Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 1 part 16/22

And of such things my life is full, and my one great hope is exceedingly Your mercy. For when our heart is made a receptacle for things of this kind, and bears throngs of abundant vanity, hence too our prayers are often interrupted and disturbed, and before Your face, while we direct the voice of our heart to Your ears, this so great a thing is cut short by trifling thoughts rushing in from I know not whence. Shall we then reckon even this among the things to be despised, or shall anything bring us back into hope save Your known mercy, since You have begun to change us?

And You know to how great a part You have changed me, who first heal me of the lust of avenging myself, that You may become propitious to all my other iniquities also, and heal all my languors, and redeem my life from corruption, and crown me in mercy and compassion, and satisfy my desire with good things; who have repressed my pride by Your fear, and tamed my neck to Your yoke. And now I bear it, and it is light to me, because so You promised and did; and truly so it was, and I knew it not, when I feared to come under it.

But is it so, O Lord, who alone rule without pride, because You alone are the true Lord, who have no lord—is it so that this third kind of temptation also has ceased from me, or can it cease in all this life: the desire to be feared and loved by men, for no other reason than that thence may come a joy which is no joy? It is a wretched life and a foul vainglory. Hence comes it, above all, that we love You not, nor chastely fear You; and therefore You resist the proud, but to the humble give grace, and thunder upon the ambitions of the world, and the foundations of the mountains tremble.

And so for us, because for certain offices of human society it is necessary to be loved and feared by men, the adversary of our true blessedness presses on, scattering everywhere in his snares his 'Well done, well done,' so that while we eagerly gather it, we may be incautiously caught, and may lay aside our joy from the truth and set it in the deceit of men, and may be pleased to be loved and feared not for Your sake, but in Your stead; and in this way, having made us like himself, he may hold us with him, not for the concord of charity, but for the fellowship of punishment—he who resolved to set his seat in the north, that, in a dark and chilly way, they might serve him who imitate You by a perverse and distorted path. But we, O Lord, behold we are Your little flock; possess us. Stretch forth Your wings, and let us flee beneath them.

Be You our glory; for Your sake may we be loved, and may Your word be feared in us. He who wishes to be praised by men while You blame, will not be defended by men while You judge, nor delivered while You condemn. But when not the sinner is praised in the desires of his soul, nor he who works iniquity is blessed, but a man is praised for some gift which You have given him, and he rejoices more to have himself praised than to have the gift itself for which he is praised, he too is praised while You blame; and better now is he who praised than he who was praised. For in the one the gift of God in man pleased; to the other the gift of man pleased more than the gift of God. By these temptations we are tempted daily, O Lord; without ceasing we are tempted. Our daily furnace is the human tongue.

You command us continence in this kind also: grant what You command, and command what You will. You know on this matter the groaning of my heart toward You, and the rivers of my eyes. For not easily do I gather how far I am made cleaner from this plague, and I greatly fear my hidden things, which Your eyes know, but mine do not. For in other kinds of temptations there is for me some faculty, such as it is, of examining myself; but in this there is almost none. For both from the pleasures of the flesh and from a superfluous curiosity of knowing, I see how far I have attained to be able to restrain my mind, when I am without those things, either by will or when they are absent. For then I question myself how much more or less it is troublesome to me not to have them.

But riches indeed, which are sought for this end, that they may serve one of those three concupiscences, or two of them, or all—if the soul cannot perceive whether, having them, it despises them, they too can be let go, that it may prove itself. But that we may lack praise, and in that may test what we can do, must we live ill, and so abandonedly and monstrously, that no one may know us who does not detest us? What greater madness can be spoken or thought? But if praise both is wont and ought to be the companion of a good life and of good works, we ought no more to forsake its companionship than the good life itself. Yet I do not perceive whether I can be without something either with equanimity or with difficulty, except when it is absent.

What then in this kind of temptation, O Lord, do I confess to You? What, but that I am delighted by praises? But more by the truth itself than by praises. For if it were set before me whether I would rather, raving or erring in all things, be praised by all men, or, steadfast and most certain in the truth, be reviled by all, I see which I should choose. Yet nevertheless I would not that even the favouring of another's mouth should add to my joy in any good of mine. But it adds, I confess; not only that, but dispraise also diminishes it. And when I am troubled by this my misery, an excuse steals in upon me, of what kind it is, You know, O God; for it makes me uncertain.

