to man: Behold, piety is wisdom (Job 28:28), and: Do not wish to seem wise (Prov 26:5), since those saying they are wise became fools (Rom 1:22). And I had now found the good pearl, and, all I had being sold, it was to be bought (Cf. Matt 13:46)—and I hesitated.

3. I went, then, to Simplicianus, father of the then bishop Ambrose in the receiving of grace, and whom Ambrose truly loved as a father. I told him the windings of my error. But when I mentioned that I had read certain books of the Platonists, which Victorinus—once a rhetorician of the city of Rome, who, I had heard, had died a Christian—had translated into the Latin tongue, he congratulated me that I had not fallen upon the writings of other philosophers, full of fallacies and deceptions according to the elements of this world (Col 2:8), whereas in these, in every way, God and his Word are insinuated.

Then, to exhort me to the humility of Christ, hidden from the wise and revealed to little ones (Cf. Matt 11:25), he recalled Victorinus himself, whom, when he was at Rome, he had known most intimately; and about him he told me what I will not pass over in silence. For it holds great praise of your grace, to be confessed to you—how that most learned old man,

most skilled in all the liberal disciplines, who had read and judged so many of the philosophers, the teacher of so many noble senators, who even, for the distinction of his renowned teaching, had merited and received a statue in the Roman forum (which the citizens of this world think a great thing)—up to that age a worshiper of idols and a sharer in sacrilegious rites, with which nearly all the Roman nobility was then puffed up and breathed—the people's Pelusian, and

had held their weapons, and to whom Rome now made supplication, though once conquered by her—which that old man Victorinus had for so many years defended with earth-thundering mouth—he did not blush to become a boy of your Christ and an infant of your font (Cf. Ps 36 (35):9; John 4:14; Rev 21:6), bending his neck (Cf. Sir 51:26; Jer 27:12) to the yoke of humility (Cf. Matt 11:29; 18:3–4), and submitting his brow to the reproach of the cross (Cf. Gal 5:11).

4. O Lord, Lord, who bowed the heavens and came down, who touched the mountains and they smoked (Ps 144 (143):5), by what means did you insinuate yourself into that breast? He read—so Simplicianus said—Holy Scripture, and investigated and searched out all the Christian writings most studiously, and said to Simplicianus, not openly, but more secretly and familiarly: "Know that I am now a Christian."

And he answered: "I will not believe it, nor count you among Christians, until I see you in the Church of Christ." But he laughed, saying: "Do walls, then, make Christians?" And this he often said—that he was already a Christian—and Simplicianus often gave that answer, and often the joke about the walls was repeated by him.

For he feared to offend his friends, proud demon-worshipers, from the height of whose Babylonian dignity, as from the cedars of Lebanon which the Lord had not yet crushed (Cf. Ps 29 (28):5), he thought enmities would fall heavily upon him.

But after, by reading and longing, he drank in firmness, and feared to be denied by Christ before the holy angels if he feared to confess him before men (Luke 12:9; Mark 8:38), and appeared to himself guilty of a great crime in being ashamed of the sacraments of the humility of your Word and not ashamed of the sacrilegious rites of the proud demons, which, a proud imitator, he had received—he ceased to be shameless toward vanity and grew ashamed before the truth, and suddenly and unexpectedly said to Simplicianus, as he himself related: "Let us go to the church: I want to become a Christian."

And he, not containing himself for joy, went with him. And when he had been steeped in the first sacraments of instruction, not long after he also gave in his name, that he might be regenerated through baptism—Rome marveling, the Church rejoicing. The proud saw and were angry; they gnashed their teeth and wasted away (Cf. Ps 112 (111):10). But for your servant the Lord God was his hope, and he did not look upon vanities and lying follies (Ps 40 (39):4).

5. Finally, when the hour came for professing the faith—which at Rome is wont to be rendered, in words framed and held by memory, from a more eminent place in the sight of the faithful people, by those who are about to come to your grace—Simplicianus said that it was offered to Victorinus by the presbyters that he might render it more privately, as it was the custom to offer to some who seemed likely to be alarmed by bashfulness; but he chose rather to profess his salvation in the sight of the holy multitude.

For there was no salvation in the rhetoric he taught, and yet he had professed that publicly. How much less, then, ought he to have feared your gentle flock, in pronouncing your word, who did not fear the crowds of madmen in his own words?

And so, when he went up to render it, all, each as he knew him, murmured his name to one another with a din of congratulation. And who there did not know him? And there sounded, in a low sound, through the mouths of all rejoicing together: "Victorinus, Victorinus." Quickly they sounded with exultation because they saw him, and quickly they fell silent with attention to hear him. He pronounced the true faith with splendid confidence, and all wished to seize him into their very heart. And they did seize him, by loving and rejoicing: these were the hands of those who seized him.

6. Good God, what happens in a man, that he should rejoice more over the salvation of a soul despaired of and freed from a greater peril than if hope had always been present to it, or the peril had been less? For you too, merciful Father, rejoice more over one penitent than over ninety-nine righteous who have no need of penitence (Luke 15:7).

And we also hear it with great gladness, when we hear with how exultant the shepherd's shoulders the sheep that had strayed is carried back (Cf. Luke 15:4–6; Ps 119 (118):176), and the coin is brought back into your treasuries, the neighbor women rejoicing with her who found it (Cf. Luke 15:8–9); and the joy of the solemnity of your house wrings out tears (Ps 26 (25):8), when it is read in your house about your younger son, that he was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found (Luke 15:32). For you rejoice in us and in your angels, holy by holy love. For you are ever the same (Cf. Ps 102 (101):27; Heb 1:12), you who know all things (Dan 13:42) that are not always nor in the same way, in the same way always.

7. What, then, happens in the soul, when it is more delighted at things found or restored which it loves than if it had always had them? For other things too bear witness, and all are full of testimonies crying out: "It is so." The victorious commander triumphs, and would not have conquered had he not fought; and the greater the peril in the battle, the greater the joy in the triumph. The storm tosses sailors and threatens shipwreck; all grow pale at coming death (Cf. Virgil, Aeneid 4.644): the sky and sea grow calm, and they exult exceedingly, because they feared exceedingly.

One dear to us is sick, and his pulse announces ill; all who desire him well are sick at once in mind: he recovers, and does not yet walk with his former strength, and already there is such joy as there was not when before he walked safe and strong.

And the very pleasures of human life men acquire even through troubles not unforeseen and bursting in against their will, but appointed and voluntary. There is no pleasure in eating and drinking unless the trouble of hunger and thirst go before. And drunkards eat certain salty things, that a troublesome burning may arise, which, when drinking quenches it, becomes delight. And it is appointed that brides already betrothed not be handed over at once, lest, as one given cheaply, the husband should hold her whom, as a bridegroom, he had not sighed for in her delay.

8. This in base and execrable joy; this in that joy which is granted and lawful; this in the most sincere honorableness of friendship; this in him who was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found: everywhere the greater joy is preceded by a greater trouble. What is this (Exod 13:14; Sir 39:26), O Lord my God, since you are an eternal joy to yourself, you yourself, and certain things about you rejoice ever around you? What is it that this part of things alternates between failing and advancing, between offenses and reconciliations? Is this their measure, and is this what you gave them, when from the heights of the heavens (Matt 24:31) down to the depths of the earth, from the beginning to the end of the ages, from the angel to the little worm, from the first motion to the last, you placed all kinds of good things and all your just works, each in its own seat, and acted each in its own time?

