1. 1. 1. To grasp and to hold to the order proper to each thing, Zenobius, and then the order of the universe by which this world is held together and ruled—whether to see it or to set it forth—is for human beings most difficult and most rare. And to this is added that, even if someone could do this, he cannot also bring it about that he find a hearer worthy of matters so divine and obscure, whether by merit of life or by some habit of learning. And yet there is nothing that the best minds more eagerly seek after, and that those more eagerly desire to hear and learn who gaze upon the rocks and storms of this life with head raised as far as may be, than how it comes about both that God cares for human affairs and that so great a perversity is everywhere spread through human affairs that it seems it ought to be assigned not to a divine governance, nor even to any servant's, if so great a power were given to him. Therefore this is left, as if of necessity, to be believed by those who have such matters at heart: either that divine providence does not extend to these last and lowest things, or that all evils are surely committed by the will of God. Both are impious, but more so the latter. For although to believe that anything is deserted by God is, while most ignorant, also most dangerous to the soul, yet among human beings themselves no one has charged anyone with not having been able to do something; but blame for negligence is far more pardonable than blame for malice and cruelty. And so reason is, as it were, compelled—not unmindful of piety—to hold either that these earthly things cannot be administered by the divine, or that they are neglected and despised rather than so governed that every complaint about God should be mild and free of blame.

1. 1. 2. But who is so blind in mind as to hesitate to assign to the divine power and governance whatever there is of reason in the movements of bodies that lies beyond human arrangement and will? Unless perhaps either the limbs of even the tiniest animals are shaped by chance with so fixed and fine a measure; or what one denies to be by chance, he could admit was done by anything but reason; or indeed, throughout all nature, we should dare, by any trifles of empty opinion, to alienate from the most secret judgment of majesty that which we marvel at as ordered in each and every thing without any human art busying itself. But this very thing is full of questions: that the limbs of a flea are wonderfully arranged and distinct, while meanwhile human life turns and tosses in the inconstancy of innumerable disturbances. But on this reckoning, if someone could see so minutely that on a mosaic pavement his sight could take in nothing beyond the span of a single tile, he would blame the craftsman as ignorant of order and composition, because he would think the variety of the little stones confused—he by whom those inlaid figures, coming together into the appearance of a single beauty, could not be seen and surveyed at once. For nothing else happens to less learned people, who, unable with a feeble mind to embrace and consider the whole fitting-together and harmony of things, think, if something offends them, that—because it is great to their own thought—a great ugliness clings to things.

1. 1. 3. The greatest cause of this error is that a person is unknown to himself. Yet that he may know himself, he has need of great practice in withdrawing from the senses and gathering his mind into itself and keeping it within itself. This is attained only by those who either, in solitude, sear over certain blows of opinion which the course of daily life inflicts, or heal them by the liberal disciplines.

1. 2. 3. For the mind thus restored to itself understands what the beauty of the universe is—which beauty surely takes its name from the One (unum). And so it is not granted to see that beauty to the soul which goes out into the many and pursues poverty with greed, a poverty it does not know can be avoided only by separating itself from the multitude. But by the multitude I mean not of human beings, but of all the things that the senses touch. And do not wonder that the soul suffers want the more, the more it seeks to embrace more things. For just as in a circle, however large, there is one center to which all things converge, which the geometers call the center, and although the parts of the whole circumference can be cut into innumerable pieces, yet there is nothing except that one point by which all the rest are equally measured, and which rules over all by a kind of law of equality; whereas if you wish to go out from there toward any part whatever, all things are lost the more one proceeds into the many—so the mind, poured out from itself, is battered by a kind of immensity, and is worn away by a true beggary, since its own nature compels it to seek the one everywhere, and the multitude does not let it find it.

1. 2. 4. But both what these things I have spoken of are like, and what cause there is for the error of souls, and in what way all things both come together into one and are perfect, and yet sins are to be fled—all this you will surely grasp, my Zenobius. For I know your character well, and your mind, a lover of beauty of every kind, without the immoderation and squalor of lust. By a divine right this sign of future wisdom marks you out against ruinous desires, that you not desert your own cause, enticed by false pleasures; than which prevarication nothing more shameful and dangerous can be found. You will grasp these things, then—believe me—when you have given attention to learning, by which the mind is purified and cultivated, in no way fit before this for the divine seeds to be entrusted to it. What all this is like, and what order it demands, and what reason promises to the studious and the good, and what kind of life we lead, your dearest friends, and what fruit we gather from our liberal leisure—these books will, I think, teach you well enough; books sweeter to us for your name than for our own labor, especially if you are willing—choosing the better things—to insert and fit yourself into that very order about which I am writing to you.

1. 2. 5. For when a pain in the stomach had forced me to leave the school—I who already, as you know, was contriving to flee into philosophy even without any such necessity—I betook myself at once to the country house of our most intimate friend Verecundus. What shall I say—he being glad of it? You know very well the man's singular benevolence, both toward all and toward us in particular. There we discussed among ourselves whatever seemed useful, with a pen at hand, of course, by which all might be taken down, which I saw was conducive to my health. For since I was held back by some care for speaking, no immoderate contention crept in during the discussion. And likewise, so that if we wished to commit anything of ours to writing, there should be neither the necessity of saying it otherwise nor the labor of recollection. Now these matters were carried on with me by Alypius and my brother Navigius, and Licentius, who had suddenly and wonderfully given himself to poetry. Military service had likewise returned Trygetius to us, who, as a veteran, fell in love with history. And we already had something of these matters in our books.

1. 3. 6. But one night, when I had awakened as usual and was silently turning over within myself things that came into my mind from I know not where—for the love of finding the truth had now turned this into a habit for me, so that, if such cares were present, either the first half or at least the last, yet about half the night, I lay awake thinking of whatever it might be; nor did I let myself be called away from myself by the young men's late studies, for they too worked so much through the whole day that it seemed too much to me if they should also take up some part of the nights for the labor of their studies; and they had this very rule from me, that they should occupy themselves with something besides their books and accustom the mind to dwell within itself—so, as I said, I was awake, when behold, the sound of the water that flowed past behind the baths drew me to give ear, and was noticed more attentively than usual. It seemed quite strange to me that the same water made its noise now more clearly, now more faintly, as it rushed against the stones. I began to ask myself what the cause might be. I confess, nothing occurred to me; when Licentius, striking a piece of wood beside his bed, frightened off the troublesome shrew-mice, and in this way showed himself awake. To him I said, "Did you notice, Licentius—for I see your Muse has lit a lamp for you to study by—how this channel sounds inconstantly?" "This is nothing new to me now," he said. "For once, when I had been awakened by longing for fair weather and had put my ear to it, lest a storm come on, this water did what it does now." Trygetius agreed. For he too was lying awake on his bed in the same room, without our knowing it; for it was dark—which in Italy is almost a necessity even for the moneyed.

1. 3. 7. So when I saw that our school, such as was present (for both Alypius and Navigius had gone to the city), was not asleep even at those hours, and that course of the waters was warning me to say something about it, I said, "What do you think is the cause that this sound thus alternates? For we do not suppose that anyone at these hours is interrupting that flow so often, either by passing through or by washing something." "What do you think," said Licentius, "but that somewhere leaves of whatever kind—which in autumn fall continually and copiously—being thrust into the narrows of the channel, are at times overcome and give way; but when the wave that pressed has passed through, are again gathered and packed; or that something else happens by the varying chance of the floating leaves, which avails in like manner now to check, now to release that flow?" It seemed probable to me, having nothing else; and I confessed, praising his talent, that I had found nothing, though I had long sought why it was so.

1. 3. 8. Then, after a little silence, I said, "Deservedly did you wonder at nothing, keeping yourself within with Calliope." "Deservedly," said he, "but just now you plainly gave me something great to wonder at." "What is this?" I said. "That you," said he, "wondered at those things." "From where," I said, "is wonder wont to arise, or what is the mother of this fault, except a thing unusual, beyond the manifest order of causes?" And he said, "Beyond the manifest, I accept; for beyond order nothing seems to me to happen." Here I, raised up with a livelier hope than I usually have when I require something of these young men, because the young man's mind had conceived so great a thing and so suddenly—he having turned to such matters only yesterday, with no question about these things ever having been stirred up among us before—said, "Well, well; but indeed you have perceived much, you have dared much: believe me in this; by a long stretch you transcend Helicon, to whose peak you are trying to come as to heaven. But I should much like you to defend this opinion, for I shall try to shake it." "Leave me to myself just now, I beg you," he said; "for I have my mind very much bent on something else." Here I, fearing not a little lest, plunged utterly into the study of poetry, he be carried far from philosophy, said, "I am provoked to attack those verses of yours, chanting and howling in every kind of meter, since they try to raise between you and the truth a wall more monstrous than between your lovers; for those at least could breathe through even a small chink." For he had just then begun to sing of Pyramus.

1. 3. 9. When I had said this in a sterner voice than he expected, he fell silent for a while. And I had now abandoned my undertaking and returned to myself, lest I should wish in vain and ineptly to seize one already preoccupied. Then he said,
I myself, poor wretch, am like the shrew, betrayed by my own outcry
—a thing said no more fittingly by Terence than it can now be said by me about myself. But perhaps that last part will be turned to the contrary: for what he says,
Today I have perished
I perhaps today shall be found. For if you do not despise what the superstitious are wont to do, taking auguries even from mice: if I, by my noise, warned that mouse or shrew which brought you word of my being awake, that—if it has any sense—it should return to its den and rest with itself, why should not I myself be warned by that noise of your voice to philosophize rather than to sing? For that, as I have already begun to believe, since you prove it to me daily, is our true and unshaken dwelling. Therefore, if it is not troublesome to you and you think it ought to be done, ask what you will: I will defend, as far as I can, the order of things, and I will assert that nothing can happen apart from order. For I have so drunk in and absorbed it in my mind that, even if anyone should overcome me in this discussion, I will assign even this not to any rashness but to the order of things. For it will not be the matter itself, but Licentius, that is overcome."

1. 4. 10. I, rejoicing again, restored myself to them. Then I said to Trygetius, "What seems good to you?" "I do indeed favor order most highly," he said, "but I am still uncertain, and I desire that so great a matter be discussed most carefully." "Then let that part have your favor," I said; "for as to your being uncertain, I think you have that in common with Licentius and with me too." "Surely," said Licentius, "I am certain of this opinion. For why should I doubt to demolish the wall you mentioned, before it has fully raised itself up? For truly poetry cannot turn me away from philosophy so much as can distrust of finding the truth." Then Trygetius, with joyful words, said, "We now have—what is more—a Licentius who is not an Academic; for he used to defend them most eagerly." "Leave off these things now, I beg you," said Licentius, "lest this crafty, ensnaring point of yours twist me away from and break me off from a certain divine thing, which has begun to show itself to me, and toward which I, gaping, hang suspended." Here I, seeing my joys abound far more richly than I had ever once dared even to wish, eagerly poured out that verse:
So may that Father of the gods grant it, so may lofty Apollo
for he himself will lead us through, if we follow where he bids us go and where to set our seat—he who now gives the augury and glides into our souls. For lofty Apollo is not the one who, in caves, on mountains, in groves, stirred by the smoke of incense and the slaughter of cattle, fills the mad; but another, surely—another is that lofty truth-teller, and that very Truth (for why should I beat about with words?), whose prophets are all who can be wise. Therefore we shall set to, Licentius, worshippers relying on piety; let us crush beneath our footsteps the ruinous fire of smoky desires.

1. 4. 11. "Now," said he, "ask, I pray you, if I can explain this great something-or-other in my own words too." "Answer me this very thing," I said, "first: from where does it seem to you that this water flows in, not at random but in order? For that it slides over little wooden channels and is led all the way to our uses can pertain to order. For it was brought about by human beings using reason that by its one course they might at once both drink and wash, and it followed, according to the convenience of the places, that it should be so. But that those leaves, as you say, fell so as to bring about what we wondered at—by what order of things, after all, and not rather by chance, shall we think it was done?" "As if, indeed," said he, "it could seem to anyone—gazing most serenely on the fact that nothing can happen without a cause—that they ought or could have fallen otherwise than they did. What? Do you now want me to go through the positions of the trees and branches, and the very weight that nature has imposed on the leaves? What of the mobility of the air by which they fly, or the softness by which they descend, and their various falls according to the state of the sky, according to their burden, according to their shapes, and the countless other and more obscure causes—what concern is it of mine to inquire into? These things are hidden from our senses, deeply hidden; yet that which is enough for the question taken up—somehow it is not hidden from the mind: that nothing happens without a cause. For an annoying questioner can go on asking: what was the cause that trees were placed there? I will answer that men followed the richness of the soil. What if the trees are not fruit-bearing, and grew at random? Here too I will answer that we see too little; for the nature that produced them is by no means random. What more? Either let me be taught that something happens without a cause, or believe that nothing happens except by a fixed order of causes."