For because You have commanded us not only continence, that is, from what things we should restrain love, but also justice, that is, on what we should bestow it, and have willed not only Yourself to be loved by us, but also our neighbour, I often seem to myself to be delighted by the progress or hope of my neighbour, when I am delighted by the praise of one who understands well, and again to be saddened by his evil, when I hear him disparage either that which he is ignorant of, or that which is good. For I am sometimes saddened too by my own praises, when either those things are praised in me with which I myself am displeased, or even lesser and trifling goods are esteemed more than they ought to be esteemed.

But again, how do I know whether I am thus affected because I do not wish my praiser to dissent from me concerning myself—not because I am moved by his benefit, but because the same goods which please me in myself are more pleasant to me when they please another also? For in a certain manner I am not praised, when my own opinion of myself is not praised, since either those things are praised which displease me, or those more which please me less. Am I then uncertain of myself in this? Behold, in You, O Truth, I see that I ought to be moved by my praises not for my own sake, but for the benefit of my neighbour. And whether I am so, I know not. In this matter I am less known to myself than to You.

I beseech You, my God, and show me my own self, that I may confess to my brethren who will pray for me what wounded thing I shall find in myself. Let me again question myself more diligently. If I am moved by my neighbour's benefit in my own praises, why am I less moved if some other man be unjustly reviled than if I myself am? Why am I more stung by that reproach which is cast at me than by that same one cast with the same iniquity at another in my presence? Do I not know even this? Does this still remain, that I should deceive myself, and not do the truth before You in my heart and in my tongue? Put this madness far from me, O Lord, lest the oil of the sinner be my mouth to fatten my head.

Needy and poor am I, and better when in hidden groaning I am displeased with myself and seek your mercy, until what is defective in me be made whole and perfected unto that peace which the eye of the arrogant knows not. But the word that proceeds from the mouth, and the deeds which become known to men, carry a most perilous temptation that springs from the love of praise, which, for the sake of a certain private excellence, gathers up begged-for votes of approval. It tempts me even when within myself I rebuke it; yet by the very fact that it is rebuked, and often it boasts the more vainly over its very contempt for vainglory, and therefore no longer boasts over that contempt of glory: for it does not despise glory while it boasts of despising it.

Within, too—within—there is another evil of this same kind of temptation, by which those grow empty who are pleased with themselves on their own account, even though they please not others, or even displease them, and do not care to please the rest. But those who are pleased with themselves greatly displease you, not only over things not good as though they were good, but even over your own good things as though they were their own; or even as though they were yours, yet as if they were their own merits; or even as though from your grace, yet not rejoicing in fellowship, but envying others that grace. In all these things and in perils and labors of this sort you see the trembling of my heart, and I feel that my wounds are continually healed by you rather than not inflicted upon me.

Where did you not walk with me, O Truth, teaching me what to beware and what to seek, when I referred my lower visions—such as I could—to you, and consulted you? I surveyed the world outside with my senses, as far as I could, and gave heed to the life of my body, which is from me, and to my very senses. From there I entered into the recesses of my memory, those manifold and vast spaces filled in wondrous ways with countless stores, and I considered, and was struck with awe; and I could discern none of these things without you, and I found that none of them was you.

Nor was I myself the discoverer—I who ranged over all things and strove to distinguish them and to value each according to its own worth, taking in some things through my wavering senses and questioning them, perceiving others mingled with myself, discerning and numbering the very messengers themselves, and now in the vast riches of memory handling some things, storing others away, drawing others forth: nor was I myself, when I did these things—that is, my power by which I did them—nor were you that power, for you are the abiding Light which I consulted about them all, whether they existed, what they were, and how greatly they were to be esteemed; and I heard you teaching and commanding. And often I do this; this delights me, and as far as I can be relieved from the actions of necessity, to this pleasure I take refuge.

Nor in all these things which I run over while consulting you do I find a safe place for my soul except in you, where my scattered parts are gathered together and nothing of me departs from you. And sometimes you admit me into an affection wholly unfamiliar, inwardly into I know not what sweetness, which, if it were perfected in me, would be I know not what, save that it would not be this present life. But I fall back into these things under wretched burdens, and am sucked back into my customary ways, and am held fast; and I weep much, but much am I held fast. So great is the weight of habit that it deserves! Here I am able to be, yet do not wish; there I wish to be, yet am not able—wretched in both. And so I considered the sicknesses of my sins under the threefold lust, and I called upon your right hand for my salvation.