Woe is me, how high you are in the heights, and how deep in the depths (Cf. Ps 113 (112):4)! And nowhere do you withdraw, and scarcely do we return to you.

9. Come, Lord, act: rouse us and call us back, kindle us and seize us, be fragrant, grow sweet: let us love, let us run. Do not many return to you from a deeper Tartarus of blindness than Victorinus, and draw near, and are enlightened (Cf. Ps 34 (33):5), receiving the light which, if any receive, they receive from you the power to become your sons (Cf. John 1:9, 12)? But if they are less known to the peoples, even those who know them rejoice less over them. For when joy is shared with many, even in individuals the joy is more abundant, because they warm and inflame one another.

Then, because they are known to many, they are an authority to many for salvation, and go before many who will follow; and therefore those also who went before them rejoice much over them, because they do not rejoice over them alone.

For far be it that in your tabernacle the persons of the rich should be accepted before the poor, or the noble before the lowly (Cf. Deut 1:17; Sir 42:1; Jas 2:1, 9), since rather you chose the weak things of the world, that you might confound the strong; and the lowly things of this world you chose, and the contemptible, and the things that are not, as though they were, that you might bring to nothing the things that are (1 Cor 1:27–28).

And yet that same least of your apostles (1 Cor 15:9), through whose tongue you sounded these words of yours, when Paul the proconsul—his pride beaten down by Paul's service and sent under the gentle yoke of your Christ (Cf. Matt 11:30), made a provincial of the great King (Cf. Acts 13:7–12)—he too, from the former Saul, loved to be called Paul, for the distinction of so great a victory.

For the enemy is more conquered in one whom he holds the more, and through whom he holds the more. But he holds the proud the more by the name of nobility, and through them holds the more by the name of authority.

By how much the more gratefully, then, was the heart of Victorinus thought of, which the devil had held as an impregnable stronghold, and the tongue of Victorinus, with which, a great and sharp weapon, he had slain many—so much the more abundantly ought your sons to exult, because our King bound the strong one (Cf. Matt 12:29), and they saw his vessels snatched away, cleansed, and fitted for your honor, and made useful to the Lord for every good work (2 Tim 2:21).

10. But when your man Simplicianus told me these things about Victorinus, I was on fire to imitate him; and for this indeed he had told them. But after he had added this too—that in the times of the emperor Julian, by a law given, Christians were forbidden to teach literature and oratory (which law he embraced, choosing to desert the wordy school rather than your word, by which you make the tongues of infants eloquent (Wis 10:21))—he seemed to me not more brave than fortunate, because he found an occasion of being free for you.

For which thing I sighed, bound not by another's iron, but by my own iron will. The enemy held my will, and from it had made a chain for me, and bound me fast. For from a perverse will came lust, and while lust was served, it became habit, and while habit was not resisted, it became necessity. By these links, as it were, interlinked one with another (whence I called it a chain), a hard servitude held me bound.

But the new will, which had begun to be in me—that I should freely worship you and wish to enjoy you, O God, the only sure delight—was not yet able to overcome the former, strengthened by age. Thus my two wills, one old, the other new (Cf. Eph 4:22, 24; Col 3:9–10), the one carnal, the other spiritual (Cf. Rom 7:14; 1 Cor 3:1), struggled with each other, and by their discord tore apart my soul.

11. Thus I understood, by my own experience, that which I had read: how the flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh (Gal 5:17). I was indeed in both, but more I in that which I approved in myself than in that which I disapproved in myself. For there it was now more not I, since in great part I suffered it unwilling rather than did it willing. But still, the habit that had been made against me was made out of me, since by willing I had come where I did not will. And who could justly contradict, when a just penalty followed the sinner?

And there was no longer that excuse by which I used to seem to myself not yet to serve you, having not yet despised the world, because my perception of the truth was uncertain: for now it too was certain. But I, still bound to the earth, refused to enlist for your service (Cf. 2 Tim 2:4), and feared to be freed of all hindrances as one ought to fear being hindered.

12. So by the burden of the world, as is wont to happen in sleep, I was sweetly pressed down; and the thoughts by which I meditated on you were like the efforts of those wishing to wake, who yet, overcome by the depth of their drowsiness, sink back.

And just as there is no one who would wish to sleep forever, and in the sound judgment of all to be awake is better, yet a man usually puts off shaking off sleep when a heavy torpor is in his limbs, and, though the time to rise has come, takes it up the more gladly even while it displeases him;

so I held it for certain that it was better to give myself to your love than to yield to my desire; but the one pleased and conquered, the other delighted and bound me.

For there was nothing I could answer you, as you said to me, Rise, you who sleep, and arise from the dead, and Christ will enlighten you (Eph 5:14), and showed on every side that you spoke truly; there was nothing at all I could answer, convicted by the truth, except only slow and drowsy words: "Presently," "See, presently," "Leave me a little while." But "presently and presently" had no present, and "leave me a little while" went on for long.

In vain I delighted in your law according to the inner man, while another law in my members warred against the law of my mind and led me captive in the law of sin which was in my members. For the law of sin is the violence of habit, by which even the unwilling mind is dragged and held, deserving it, since by willing it slipped into that habit. Who, then, would free wretched me from the body of this death, but your grace, through Jesus Christ our Lord? (Rom 7:22–25)

13. And how you took me out of the bond of the desire for intercourse, by which I was most tightly held, and out of the servitude of worldly business, I will tell, and I will confess to your name, O Lord (Ps 54 (53):8), my helper and my redeemer (Ps 19 (18):14).

I was going about my usual affairs, with anxiety growing, and daily I sighed to you; I frequented your church, as much as I had leisure from the business under whose weight I groaned. With me was Alypius, idle from the work of the legal experts after his third assessorship, awaiting to whom he might again sell his counsels, just as I sold the faculty of speaking, if any can be furnished by teaching.

But Nebridius had yielded to our friendship, to teach under Verecundus, a citizen and grammarian of Milan, most intimate with us all—who vehemently desired, and by the right of friendship demanded, faithful help from our number, of which he was in great need.

It was not, then, the desire of advantages that drew Nebridius there (for he could have done greater things with letters, if he wished), but, out of a duty of goodwill, that most sweet and gentle friend would not despise our petition.

He did it most prudently, careful not to become known to persons great according to this world (Eph 2:2), avoiding in them all disquiet of mind, which he wished to keep free and at leisure for as many hours as he could, to seek or read or hear something of wisdom.

14. One day, then (I do not recall the cause why Nebridius was absent), behold, there came to us at the house, to me and Alypius, a certain Ponticianus, our countryman insofar as he was African, serving with distinction at the palace. He wanted something of us; and we sat down to talk. And by chance he noticed, on the gaming table that was before us, a book: he took it, opened it, and found the apostle Paul—quite unexpectedly, for he had supposed it to be something from the books over which I was wearing myself out in my profession. Then, smiling and looking at me, he marveled with congratulation that he had suddenly found these writings, and these alone, before my eyes.

For he was a Christian and one of the faithful, and often prostrated himself before you, our God, in church, in frequent and lengthy prayers. When I had told him that I bestowed the greatest care on those Scriptures, a conversation arose, he telling of Antony, the Egyptian monk, whose name shone with excellence among your servants, though it lay hidden from us until that hour. When he learned this, he dwelt on that subject, making so great a man known to those who knew him not, and marveling at our very ignorance. But we were astonished, hearing of your wonderful works (Ps 145 (144):5), so well attested by a memory so recent, almost in our own times, in the right faith and the catholic Church. We all marveled—we, because they were so great, and he, because they were unheard of by us.