1. 5. 12. To him I said, "Though you call me an annoying questioner—for I can scarcely help being one, who fought to keep you from conversing with Pyramus and Thisbe—I will nonetheless go on asking you. This nature, which you want to seem ordered, for what good (to say nothing of countless other things) did it bring forth those very trees that bear no fruit?" While he was thinking what to say, Trygetius said, "Is the use of trees furnished to human beings in their fruits alone? How many other uses there are, which come from their shade, from their wood—though that is last—from their very branches or leaves?" "Do not, I beg you," said Licentius, "give these answers to his questions. For countless are the things that can be brought forward from which there is no use to human beings, or at least it is so hidden or so feeble that it cannot be drawn out or defended by human beings, especially by us. Let him rather teach us how anything can happen that a cause has not preceded." "We shall look at these things later," I said. "For it is not now necessary that I be the teacher, since you, who have professed yourself certain of so great a matter, have so far taught nothing to me, who desire exceedingly to learn and for this alone lie awake day and night."

1. 5. 13. "Where are you sending me?" he said. "Is it because I follow you more lightly than those leaves follow the winds, by which they are thrown into the flowing water, so that for them to fall is too little unless they are also dragged along? For what else will it be when Licentius teaches both Augustine and the things that lie in the midst of philosophy?" "Do not, I beg you," I said, "either cast yourself down so low or exalt me so high. For I too am a boy in philosophy, and I do not much care, when I ask, through whom he answers me who receives my daily complaints—whose prophet I believe you will one day be; and perhaps that 'one day' is not far off. But still, others too, much removed from studies of this kind, can teach something, when they are constrained, as by the bonds of questions, in a fellowship of disputants. And the same person 'something' is not 'nothing.' Or do you not see (for I will gladly use your own simile) that those very leaves carried by the winds, that swim on the waves, resist somewhat the river that hurls itself headlong, and remind human beings of the order of things—if, that is, what you defend is true?"

1. 5. 14. Here he, leaping even from his bed for joy, said, "Who would deny, great God, that you administer all things by order? How all things hold together! With what fixed successions they are pressed into their own knots! How great and how many things have been done that we might speak these words! How great things come about that we might find you! For from where does this very thing flow and come, except from the order of things—that we awoke, that you noticed that sound, that you sought with yourself the cause, that you did not find the cause of so small a matter? The shrew too comes forth, that I, awake, might be betrayed. Finally, your very own speech—you perhaps not intending it (for it is not in anyone's power what comes into the mind)—is somehow so turned about that it itself teaches me what I ought to answer you. For, I pray you, if these things that have been said by us, committed to writing as you have arranged, should spread somewhat more widely to the report of human beings, would not the matter seem so great that some great seer or Chaldean, consulted about it, ought to have answered long before it happened? And if he had so answered, he would be called so divine, he would be so extolled with the praises of all, that yet no one would dare to ask of him why a leaf fell from the tree, or whether a wandering mouse was troublesome to a man lying down. For did any of them ever say of his own accord, or was forced by a consulter to say, that such things would be? And yet, if he were to say that a certain not-ignoble book would come to be, and saw that it would necessarily come to pass (for otherwise he could not divine it), surely whatever the tumbling of leaves in the field does, whatever the lowliest little beast does in the house, is as necessary in the order of things as those writings. For by these words they come about, words that, without those preceding lowliest things, could neither come into the mind, nor proceed from the mouth, nor be handed down to posterity. Therefore now, I ask, let no one ask of me why anything happens. It is enough that nothing happens, nothing is begotten, that some cause has not begotten and set in motion."

1. 6. 15. "It is plain," I said, "young man, that you do not know how many things, and by what sort of men, have been said against divination. But answer now—not whether anything happens without a cause (for I now see you are unwilling to answer that), but whether this order of yours that you have taken up seems to you to be anything good or evil." And he, muttering somewhat, said, "You did not ask in such a way that I can answer one of the two. For I see here a kind of middle. For order seems to me neither good nor evil." "What, at least, do you judge to be contrary to order?" I said. "Nothing," said he. "For how can anything be contrary to that which has occupied the whole, has taken hold of the whole? For what will be contrary to order must necessarily be apart from order. But I see that nothing is apart from order. We must therefore think that nothing is contrary to order." "Then," said Trygetius, "is error not contrary to order?" "In no way," said he. "For I see no one err without a cause. But the series of causes is included in order. And error itself is not only begotten by a cause, but also begets something for which it becomes a cause. Therefore, in that it is not outside order, it cannot be contrary to order."

1. 6. 16. And when Trygetius had fallen silent, and I could not contain myself for joy—because I saw that the young man, the son of my dearest friend, was becoming my son too, and not only that, but was already rising and growing into a friend for me as well; and he whose zeal I had despaired of even for ordinary letters was, as if having regard for his own possession, coming with full force into the midst of philosophy—while I silently marveled at this and boiled over in congratulation, suddenly he, as if seized by a kind of inspiration, cried out, "O if I could say what I want! I ask, wherever you are, words, come to my aid. Both good things and evil things are in order. [7. 17.] Believe it, if you will; for how to explain it I do not know."

1. 7. 17. I marveled and was silent. But Trygetius, when he saw the man become a little affable, as if the drunkenness had been digested, and given back to conversation, said, "It seems absurd to me, Licentius, and plainly foreign to the truth, what you say; but I beg you to bear with me a little, and not to drive me off by shouting." "Say what you will," said he; "for I do not fear that you will carry me off from that which I see and almost hold." "Would," said Trygetius, "that you were not wandering away from that order which you defend, that you were not borne (to put it more mildly) into so great a carelessness toward God. For what could be said more impious than that even evils are contained in order? For surely God loves order." "Truly he loves it," said he; "from him it flows, and with him it is. And if anything can be said more fittingly about a matter so deep, think it over yourself, I beg you. For I am not fit to teach you these things now." "What should I think?" said Trygetius. "I accept entirely what you say, and it is enough for me in what I understand. For surely you said both that evils are contained in order, and that order itself flows from the highest God and is loved by him. From which it follows that evils too are from the highest God, and that God loves evils."

1. 7. 18. In this conclusion I feared for Licentius. But he, groaning at the difficulty of words, and not at all seeking what to answer, but how to bring out what had to be answered, said, "God does not love evils; and for no other reason than that it is not of order that God should love evils. And therefore he greatly loves order, because through it he does not love evils. But how can evils themselves not be in order, since God does not love them? For this very thing is the order of evils, that they not be loved by God. Or does it seem to you a small order of things, that God both love good things and not love evil ones? Thus evils, which God does not love, are not apart from order; and yet he loves order itself: for this very thing he loves—to love good things and not to love evil ones, which is of the great order and the divine arrangement. And this order and arrangement, because by its very distinction it guards the harmony of the universe, brings it about that even evils must necessarily exist. Thus, as it were from antitheses—which is pleasing to us even in speech—from contraries, the beauty of all things together is figured forth."

1. 7. 19. After this he paused moderately. And suddenly raising himself toward where Trygetius had his bed, he said, "For I ask of you, I pray: is God just?" Trygetius was silent—too much, as he afterward reported, marveling and shuddering at his fellow-pupil's and friend's speech, breathed out by a new inspiration. And he being silent, the other went on thus. "For if you answer that God is not just, you see to it what you are doing, you who a while ago were charging me with impiety. But if, as is handed down to us, and as we ourselves feel by the very necessity of order, God is just, then surely he is just by distributing to each his own. But what distribution can be spoken of where there is no distinction? Or what distinction, if all things are good? Or what can be found apart from order, if by God's justice their own things are rendered to each according to the merits of the good and the evil? But all of us confess God to be just. Therefore the whole is included in order." When he had said this, he sprang back from his couch, and now in a gentler voice, since no one made answer to him, he said, "Do you answer me nothing—not even you, who pressed me to these things?"

1. 7. 20. To him I said, "A new religion has now come upon you in this; I yield, I say. But what seems good, I will answer by daylight, which now seems to me to be returning—unless that brightness clothing the windows is the moon's. At the same time, I must keep silent, lest forgetfulness swallow up your great goods, Licentius. For when would our writings not demand that these things be committed to them? I will plainly tell you what I think: I will argue against you as much as I can; for no greater triumph can be given me than if you overcome me. But if your weakness—which, less fed by the learning of the disciplines, will perhaps not be able to sustain so great a god—should yield either to the cleverness or to some sharp error of the men whose part I shall try to take, the matter itself will warn you how great strength you must prepare, that you may return more firmly to him; and at the same time because I want this discussion of ours to come out more polished; for I ought not to give it to coarse ears. For our Zenobius often discussed many things with me about the order of things, and I could never satisfy his deep questioning, whether because of the obscurity of the matters or because of the narrowness of the times. And he was so impatient of frequent postponements that, to force me to answer more carefully and more fully, he even challenged me with a poem—and a good poem, for which you should love him the more. But it could neither then be read to you, most remote from the study of these things, nor can it now. For his departure was so sudden and disturbed by that tumult that none of these things could come into our mind; for he had decided to leave it for me to answer, and many things concur to make this discourse be sent to him. The first is that it is owed; then, that it is fitting that even thus the kind of life we now lead should be made known to one so benevolent toward us; finally, that in rejoicing over hope for you he yields to no one. For even when he was present, out of friendship for your father, or rather for all of us, he was much anxious lest certain sparks of your talent, which he diligently noticed, should not so much be kindled into flame by my care as be extinguished by your carelessness. And when he learns that you are zealous for poetry too, he will rejoice so that I now seem already to see him exulting."

1. 8. 21. "You will do nothing more pleasing to me," he said; "but whether you laugh at my fickleness and boyish lightness, or whether it comes about in us by some truly divine prompting and order, I would not hesitate to tell you: I have suddenly become more sluggish toward those meters; another thing, far other, I know not what, has now shone again upon me with a kind of light. More beautiful is philosophy, I confess, than Thisbe, than Pyramus, than that Venus and Cupid and loves of every such kind." And with a sigh he gave thanks to Christ. I received these things—what shall I say?—gladly; or what shall I not say? Let each take it as he will, I care nothing, except that perhaps I rejoiced immoderately.

1. 8. 22. Meanwhile, after a little, the day opened itself up. They rose, and I, weeping, prayed much, when I hear Licentius chanting, joyfully and chattily, that verse of the prophet: O God of hosts, turn us again, and show your face, and we shall be saved (Ps 80:7 (79:8)). The day before, when he had gone outside after supper for the needs of nature, he had sung this a little more loudly than our mother could bear—that such things should be sung again and again in that place. For he said nothing else, since he had lately taken in the very tune of the chant and loved, as happens, an unaccustomed melody. That most religious woman, as you know, rebuked him for this very thing, that the place was unsuited to a song. Then he had said, jesting, "As if, indeed, if some enemy were to shut me up here, God would not hear my voice."

1. 8. 23. So in the morning, when he had come back alone (for each had gone out for the same reason), he came to my little bed. "Tell me truly," he said—"so may what you wish come about for us—what you think of me." And I, taking the young man's right hand, said, "What I think you perceive, you believe, you understand. For I do not suppose you sang for so long yesterday in vain, that the God of hosts might show himself to you, once you are turned to him." But he, recalling it with wonder, said, "You say something great, and true. For it moves me not a little that just now I was so reluctantly called away from those trifles of my poem, and now it irks and shames me to return to them, so wholly am I borne up into certain great and wondrous things. Is this not truly to be turned toward God? At the same time I rejoice also at this, that the scruple of superstition was cast upon me in vain—that I kept singing such things in such a place." "This does not displease me either," I said, "and I think it pertains to that order that we should say something even on this point. For I see that both the place itself, at which she was offended, and the night, fit that song. For from what things do you suppose we pray to be turned toward God and to see his face, except from a kind of filth and squalor of the body, and likewise from the darkness in which error wraps us? Or what else is it to be turned, except to be raised up into oneself out of the immoderation of vices, by virtue and temperance? And what else is the face of God than that very Truth for which we sigh, and to which, beloved by us, we render ourselves clean and beautiful?" "It could not be better said," he said, crying out. Then, more softly, as if into my ear: "See, I beg you, how many things have met together, that I may believe something is now happening for us by a more prosperous order."

1. 8. 24. "If you care for order," I said, "you must return to those verses. For the learning of the liberal disciplines—moderate, of course, and concise—makes lovers more lively and more persevering and more refined for embracing the truth, so that they more ardently desire it, more constantly pursue it, and at last cling more sweetly to what is called, Licentius, the happy life. At which name all raise themselves up and, as it were, attend to your hands, to see whether you have something you can give to the needy, hindered by various diseases. To them, when wisdom has begun to prescribe that they bear the physician and let themselves be cured with some patience, they fall back into their own rags. Wasted away by the heat of these, they scratch the itch of their wretched pleasures more gladly than, by enduring and undergoing the physician's warnings—a little hard and burdensome to their diseases—they would be restored to the health and the light of the sound. And so, content with that name and sense of the highest God as with an alms, they live wretched—yet they live. But other men, or, to speak more truly, other souls, while they wear this body, that best and most beautiful spouse seeks out as now worthy of his chamber, for whom not to live, but to live happily, is enough. Go, then, meanwhile, to those Muses. Nevertheless, do you know what I want you to do?" "Command what pleases you," he said. "When," I said, "Pyramus and that beloved of his have, one upon the other, slain themselves, as you are about to sing, in that very grief by which it is fitting that your song be more vehemently inflamed, you have a most convenient opportunity. Seize the execration of that foul lust and those poisonous fires, by which those pitiable things come about; then raise yourself wholly into the praise of pure and sincere love, by which souls, taught by the disciplines and made beautiful by virtue, are joined to the understanding through philosophy, and not only flee death but also enjoy a most happy life." Here he, silent and long nodding in thought, with a turn of his head went away.