For I saw your splendor with a wounded heart, and being beaten back I said: Who can attain to that? I was cast away from the sight of your eyes. You are the Truth presiding over all things. But I through my greed did not wish to lose you, yet wished to possess a lie together with you—just as no one wishes so to speak falsehood that he himself does not know what is true. And so I lost you, because you do not deign to be possessed together with a lie. Whom should I find to reconcile me to you? Was I to seek the favor of angels? By what prayer? By what sacraments? Many, striving to return to you and unable to do so by themselves, as I hear, attempted these things and fell into a craving for curious visions, and were deemed worthy of delusions.

For being puffed up, they sought you with the pride of learning, thrusting out their breasts rather than beating them, and through the likeness of their own heart drew to themselves, as conspirators and allies of their pride, the powers of this air, by whom through magical powers they were deceived—seeking a mediator through whom they might be purified, and there was none. For it was the devil transfiguring himself into an angel of light. And he greatly enticed proud flesh by this, that he himself had no fleshly body. For those men were mortal and sinners, but you, O Lord, to whom they wished to be reconciled, are immortal and without sin.

But a mediator between God and men ought to have something like to God, something like to men, lest, being in both respects like to men, he should be far from God, or, being in both respects like to God, he should be far from men, and so should not be a mediator. That deceitful mediator, therefore, by whom through your secret judgments pride deserves to be deluded, has one thing in common with men, that is, sin; another thing he wishes to seem to have with God, namely, that, since he is not clothed with mortality of flesh, he flaunts himself as immortal. But because the wages of sin is death, this he has in common with men, whereby he is condemned together with them unto death.

But the true Mediator, whom in your secret mercy you showed to men and sent, that by his example they might learn that very humility—that Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus—appeared between mortal sinners and the immortal Just One: mortal with men, just with God; that, since the wage of righteousness is life and peace, through the righteousness joined to God he might abolish the death of justified sinners, which death he willed to have in common with them. He was shown forth to the saints of old, that they too might be saved through faith in his passion to come, even as we through faith in it as already past.

For inasmuch as he is man, he is a mediator; but inasmuch as he is the Word, he is not in the middle, because he is equal to God, and God with God, and together one God. How much you loved us, O good Father, who spared not your only Son, but delivered him up for us ungodly ones! How you loved us, for whom he, not counting it robbery to be equal to you, was made obedient unto death, even the death of the cross—he, the one free among the dead, having power to lay down his life and power to take it up again; for us, your victor and your victim, and therefore victor because victim; for us, your priest and sacrifice, and therefore priest because sacrifice; making us, from slaves, sons to you, by being born of you, by serving you.

Rightly, then, is my hope strong in him, that you will heal all my sicknesses through him who sits at your right hand and intercedes for us; otherwise I should despair. For many and great are these same sicknesses, many and great they are; but your medicine is greater still. We might have thought your Word to be far removed from union with man, and have despaired of ourselves, had he not become flesh and dwelt among us. Terrified by my sins and the burden of my misery, I had agitated in my heart and pondered flight into solitude; but you forbade me and strengthened me, saying: Therefore Christ died for all, that they who live should no longer live to themselves, but to him who died for all.

Behold, O Lord, I cast my care upon you, that I may live, and I will consider wondrous things out of your law. You know my unskillfulness and my weakness: teach me and heal me. That only Son of yours, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, has redeemed me with his blood. Let not the proud slander me, since I think upon my ransom, and eat and drink and distribute it, and, being poor, I desire to be satisfied with it among those who eat and are satisfied: and they shall praise the Lord who seek him. Is it that, O Lord, since eternity is yours, you are ignorant of what I tell you, or do you see only at one time what comes to pass in time? Why then do I set in order for you the narration of so many things?

Certainly not that you should come to know them through me; but I rouse up my own affection toward you, and that of those who read these things, that we may all say: Great is the Lord, and exceedingly to be praised. I have said it, and will say it: out of love of your love do I do this. For we pray also, and yet Truth says: Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Therefore we lay open our affection before you in confessing to you our miseries and your mercies upon us, that you may set us wholly free, since you have begun, that we may cease to be wretched in ourselves and be made blessed in you—since you have called us, that we may be poor in spirit, and meek, and mourning, and hungering and thirsting for righteousness, and merciful, and pure in heart, and peacemakers.