16. Ponticianus was telling these things. But you, Lord, amid his words, were turning me back toward myself, taking me from behind my own back, where I had placed myself while I refused to attend to myself (Cf. Ps 50 (49):21), and setting me before my own face, that I might see how foul I was, how distorted and sordid, spotted and ulcerous. And I saw, and was horrified, and there was nowhere to flee from myself (Cf. Ps 139 (138):7). And if I tried to turn my gaze from myself, he kept telling what he told, and you again set me over against myself, and thrust me into my own eyes, that I might find my iniquity and hate it (Cf. Ps 36 (35):2). I had known it, but I dissembled, and held it back, and forgot it.

17. But then, the more ardently I loved those of whom I heard such wholesome affections—that they had given themselves wholly to you to be healed—so much the more execrably did I hate myself compared with them, since many of my years had flowed away with me (perhaps twelve years), from the time when, in my nineteenth year, having read Cicero's Hortensius, I had been roused to the zeal of wisdom,

and I kept putting off, with earthly felicity despised, to be free for searching it out—the mere search for which, not to say the finding, was already to be preferred even to treasures found and the kingdoms of the nations, and to bodily pleasures flowing about me at a nod.

But I, a most wretched young man, wretched at the very outset of my youth, had even begged chastity of you, and had said: "Give me chastity and continence, but not yet." For I feared that you would hear me quickly, and quickly heal me of the disease of concupiscence, which I preferred to be glutted rather than extinguished. And I had gone by crooked ways (Cf. Sir 2:14) in sacrilegious superstition—not indeed certain in it, but as it were preferring it to the others, which I did not devoutly seek but assailed as an enemy.

18. And I had supposed that I was therefore putting off from day to day (Cf. Sir 5:8) following you alone, with the hope of the world despised, because there appeared to me nothing certain by which to direct my course. And the day had come when I was laid bare to myself, and my conscience upbraided me: "Where is your tongue? Surely you used to say that, on account of the uncertainty of the truth, you would not cast off the burden of vanity. Behold, now it is certain, and that burden still presses you, while wings are received on the freer shoulders of those who have neither been so worn out in seeking, nor meditated on these things for a decade and more."

So I was gnawed within, and was confounded with a horrible shame, vehemently, while Ponticianus spoke such things. And the conversation being ended, and the cause for which he had come, he went away, and I to myself.

What did I not say against myself? With what scourges of sentences did I not lash my soul, that it might follow me as I tried to go after you (Cf. Jer 7:9; Luke 21:8)? And it resisted, it refused, and did not excuse itself. All arguments were used up and refuted; there remained a mute trembling, and it dreaded, as it were death, to be restrained from the flux of habit, by which it was wasting away unto death.

19. Then, in that great quarrel of my inner house, which I had strongly stirred up with my soul in our chamber (Cf. Matt 6:6), my heart—disturbed in countenance as in mind—I burst in upon Alypius and cried out: "What are we suffering? What is this? What have you heard? The unlearned rise up and seize heaven (Cf. Matt 11:12), and we, with our learning, without heart—behold, where we wallow in flesh and blood (Cf. Gal 1:16; Matt 16:17; 1 Cor 15:50)! Is it because they have gone before that we are ashamed to follow, and not ashamed not even to follow?"

I said something of the sort, and my fever tore me away from him, while he kept silent, astonished, gazing at me. For I did not sound as usual. My brow, cheeks, eyes, color, and the manner of my voice spoke my mind more than the words I uttered.

There was a little garden belonging to our lodging, which we used as we did the whole house; for the host, the owner of the house, did not live there. To it the tumult of my breast had carried me, where no one might hinder the burning suit which I had entered upon with myself, until it should come out—how, you knew, but I did not; but I was only raging wholesomely and dying vitally, knowing what evil I was, and not knowing what good I was about to be after a little while.

So I withdrew into the garden, and Alypius, step after step. For my secret was no less secret where he was present. Or when would he desert me, so affected? We sat down as far as we could from the buildings. I was groaning in spirit (Cf. John 11:33), indignant with a most turbulent indignation, because I did not go over into your covenant and pact (Cf. Ezek 16:8), my God, into which all my bones (Ps 35 (34):10) cried out that I must go, and extolled it to heaven with praises; and one did not go there by ships or chariots or feet, as far even as I had gone from the house to the place where we were sitting. For not only to go, but also to arrive there, was nothing other than to will to go—but to will strongly and wholly, not to turn and toss a half-wounded will this way and that, struggling, with one part rising while another part fell.

20. Finally, I did so many things with my body, in the very tossings of hesitation, which men sometimes will and cannot do, if they either do not have the limbs themselves, or have them bound by chains, or loosened by weakness, or in some way hindered. If I tore my hair, if I struck my forehead, if, with fingers interlocked, I clasped my knee—I did it because I willed. But I could have willed and not done it, if the mobility of my limbs had not obeyed.

So I did many things where to will was not the same as to be able; and I did not do what pleased me with an incomparably greater affection, and which soon, as soon as I should will it, I would be able to do—because, as soon as I should will it, I would surely will it. For there the faculty was the same as the will, and the very willing was already the doing;

and yet it was not done; and the body more easily obeyed the slightest will of the soul, that the limbs should move at its nod, than the soul itself obeyed itself, to accomplish its own great will in the will alone.

21. Whence this monstrous thing? And why this? Let your mercy shine, and let me ask, whether perhaps the hidden places of men's punishments and the most darksome contritions of the sons of Adam can answer me. Whence this monstrous thing? And why this?

The mind commands the body, and it obeys at once: the mind commands itself, and it is resisted. The mind commands that the hand be moved, and there is such ease that the command is scarcely distinguished from the obeying; and the mind is mind, but the hand is body.

The mind commands that the mind will, and it is no other, and yet it does not do it. Whence this monstrous thing? And why this?

It commands, I say, that it will, which would not command unless it willed, and it does not do what it commands.

But it does not will wholly: therefore it does not command wholly. For it commands insofar as it wills, and insofar as it does not will, what it commands is not done—since the will commands that there be a will, not another, but itself.

Therefore it does not command fully; and so what it commands is not. For if it were full, it would not even command that it be, because it would already be.

It is not, then, a monstrous thing partly to will, partly to be unwilling, but a sickness of the mind, because it does not rise wholly, lifted up by truth, weighed down by habit. And so there are two wills, because one of them is not whole, and what is lacking to the one is present in the other.

22. Let them perish from your face (Ps 68 (67):2), O God, as they perish, the vain talkers and seducers of the mind (Titus 1:10), who, when they have noticed two wills in deliberating, assert that there are two natures of two minds, one good, the other evil. They themselves are truly evil, when they hold these evil things; and these same will be good, if they hold true things and consent to the true, so that your Apostle may say to them: You were once darkness, but now light in the Lord (Eph 5:8). For they, while they wish to be light not in the Lord but in themselves, supposing the nature of the soul to be what God is, have thus become denser darkness, because by a horrible arrogance they withdrew farther from you, the true light, which enlightens every man coming into this world (John 1:9). Attend to what you say, and blush, and draw near to him and be enlightened, and your faces shall not blush (Ps 34 (33):5).

When I deliberated about now serving the Lord my God (Jer 30:9), as I had long resolved, it was I who willed, I who was unwilling; it was I. I neither willed fully nor was fully unwilling.