1. 8. 25. Then I too rose, and having paid our daily prayers to God, we had begun to go to the baths (for that place was suited and familiar to us for discussion, when, with a gloomy sky, we could not be in the field), when behold, before the doors we noticed cocks joining in a too fierce battle. It pleased us to attend. For what do the eyes of lovers not range over, where do they not roam, lest from anywhere the beauty of reason—which by knowledge and unknowing measures and governs all things—give some hint, beauty that draws its gaping followers wherever and to whatever place it bids itself be sought? For from where, or where, can it not give a sign? As in those very cocks it was to be seen: the heads thrust forward intent, the feathers ruffled, the vehement blows, the most cautious avoidances, and in every movement of the irrational animals nothing that was not graceful—since, of course, another reason from above governed all things; and finally the very law of the victor: a proud crowing and the limbs gathered, as it were, into one orb, as if in the haughtiness of dominion; but the sign of the vanquished: the little feathers raised from the neck, and in voice and movement everything misshapen, and by that very fact somehow neat and beautiful by the laws of nature.

1. 8. 26. We asked many things: why all act thus; why for the sake of dominion over the females subject to them; why, then, the very appearance of the fight led us somewhat, even apart from that higher consideration, into the pleasure of the spectacle; what there was in us that sought many things removed from the senses; and what, again, that was captured by the invitation of the senses themselves. We said to ourselves: Where is there no law? Where is there not authority owed to the better? Where is there not a shadow of constancy? Where is there not an imitation of that truest beauty? Where is there no measure? And thence, warned that there should be a measure to watching, we went on where we had purposed. And there, as we could—diligently indeed, for the events were recent, and when could things so notable escape the memory of three eager men?—we gathered all the little works of our night-study into this part of the book; and nothing else was done by me that day, that I might spare my health, except that before supper I was accustomed daily to hear half a volume of Virgil with them, we everywhere considering nothing other than the measure of things. Which no one can fail to approve; but to perceive it, when anyone is doing something eagerly, is most difficult and most rare.

1. 9. 27. Then the next day, early in the morning, we came eagerly to the usual place and sat down in it. And I, both attentive upon me, said, "Be here, Licentius, as much as you can, and you too, Trygetius; for no small matter is at hand: we are inquiring about order. Why should I now, set as if in that school from which I rejoice to have somehow escaped, praise order to you copiously and in order? Receive, if you will—nay, make it that you are willing—that than which nothing can be said about its praise more briefly or, as it seems to me, more truly. Order is that which, if we hold to it in life, will lead us to God; and which, if we do not hold to it in life, we shall not come to God. But that we are going to come, unless my mind deceives me about you, we presume and hope. Therefore this question ought to be turned over among us most diligently and resolved. I could wish the others were present who are wont to take part with us in these affairs. I could wish, if it could be done, to have with me now—as intent as you are—not these only, but at least all our friends, whose talent I always admire; or at least Zenobius alone, whom I never received at leisure—as his greatness deserved—when he was working at so great a matter. But because that does not happen, they will read our writings, since we have now resolved not to lose words about these matters, and to bind the things themselves, fleeting from memory, with the bond, as it were, of writings, by which they may be brought back. And perhaps order itself demanded this, which procured their absence. For surely you too rise up with a more upright mind to so great a matter, because it is laid on us alone to carry it through; and when those read it who are our greatest care, if anything moves them to contradict, this discussion will beget for us other discussions, and the very succession of discourses will insert itself into the order of the discipline. But now, as I had promised, I shall oppose Licentius, as far as the matter allows—he who has now almost finished the whole cause, if he can solidly and firmly fortify it with a wall of defense."

1. 10. 28. Here, when I saw that they were, by their silence, their face, their eyes, the suspense and immobility of their limbs, and by the greatness of the matter, sufficiently moved and inflamed with desire of hearing, I said, "Then, Licentius, if it seems good to you, gather into yourself whatever of strength you can, file down whatever of sharpness you have, and embrace in a definition what this order is." Then he, when he heard himself forced to define, shuddered as if sprinkled with cold water, and looking at me with a more troubled face and, as happens, smiling at his very trepidation, said, "What is this? Why do I seem to you, as it were, to nod assent? Do you believe me filled with some adventitious spirit?" And at once rousing himself: "Or perhaps," he said, "there is something with me." And he was silent a little, that whatever notion he had about order might be drawn into a definition. Then, more upright, he said, "Order is that through which are done all the things that God has established."

1. 10. 29. "What of God himself?" I said. "Does he not seem to you to be done by order?" "Surely," said he, "he does seem so." "Then God is done," said Trygetius. And the other said, "Why? Do you deny that Christ is God, who both came to us by order, and says that he was sent by God the Father? If, then, God sent Christ to us by order, and we do not deny that Christ is God, then not only does God do all things, but God too is done by order." Here Trygetius, in doubt, said, "I do not know how I should take that. For when we name God, it is not Christ himself who, as it were, comes to mind, but the Father. But he comes to mind then, when we name the Son of God." "You are making a fine thing of it," said Licentius. "Shall we then deny that the Son of God is God?" Here Trygetius, since it seemed dangerous to answer him, yet forced himself and said, "He too is indeed God, but still we properly call the Father God." To him I said, "Restrain yourself rather; for the Son is not improperly called God." But he, moved by religious scruple, since he did not even want his words to be written down, while Licentius pressed that they remain—after the manner, that is, of boys, or rather of almost all people, alas!—as if, indeed, it were being done among us for the sake of boasting. When I rebuked this motion of his mind with rather grave words, he blushed; and at his disturbance I noticed Trygetius laughing and rejoicing. And to them both I said, "Is it thus you act? Does it not move you, by what masses of vices and darkness of ignorance we are pressed down and covered over? Is this that attention of yours, of a little while ago, over which—fool that I was—I rejoiced, and that rising-up toward God and the truth? O if you could see, even with eyes as bleared as mine, in what dangers we lie, of what disease that laughter shows the madness! O if you could see! How quickly, how at once, and how much more lastingly you would turn it into weeping. Wretches, do you not know where we are? That the souls of all the foolish and unlearned are sunk down is common; but to those sunk not in one and the same way does wisdom hold out aid and a hand. There are others, believe me, there are others who are called upward, others who are loosened into the depths. Do not, I beg you, double my miseries. Let my own wounds be enough for me, which—asking God, by almost daily weeping, that they be healed—I yet often convince myself that I am too unworthy to be healed as quickly as I wish. Do not, I beg you—if you owe me any love, any tie of kinship, if you understand how much I love you, how much I esteem you, how much care for your characters torments me, if I am worthy that you not neglect me, if, finally—God being witness—I do not lie that I wish nothing more for myself than for you—repay me my kindness; and if you gladly call me master, render me my wages: be good."

1. 10. 30. Here, when tears imposed a limit on me, lest I say more, Licentius, bearing it most ill that everything was being written down, said, "Why, what have we done, I pray you?" "Do you," I said, "still not even confess your sin? Do you not know that in that school I was wont to be gravely vexed because boys were led, not by the usefulness and beauty of the disciplines, but by love of the emptiest praise, so far that some were not even ashamed to recite the words of others and received applause (a thing to be groaned over!) from the very men whose were the things they recited? Thus you—although you have never, I think, done anything of the sort—are nevertheless trying to introduce and sow into philosophy, and into that life which I rejoice at last to have taken up, the last but, of all the rest, the more harmful plague of wasting rivalry and empty boasting; and perhaps, because I frighten you away from that vanity and disease, you will be more sluggish toward the studies of learning, and, driven back from the ardor of windy fame, you will freeze into the torpor of idleness. Wretched me, if it shall be necessary even now to endure such men, from whom vices cannot depart without the succession of other vices." "You will prove," said Licentius, "how much more purified we shall be. Only this we beg, by all that you love, that you be willing to forgive us, and order all those things to be deleted; at the same time, that you spare even the tablets which we no longer have. For nothing of the many things discussed by us has been transferred into the books." "By all means," said Trygetius, "let our penalty remain, that the very fame which entices us may, by its own scourge, frighten us away from love of it. For to make these writings known only to our friends and intimates, we shall sweat not a little." The other assented.

1. 11. 31. And meanwhile my mother came in and asked us what progress we had made; for the question was known to her too. When I had ordered both her entrance and her question to be written down, after our manner, she said, "What are you doing? Have I ever heard, even in those books you read, that women were brought into this kind of discussion?" To her I said, "I do not much care for the judgments of the proud and ignorant, who rush into the reading of books as into the greeting of people. For they do not consider what sort the people themselves are, but in what sort of clothes they are dressed and with how great a pomp of wealth and fortune they shine. For such people, in writings, do not much attend either to where the question comes from, or to what the disputants are striving to arrive at, or to what has been explained and accomplished by them. Yet because among them some are found whose minds are not to be despised (for they are sprinkled with certain seasonings of culture, and are easily led through the golden and painted doors to the most holy inner shrines of philosophy), our forebears have done enough for them too, whose books I see are known to you while we read them to you. And in these times—to omit the rest—a man most outstanding in talent and eloquence and in the very insignia and gifts of fortune, and, what is before all, in mind, Theodorus, whom you yourself know well, is bringing it about that neither now nor among posterity may any kind of human being rightly complain about the literature of our times. But as for my books, if the hands of any chance to touch them, and, having read my name, they do not say, 'Who is this fellow?' and throw down the volume, but, whether out of curiosity or excessive zeal, despising the lowliness of the threshold, proceed to enter, they will not take it amiss that I am philosophizing with you, nor perhaps will they despise any of those whose conversation is mingled in my writings. For they are not only free—which is enough for any liberal discipline, let alone philosophy—but born in the highest place among their own. But the writings of most learned men contain even cobblers turned philosophers, and far baser kinds of fortune; who nevertheless shone with so great a light of talent and virtue that they would in no way wish—even if they could, on any condition—to exchange their goods for any nobility of this kind. Nor will there be lacking, believe me, that kind of people to whom this very thing—that you philosophize with me—will be more pleasing than if they found here anything else of either delight or weight. For there were among the ancients women too who philosophized, and your philosophy pleases me very much."

1. 11. 32. "For, lest you be ignorant of anything, mother, this Greek word by which philosophy is named is in Latin called 'love of wisdom.' Whence even the divine Scriptures, which you vehemently embrace, teach that not philosophers altogether, but the philosophers of this world, are to be avoided and mocked. But that there is another world, most remote from these eyes, which the understanding of a few sound persons beholds, Christ himself sufficiently signifies, who does not say, My kingdom is not of the world, but, My kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36). For whoever thinks that all philosophy is to be fled wants nothing else of us than that we not love wisdom. I would therefore despise you in these writings of mine if you did not love wisdom; but I would not despise you if you loved it moderately; much less if you loved wisdom as much as I do. But now, since you love it much more than you love me, and I know how much you love me, and since you have so profited in it that you are now terrified by the horror neither of any chance misfortune nor of death itself—which is most difficult for the most learned men, and which all confess to be the highest citadel of philosophy—shall I not gladly give myself to you even as a pupil?"

1. 11. 33. Here, when she had said sweetly and reverently that I had never lied so much, and I saw that we had poured out so many words that they both had to be written down and there was now a limit to the book and no tablets remained, it pleased us to defer the question, and at the same time that I might spare my stomach. For those things which it seemed necessary to me to move against those young men had stirred it more than I wished. But when we had begun to depart, Licentius said, "Remember how many and how necessary things are supplied to us, to be received from you, through that most hidden and divine order, even without your knowing." "I see it," I said, "and I am not ungrateful to God; and I presume that you yourselves, who notice these things, will for that very reason be better." This was the whole of my business that day.

2. 1. 1. Then, after a few days had passed, Alypius came, and when the sun had risen most brightly, the brightness of the sky and a mild mildness—as much as was possible in that season in those parts—invited us to go down into the meadow, which we used rather often and more familiarly. With us was our mother too, whose talent and mind inflamed toward divine things I had perceived before, both by long living together and by diligent consideration; but especially in a certain discussion of no small matter, which I had on my birthday with my fellow-guests and gathered into a little book, her mind had so appeared to me that nothing seemed more fitted to true philosophy. And so I had resolved, when she had leisure in abundance, to arrange that she not be absent from our conversation. This too has been made known to you in the first book of this work.