Behold, I have narrated to you many things, such as I could and such as I willed, because you first willed that I should confess to you, O Lord my God, because you are good, because your mercy endures forever. But when shall I be able with the tongue of my pen to set forth all your exhortations and all your terrors and consolations and guidings, by which you have led me to preach your Word and to dispense your sacrament to your people? And even if I were able to set these forth in order, the drops of time are precious to me. And for long have I burned to meditate in your law and there to confess to you my knowledge and my unskillfulness, the first beginnings of your enlightenment and the remnants of my darkness, until my weakness be swallowed up by your strength.

And I do not wish that the hours should flow away into other things—those hours which I find free from the necessities of refreshing the body and of the soul's intent application, and of that service which we owe to men, and which we do not owe yet nonetheless render. O Lord my God, give heed to my prayer, and let your mercy hear my desire, since it burns not for myself alone, but wishes to be of use to brotherly love: and you see in my heart that it is so. Let me sacrifice to you the service of my thought and of my tongue, and grant what I may offer you. For I am needy and poor; you are rich toward all who call upon you, you who, free from all anxiety, take care of us. Circumcise from all rashness and all falsehood my inward and my outward parts, my lips.

Let your Scriptures be my chaste delights; let me not be deceived in them, nor deceive others out of them. O Lord, give heed and have mercy, O Lord my God, light of the blind and strength of the weak, and at once light of the seeing and strength of the strong; give heed to my soul and hear it crying from the depths. For unless your ears be present even in the depths, where shall we go? whither shall we cry? Yours is the day and yours is the night: at your nod the moments fly past. Grant thence a space for our meditations in the hidden things of your law, and do not close it against those who knock. For not in vain did you will that the dark secrets of so many pages be written, nor are those forests without their stags, betaking themselves into them and recovering, walking and grazing, lying down and ruminating.

O Lord, perfect me and reveal them to me. Behold, your voice is my joy; your voice is above the abundance of pleasures. Give what I love: for indeed I love. And this too you have given. Forsake not your gifts, nor despise your herb that thirsts. Let me confess to you whatever I shall find in your books, and let me hear the voice of praise, and drink you in, and consider the wondrous things out of your law, from the very beginning, in which you made heaven and earth, even to the perpetual kingdom with you of your holy city. O Lord, have mercy upon me and hear my desire.

For I think that it is not of the earth, not of gold and silver and stones, nor of fine garments, nor of honors and powers, nor of the pleasures of the flesh, nor yet of the things necessary for the body and for this pilgrimage of our life—all of which are added unto us who seek your kingdom and your righteousness. See, my God, from what my desire arises. The unrighteous have told me of delights, but not such as your law, O Lord. Behold, from this my desire arises. See, Father, look and see and approve, and may it be pleasing in the sight of your mercy that I find grace before you, that the inner meaning of your words may be opened to me as I knock.

I beseech you through our Lord Jesus Christ your Son, the man of your right hand, the Son of man, whom you confirmed for yourself as Mediator between you and us, through whom you sought us who sought you not, and sought us that we might seek you—your Word, through whom you made all things, among which also me; through whom you called into adoption the people of believers, among whom also me: through him I beseech you, who sits at your right hand and intercedes for us, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. These very treasures I seek in your books. Moses wrote of him: this he himself says, this Truth says. Let me hear and understand how in the beginning you made heaven and earth.

Moses wrote this, wrote it and departed; he passed from here, from you to you, and is not now before me. For if he were, I would hold him fast and ask him and beseech him through you to lay these things open to me, and I would lend the ears of my body to the sounds bursting forth from his mouth; and if he spoke in the Hebrew tongue, in vain would it strike upon my sense, nor would anything thereof touch my mind; but if in Latin, I should know what he said. But whence should I know whether he spoke the truth? And even if I knew this, would I know it from him? Surely within me, within, in the dwelling-place of thought, Truth—neither Hebrew nor Greek nor Latin nor barbarian, without the organs of mouth and tongue, without the noise of syllables—would say, "He speaks the truth"; and at once, made certain, I would confidently say to that man of yours:

"You speak the truth." Since, then, I cannot question him, I ask you, O Truth, of whom he was full when he spoke true things; I ask you, my God, I ask, spare my sins, and you who gave that servant of yours to speak these things, grant also to me to understand these things. Behold, heaven and earth are; they cry out that they were made, for they are changed and varied. But whatever has not been made and yet is, there is in it nothing that was not before—which is what it is to be changed and varied. They cry out also that they did not make themselves: "We are, therefore, because we were made; we were not, then, before we existed, so as to be able to make ourselves." And the very evidence is the voice of those that say it. You therefore, O Lord, made them—you who are beautiful: for they are beautiful; who are good: for they are good; who are: for they are.