Therefore I strove with myself and was torn apart by myself; and that very tearing happened against my will, yet did not show the nature of an alien mind, but the punishment of my own. And so it was now no longer I that did it, but the sin that dwelt in me (Rom 7:17), from the punishment of a sin more freely committed, because I was a son of Adam.

23. For if there are as many contrary natures as there are wills resisting one another, there will be not two, but more. If anyone deliberates whether he should go to their conventicle or to the theater, those men cry out: "Behold, two natures—one good leads this way, the other evil leads back that way. For whence this hesitation of wills opposing one another?"

But I say that both are evil—both that which leads to them and that which leads back to the theater. But they do not believe that the one by which one goes to them is anything but good.

What, then? If one of us deliberates, and wavers, with two wills contending within him, whether he should go to the theater or to our church—will not these men too waver as to what to answer? For either they will confess, what they do not wish, that one goes to our church by a good will, as those go to it who have been steeped in its sacraments and are held by them; or they will think that two evil natures and two evil minds clash in one man, and then it will not be true, as they are wont to say, that one is good, the other evil; or they will be converted to the truth, and will not deny that, when anyone deliberates, one soul seethes with diverse wills.

24. Let them, then, no longer say, when they perceive two wills in one man opposing each other, that two contrary minds, of two contrary substances and two contrary principles, are contending, one good, the other evil. For you, truthful God (John 3:33; Rom 3:4), disprove them and refute and convict them—as in the case of two evil wills, when someone deliberates whether to kill a man by poison or by the sword; whether to seize this estate of another's or that, when he cannot both; whether to buy pleasure by self-indulgence or keep his money by avarice; whether to go to the circus or to the theater, if both are put on the same day. I add even a third: whether to go to steal from another's house, if the occasion is at hand; I add a fourth too: whether to commit adultery, if the chance for that also opens at the same time—if all converge upon one point of time, and all are equally desired which cannot be done together;

for they tear the mind apart with four mutually opposing wills, or even more, in so great a supply of things that are desired; and yet they are not wont to say that there is so great a multitude of diverse substances.

So too in good wills. For I ask them whether it is good to be delighted by the reading of the Apostle, and whether it is good to be delighted by a sober psalm, and whether it is good to expound the Gospel. To each they will answer: "Good." What, then? If all equally delight, and at one and the same time, do not diverse wills stretch the heart of man, while we deliberate what we should most of all seize upon? And all are good, and they contend among themselves, until one is chosen, to which the whole will, which was divided into many, may be borne. So too, when eternity delights on high and the pleasure of a temporal good holds below, it is the same soul, willing this or that with less than its whole will, and therefore it is torn apart by a heavy trouble, while by truth it prefers the one, but by familiarity does not put away the other.

25. So I was sick and tormented, accusing myself far more bitterly than usual, and rolling and turning in my chain, until the whole should be broken, by which I was now but slightly held. But held I still was. And you pressed upon me in my hidden depths, Lord, with a severe mercy, redoubling the scourges of fear and shame, lest I should again give way and that very slight and thin remnant that was left should not be broken, but recover strength again and bind me more strongly. For I said within myself: "Behold, let it be done now, let it be done now," and with the word I was already going into the resolve. I almost did it, and did not do it; yet I did not slip back into my former state, but stood close by and caught my breath. And again I tried, and was a little less far off, and a little less, and now, now I was all but touching it and holding it; and I was not there, nor touching, nor holding—hesitating to die to death and to live to life, and the worse, ingrained in me, prevailed more than the better, to which I was unaccustomed; and the very point of time at which I was to become other, the nearer it drew, the greater horror it struck into me; but it did not strike me back, nor turn me away, but held me in suspense.

26. The trifles of trifles, and vanities of vanities (Cf. Eccl 1:2; 12:8), my old loves, held me back, and plucked at my garment of flesh, and murmured softly: "Are you dismissing us?" and: "From this moment we shall not be with you anymore, forever," and: "From this moment this and that will not be allowed you anymore, forever." And what they suggested in what I called "this and that"—what they suggested, my God! Let your mercy turn it away from the soul of your servant! What filth they suggested, what shameful things!

And I heard them now far less than half, not as if openly contradicting me by going to meet me face to face, but as if muttering behind my back, and, as I departed, furtively plucking at me to look back. Yet they delayed me, hesitating to tear myself away and shake free of them and leap across to where I was called, while violent habit said to me: "Do you think you can do without these?"

27. But by now it said this very tepidly. For on that side toward which I had set my face, and to which I trembled to cross, there was revealed the chaste dignity of Continence, serene and not dissolutely cheerful, honorably coaxing me to come and not to hesitate, and stretching out to receive and embrace me her devout hands, full of flocks of good examples.

There were so many boys and girls, there much youth and every age, and grave widows and aged virgins; and in all of them Continence herself was by no means barren, but a fruitful mother of children of joys (Cf. Ps 113 (112):9) by you, her husband, Lord.

And she mocked me with an encouraging mockery, as if to say: "Can you not do what these men and women can? Or can these men and women do it in themselves, and not in the Lord their God? The Lord their God gave me to them. Why do you stand in yourself, and so do not stand? Cast yourself upon him, do not be afraid; he will not withdraw, that you should fall: cast yourself securely; he will receive and heal you."

And I blushed exceedingly, because I still heard the murmurs of those trifles, and, hesitating, I hung back. And again she, as if to say: "Be deaf toward those unclean members of yours upon the earth (Col 3:5), that they may be mortified. They tell you of delights, but not as the law of the Lord your God (Ps 119 (118):85)."

This controversy in my heart was nothing but myself against myself. But Alypius, fixed at my side, silently awaited the outcome of my unwonted agitation.

28. But when a deep consideration drew up, from the secret bottom, and heaped together my whole misery in the sight of my heart (Cf. Ps 16 (15):8), there arose a huge storm, bearing a huge shower of tears. And, that I might pour it all out with its own cries, I rose up from Alypius (solitude seemed to me fitter for the business of weeping) and withdrew far enough that even his presence could not be a burden to me. So I was then, and he perceived it; for I had said something, I think, in which the sound of my voice already appeared heavy with weeping, and thus I had risen. He remained, then, where we had been sitting, utterly astonished.

I flung myself down, somehow, under a certain fig tree, and gave free rein to my tears, and the rivers of my eyes burst forth, an acceptable sacrifice to you (Cf. Ps 51 (50):19); and, not indeed in these words, but to this effect, I said many things to you: And you, Lord, how long? (Ps 6:3) How long, Lord, will you be angry forever? Remember not our old iniquities (Ps 79 (78):5, 8). For I felt that I was held by them. I cast out wretched cries: "How long, how long? 'Tomorrow and tomorrow'? Why not now? Why not, this very hour, an end to my foulness?"

1. O Lord, I am your servant; I am your servant and the son of your handmaid. You have burst my bonds; I will sacrifice to you a sacrifice of praise (Ps 116 (115):16–17). Let my heart and my tongue praise you (Cf. Ps 16 (15):9; 45 (44):1), and let all my bones say: Lord, who is like you? (Ps 35 (34):10) Let them say, and answer me, and say to my soul: I am your salvation (Ps 35 (34):3).