2. 1. 2. When, then, we had sat down in the place mentioned, as conveniently as we could, I said to those two young men, "Although I was angry with you, childishly, when you were dealing with great matters, yet it seems to me that it happened not without order—God being favorable—that, in the talk by which I was drawing you away from that lightness, the time was so spent that so great a matter seems to have been deferred to Alypius's arrival. Therefore, since I have now made the question very well known to him, and have shown how far we have advanced in it: are you prepared, Licentius, to defend the cause you took up, from that definition of yours? For I think I remember that you said order is that through which God does all things." "I am prepared," he said, "as far as I am able." "How, then," I said, "does God do all things by order? In such a way that he does even himself by order, or is it that, apart from him, the rest are governed by him in order?" "Where all things are good," he said, "there is no order. For there is the highest equality, which desires nothing of order." "Do you deny," I said, "that with God all things are good?" "I do not deny it," he said. "It is concluded, then," I said, "that neither God nor the things that are with God are administered by order." He conceded it. "Do all things good," I said, "seem to you to be nothing?" "On the contrary," he said, "they truly are." "Where, then," I said, "is that statement of yours, that you said all things that are are administered by order, and that there is nothing at all that is separated from order?" "But there are," he said, "also evils, through which it has come about that order should include the goods too; for goods alone are not ruled by order, but goods and evils together. But when we say 'all things that are,' we surely do not mean goods alone. From which it comes about that all things together, which God administers, are administered by order."

2. 1. 3. To him I said, "The things that are administered and done—do they seem to you to be moved, or do you think them immovable?" "Those things," he said, "that come to be in this world, I confess, are moved." "The rest," I said, "you deny?" "The things that are with God," he said, "are not moved; all the rest I think are moved." "Since, then, you think that the things which are with God are not moved," I said, "but concede that the rest are moved, you show that all the things that are moved are not with God." "Repeat this very thing a little more plainly," he said. Which seemed to me he wished not from difficulty of understanding, but to gain space for inquiry, in which to find what he should answer. "You said," I said, "that the things which are with God are not moved, but the rest are moved. If, then, these things which are moved would not be moved if they were with God—since you deny that all the things which are with God are moved—it remains that the things which are moved are apart from God." When I had said this, he was still silent, when at last he said, "It seems to me that in this world too, if any things are not moved, they are with God." "This is nothing to me," I said. "For you confess, I think, that not all the things in this world are unmoved. From which it is concluded that not all things of this world are with God." "I confess," he said, "not all." "Then there is something without God." "No," he said. "Then all things are with God." Here, hesitating, he said, "I beg I had not said that nothing is without God; for surely all the things that are moved do not seem to me to be with God." "Then is this heaven," I said, "which no one doubts is moved, without God?" "Heaven is not without God," he said. "Then there is something with God that is moved." "I cannot," he said, "explain as I wish what I think; yet what I am trying to say, I ask that, not waiting for my words, you most shrewdly understand, if you can. For both nothing seems to me to be without God, and what is with God seems again to remain unshaken; but I cannot say that heaven is without God—not only because I think nothing is without God, but because I think heaven has something that is not moved, which is either God or is with God—although I do not doubt that heaven itself is turned and moved."

2. 2. 4. "Define, then, if you please," I said, "what it is to be with God, and what it is not to be without God. For if there is a controversy between us about words, it will easily be despised, provided we see the matter itself which you have conceived in your mind." "I hate to define," he said. "What, then, shall we do?" I said. "Do you," he said, "define, I beg. For it is easier for me to see in another's definition what I do not approve than to explain anything by defining it well." "I will humor you," I said. "Does it seem to you that that is with God which is ruled and administered by him?" "That is not," said he, "what I had conceived in mind when I said that the things which are not moved are with God." "See, then," I said, "whether at least this definition pleases you: that is with God whatever understands God." "I concede it," he said. "What, then," I said, "does the wise man not seem to you to understand God?" "He does," he said. "Since, then, wise men are moved—not only within one house or city, but even across vast regions, by traveling and sailing—how will it be true that whatever is with God is not moved?" "You have made me laugh," he said, "as if I had said that what the wise man does is with God. That is with God, but that which he knows." "Does not the wise man know," I said, "his book, his cloak, his tunic, his furniture, if he has any, and the rest of that kind, which even the foolish know well?" "I confess," he said, "that to know a tunic and to know a cloak is not to be with God."

2. 2. 5. "This, then," I said, "is what you say: not everything that the wise man knows is with God, but yet whatever of the wise man's is with God, the wise man knows it." "Excellent," he said; "for whatever he knows by that bodily sense is not with God, but that which he perceives with the mind. Perhaps I dare to say even more; but yet I will say it: for with you as judges I shall either confirm it or learn. Whoever knows only those things that the bodily sense touches seems to me to be not only not with God, but not even with himself." Here, when I had noticed Trygetius with such an expression that he seemed to want to say something, but to be held back by modesty, lest he rush, as it were, into another's place, I gave him leave—Licentius being now silent—to bring out whatever he wished. And he said, "Those things which pertain to the bodily senses—no one at all, it seems to me, knows them. For it is one thing to sense, another to know. Therefore, if we know anything, I think it is contained by the understanding alone and can be comprehended by that alone. From which it comes about that, if that is with God which the wise man knows by understanding, the whole of what the wise man knows can be with God." When Licentius had approved this, he added something else that I could by no means despise. For he said, "The wise man is altogether with God, for the wise man understands himself too. Which is concluded both from what I received from you—that that is with God which understands God—and from what was said by us—that that is with God which is understood by the wise man. But this part of him by which he uses these senses (for I do not think it should be counted in when we call him wise), I confess I do not know, nor do I at all suspect of what kind it is."

2. 2. 6. "Then you deny," I said, "that the wise man consists not only of body and soul, but even of soul as a whole—since to deny that this part by which he uses the senses belongs to the soul is the act of a madman. For not the eyes themselves or the ears, but something else, I know not what, senses through the eyes. But if we do not give the sensing itself to the understanding, we do not give it to any part of the soul. It remains that it be assigned to the body—than which nothing more absurd can, for the moment, be said to me." "The soul of the wise man," he said, "purged through and through by the virtues and now cleaving to God, is worthy even of the name of the wise man, nor does anything else of his deserve to be called wise; but yet certain, as it were—so to speak—dregs and cast-off skins, from which he has cleansed himself and, as it were, withdrawn into himself, serve that soul; or, if all this is to be called soul, they at least serve and are subject to that part of the soul which alone it is fitting to name wise. In which subject part I think even memory dwells. The wise man, then, uses this as a servant, that he may command it and impose on it—already tamed and laid low—the bounds of law; so that, while he uses these senses for the sake of those things which are now necessary not to the wise man but to himself, he may not dare to exalt himself nor be proud as a master, nor use even those things that pertain to himself indiscriminately and immoderately. For to that lowliest part can belong those things that pass away. But to what is memory necessary, if not to passing and, as it were, fleeing things? That wise man, then, embraces God and enjoys him who always abides, who is neither awaited that he may be, nor feared that he may fail, but by the very fact that he truly is, is always present. But he, immovable and abiding in himself, cares somehow for the peculium of his servant, that he may use it well, like a thrifty and diligent steward, and guard it sparingly."

2. 2. 7. Considering this opinion of his with wonder, I recalled that I had once said this very thing briefly while he listened. Then, smiling, I said, "Give thanks, Licentius, to this servant of yours, who, if he had not supplied you something from his peculium, you would now perhaps have nothing to bring out. For if memory pertains to that part which yields itself, as a maidservant, to be ruled by the good mind, you have now been helped by it, believe me, to say this. Therefore, before I return to that order, does it not seem to you that, for the sake of such things—that is, for the sake of honorable and necessary disciplines—memory is needed by the wise man?" "Why," he said, "is memory needed, when he has and holds all his own things present? For we do not even in sense itself call memory to our aid for that which is before our eyes. For the wise man, then, having all things before those inner eyes of the understanding—that is, fixedly and immovably beholding God himself, with whom are all the things that the understanding sees and possesses—what need, I ask, is there of memory? But that I should need it, for retaining these things I have heard from you, comes about because I am not yet master of that servant, but now serve him, now fight not to serve him, and dare, as it were, to claim myself into my own liberty. And if perhaps at some time I command and he obeys me and often makes me think I have conquered, in other matters again he so raises himself up that I, wretched, lie beneath his feet. Therefore, when we inquire about the wise man, do not name me." "Nor me," I said. "But yet can this wise man desert his own, or in any way, while he wears this body, in which he holds that servant bound by his own law, abandon the duty of conferring benefits on those he can, and especially what is most vehemently demanded of him, of teaching wisdom itself? When he does this, that he may teach fittingly and be less inept, he often prepares something to set forth from arrangement and discuss, which, unless he commits it to memory, must necessarily perish. Therefore either you will deny that the duties of benevolence belong to the wise man, or you will confess that some things of the wise man are guarded by memory. Or perhaps he commits to that servant for safekeeping something of his affairs—necessary to him not for his own sake, but for the sake of his people—so that that servant, as if sober and from the best training of his master, guards not indeed anything except what serves to lead the foolish to wisdom, but what that master has commanded him to guard." "I think," he said, "that nothing at all is committed to this servant by the wise man, since he is always fixed in God, whether silent or speaking with men; but that servant, now well trained, diligently guards what at times he may suggest to his discussing master, and renders to him—as to a most just lord, under whose power he sees that he lives—his service as a welcome thing. And he does this not, as it were, by reasoning, but at the prescription of that highest law and highest order." "I do not now resist your reasons at all," I said, "that what we have undertaken may rather be carried through. But how this matter stands diligently (for it is no small matter, nor content with so small a discourse) we shall see at another time, when God himself shall have given the opportunity by order."

2. 3. 8. "But it has been defined what it is to be with God. And when it was said by me that that is with God which understands God, you added something more—that there be there also those things which are understood by the wise man. In which matter it much moves me how suddenly you have placed folly with God. For if whatever the wise man understands is with God, and he cannot escape folly except as understood, then there will be—what is wicked to say—that plague too with God." Moved by this conclusion, when they had kept themselves in silence for a while, Trygetius said, "Let him too answer—the one upon whose most opportune arrival for this discussion I think we did not rejoice rashly." Then Alypius said, "God send better things! Was so great a silence on my part being prepared for me at last only for this? But my rest is now broken. Truly now I will strive to satisfy this question somehow, when I have first looked ahead to the future and obtained from you that you demand nothing more of me by way of this answer." "It is in no way," I said, "consistent with your benevolence and humanity, Alypius, to deny your voice to our conversation, which has even been longed for. But go on now, accomplish what you have begun; the rest, as that order now stands, will come about." "I too," he said, "ought to hope for better things about order, in whose defense you have meanwhile wished to substitute me. But, unless I am mistaken, you thought folly coupled to God by them in that conclusion of yours, because they said that all things which the wise man understands are with God. But how that is to be taken I now omit; attend a little to that reasoning of yours. For you said: 'For if whatever the wise man understands is with God, and he cannot escape folly except as understood.' As if, indeed, it were obscure that, before anyone avoids folly, he is not to be reckoned by the name of wise. And it was said that the things understood by the wise man are with God. Since, then, for the sake of avoiding folly each one understands that same folly, he is not yet wise. But when he shall have become so, folly is not to be numbered among the things he understands. Therefore, since those things which the wise man now understands are joined to God, folly is rightly separated from God."

2. 3. 9. "Acutely indeed," I said, "as you are wont, Alypius, you have answered, but as if thrust into another's straits. Yet because, as I think, you still deign to be foolish along with me—what shall we do if we get hold of some wise man, who may gladly free us from so great an evil by teaching and discussing? For I shall, I think, ask nothing of him sooner than that he show me what folly is, what it is, of what sort altogether. For about you I would not easily affirm it—yet it holds me so much and so long as it is not understood by me. He will say, then, on your authority: 'That I might teach you this, you ought to have come to me when I was foolish; but now you can be your own masters, for I no longer understand folly.' Which indeed, if I heard from him, I would not hesitate to warn the man to become our companion, and to seek another master together. For although I do not fully understand folly, I see nonetheless that nothing is more foolish than this answer. But perhaps he will be ashamed thus either to leave us or to follow us. He will therefore discuss and pile up most copiously the evils of folly. But we, well providing for ourselves, will either attentively hear a man not knowing what he says, or believe that he knows what he does not understand, or else folly is still, by the reasoning of those clients of yours, coupled to God. But there is none of the foregoing that I see can be defended. There remains, then, the last—which you do not want." "I had never thought you envious," he said. "For if from those clients, as you say, I had received some honorarium, as is the custom, then—while you are too tenacious of this reasoning—I would now be forced to return it to them. So either let them be content with this, that, while I labored with you, I gave them no little time for thinking, or, if vanquished patrons—through no fault of their own—gladly hearken to counsel, let them yield to you in this too, and be more cautious in the rest."