Yet they are not so beautiful, nor so good, nor do they so exist, as you their Creator are; compared with whom they are neither beautiful nor good nor existent. We know these things—thanks be to you—and our knowledge, compared with your knowledge, is ignorance. But how did you make heaven and earth, and what was the engine of so vast a work of yours? For you did not, like a human craftsman, fashion a body out of a body according to the judgment of a soul able somehow to impose upon it the form which it beholds within itself by an inner eye—and whence would it be able to do this, save that you made the soul?—and to impose a form upon what already exists and has being, so as to be, such as earth or stone or wood or gold or anything of that kind. And whence would these things be, unless you had established them?

You made the craftsman's body; you made the soul that commands its members; you made the material from which he makes something; you made the talent by which he grasps an art and sees inwardly what he is to make outwardly; you made the bodily sense by whose interpretation he carries over from soul to material that which he makes, and reports back to the soul what has been made, so that the soul within may consult the Truth presiding over it, whether it has been well made. All these things praise you, the Creator of all. But how do you make them? How did you make, O God, heaven and earth? Surely not in heaven nor in earth did you make heaven and earth, nor in air or in waters, since these too belong to heaven and earth; nor in the whole universe did you make the whole universe, because there was nowhere for it to be made, before it was made so as to exist.

Nor did you hold something in your hand from which to make heaven and earth: for whence would you have this which you had not made, whence to make anything? For what is there, save because you are? Therefore you spoke and they were made, and in your Word you made them. But how did you speak? Was it in that manner in which the voice came from the cloud, saying: This is my beloved Son? For that voice was uttered and passed away, begun and ended. The syllables sounded and passed by, the second after the first, the third after the second, and so on in order, until the last after the rest, and silence after the last. Whence it is clear and evident that the motion of a creature, itself temporal, serving your eternal will, expressed that voice.

And these words of yours, made for a time, the outer ear reported to the prudent mind, whose inner ear is set toward your eternal Word. But that mind compared these words sounding temporally with your eternal Word in silence, and said: It is far different, far, far different. These are far below me, nor do they exist, because they flee and pass away; but the Word of my God remains above me forever. If, then, by words sounding and passing away you said that heaven and earth should come to be, and thus made heaven and earth, there was already a corporeal creature before heaven and earth, by whose temporal motions that voice might run its temporal course.

But there was no body before heaven and earth; or if there was, you had certainly made it without a transitory voice, from which you might make the transitory voice by which you might say that heaven and earth should come to be. For whatever that was from which such a voice was made, unless it were made by you, it would not exist at all. So then, that there might come to be a body from which these words might be made—by what word was it spoken by you? You call us therefore to understand the Word, God with you, God, which is uttered eternally, and by which all things are uttered eternally. For that which was being said is not ended and another thing said, so that all things might be said; but all things at once and eternally: otherwise there would already be time and change, and not true eternity nor true immortality. This I know, my God, and I give thanks.

I know it, I confess to you, O Lord God, and with me he knows it and blesses you, whoever is not ungrateful to the certain Truth. For we know, O Lord, we know, that insofar as anything is not what it was and is what it was not, so far does it die and rise. Nothing therefore of your Word gives way and follows after, since it is truly immortal and eternal. And therefore by the Word coeternal with you, together and everlastingly, you say all things which you say, and there comes to be whatever you say should come to be; nor do you make in any other way than by speaking: yet not all things which you make by speaking come to be at once and everlastingly. Why, I ask, O Lord my God?

Somehow I see it, but how to express it I know not, except that everything which begins to be and ceases to be then begins to be and then ceases to be when in the eternal reason it is known that it ought to begin or to cease—where nothing begins nor ceases. That is your Word, which is also the Beginning, because it also speaks to us. Thus in the Gospel he spoke through the flesh, and this sounded forth outwardly to the ears of men, that it might be believed and sought within and found within in the eternal Truth, where the good and only Master teaches all his disciples. There I hear your voice, O Lord, saying to me that he who teaches us speaks to us, but he who does not teach us, even if he speaks, speaks not to us.