Who was I, and what kind of man? What evil was there not, either in my deeds, or, if not in deeds, in my words, or, if not in words, in my will? But you, Lord, good and merciful (Cf. Ps 103 (102):8; Exod 34:6), your right hand looking upon the depth of my death and draining out from the bottom of my heart the abyss of corruption. And this was the whole of it: to be unwilling for what I willed, and to will what you willed (Cf. Matt 26:39; Mark 14:36). But where, in all that long time, and from what deep and hidden recess, was my free choice called forth in a moment, by which I should bow my neck to your gentle yoke and my shoulders to your light burden (Cf. Matt 11:30), Christ Jesus, my helper and my redeemer (Ps 19 (18):14)?

How sweet it suddenly became to me to be without the sweetnesses of those trifles—and what I had feared to lose, it was now joy to dismiss. For you cast them out from me, you, the true and supreme sweetness; you cast them out, and entered in their place, sweeter than every pleasure, but not to flesh and blood (Gal 1:16; cf. Matt 16:17; 1 Cor 15:50); brighter than every light, but more inward than every secret; loftier than every honor, but not to those who are lofty in their own eyes. Now my mind was free from the gnawing cares of ambition and acquiring and wallowing and scratching the itch of lusts; and I prattled to you, my brightness and my riches and my salvation, the Lord my God.

2. And it pleased me in your sight (Ps 19 (18):14), not to tear away the service of my tongue tumultuously from the marketplace of loquacity, but to withdraw it gently, so that the boys—meditating not on your law (Ps 119 (118):70), not on your peace, but on lying follies (Cf. Ps 40 (39):4) and the wars of the forum—should no longer buy from my mouth weapons for their fury. And conveniently, very few days now remained before the vintage vacation, and I resolved to bear with them, that I might depart in due form, and, redeemed by you, no longer return for sale.

Our plan, then, was before you; but before men, except our own, it was not; and it had been agreed among us that it should not be poured out to anyone at large—though you had given us, as we ascended from the valley of weeping (Cf. Ps 84 (83):6–7) and sang the song of degrees (Cf. Ps 120 (119):1), sharp arrows and devastating coals against the deceitful tongue (Ps 120 (119):3–4), which, as if counseling, contradicts, and, as it is wont with food, by loving consumes.

3. You had shot our heart with your love (Cf. Prov 7:23), and we carried your words fixed in our vitals; and the examples of your servants, whom you had made shining from black and living from dead, heaped together in the bosom of our thought, burned and consumed our heavy torpor, lest we sink to the depths; and they kindled us so strongly that every blast of contradiction from the deceitful tongue (Ps 120 (119):3) could but inflame us the more sharply, not extinguish us.

Yet, because for the sake of your name, which you have sanctified throughout the lands (Cf. Ezek 36:23), our vow and purpose would surely have its praisers too, it seemed like boastfulness not to wait for the vacation time, now so near, but to depart beforehand from a public profession set before the eyes of all—so that, with the eyes of all who looked turning to my deed, they would say much about how I had wished to anticipate the vintage day so near at hand, as if I had sought to seem great.

And what was it to me that men should think and dispute about my mind, and that our good should be blasphemed (Rom 14:16)?

4. Moreover, that very summer my lungs had begun to give way under the excessive labor of literary work, and to draw breath with difficulty, and by pains in the chest to testify that they were injured, and to refuse a clearer or more sustained voice. This had at first disturbed me, because it almost compelled me, of necessity, to lay down the burden of that teaching, or, if I could be cured and recover, at least to interrupt it.

But when a full will arose in me and was strengthened, to be at leisure and to see that you are the Lord (Ps 46 (45):11) (you know it, my God), I even began to rejoice that there was at hand this excuse too, no lying one, which might temper the offense of men who, for their children's sake, never wished me to be free.

Full, therefore, of such joy, I bore that interval of time until it should run out (I do not know whether there were even twenty days); yet they were borne bravely, because the greed that used to bear with me the heavy business had departed, and I would have remained to be crushed, had not patience taken its place.

Perhaps some servant of yours, my brothers, will say that I sinned in this, that, with a now full heart for your service, I allowed myself to sit even one hour in the chair of lying (Ps 1:1). But I do not contend. Yet you, most merciful Lord, did you not forgive and remit this sin too, along with the rest, horrible and deadly, in the holy water?

5. Verecundus was worn with anxiety over this good of ours, because, on account of his own bonds, by which he was most tightly held, he saw himself deserted by our fellowship. Not yet a Christian, with a faithful wife, he was yet held back by her—that very tie tighter than the rest—from the journey we had undertaken; and he said he did not wish to be a Christian in any other way than that in which he could not be. Kindly, however, he offered that, as long as we were there, we should be on his estate. You will repay him, Lord, in the resurrection of the just (Luke 14:14), since you have already repaid him with the lot itself (Cf. Ps 125 (124):3). For although, in our absence, when we were now at Rome, he was seized with bodily sickness, and in it was made a Christian and one of the faithful, and departed from this life.

So you had mercy not only on him but also on us, lest, thinking of our friend's outstanding kindness toward us and not numbering him in your flock, we should be tortured with intolerable grief. Thanks be to you, our God (Cf. Ps 125 (124):3)! We are yours. Your exhortations and consolations declare it:

faithful promiser, you will repay Verecundus, for that estate of his at Cassiciacum, where we rested from the fever of the world in you, with the loveliness of your eternally green paradise, since you forgave him his sins upon the earth (Cf. Matt 9:6), on the curded mountain, your mountain, the fertile mountain (Cf. Ps 68 (67):16).

6. So at that time he himself was in anguish, but Nebridius rejoiced with us. For although he too, not yet a Christian, had fallen into that pit of most pernicious error (Cf. Ps 7:16), so as to believe the flesh of your Son, the Truth (Cf. John 14:6), a phantasm—yet, emerging from it, so he was: not yet steeped in any sacraments of your Church, but a most ardent inquirer after truth.

Not long after our conversion and regeneration through your baptism, him too—now a faithful catholic, serving you in perfect chastity and continence in Africa among his own, when his whole household had been made Christian through him—you loosed from the flesh. And now he lives in the bosom of Abraham (Cf. Luke 16:22). Whatever that is which is signified by that bosom, there my Nebridius lives, my sweet friend, but your son, Lord, adopted from a freedman: there he lives.

For what other place is there for such a soul? There he lives, about which he used to ask me many things—me, an inexperienced little man. Now he no longer puts his ear to my mouth, but his spiritual mouth to your fountain, and drinks, as much as he can, wisdom according to his eagerness, happy without end. Nor do I think he is so intoxicated by it as to forget me, since you, Lord, whom he drinks, are mindful of us (Ps 136 (135):23).

So, then, we were—consoling Verecundus, sad (with friendship safe) over such a conversion of ours, and exhorting him to faith of his own degree, namely, of married life; but awaiting Nebridius, when he would follow. And this he could do from so near, and was now all but about to do, when, behold, those days at last rolled away. For they had seemed long and many, before the love of free leisure, to sing from all my marrow: To you my heart has said, I have sought your face; your face, Lord, will I seek (Ps 27 (26):8).

7. And the day came when I was in fact released from the profession of rhetoric, from which in thought I was already released. And so it was done: you rescued my tongue, from which you had already rescued my heart, and I blessed you, rejoicing as I set out for the country estate with all my own.

What I did there in my writings—now indeed serving you, yet still, as if in a pause, panting from the school of pride—is attested by the books of the discussions held with those present and with myself alone before you; and what passed with Nebridius in his absence is attested by my letters.