2. 3. 10. "I will not despise," I said, "what Trygetius, even somewhat noisily, was desiring to say in your defense; and I will bring it about, by your good leave (for perhaps you are not well instructed, having come recently to this business), that, with advocacy set aside, I may patiently hear them pleading their own cause, as I had begun." Then Trygetius, Licentius being wholly absent, said, "Take it how you will, and laugh at my folly. It does not seem to me that that ought to be called understanding by which folly itself is understood—folly which is the sole or chief cause of not understanding." "I do not easily refuse to accept that," I said. "For although it much moves me what Alypius feels—how anyone can rightly teach what sort a thing is which he does not understand, and how great a ruin it brings to the mind that he does not see with the mind (for attending to that very thing, he was afraid to say what you said, since that opinion is known to him even from the books of the learned)—yet, considering the bodily sense itself (for the soul uses that too, and there is some comparison, of whatever sort, with the understanding), I am led to say that no one can see darkness. Therefore, if to understand is for the mind what to see is for the sense, and although anyone may have his eyes open, sound, and pure, he yet cannot see darkness, it is not absurdly said that folly cannot be understood: for we call no other thing the darkness of the mind. Nor will that now trouble us—how folly, not being understood, can be avoided. For as we avoid darkness with our eyes by the very fact that we are unwilling not to see, so whoever wishes to avoid folly, let him not try to understand it, but grieve that, through it, he does not understand the things that can be understood, and feel it present to him—not in that he understands it the more, but in that he understands other things the less."

2. 4. 11. "But let us return to order, that Licentius may at last be restored to us. For this I now require of you: whether whatever the foolish man does seems to you to be done by order. For see what snares the question has. If you say 'by order,' where will that definition be—Order is that by which God does all things that are—if even the foolish man does by order whatever he does? But if there is no order in the things that are done by the foolish man, there will be something that order does not hold; but you want neither. See, I beg, lest you throw all into confusion by the very defense of order." Here again Trygetius (for that other was still wholly absent) said, "It is easy indeed to answer this complex of yours; but at present a simile fails me, by which I see that my opinion ought to be asserted and illustrated. Yet I will say what I feel; for you will do what you did a little while ago. For that mention of darkness brought us no little light upon what had been wrapped up by me. For all the life of the foolish, although through them themselves it is least constant and least ordered, is nonetheless necessarily included by divine providence in the order of things, and—certain places having been arranged, as it were, by that ineffable and everlasting law—is in no way allowed to be where it ought not to be. So it comes about that, with a narrow mind, anyone considering that life alone, struck back as by a great ugliness, turns from it. But if, raising and spreading the eyes of the mind, he should at once survey all things together, he will find nothing not ordered and always distinguished and disposed, as it were, in its own seats."

2. 4. 12. "How great, how wondrous," I said, "that God answers me through you, and—as I am led more and more to believe—some hidden order of things itself! For you say things that I understand neither how they are said, not having seen them, nor how you see them; so I suspect they are both true and deep. But you perhaps sought one simile only for this opinion. But to me now countless ones occur, which draw me altogether to consent. For what is more foul than an executioner? What more truculent and dire than that mind? Yet among the very laws he holds a necessary place, and is inserted into the order of a well-ordered city; and he is, in his own mind, harmful, but, in another's order, the punishment of the harmful. What more sordid, what more empty of grace, and fuller of foulness, than prostitutes, pimps, and the rest of that kind of plagues, can be named? Take away prostitutes from human affairs, and you will throw all things into confusion by lusts; set them in the place of matrons, and you will dishonor all with stain and disgrace. So this kind of people, by their own ways most impure in life, by the laws of order is by condition most base. Are there not in the bodies of living things certain members which, if you attend to them alone, you could not attend to? Yet the order of nature has willed neither that they be absent, because they are necessary, nor permitted that they stand out, because they are unseemly. Which deformed things, nevertheless, by holding their own places, have yielded the better place to the better. What was sweeter to us, what spectacle more fitting to the field and the country house, than that fight and conflict of the cocks, of which we made mention in the earlier book? Yet what did we see more abject than the deformity of the vanquished? And through that very thing a more perfect beauty of the same contest came about."

2. 4. 13. "Such, I believe, are all things, but they require eyes. The solecisms and barbarisms, as they are called, the poets have fallen in love with; preferring to call them figures (schemata) and transformations (metaplasms), with changed names, rather than to flee them as manifest faults. Yet take these away from the poems, and we shall miss the sweetest seasonings. Heap many of them into one place, and I shall loathe the whole as harsh, rank, rancid. Transfer them into free and forensic speech: who will not bid it flee and hide itself in the theaters? Order, then, governing and moderating these things, will suffer them to be neither too many in their own place nor foreign anywhere. A certain plain speech, most like the unpolished, by interposing itself among the very leaps and graceful passages, sets them in light. Which if it stand alone, you throw away as cheap; but if it be lacking, those beautiful things do not stand out, do not lord it in their own regions and possessions, as it were, and stand in their own light's way, and confound the whole."

2. 5. 13. "Great thanks are owed here too to order. Lying conclusions, or such as creep in little by little, whether by lessening or by adding, into assent to falsehood—who would not fear them? Who would not hate them? Yet often in disputations, placed in their fixed and proper seats, they avail so much that somehow through them the very deception grows sweet. Will not order itself be praised here too?"

2. 5. 14. "Now in music, in geometry, in the movements of the stars, in the necessities of numbers, order so reigns that, if anyone desires to see, as it were, its fountain and inner sanctuary, he either finds it in these or is led through these to it without any error. For such learning, if anyone use it with moderation (for nothing there is to be feared but excess), nourishes such a soldier of philosophy, or even a leader, that to that highest measure—beyond which he can neither seek anything, nor ought to, nor desire to—he flies by what way he will and arrives, and leads many through. From which, even while he is held by human affairs themselves, he so despises them and so discerns all things that it in no way moves him why one man wishes to have children and does not, another is tortured by his wife's excessive fruitfulness; why a man lacks money who is ready to bestow much liberally, while a lean and scabby moneylender broods over his buried hoard; why luxury squanders and scatters an ample patrimony, while a beggar, weeping nearly the whole day, barely obtains a coin; why honor exalts an unworthy man, while bright characters are hidden in the crowd."

2. 5. 15. "These and other things in the life of human beings compel people for the most part to believe impiously that we are governed by no order of divine providence. But others, pious and good and endowed with splendid talent, who can neither bring themselves to believe that we are deserted by the highest God, and yet, disturbed by so great a fog, as it were, and intermixture of things, see no order—wishing the most hidden causes to be laid bare for them—often bewail their errors even in poems. If these should ask only this, why the Italians always pray for clear winters, and likewise our Getulia is always wretchedly athirst, who will easily answer them? Or where among us will any suspicion of that order be traced out? But I, if I can advise my own people at all, as far as it appears to me and as far as I feel, judge that they must be instructed in all the disciplines. For otherwise these things can in no way be so understood as to be clearer than light. But if they are either too sluggish, or preoccupied with other affairs, or already too hardened to learn, let them provide themselves the safeguards of faith, by which bond he may draw them to himself and free them from these horrible and most entangled evils—he who permits no one who believes well in him through the mysteries to perish."

2. 5. 16. "For twofold is the way we follow when the obscurity of things moves us: either reason or at least authority. Philosophy promises reason and frees scarcely the very fewest; whom, nevertheless, it compels not only not to despise those mysteries, but to understand them alone as they are to be understood. And it has no other business—the philosophy that is true and, so to speak, genuine—than to teach what is the principle without principle of all things, and how great an understanding abides in it, and what has flowed from it for our salvation, with no degeneration: which one God omnipotent, with whom three-powerful—the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit—the venerable mysteries, which by sincere and unshaken faith free the peoples, proclaim, neither confusedly, as some do, nor contemptuously, as many do. But how great a thing it is, that so great a God deigned for our sake to take on and bear even a body of our kind—the baser it seems, the fuller it is of clemency, and the further and higher removed from a certain pride of the clever."

2. 5. 17. "But whence the soul draws its origin, and what it does here, how much it differs from God, what it has of its own that alternates into either nature, in what way it dies and how it is proved immortal—how great an order, do you think, there is, that these things be learned? Great altogether and certain; about which I shall speak briefly afterward, if there shall be time. Now I want you to accept this from me: if anyone rashly and without the order of the disciplines dares to rush into the knowledge of these things, he becomes, instead of studious, curious; instead of learned, credulous; instead of cautious, incredulous. And so, as for that which just now, when I questioned, you answered so well and aptly, I both wonder whence it is and am compelled to find out. Yet let us see how far your hidden attention can go forward. Let Licentius's words now be restored to us too—he who, so long occupied with I know not what care, has been so estranged from this discourse that I believe he will read these things no otherwise than those of our friends who are not present. But return to us, I beg, Licentius, and make yourself wholly present here; for I am speaking to you. For you approved my definition, in which it was said what it is to be with God, with whom you wished to teach me—as far as I can grasp—that the mind of the wise man remains immovable."

2. 6. 18. "But this moves me: how, since this wise man is not denied to be in a body so long as he lives among men, it comes about that, while his body wanders here and there, his mind remains immovable. For in this way you can say that, when a ship is moved, the people who are in it are not moved—although we confess that it is owned and steered by them. For even if they steered it by thought alone and made it go where they wished, yet, since it is moved, they who are set in the same place could not but be moved." "The mind," said Licentius, "is not in the body in such a way that the body commands the mind." "Neither do I say this," I said; "but the rider, too, is not on the horse in such a way that the horse commands him, and yet, although he drives the horse where he wishes, when the horse is moved he is necessarily moved." "He can," he said, "sit immovable himself." "You force us," I said, "to define what it is to be moved; which, if you can, I want you to do." "By all means," he said, "let your benefit stand, I beg; for my request stands—do not ask me at all whether it pleases me to define; when I can do it, I myself will declare it." When this had been said, the boy from the house to whom we had given that task ran to us and announced that it was the hour for the meal. Then I said, "What it is to be moved, this boy forces us not to define, but to show with the very eyes. Let us go, then, and let us pass from this place into another place; for it is nothing else, unless I am mistaken, to be moved." Here, when they had smiled, we departed.

2. 6. 19. But when we had refreshed our bodies, since the sky had drawn clouds over, we sat down in the usual place in the bath. And I said, "Do you concede, then, Licentius, that motion is nothing other than a passing from place to place?" "I concede it," he said. "Do you concede, then," I said, "that no one is in a place in which he had not been, without having been moved?" "I do not understand," he said. "If anything," I said, "was a while ago in another place and now is in another, do you concede that it has been moved?" He agreed. "Then," I said, "could the living body of some wise man be here with us just now, while his mind was absent from here?" "It could," he said. "Even," I said, "if he conversed with us and taught us something?" "Even if," he said, "he taught us wisdom itself, I would not say that he was with us, but with himself." "Then not in his body?" I said. "No," he said. To him I said, "That body which lacks a mind—do you not confess it dead, when I have proposed it as living?" "I do not know," he said, "how to explain it. For I both see that a man's body cannot be living if the mind is not in it, and I cannot say that, wherever the body of the wise man is, his mind is not with God." "I," I said, "will make you explain this. For perhaps, because God is everywhere, wherever the wise man goes, he finds God with whom he can be. Thus it comes about that we can both not deny that he passes from place to place, which is to be moved, and yet that he is always with God." "I confess," he said, "that that body makes a passage from place to place, but the mind itself I deny it—on which the name of wise has been imposed."

2. 7. 20. "For now, meanwhile, I yield to you," I said, "lest a most obscure matter, to be treated longer and more diligently, should hinder for the present our purpose. But let us see this: since it has been defined by us what it is to be with God, whether we can know also what it is to be without God—although I think it is already manifest. For I believe it seems to you that those who are not with God are without God." "If words could be supplied to me," he said, "I would say what perhaps would not displease you. But I beg you to bear with my infancy, and—as befits you—to seize the matters themselves beforehand with your swift mind. For those people seem to me neither to be with God, and yet to be held by God. And so I cannot say that they are without God, whom God holds. Likewise I do not say they are with God, because they themselves do not have God. Since indeed, to have God—as it pleased us long ago among ourselves in that conversation, most delightful, which we had on your birthday—is nothing other than to enjoy God. But I confess I dread these contraries: how anyone is neither without God nor with God."

2. 7. 21. "Do not let these things move you," I said. "For where the matter is agreed, who would not despise the words? Therefore let us at last return to that definition of order. For you said that order is that by which God does all things. But God, as I see, does not fail to do anything; for thence it seemed to you that nothing could be found apart from order." "My opinion stands," he said; "but I now see what you are about to say: whether God does the things which we confess are not well done." "Excellent," I said; "you have plainly cast your eye into my mind. But as you saw what I was about to say, so I ask that you see what is to be answered." And he, nodding with head and shoulders, said, "We are thrown into confusion." And to this question, by chance, my mother had come up. And he, after some silence, asked that this very thing be asked of him again. He had not at all noticed that this place had been answered earlier by Trygetius. Then I said, "Why, or for what, should I repeat it to you? 'What is done,' they say, 'do not do over.' Therefore I advise rather that you take care to read—if you could not hear—the things that were said above. This absence of your mind from our discourse I did not take amiss, and long endured it to be so, that I might neither hinder those things which, intent and removed from us, you were doing for yourself, nor fail to pursue the things which this pen would not let you lose."