And when would there be time enough to recall all your great benefits toward us in that time, especially as I hasten on to greater matters? For my memory calls me back, and it becomes sweet to me, Lord, to confess to you by what inward goads you subdued me, and how you leveled me low—the mountains and hills of my thoughts—and made my crooked ways straight and my rough ways smooth (Cf. Isa 40:4; Luke 3:4–5); and in what way you also brought Alypius himself, the brother of my heart, into subjection to the name of your Only-begotten, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (2 Pet 3:18), which at first he disdained to have inserted in our writings. For he wanted them rather to be redolent of the cedars of the schools, which the Lord has now broken (Cf. Ps 29 (28):5), than of the wholesome herbs of the Church, effective against serpents.

13. When the vintage holidays were over, I resigned, so that the Milanese might provide their students with another seller of words, because I had chosen to serve you, and also because I was no longer adequate to that profession through the difficulty of breathing and the pain in my chest.

And I made known by letter to your bishop, the holy man Ambrose, my former errors and my present resolve, that he might advise what among your books I ought especially to read, so that I might become more ready and fit to receive so great a grace. But he ordered Isaiah the prophet—because, I believe, he is, more than the others, an opener-announcer of the Gospel and of the calling of the nations. Yet I, not understanding the first reading of him and judging the whole to be of the same kind, put it off to be taken up again when I was more practiced in the Lord's speech.

14. From there, when the time came at which I had to give in my name, we left the country and returned to Milan. It pleased Alypius too to be reborn in you with me, already clothed with the humility suited to your sacraments, and a most steadfast tamer of his body, so far as to wear down even the icy Italian ground with bare foot, with unwonted daring.

We joined to us also the boy Adeodatus, born to me carnally of my sin. You had made him well. He was about fifteen years old, and in talent he surpassed many serious and learned men.

I confess your gifts to you, Lord my God, Creator of all things (Cf. 2 Macc 1:24) and mighty to form anew our deformities; for in that boy I had no part but the sin. That he was being reared by us in your discipline—you had inspired this in us, no other: I confess your gifts to you.

There is a book of ours entitled The Teacher: it is he who speaks there with me. You know (Tob 3:16; 8:9; Ps 69 (68):6; John 21:15–16) that all the thoughts there put in the mouth of my interlocutor are his, when he was sixteen years old. Many other still more wonderful things of his I came to know. That genius was a thing of awe to me: and who but you is the maker of such marvels?

Soon you took his life from the earth, and I remember him with the greater security, fearing nothing for his childhood or his youth or for that man at all. We joined him to us, our coeval, in your grace, to be brought up in your discipline:

and we were baptized, and the anxiety of our past life fled from us. Nor could I be sated in those days with the wonderful sweetness of considering the depth of your counsel concerning the salvation of the human race.

How I wept at your hymns and canticles (Eph 5:19), keenly moved by the voices of your sweetly singing Church! Those voices flowed into my ears, and the truth was distilled into my heart, and from it the feeling of devotion boiled up, and my tears ran down, and it was well with me amid them.

15. Not long before, the Church of Milan had begun to practice this kind of consolation and exhortation, with the brethren singing together with great zeal, with their voices and their hearts. It was about a year, or not much more, since Justina, the mother of the boy-king Valentinian, had been persecuting your man Ambrose for the sake of her heresy, into which she had been seduced by the Arians. The devout people kept watch in the church, ready to die with their bishop, your servant.

There my mother, your handmaid, holding first place in anxiety and in vigils, lived for her prayers. We, still cold from the heat of your Spirit, were nonetheless stirred by the city, astonished and troubled.

Then it was established that hymns and psalms should be sung after the manner of the Eastern regions, lest the people should waste away in the weariness of their grief; and from that time it has been kept to this day, with many—indeed almost all—of your flocks imitating it, throughout the rest of the world as well.

17. You who make those of one mind to dwell in a house (Ps 68 (67):7) joined to us also Evodius, a young man from our own town. While serving in the imperial service as an agent, he had been converted to you before us (Cf. Ps 51 (50):15) and baptized, and, leaving the worldly service, had girded himself for yours. We were together, meaning to dwell together by a holy resolve. We were seeking what place might hold us most usefully as we served you; together we were on our way back to Africa. And when we were at Ostia on the Tiber, my mother died.

I pass over many things, because I am in great haste. Receive my confessions and thanksgivings, my God, for things beyond number, even in silence. But I will not pass over whatever my soul brings to birth concerning that handmaid of yours, who brought me to birth—both in the flesh, that I might be born into this temporal light, and in heart, that I might be born into the eternal. Not her gifts, but yours in her, will I tell. For she had not made herself, nor brought herself up: you created her, and neither her father nor her mother knew what she would become from them. And the rod of your Christ (Cf. Ps 23 (22):4), the rule of your Only-begotten, brought her up in your fear (Ps 5:8; 119 (118):38), in a faithful household, a good member of your Church.

And she used to praise, for the diligence shown toward her upbringing, not so much her mother as a certain decrepit servant woman, who had carried her father as an infant, as little ones are commonly carried on the backs of older girls. For this reason, and because of her old age and excellent character, she was held in considerable honor by the masters in that Christian household. Hence too she carried out diligently the care of the daughters of the house committed to her, and was vehement, with a holy severity, in restraining them when need required, and sober and prudent in teaching them.

For except at those hours when they were fed most moderately at their parents' table, she would not let them drink even water, however they burned with thirst, guarding against a bad habit and adding a sound word (Titus 2:8; cf. 2 Tim 1:13): "Now you drink water, because you have no wine in your power; but when you come to husbands and are made mistresses of storerooms and cellars, water will seem mean, but the habit of drinking will prevail."

By this method of instruction and authority of command she bridled the greediness of the tenderer age and shaped the very thirst of the girls to an honorable measure, so that now they took no pleasure in what was not seemly.

18. And yet, as your handmaid told me, her son, a fondness for wine had crept upon her. For when, as a sober girl, she was bidden by her parents to draw wine from the cask, holding the cup beneath the opening at the top, before she poured the wine into the flagon she would sip a little with the tips of her lips, since she could take no more, her taste refusing it. She did this from no drunken craving, but from certain overflowing excesses of that age, which bubble up in playful impulses and in childish minds are usually pressed down by the weight of their elders. And so, adding daily a little to that little—since he who despises little things falls little by little (Sir 19:1)—she had slipped into such a habit that she would greedily drain little cups now nearly full of wine.

Where then was the shrewd old woman and that vehement prohibition? Could anything avail against the hidden disease, unless your medicine, Lord, kept watch over us? With father and mother and guardians absent, you were present—you who created her, who call, who through the men set over us also work some good for the salvation of souls. What did you do then, my God? How did you cure her? How did you heal her?

Did you not bring forth, from another soul, a hard and sharp reproach, like a surgeon's iron, out of your hidden provisions, and with one stroke cut away that rottenness? For a maidservant, with whom she used to go to the cask, quarreling with her young mistress, as happens, alone with her alone, threw this fault in her face with the bitterest insult, calling her a wine-bibber. Struck by that goad, she looked upon her own foulness, and at once condemned and put it off.

As flattering friends pervert, so quarreling enemies for the most part set right. Yet you repay them not for what you accomplish through them, but for what they themselves intended. For she, in her anger, wished to provoke her younger mistress, not to heal her, and therefore spoke secretly—either because the place and time of the quarrel had so found them, or lest she herself should perhaps be in danger for having disclosed it so late.

But you, Lord, ruler of things heavenly and earthly, who turn the deeps of the torrent to your own uses and order the turbulent flux of the ages, healed one soul even by the madness of another, lest anyone who marks this should ascribe it to his own power if, by his word, another is set right whom he wishes to be set right.

19. Brought up thus, chastely and soberly, and made subject by you to her parents rather than by her parents to you, when, in her full years, she was of marriageable age (Cf. Virgil, Aeneid 7.53), she was given to a husband and served him as a lord (Cf. Eph 5:22; 6:7; 1 Pet 3:6), and busied herself to win him for you (Cf. 1 Pet 3:1), speaking of you to him by her character, by which you made her beautiful and reverently lovable and admirable to her husband.

And she so bore the wrongs of his bed that she never had any quarrel with her husband over this matter. For she awaited your mercy (Jude 21) upon him, that, believing in you, he might be made chaste. And he was, besides, as outstanding in kindness, so hot in anger. But she knew not to resist her husband when he was angry, not in deed only, but not even in word. And when she had seen him grown calm and quiet at an opportune moment, she would render the account of her conduct, if perhaps he had been stirred more rashly than he should.

In short, when many matrons, whose husbands were gentler, bore the marks of blows even on their disfigured faces, and in friendly conversation found fault with the lives of their husbands, she would find fault with their tongues—admonishing them gravely, as if in jest—that from the time they had heard those tablets called marriage contracts read out, they ought to have reckoned them as legal instruments by which they had been made servants; and so, mindful of their condition, they ought not to be proud against their lords.

And when those who knew what a fierce husband she endured marveled that it had never been heard, nor shown by any sign, that Patricius had beaten his wife, or that they had quarreled with each other in domestic strife for even a single day, and asked the reason in a friendly way, she would teach them her rule, which I have mentioned above. Those who observed it, having tried it, gave thanks; those who did not observe it, kept in subjection, were tormented.

20. Her mother-in-law too, at first set against her by the whisperings of wicked maidservants, she so overcame by her attentiveness, persevering in patience and gentleness, that the older woman of her own accord disclosed to her son the meddling tongues of the maids, by which the domestic peace between herself and her daughter-in-law was disturbed, and demanded that they be punished.

And so, after he—obeying his mother, caring for the discipline of the household, and looking to the concord of his own—had punished with beatings the maids who were betrayed, at the discretion of her who betrayed them, she promised that any maid who, to please her, should speak anything bad of her daughter-in-law ought to expect like rewards from her; and, with none now daring to do so, they lived together in a memorable sweetness of goodwill.

21. On that good bondservant of yours too, in whose womb you created me, my God, my mercy (Ps 59 (58):18; cf. Ps 144 (143):1–2), you had bestowed a great gift: that among any souls at variance and in discord, where she could, she showed herself so much a peacemaker that, although she heard from both sides many most bitter things about each other—such as swelling and undigested discord is wont to belch up, when to a friend who is present the rawness of hatreds is breathed out, through sour conversations, about an enemy who is absent—she yet disclosed nothing of the one to the other except what would avail to reconcile them.

This would seem a small good to me, did I not, in sorrow, experience countless crowds—through some horrible plague of sins ranging far and wide—not only betraying to angry enemies the words of angry enemies, but even adding what was never said; whereas, on the contrary, it ought to be too little for a humane person merely not to stir up or increase enmities among people by speaking evil, unless he also strove to extinguish them by speaking well. Such was she, with you teaching her, the inmost Master, in the school of her heart.

22. At last she won even her husband for you (Cf. 1 Pet 3:1), now at the very end of his temporal life; and in him, now one of the faithful, she did not bewail what she had endured in him while he was not yet of the faithful. She was also a servant of your servants. Whoever of them knew her praised much in her, and honored, and loved you, because he felt your presence in her heart, with the fruits of her holy way of life (Cf. Tob 14:17; 2 Pet 3:11) bearing witness.

For she had been the wife of one man, had repaid the debt to her parents, had governed her house piously, had the testimony of good works. She had brought up children (1 Tim 5:9; 4:10), bringing them to birth as often (Cf. Gal 4:19) as she saw them straying from you. Finally, for all of us, Lord—since by your gift you allow your servants to speak—who before her falling asleep were already living joined together in you, having received the grace of your baptism, she took such care as if she had borne us all, and so served us as if she had been borne by us all.

23. Now as the day drew near on which she was to depart from this life—the day which you knew, though we did not—it had come about, as I believe, by your secret arranging, that she and I stood alone, leaning at a certain window, from which the garden within the house that held us was looked upon, there at Ostia on the Tiber, where, far from the crowds, after the labor of a long journey, we were restoring ourselves for the voyage.

We were conversing, then, alone, very sweetly, and, forgetting the things that are behind and stretching forward to those that are ahead (Phil 3:13), we were inquiring between ourselves, in the presence of the Truth, which you are (Cf. John 14:6), what the eternal life of the saints would be like, which neither eye has seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man (1 Cor 2:9; cf. Isa 64:4). But we panted with the mouth of our heart for the supernal streams of your fountain, the fountain of life, which is with you (Ps 36 (35):10), that, sprinkled from it according to our capacity, we might in some way think upon so great a matter.

24. And when the conversation was brought to this point—that the delight of the carnal senses, however great, in whatever bodily light, seemed, beside the sweetness of that life, not worthy of comparison, nor even of mention—raising ourselves up with a more ardent affection toward the Selfsame (Ps 4:9), we passed step by step through all bodily things, and through heaven itself, from which sun and moon and stars shine upon the earth. And still we ascended inwardly, by thinking and speaking and marveling at your works, and we came into our own minds and transcended them, that we might reach the region of unfailing abundance (Cf. Ezek 34:14), where you feed Israel (Ps 80 (79):2) forever with the food of truth; and there life is the wisdom through which all these things come to be, both those that have been and those that shall be—and it itself does not come to be, but is as it was, and so shall be forever.

Rather, to have been and to be going to be is not in it, but only to be, since it is eternal; for to have been and to be going to be is not eternal. And while we spoke and panted for it, we touched it slightly with the whole stroke of our heart; and we sighed, and left bound there the first fruits of the Spirit (Rom 8:23), and returned to the noise of our mouth, where a word both begins and ends. And what is like your Word, our Lord, who abides in himself without growing old and yet makes all things new (Cf. Wis 7:27)?

26. I was saying such things, though not in this way and in these words; yet, Lord, you know (Tob 8:7; John 21:15–16) that on that day, while we were speaking such things, and this world, with all its delights, was growing worthless to us amid our words, then she said: "Son, for my part, I now take delight in nothing in this life. What I should still do here, and why I am here, I do not know, now that my hope in this age is spent. There was one thing for which I desired to linger a little while in this life: that I might see you a catholic Christian before I died. My God has granted me this more abundantly, that I should see you, with earthly happiness despised, his servant. What am I doing here?"

27. What I answered her to this I do not well remember, since meanwhile, within scarcely five days or not much more, she took to her bed with fever. And while she was ill, one day she suffered a fainting of soul and was for a little while withdrawn from those present. We ran to her, but she was soon restored to her senses, and, looking at me and my brother standing by, she said to us, like one inquiring: "Where was I?" Then, gazing at us, stunned with grief: "Here," she said, "you will bury your mother." I kept silent and restrained my weeping. But my brother said something by which he wished for her, as if more happily, to die not abroad but in her homeland.

Hearing this, she, with an anxious face, struck him back with her eyes for relishing such things, and then, gazing at me: "See," she said, "what he says." And soon to us both: "Lay this body anywhere," she said; "let no care of it trouble you. This only I ask of you, that wherever you are, you remember me at the altar of the Lord." And when she had explained this thought in such words as she could, she fell silent, and was tried by her worsening illness.