2. 7. 22. "Now I inquire into that which we have not yet tried to discuss by careful reasoning. For when first some order, I know not what, brought forth for us this question about order, I remember you said that this is the justice of God, by which he separates between the good and the evil and distributes to each his own. For there is, as far as I feel, no clearer definition of justice; and so I would like you to answer whether it seems to you that at some time God was not just." "Never," he said. "If, then, God is always just," I said, "good and evil always existed." "By all means," said my mother, "I see nothing else that follows. For there was no judgment of God when there was no evil; nor, if at some time he did not distribute to good and evil each its own, can he seem to have been just." To her Licentius said, "Then do you judge we must say that evil always existed?" "I do not dare," she said, "to say this." "What, then, shall we say?" I said. "If God is just because he judges between good and evil, when there was no evil he was not just." Here, while they were silent, I noticed that Trygetius wished to answer, and I allowed it. And he said, "By all means God was just. For he could separate good and evil, if it existed, and by that very thing whereby he could, he was just. For when we say that Cicero prudently investigated the conspiracy of Catiline, temperately was corrupted by no bribe to spare the wicked, justly slew them with the highest punishment by the authority of the senate, bravely sustained all the weapons of his enemies and the burden (as he himself said) of envy—those virtues would not have been in him unless Catiline had prepared so great a ruin for the republic. For virtue is to be considered through itself, not through any work of this kind, both in a man and—how much more—in God, if we are at all permitted somehow to compare these things to those, in the straits of matters and of words. For—that we may understand that God was always just—when the evil arose which he might sunder from the good, he did not at all delay to distribute to each his own: for he did not then have to learn justice, but then had to use that which he always had."

2. 7. 23. When both Licentius and his mother had approved this by intent necessity, I said, "What do you say, Licentius? Where is what you so greatly asserted, that nothing happens apart from order? For that it came about that evil was born was surely not done by God's order; but, once it had been born, it was included by God's order." And he, marveling and bearing it ill that so good a cause had so suddenly slipped from his hands, said, "By all means I say that order began from that point at which evil began to be." "Then," I said, "for evil itself to be was not done by order, if order began to be only after evil arose. [Order always was with God, and either there always was nothing of what is called evil, or, if it is found to have begun at some time, then, because order itself is either good or is from the good, there never was anything without order, nor will there ever be. Although something else rather occurs to me, but it has slipped away by that habit of forgetfulness—which I believe happened by order, according to merit or degree or order of life.]" "Somehow," he said, "there escaped me an opinion that I now scorn: for I ought not to have said that order began after evil was born, but that—as with that justice of which Trygetius discoursed—so order too existed with God, but did not come into use except after evils began to be." "You slip back into the same thing," I said. "For that which you least want stands unshaken: for whether order was with God, or began to be from that time at which evil also did, yet that evil was born apart from order. If you concede this, you confess that something can happen apart from order, which weakens and lops off your cause; but if you do not concede it, evil begins to seem to have been born by God's order, and you will confess God the author of evils—than which sacrilege nothing more detestable occurs to me." When I turned and rolled this over again and again to him—whether not understanding or pretending to have understood—he had nothing else to say and gave himself to silence. Then my mother said, "I do not think that nothing could have happened apart from God's order, because the very evil that was born was in no way born by God's order; but that justice did not allow it to be disordered, and brought and forced it into the order it deserved for itself."

2. 7. 24. Here, when I saw that all were most eagerly seeking God, each according to his own strength, but that the very order about which we were dealing was not such that one comes by it rashly to an understanding of that ineffable majesty, I said, "I beg you, if, as I see, you greatly love order, do not let us be preposterous and disordered. For although the most hidden reason promises that it will show that nothing happens apart from divine order, yet, if we should hear some schoolmaster trying to teach a boy syllables whom no one had first taught his letters, we would think him—I do not say to be laughed at as foolish, but to be bound as a madman—for no other reason, I think, than that he did not hold to the order of teaching. But that the unlearned do many such things which are reproved and laughed at by the learned, and madmen do things which do not escape even the judgment of the foolish, no one doubts; and yet that even all these things which we confess to be perverse are not apart from divine order, a certain high discipline—most remote even from the suspicion of the multitude—promises to make manifest, to minds so studious and loving God and souls alone, that the sums of numbers could not be more certain to us."

2. 8. 25. "But this discipline itself is the law of God, which, fixed and unshaken with him, ever abiding, is, as it were, transcribed into wise souls, so that they know they live so much the better and so much the more sublimely, the more both perfectly they contemplate it by understanding and the more diligently they guard it by living. This discipline, then, bids those who desire to know it to follow at once a twofold order, of which one part is of life, the other of learning. Young men, then, who are studious of it, must so live that they abstain from sexual things, from the allurements of the belly and the throat, from immoderate care and adornment of the body, from the empty business of games, from the torpor of sleep and sloth, from rivalry, detraction, envy, from ambitions for honors and powers, even from immoderate desire of praise itself. But let them believe that the love of money is the most certain poison of all their hope. Let them do nothing weakly, nothing rashly. In the sins of their own people, let them either drive out anger altogether or so rein it in that it be like anger driven out. Let them hate no one. Let them be unwilling to leave any vices uncured. Let them greatly watch, when they punish, that it not be too much; when they pardon, that it not be too little. Let them punish nothing that does not avail toward something better; let them indulge nothing that turns to something worse. Let them think all their own over whom power has been given to them. Let them so serve that they are ashamed to lord it over them; let them so rule that they delight to serve them. In the sins of others, let them not be troublesome to the unwilling. Let them avoid enmities most cautiously, bear them most evenly, end them most quickly. But in every dealing and association with people, it is enough to keep this one common proverb: Let them do to no one what they are unwilling to suffer. Let them be unwilling to administer the republic unless perfected. But let them hasten to be perfected either within senatorial age, or at least within their youth. But whoever turns himself late to these things, let him not think that nothing has been prescribed for him: for he will keep these things the more easily, his age being matured. But in all of life, place, time, let them either have friends or strive to have them. Let them obey the worthy even when they do not expect it. Let them care less for the proud, and be such least of all. Let them live aptly and harmoniously. Let them worship God, think of God, seek God, sustained by faith, hope, charity. Let them desire tranquility and a sure course of their own study and of all their associates, and for themselves and for whomever they can, a good mind and a peaceful life."

2. 9. 26. "It follows that I say how the studious ought to be instructed, who, as has been said, have resolved so to live. To learning, likewise, we are necessarily led in two ways, by authority and by reason. In time, authority is prior; in the matter itself, reason. For one thing is what is put first in acting, another what is reckoned of more worth in seeking. And so, although the authority of the good seems more wholesome for the unlearned multitude, but reason more fitted for the learned, yet because no one among human beings becomes skilled except from being unskilled, and no unskilled person knows how he ought to present himself to teachers and by what manner of life he can be teachable, it comes about that for all who desire to learn great and hidden goods, nothing opens the door but authority. Whoever has entered by it, without any hesitation, follows the precepts of the best life; through which, when he has been made teachable, then at last he will learn both with how great reason those very things are endowed which he followed before reason, and what reason itself is, which—after the cradle of authority—he now, firm and fit, follows and comprehends; and what understanding is, in which are all things, or rather which is itself all things; and what, beyond all things, is the principle of all things. To which knowledge in this life few can come; but beyond it not even after this life can anyone advance. But those who, content with authority alone, have steadily given effort only to good morals and right desires—either despising the liberal and best disciplines, or not able to be instructed in them—I do not know how I should call them happy, while they live among men; yet I believe unshakably that, as soon as they have left this body, they are freed more easily or more difficultly, in proportion as they lived more or less well."

2. 9. 27. "But authority is partly divine, partly human; yet the true, firm, highest is that which is named divine. In which we must beware of the wondrous deceit of the airy animals, which by certain divinations of things pertaining to these bodily senses, and by some pronouncements, have been most accustomed most easily to deceive souls—souls either curious about perishable fortunes, or desirous of fragile powers, or fearful of empty miracles. That authority, then, is to be called divine which not only in sensible signs transcends every human faculty, but also, acting upon the very man, shows him how far for his sake it has lowered itself, and bids him not be held by the senses, to which those wondrous things seem to belong, but to fly up to the understanding—at the same time demonstrating both how great things it can do here, and why it does these things, and how little it values them. For it is fitting that it teach both its power, by deeds, and its clemency, by humility, and the nature of things, by precept—all of which are handed down more secretly and more firmly in the sacred rites by which we are initiated, in which the life of the good is most easily purified, not by the windings of disputations, but by the authority of the mysteries. But human authority for the most part deceives; yet among these men it rightly seems to excel who, as far as the sense of the unlearned can grasp, give many indications of their teachings and do not live otherwise than they teach one ought to live. And if to these any gifts of fortune also accrue, by the use of which they appear great and by the contempt of which greater, it is altogether most difficult that anyone, believing them as they give precepts of living, should be rightly blamed."

2. 10. 28. Here Alypius said, "A very great image of life has been set up by you before our eyes, both fully and briefly; and although we hang upon your daily precepts, yet today you have made us more desirous and more ardent for it. To which, if it could be, I would wish not only us, but all human beings, now to come and to cling—if only, as these things are wonderful to hear, they were as easy to imitate. For somehow—which would that it were far from us!—the human mind, while by hearing these heavenly things it proclaims them divine and altogether true, in desiring conducts itself otherwise; so that it seems most true to me that either divine men, or men not without divine help, live so." To him I said, "These precepts of living, which, as always, please you very much, Alypius, although they have here been expressed in my words as the time allowed, were nevertheless not invented by me, as you know very well. For the books of great and almost divine men are most full of them; which I thought I had to say not for your sake, but for the sake of these young men, lest in them, as it were, they rightly despise my authority. For I do not at all want them to believe me, except when I teach and render a reason—for whose sake, on account of the greatness of the matter, I think you too interposed this discourse to stir them. For these things are not difficult for you to follow, things you seized with so great avidity and entered upon with so great an impetus of your admirable nature, that you have become my master in matters as I have become yours in words. For there is now no cause of lying, or even occasion; for I think neither that you would become more studious by false praise of yours, and those are present who know us both, and this discourse will be sent to one to whom neither of us is unknown."

2. 10. 29. "But as for good men, given to the best morals, if you do not feel otherwise than you said, I think you believe them fewer than is probable to me; but many are wholly hidden from you. Likewise, of many who are not hidden, those very things which are wonderful are hidden: for these are in the mind, which can neither be received by sense, and for the most part, while it wishes to suit the conversations of vicious people, says things which it would seem either to approve or to seek. It also does many things unwillingly, for the sake of either avoiding the hatred of people or fleeing ineptitude; which we, hearing or seeing, hardly judge otherwise than this sense reports. And thence it comes about that we believe many to be not such as both they themselves and their intimates know them to be. Of which I would have you persuade yourself from certain great goods of mind in our friends, which we alone know. For this error rests on no small cause—that not a few suddenly turn themselves to a good and wondrous life, and, until they become known by certain more notable deeds, are believed to be such as they were. For, not to go too far afield, who that knew these young men before would easily believe that they so eagerly seek great things, that they have suddenly at this age declared so great enmities against pleasures? Therefore let us drive this opinion from the mind; for that divine help too, which—as was fitting—you religiously placed at the end of your discourse, exercises the office of its clemency more widely than some suppose, through all peoples. But let us return, if you please, to the order of our discussion; and since enough has been said about authority, let us see what reason means."

2. 11. 30. "Reason is a motion of the mind, capable of distinguishing and connecting the things that are learned; by which as guide, to use it for understanding God, or the soul which is either in us or anywhere at all, a most rare kind of human being is able—for no other reason than that, having gone forward into the business of these senses, it is difficult for anyone to return into himself. And so, although in these very deceptive matters human beings strive to do everything by reason, what reason itself is, and of what kind, all but very few are utterly ignorant. It seems strange, but yet the matter stands so. It is enough to have said this for the present: for if I should now desire to show you so great a thing as it is to be understood, I would be as inept as I would be arrogant if I professed that I had already grasped it. Yet, as far as reason has deigned to go forward into the things that seem known to us, let us track it down, if we can for now, as the discourse we have taken up requires."

2. 11. 31. "And first let us see where this word that is called 'reason' is wont to be used; for this above all ought to move us, that man himself was so defined by the ancient wise men: 'Man is a rational mortal animal.' Here, the genus being set down in what is called 'animal,' we see two differences added, by which, I believe, man had to be warned both whither he should return to himself and whence he should flee. For as the soul's advance slipped all the way down to mortal things, so its return ought to be into reason. By the one word, 'rational,' he is separated from the beasts; by the other, 'mortal,' he is separated from the divine. Unless, then, he holds to the former, he will be a beast; unless he turns himself from the latter, he will not be divine. But since the most learned men are wont acutely and subtly to distinguish what difference there is between 'rational' and 'reasonable,' it is by no means to be neglected for our purpose: for they said that 'rational' is what uses reason or can use it, but 'reasonable' is what has been done or said by reason. And so we can call these baths 'reasonable,' and our speech, but 'rational' either the one who made them, or us who speak. Therefore reason proceeds from the rational soul—namely, into those things which either are done reasonably or are said reasonably."

2. 11. 32. "Two things, then, I see, in which the power and force of reason can be brought to bear upon the senses themselves: the works of human beings that are seen, and the words that are heard. In both the mind uses a twofold messenger, according to the body's need: one which is of the eyes, the other which is of the ears. And so, when we see something shaped with parts congruent to one another, we not absurdly say that it appears reasonably. And likewise, when we hear something sound together well, we do not hesitate to say that it sounds reasonably. But everyone would be laughed at if he said, 'It smells reasonably,' or 'It tastes reasonably,' or 'It is reasonably soft'—unless perhaps in those things which have been prepared by human beings for some purpose, that they should smell or taste or be hot, or something else. As if someone should say that a place from which serpents are driven by strong odors smells reasonably so, looking to the cause why it was done; or that a cup which a physician has made up is reasonably bitter or sweet; or that a tub he has ordered to be tempered for an invalid is reasonably hot or warm. But no one entering a garden and putting a rose to his nostrils dares to praise it thus: 'How reasonably it smells!'—nor, if a physician should bid him smell it: for then the precept or order is given reasonably, yet it is not said to smell reasonably, nor because that odor is natural. For although a dish is seasoned by a cook, we can say it is seasoned reasonably; but to say it tastes reasonably, when there is no cause outside but the present pleasure is satisfied, is in no way said by the very habit of speech. For if it be asked, of the one to whom the physician gave the cup, why he ought to have felt it as sweet, something else is brought in on account of which it is so—that is, a kind of disease, which is now not in that sense but is otherwise in the body. But if someone tasting something, stirred by the goad of the gullet, be asked why it is so sweet, and he answer, 'Because it pleases,' or 'Because I am delighted,' no one will call it reasonably sweet—unless perhaps his delight be necessary to something, and what he eats has been so prepared for this purpose."

2. 11. 33. "We hold, as far as we have been able to investigate, certain traces of reason in the senses; and, as far as pertains to sight and hearing, in pleasure itself. But the other senses are wont to demand this name not in their own pleasure, but on account of something else: and that is the deed of a rational living being done for some end. But as for what pertains to the eyes, in which the congruence of parts is called reasonable, it is usually called beautiful. But what pertains to the ears, when we call a concord reasonable and say that a measured song has been reasonably composed, that is, by a proper name now, called sweetness. But neither in beautiful things, in that which entices us, nor in the sweetness of the ears, when the struck string sounds, as it were, liquidly and purely, are we wont to call that reasonable. It remains, then, that we confess that in the pleasure of these senses that pertains to reason where there is a certain measurement and modulation."

2. 11. 34. "And so in this very building, considering the parts well, we cannot but be offended that we see one door in the side, another nearly in the middle, yet not placed in the middle. Indeed, in things constructed, when no necessity compels, an unequal measurement of parts seems to do, as it were, a kind of injury to the very sight. But that within, three windows—one in the middle, two at the sides—pour light upon the bathing-tub at equal intervals, how it delights us, gazing more diligently, and how it seizes the mind to itself, is a manifest thing and need not be opened to you in many words. Whence the architects themselves now call this 'reason' by their own word, and say that parts discordantly placed do not have reason. Which extends widely and is poured out into nearly all the arts and human works. Now in songs, in which likewise we say there is a reason pertaining to the pleasure of the ears, who would not feel that measurement is the maker of all this sweetness? But when an actor is dancing, although those gestures of his are signs of things to those who watch well, although a certain numbered motion of the limbs delights the eyes by that same measurement, yet that dancing is called reasonable because it signifies and shows something well, apart from the pleasure of the senses. For if he represents a winged Venus and a cloaked Cupid, although he depict it with wondrous motion and arrangement of limbs, he does not seem to offend the eyes, but through the eyes the mind, to which those signs of things are shown: for the eyes would be offended if he did not move beautifully. For that pertained to the sense, in which the soul, by the very fact that it is mixed with body, perceives pleasure. One thing, then, is sense, another is what is through sense: for a beautiful motion charms the sense, but through the sense only the beautiful signification in the motion charms the mind. This is also more easily noticed in the ears: for whatever sounds pleasantly, that very hearing pleases and entices; but what is well signified through that same sound, by the messenger of the ears indeed, is referred to the mind alone. And so when we hear those verses:
Why the winter suns hasten so to dip themselves in ocean, or what delay holds back the lingering nights
we praise the meters in one way and the meaning in another, nor do we say under the same understanding 'it sounds reasonably' and 'it is said reasonably.'"

2. 12. 35. "Now then there are three kinds of things in which that 'reasonable' appears. One is in deeds referred to some end, another in teaching, the third in giving delight. The first warns us to do nothing rashly; the second, to teach rightly; the last, to contemplate happily. The former pertains to morals; but these two to the disciplines about which we are now dealing. For that which in us is rational—that is, which uses reason and either does or follows reasonable things—because it was bound by a certain natural bond into the fellowship of those with whom that very reason was common to it, and because man could not be most firmly joined to man unless they conversed and so, as it were, poured back their minds and thoughts into one another, saw that names had to be imposed on things—that is, certain significant sounds—so that, since they could not perceive one another's minds, they might use sense as an interpreter, as it were, to couple themselves together. But the words of those absent could not be heard; therefore that reason brought forth letters, having marked and distinguished all the sounds of the mouth and tongue. But it could do none of these things if the multitude of things seemed to lie open infinitely without some fixed limit. Therefore the usefulness of numbering was noticed by great necessity. These two things having been found, there was born that profession of the scribes and the calculators—a kind of infancy, as it were, of grammar, which Varro calls 'lettering' (litteratio); but how it is called in Greek I do not sufficiently recall at present."

2. 12. 36. "Reason then, going forward, noticed that, of the same sounds of the mouth by which we speak and which it had already marked with letters, some were such that, with the mouth variously opened, they flowed out free, as it were, and simple, from the throat without any collision; others, with a different pressure of the mouth, yet held some sound; but the last could not break out unless the first were joined to them. And so it named the letters, in this order in which they have been set out, vowels, semivowels, and mutes. Then it noted the syllables; then the words were arranged into eight kinds and forms, and all their motion, integrity, and joining were skillfully and subtly distinguished. Thence, now not unmindful of number and measurement, it turned its attention to the various durations of the very sounds and syllables, and thence found that some spaces of time were double, others single, by which long and short syllables were measured out. It noted these too and arranged them into fixed rules."

2. 12. 37. "Grammar could now have been complete; but because by its very name it proclaims that it professes letters—whence in Latin too it is called literature (litteratura)—it came about that whatever was committed to letters as worthy of memory necessarily pertained to it. And so, one name indeed, but an infinite matter, manifold, fuller of cares than of delight or truth, was added to this discipline: history—laborious not so much for the historians themselves as for the grammarians. For who would bear that a man should seem unlearned who has not heard that Daedalus flew, but that the one who invented the tale should not seem a liar, the one who believed it foolish, the one who asked about it shameless? Or in which matter I am wont gravely to pity our friends, who, if they have not answered what the mother of Euryalus was called, are accused of ignorance, while they themselves dare not call those who ask them such things empty and inept and not even curious?"

2. 13. 38. "That reason, then, having perfected and arranged grammar, was warned to inquire into and attend to this very power by which it brought forth the art: for by defining, distributing, and gathering, it had not only digested and ordered it, but had also defended it from every creeping-in of falsehood. When, then, would it pass to fashioning other things, unless it first distinguished, noted, digested, and brought forth its own, as it were, engines and instruments—the very discipline of disciplines, which they call dialectic? This teaches teaching, this teaches learning; in this reason shows and opens itself, what it is, what it wants, what it avails. It knows knowing; it alone not only wills but can make people knowing. But because for the most part foolish people, toward those things which are rightly, usefully, and honorably counseled, follow not the most sincere truth itself, which a rare mind sees, but their own feelings and habit, it was fitting that they not only be taught as far as they can, but often and especially be moved. This part of itself which would do this—fuller of necessity than of purity—with a lap most stuffed with delights, which it might scatter among the people that it might deign to be led to its own usefulness, it called rhetoric. Thus far that part which is called reasonable in signifying has been advanced by the liberal studies and disciplines."

2. 14. 39. "Hence that reason wished to carry itself off to the most happy contemplation of divine things themselves. But, lest it fall from on high, it sought steps and contrived for itself the very way through its own possessions and an order. For it desired a beauty which it could behold, alone and simple, without these eyes; it was hindered by the senses. And so it turned its gaze for a little upon those very senses, which, crying out that they had the truth, recalled it with importunate clamor as it hastened to go on to other things. And first it began from the ears, because they said the words were their own by which it had already made grammar and dialectic and rhetoric. But that most powerful faculty of distinguishing quickly saw what difference there was between sound and that of which it was a sign. It understood that nothing else pertained to the judgment of the ears than sound, and that this was threefold: either in the voice of a living being, or in that which breath makes in instruments, or in that which is produced by striking. To the first pertain tragedians or comedians, or choruses of whatever kind, and absolutely all who sing with their own voice; the second is assigned to flutes and similar instruments; to the third are given citharas, lyres, cymbals, and everything that is tuneful by being struck."

2. 14. 40. "But it saw that this material was most base unless it were shaped by a fixed measurement of times and by a moderated variety of sound, of high and low pitch. From this it recognized that those were the seeds which, in grammar, when it turned over syllables with diligent consideration, it had called feet and accents. And because it was easy to notice that in the words themselves the shortnesses and lengths of syllables are scattered through speech in nearly equal number, it tried to arrange and join those feet into fixed ranks; and in this, first following sense itself, it impressed measured joints, which they call sections and members. And lest the course of feet should roll on further than its judgment could sustain, it set a limit from which it might turn back, and from that very thing it called it a verse (versus). But that which was not bounded by a fixed end, yet ran on with feet reasonably arranged, it noted by the name of rhythm, which in Latin could be called nothing other than number (numerus). Thus from it the poets were begotten: in whom, when it saw great weight not only of sounds but also of words and matters, it honored them very much, and granted them the power of reasonable falsehoods of whatever kind they wished. And because they drew their stock from that first discipline, it allowed the grammarians to be judges over them."

2. 14. 41. "In this fourth step, then—whether in rhythms or in modulation itself—it understood that numbers reigned and perfected the whole: it examined most diligently of what kind they were; it found them divine and everlasting, especially because, with their help, it had woven together all the foregoing. And now it most ill endured that their splendor and serenity should be discolored by the bodily material of voices. And because that which the mind sees is always present and is approved as immortal—of which kind the numbers appeared to be—while sound, because it is a sensible thing, flows past into past time and is imprinted on memory, reason now favoring the poets by a reasonable falsehood (was it to be inquired whether something similarly was in the offspring?), it was feigned that the Muses are daughters of Jupiter and Memory. Whence this discipline, sharer of sense and understanding, found the name of music."

2. 15. 42. "Hence it set out into the riches of the eyes, and surveying earth and heaven, it perceived that nothing else pleased it than beauty; and in beauty, figures; in figures, dimensions; in dimensions, numbers. And it asked within itself whether there was there such a line and such a roundness, or any other form and figure, as the understanding contained. It found it far inferior, and in no part to be compared—what the eyes saw with what the mind discerned. These things too, distinguished and arranged, it reduced into a discipline and called geometry. The motion of the heavens moved it much and invited it to consider it diligently. There too, through the most constant alternations of times, through the fixed and defined courses of the stars, through the measured spaces of the intervals, it understood that nothing else ruled than that dimension and numbers. And these likewise, by defining and distinguishing, knitting them into order, it begot astronomy—a great proof for the religious and a great torment for the curious."

2. 15. 43. "In all these disciplines, then, there met it all things numbered, which yet stood out more manifestly in those dimensions which it beheld as most true by thinking and turning them over within itself; but in the things that are sensed, it recollected rather their shadows and traces. Here it raised itself much and presumed much; it dared to prove the soul immortal. It handled all things diligently; it perceived that it could do very much, and that whatever it could, it could by numbers. A certain marvel moved it, and it began to suspect that it itself was perhaps that very number by which all things were numbered, or, if it were not that, that yet there it was, to which it busied itself to come. This number, which was now to be the index of the whole truth, it grasped with all its strength—that number which Alypius mentioned, when we were inquiring about the Academics, was like Proteus in our hands. For false images of those things which we number, flowing from that most hidden number by which we number, snatch our thought into themselves, and often make that number, when it is already held, slip away."