28. But I, thinking of your gifts, invisible God (Col 1:15), which you send into the hearts of your faithful, from which wonderful fruits spring up, rejoiced and gave you thanks (Cf. Luke 18:11), recalling what I had known: with how great a care she had always burned over the tomb she had provided and prepared for herself beside the body of her husband. For because they had lived in great concord, she also wished this—for the human mind is less capable of divine things—to be added to that happiness, and to be remembered by people: that it had been granted her, after her journey across the sea, that the earth of both spouses should be covered by a common earth.

But when this emptiness had begun, through the fullness of your goodness (Cf. Ps 104 (103):28; 2 Thess 1:11), to be no longer in her heart, I did not know; and I rejoiced, marveling that she had so shown herself to me—although even in that conversation of ours at the window, when she said, "What am I now doing here?" she did not appear to desire to die in her homeland. I heard afterward, too, that already, while we were at Ostia, she had one day, with a mother's confidence, conversed with certain friends of mine—when I myself was not present—about the contempt of this life and the good of death; and when they were astonished at the woman's courage (since you had given it to her) and asked whether she did not dread to leave her body so far from her own city: "Nothing," she said, "is far from God, nor is it to be feared that he should not know, at the end of the world, from where to raise me up."

And so, on the ninth day of her illness, in the fifty-sixth year of her age and the thirty-third of mine, that religious and devout soul was released from the body.

29. I closed her eyes, and an immense sadness flowed together into my heart and was overflowing into tears, while at the same time my eyes, under the violent command of my mind, drank back their own fountain to dryness; and in such a struggle it went very ill with me. Then indeed, when she breathed her last, the boy Adeodatus cried out in lamentation, and, checked by all of us, fell silent. In this way too something childish in me, which was slipping into weeping, was checked and silenced by the voice of my youth, the voice of my heart. For we did not think it fitting to mark that death with tearful complaints and groans, since by these a certain misery of the dying, or as it were their utter extinction, is usually bewailed. But she was neither dying miserably nor altogether dying. This we held both from the testimony of her character and from her unfeigned faith (1 Tim 1:5) and from sure reasons.

30. What was it, then, that grieved me heavily within, but a fresh wound from the sweetest and dearest habit of living together, suddenly torn apart? I rejoiced indeed in her testimony, that in that very last illness, caressing me in return for my attentions, she called me dutiful, and recalled, with a great feeling of love, that she had never heard from my mouth a harsh or insulting word hurled at her.

But yet what such thing, my God, who made us (Cf. Ps 100 (99):3; Bar 4:7)—what comparable thing had the honor I paid her, and her service to me? Since, then, I was being bereft of so great a solace of hers, my soul was wounded, and the life that had been made one out of mine and hers was, as it were, torn to pieces.

31. When the boy had been kept from weeping, then, Evodius took up the psalter and began to sing a psalm. And the whole household answered him: Mercy and judgment I will sing to you, Lord (Ps 101 (100):1). When it was heard what was going on, many brethren and religious women came together; and while those whose office it was took care of the funeral, after the custom, I, in a part of the house where I fittingly could, discussed with those who judged that I should not be left alone what was suited to the time, and with that poultice of truth I soothed a torment known to you, while they, not knowing it, listened intently and thought that I was without any feeling of grief.

But I, in your ears, where none of them was listening, rebuked the softness of my feeling and restrained the flow of my grief; and it yielded to me a little, then again was borne on by its own force—not to the bursting forth of tears, nor to a change of countenance; but I knew what I was pressing down in my heart. And because it greatly displeased me that these human things had such power over me, things which by the due order and the lot of our condition must necessarily happen, I grieved over my grief with another grief, and was wasted by a double sadness.

32. And behold, the body was carried out; we went, we returned, without tears. For not even in those prayers which we poured out to you, when the sacrifice of our ransom was offered for her, the corpse now placed beside the tomb before it was laid in it, as is the custom there—not even in those prayers, then, did I weep; but all that day I was heavily sad in secret, and with a troubled mind I asked you, as I could, to heal my grief; and you did not, intimating to my memory, I believe, by this one lesson, the bond of all habit even against a mind that no longer feeds on a deceitful word.

It also seemed good to me to go and bathe, because I had heard that the baths took their name from this—since the Greeks said balaneion—because it drives anxiety from the mind. And behold, this too I confess to your mercy, Father of orphans (Ps 68 (67):6): I bathed, and I was just as I had been before I bathed. For the bitterness of grief did not sweat out of my heart. Then I slept, and woke, and found my grief soothed in no small part; and, as I lay alone on my bed, I remembered the truthful verses of your Ambrose. For you are:

33. And from there I gradually brought back into my former mind your handmaid, and her way of life—devout toward you, and toward us holily tender and obliging—of which I was suddenly bereft; and it pleased me to weep in your sight (Ps 19 (18):15) over her and for her, over myself and for myself.

And I let go the tears I had been holding back, that they might flow out as much as they would, spreading them beneath my heart; and it rested in them, because there were your ears, not those of any man proudly interpreting my weeping.

And now, Lord, I confess to you in writing. Let whoever wishes read and interpret as he wishes; and if he finds it a sin that I wept for my mother for a small part of an hour—the mother now dead to my eyes, who had wept over me for many years that I might live to your eyes—let him not mock, but rather, if he is of great love, let him himself weep to you for my sins, to you, the Father of all the brethren of your Christ.

34. But I, my heart now healed of that wound in which a carnal affection could be reproved, pour out to you, our God, for that handmaid of yours, a far different kind of tears, which flows from a spirit shaken by the consideration of the perils of every soul that dies in Adam.

Although she, made alive in Christ (Cf. 1 Cor 15:22; Eph 2:5), even before she was released from the flesh, so lived that your name is praised in her faith and character, yet I do not dare to say that, from the time you regenerated her through baptism (Cf. Titus 3:5), no word came from her mouth against your commandment. And it was said by the Truth, your Son (Cf. John 14:6): whoever says to his brother, You fool, shall be liable to the fire of Gehenna (Matt 5:22); and woe even to the praiseworthy life of human beings, if you should examine it with mercy set aside!

But because you do not search out our faults severely, we confidently hope for some place with you. Yet whoever counts up to you his true merits, what does he count up to you but your gifts? Oh, if only people would recognize themselves to be people, and let him who glories glory in the Lord (1 Cor 1:31; 2 Cor 10:17)!

35. And so I, my praise (Exod 15:2; Ps 118 (117):14; Isa 12:2) and my life, God of my heart (Ps 73 (72):26), setting aside for a little while her good deeds, for which I joyfully give you thanks (Luke 18:11), now plead with you for my mother's sins. Hear me (Jdt 9:17) through the medicine of our wounds, which hung upon the wood (Cf. Deut 21:23; Gal 3:13), and, sitting at your right hand, intercedes for us (Rom 8:34). I know that she acted mercifully and from her heart forgave the debts of her debtors; forgive her also her debts (Cf. Matt 6:12; 18:35), if any she contracted through so many years after the water of salvation.

Forgive, Lord, forgive, I beseech you (Num 14:19); do not enter into judgment with her (Ps 143 (142):2). Let mercy exult over judgment (Jas 2:13), since your words are true, and you have promised mercy to the merciful (Cf. Matt 5:7). That they should be merciful, you gave it to them—you who will have mercy on whom you will have mercy, and will show compassion to whom you will be compassionate (Cf. Rom 9:15).