2. 16. 44. "If anyone does not yield to these, but reduces all those things which through so many disciplines are spread widely and variously to one simple, true, and certain thing, most worthy of the name of learned, he now no longer rashly inquires into those divine things—now not only to be believed, but also to be contemplated, understood, and retained. But whoever is either still a slave of desires, gaping after perishing things, or, though now fleeing these and living chastely, yet not knowing what is nothing, what is formless matter, what is formed-yet-lifeless, what is body, what is the lifeless in body, what is place, what is time, what is in place, what is in time, what is motion according to place, what is motion not according to place, what is stable motion, what is eternity, what it is to be neither in place nor nowhere, and what it is to be beyond time and always, what it is both to be nowhere and not to be nowhere, and never to be and never not to be—whoever, then, not knowing these things, should wish, I do not say about that highest God, who is known better by not knowing, but about his own soul, to inquire and dispute, will err as much as can be erred at all. But these things he will more easily come to know who has grasped the simple and intelligible numbers. And he will grasp these who, both strong in talent and, by the privilege of age or of any good fortune, at leisure, and vehemently kindled with zeal, has pursued, as far as is enough, the aforesaid order of the disciplines. For since all those liberal arts are learned partly for the use of life, partly for the knowledge and contemplation of things, to attain their use is most difficult except for one who, from very boyhood most talented, has given attention most insistently and most constantly."

2. 17. 45. "But as for what of those things is needed for that which we seek—do not, I beg you, mother, let these things deter you, as if a vast forest of matters. For certain things will be chosen out of them all, fewest in number, most powerful in force, but in their knowledge hard indeed for many; for you, however—whose talent is daily new to me, and whose mind, both by age and by an admirable temperance most remote from all trifles and emerging from the great stain of the body, I know to have risen much into itself—they will be as easy as they are difficult for those who live most sluggishly and most wretchedly. For if I should say that you will easily arrive at that speech which lacks the fault of expression and tongue, surely I would lie. For even me, who had great necessity of learning these things thoroughly, the Italians still harass in many sounds of words, and by me in turn, as far as the very sound is concerned, they are reproved. For it is one thing to be secure by art, another by birth. But the solecisms, as we call them, perhaps any learned man attending diligently will find in my speech; for there has been no lack of one who has most expertly persuaded me that Cicero himself made some faults of this kind. But the kind of barbarisms in our times has become such that even that speech by which Rome was saved seems barbarous. But you, despising these things, whether childish or not pertaining to you, so know the almost divine power and nature of grammar that you seem to the eloquent to have held its soul and left its body."

2. 17. 46. "This I would say also of the other arts of this kind: which, if perhaps you wholly despise, I admonish you—as much as a son dares and as much as you permit—that you firmly and carefully guard that faith of yours which you have received through the venerable mysteries, and then that you persevere constantly and watchfully in this life and these morals. But about matters most obscure and yet divine—how God both does nothing of evil and is omnipotent, and yet so great evils come about, and for what good he made the world, he who was not in need, and whether evil always existed or began in time, and, if it always existed, whether it existed under the power of God, and, if it did, whether this world too always existed, in which that evil was tamed by divine order; but if this world at some time began to be, how, before it existed, evil was held by the power of God, and what need there was for the world to be fashioned, in which the evil that God's power was already reining in might be shut up for the punishment of souls; but if there was a time in which under God's dominion there was no evil, what suddenly happened, which had not happened through eternal ages back—for to say that a new counsel arose in God is, not to say impious, most inept; but if we say that evil was, as it were, importunate and wicked toward God, as some suppose, no learned man will hold his laughter, no unlearned man will fail to be angry. For what harm could that nature of evil, I know not what, do to God? For if they say it could not, there will be no cause for fashioning the world; if they say it could, it is an inexpiable wickedness to believe God violable—nor even so as to provide, by his power, that his substance not be violated. For they confess that the soul pays penalties here, while they want there to be no difference at all between its substance and God's. But if we should say this world was not made, it is impious and ungrateful to believe so, lest that follow, that God did not fashion it—therefore about these and matters of this kind, either by that order of learning, or in no way, must anything be inquired into."

2. 18. 47. "And lest anyone think we have embraced something most vast, I say this more plainly and briefly. To the knowledge of these matters no one ought to aspire without that, as it were, twofold knowledge of good disputation and of the power of numbers. If anyone thinks even this very much, let him know well only numbers, or dialectic alone. If this too is endless, let him know perfectly only what the one (unum) is in numbers, and how much it avails—not yet in that highest law and highest order of all things, but in those things which we daily, here and there, sense and do. For this learning is now taken up by the very discipline of philosophy itself, and in it he will find nothing more than what the one is, but far higher and far more divine. The question of which is twofold: one about the soul, the other about God. The first brings it about that we know ourselves, the other that we know our origin. The former is sweeter to us, the latter dearer; the former makes us worthy of the happy life, the latter makes us happy; the former is for those learning, the latter for those now learned. This is the order of the studies of wisdom, through which each becomes fit to understand the order of things—that is, to discern the two worlds and the very parent of the universe, of whom there is no knowledge in the soul except to know how it does not know him."

2. 18. 48. "Holding to this order, then, the soul, now handed over to philosophy, first inspects itself; and, when that learning has persuaded it either that reason is its own or is itself, and that in reason either there is nothing better and more powerful than numbers, or that reason is nothing other than number, it will speak with itself thus: 'I, by a certain inner and hidden motion of mine, can distinguish or connect the things that are to be learned; and this power of mine is called reason. But what is to be distinguished, except what is either thought to be one and is not, or at least is not so much one as it is thought to be? Likewise, why is anything to be connected, except that it may become one as far as it can? Therefore both in distinguishing and in connecting I want the one, and I love the one. But when I distinguish, I want it purified; when I connect, I want it whole. In the one case foreign things are avoided; in the other, proper things are coupled, that one perfect thing may come to be. That a stone might be a stone, all its parts and all its nature have been consolidated into one. What of a tree? Would it not not be a tree if it were not one? What of the limbs of any living being, and its inward parts, and whatever there is of those things of which it consists? Surely, if they suffer a divorce of unity, it will not be an animal. What else do friends try to be than one? And the more one, the more they are friends. A people is one city, to which dissension is dangerous: but what is it to dissent, except not to feel as one? Out of many soldiers is made one army: is not any multitude the less conquered, the more it comes together into one? Whence the very coming-together into one is called a wedge (cuneus), as if a one-going (couneus). What of all love? Does it not want to become one with what it loves, and, if it attains it, become one with it? Pleasure itself delights more vehemently for no other reason than that loving bodies are forced into one. Whence is pain ruinous? Because it strives to sunder what was one. Therefore it is troublesome and dangerous to become one with that which can be separated.'"

2. 19. 49. "'Out of many things lying about here and there before, then gathered into one form, I make one house. I am the better, since I make it, it is made: therefore the better because I make it; there is no doubt that I am thereby better than the house is. But I am not thereby better than a swallow or a little bee, for the one builds its nests skillfully and the other its combs: but I am better than these because I am a rational animal. But if reason is in fixed measurements, is not also that which the birds build less aptly and congruently measured? On the contrary, it is most numbered. Therefore I am better not by making numbered things, but by knowing numbers. What, then? Could they, not knowing, work numbered things? They could indeed. Whence is this taught? From the fact that we too, by fixed measurements, accommodate the tongue to the teeth and palate, so that letters and words burst forth from the mouth, and yet we do not, when we speak, think by what motion of the mouth we ought to do this. Then what good singer, even if he be unskilled in music, does not, by natural sense itself, keep in memory both the rhythm and the melody he has perceived, in singing? Than which what can be done more numbered? If, being unlearned, he does not know it, yet he does it, nature working. But when is he better and to be preferred to the beasts? When he knows what he does. But nothing else prefers me to the beast except that I am a rational animal.'"

2. 19. 50. "'How, then, is reason immortal, and I at the same time defined as something both rational and mortal? Or is reason not immortal? But that one is to two, or two to four, is the truest reason: nor was this reason more true yesterday than today, nor will it be more true tomorrow or after a year, nor, if this whole world should collapse, could this reason not be. For this is always such; but this world neither yesterday had, nor tomorrow will have, what it has today, nor on this very day, or in the space of a single hour, has it had the sun in the same place: thus, since nothing in it abides, it has nothing in the same way even for a small space of time. Therefore, if reason is immortal, and I, who distinguish or connect all these things, am reason, then that by which I am called mortal is not mine. Or, if the soul is not what reason is, and yet I use reason and through reason am the better, one must flee from the worse to the better, from the mortal to the immortal.' These and many other things the well-instructed soul speaks and stirs within itself: which I do not wish to pursue, lest, while I desire to teach you order, I exceed measure, which is the father of order. For step by step it leads itself even to the best morals and life, now not by faith alone, but by certain reason. To it, diligently beholding the force and power of numbers, it will seem too unworthy and too much to be wept over, that by its own knowledge a verse runs well and a cithara sounds in tune, while its own life and itself, which is the soul, follows a devious path, and, with lust lording it over it, jars discordantly with the most shameful din of vices."

2. 19. 51. "But when it has composed and ordered itself and rendered itself harmonious and beautiful, it will now dare to see God, and the very fountain whence all truth flows, and the very Father of Truth. Great God, what eyes those will be! how sound, how comely, how strong, how constant, how serene, how blessed! But what is that which they see? What, I ask? What shall we think, what reckon, what say? Everyday words come to mind, and all have been soiled by the basest things. I will say nothing more, except that there is promised to us the sight of a beauty in imitation of which other things are beautiful, in comparison with which other things are foul. Whoever has seen this—and he will see it who lives well, prays well, studies well—when will it move him why one man, wishing to have sons, does not have them, another casts them out in abundance, another hates those to be born, loves those born; how it will not be repugnant to him that nothing will be that is not with God, from whom all things must necessarily come about by order, and yet that God is not asked in vain? Finally, when will any burdens, or any dangers, or any disgusts, or any flatteries of fortune move that man? For in this sensible world it must be vehemently considered what time and place are, so that what delights in a part, whether of place or of time, may yet be understood to be much better as the whole of which that is a part; and again, that what offends in a part may be clear to the learned man not to offend for any other reason than that the whole is not seen, to which that part wondrously fits; but that in that intelligible world any part whatever is, like the whole, beautiful and perfect. These things will be said more fully, if your studies shall have resolved to hold—and shall altogether actively and constantly have held—the right order, whether that one mentioned by us, or perhaps another shorter and more convenient, as I exhort and hope."

2. 20. 52. "And that this may be permitted to us, the greatest effort must be given to the best morals; for our God cannot otherwise hear us, but those living well he will most easily hear. Let us pray, then, not that riches or honors or things of this kind, fleeting and wavering and passing away though anything resist, may come to us, but that those things may come about which make us good and happy. That these prayers may be most devoutly fulfilled, on you, mother, especially do we lay this business, by whose prayers I undoubtedly believe and affirm that God gave me this mind, that I should prefer nothing at all to finding the truth, should wish nothing else, think of nothing else, love nothing else. Nor do I cease to believe that we shall attain this so great good, which by your meriting we have desired, with you also asking for it. But now, Alypius, what should I exhort you, what admonish? You, who are not excessive in this, because to love such things, however much, can perhaps always be rightly called too little, but never too much."

2. 20. 53. Here he said, "Truly you have brought it about that the memory of the most learned and great men—which once, because of the greatness of the matters, seemed incredible—we not only hold not doubtful, both by daily consideration and by this present admiration which we have for you, but, if it were necessary, could even swear about it. For what? Has not that venerable and almost divine discipline of Pythagoras—which has rightly both been held and proved—been unlocked for us by you today, almost before our very eyes? Since you have signified both the rules of life, and not so much the paths of knowledge as the very fields and clear seas, and—what was for that man a matter of great veneration—where the very sanctuaries of truth are, of what kind they are, what kind of men seek them, both briefly and so plainly that, although we suspect and believe that there are still more secret things with you, yet we would not think, without shamelessness, that we ought to demand anything further."

2. 20. 54. "I accept these things gladly," I said. "For not so much your words, which are not true, as the mind, true in its words, delights and rouses me. And it is well that we have resolved to send these writings to one who is wont gladly to lie much about us. But if any others perhaps shall read them, neither do I fear that they will be angry with you. For who would not most benevolently forgive a lover's error in judging? But that you made mention of Pythagoras, I believe it came into your mind by that hidden divine order, I know not how. For a matter much needed by me had quite slipped away—a thing which in that man (if anything committed to writing is to be believed; though who would not believe Varro?) I am wont to admire and to extol with almost daily praises, as you know: that he handed down the discipline of governing the republic last to his hearers, when they were now learned, now perfect, now wise, now happy. For he saw there so great waves that he would not entrust them to anyone except a man who would, both in ruling, almost divinely avoid the rocks, and, if all things should fail, himself become, as it were, a rock to those waves. For of the wise man alone can it be most truly said:
He, like a rock of the sea unmoved, resists
and the rest that has been said, in brilliant verses, to this effect." Here the end of the discussion was made, and, with all glad and hoping much, we dismissed the gathering, when the lamp had now been brought in for the night.