Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 1 part 5/22

Whatever you perceive through it is in part, and you are ignorant of the whole of which these are parts, and yet they delight you. But if the sense of your flesh were capable of comprehending the whole, and had not itself, for your punishment, received a just limitation within a part of the universe, you would wish that whatever exists in the present should pass away, that all things might please you the more. For even what we speak, you hear through that same sense of the flesh, and you certainly do not wish the syllables to stand still, but to fly past, that others may come and you may hear the whole. So is it always with all things of which some one thing is composed, and not all at once are those things of which it is composed: they delight more, all of them together, than singly, if all could be perceived.

But far better than these is He who made all things, and He is our God; and He does not depart, because none succeeds Him. If bodies please you, praise God for them, and turn your love back to their Artificer, lest in those things which please you, you yourself become displeasing. If souls please you, let them be loved in God, because they too are mutable, and only when fixed in Him are they made stable; otherwise they would go and perish. In Him, then, let them be loved, and carry away with you to Him as many as you can, and say to them: 'Let us love Him: He made these things, and He is not far off.' For He did not make them and depart, but they are from Him and in Him. Behold where He is, where truth is savored: He is innermost to the heart, but the heart has wandered from Him. Return, transgressors, to your heart, and cleave to Him who made you.

Stand with Him, and you shall stand; rest in Him, and you shall be at rest. Whither do you go into rough places? Whither do you go? The good which you love is from Him; but only insofar as it is referred to Him is it good and sweet; yet it shall justly become bitter, because whatever is from Him is unjustly loved if He is forsaken. To what end do you walk on and on in difficult and laborious ways? There is no rest where you seek it. Seek what you seek, but it is not there where you seek it. You seek the blessed life in the region of death: it is not there. For how can there be a blessed life where there is not even life?

And our very Life came down hither and bore our death, and slew it out of the abundance of His own life; and He thundered, crying out that we should return hence to Him into that secret place from which He came forth to us — first into the virginal womb itself, where the human creature, mortal flesh, was wedded to Him, that it should not be forever mortal — and thence, like a bridegroom coming forth from his chamber, He exulted as a giant to run His course. For He did not delay, but ran, crying out by words, by deeds, by death, by life, by descent, by ascent, crying out that we should return to Him. And He departed from our eyes, that we might return to our heart and find Him. For He withdrew, and behold, He is here. He would not be long with us, and yet He did not forsake us.

For He withdrew thither whence He never departed, because the world was made through Him, and He was in this world, and He came into this world to save sinners. To Him my soul confesses, and He heals it, because it has sinned against Him. O sons of men, how long will you be heavy of heart? Will you not even after the descent of Life ascend and live? But whither do you ascend, when you are on high and have set your mouth against heaven? Descend, that you may ascend, and ascend to God. For you have fallen by ascending against God. Tell them these things, that they may weep in the valley of weeping, and so carry them up with you to God, because it is of His Spirit that you tell them these things, if you tell them burning with the fire of charity.

These things I did not then know, and I loved inferior beauties and was sinking into the depths, and I would say to my friends: 'Do we love anything but the beautiful? What then is the beautiful? And what is beauty? What is it that allures us and binds us to the things we love? For unless there were in them grace and form, they would in no way move us toward themselves.' And I observed and saw that in bodies themselves there is one thing that is, as it were, a whole and therefore beautiful, and another thing that is becoming because it is fittingly adapted to something else, as a part of the body to the whole, or a shoe to the foot, and the like. And this consideration gushed up in my mind out of the depths of my heart, and I wrote books 'On the Beautiful and the Fitting,' two or three, I think; thou knowest, O God:

for it has slipped from my memory. For we no longer possess them, but somehow they have strayed away from us. But what was it, O Lord my God, that moved me to write those books to Hierius, an orator of the city of Rome? Him I had never seen face to face, yet I had come to love the man from the fame of his learning, which was bright in him; and I had heard certain of his words, and they had pleased me. But still more they pleased me because he pleased others and they extolled him with praises, amazed that out of a Syrian man, first learned in Greek eloquence, there had afterward arisen also in Latin a marvellous speaker, most knowing in matters pertaining to the pursuit of wisdom. The man was praised and loved while absent. Does that love enter the heart of the hearer from the mouth of the one who praises? Far from it;

but from one lover another is kindled. For thus is he loved who is praised, when the praise is believed to be proclaimed from no deceitful heart of the praiser—that is, when one who loves him praises him. For so did I then love men by the judgment of men, and not by thine, O my God, in whom no one is deceived. But yet, why not as a famous charioteer, or as a hunter renowned by popular zeal, but far otherwise, and gravely, and even as I myself would wish to be praised? For I would not wish to be praised and loved as actors are, although I myself praised and loved them; rather choosing to lie hidden than to be so known, and even to be held in hatred than to be loved in that way. Where are these weights of various and diverse loves apportioned within one soul?

What is it that I love in another which, if I did not in turn hate it, I would not detest and reject in myself, since each of us is a man? For not as a good horse is loved by one who would not wish himself to be that, even if he could—this is not to be said of the actor, who is a partner of our nature. Do I then love in a man what I hate to be, since I am a man? A great deep is man himself, whose very hairs thou, O Lord, hast numbered, and they are not diminished in thee; and yet his hairs are more easily numbered than his affections and the motions of his heart. But that rhetorician was of that kind whom I so loved that I wished to be such as he; and I went astray through pride, and was carried about by every wind, and was being steered by thee all too hiddenly.

And whence do I know, and whence do I confess to thee with certainty, that I had loved him more for the love of those who praised him than for the very things for which he was praised? For if those same men, instead of praising him, had reviled him, and in reviling and despising him had recounted those very same things, I would not have been kindled toward him nor stirred up; and surely the facts would not have been different, nor the man himself other, but only the affection of the narrators would have been other. Behold where the feeble soul lies that does not yet cling to the solidity of truth. According as the breezes of tongues blow from the breasts of those who form opinions, so is it borne and turned, twisted and twisted back, and the light is clouded over for it, and the truth is not discerned. And lo, it is before us. And it was something great to me, if my discourse and my studies should become known to that man:

if he approved them, I would blaze the more; but if he disapproved them, my heart, hollow and empty of thy solidity, would be wounded. And yet that 'beautiful and fitting' about which I had written to him I gladly turned over in my mind before the gaze of my contemplation, and I marvelled at it even with no one to join in the praise. But the hinge of so great a matter, lying in thy art, I did not yet see, O Almighty, who alone dost work wonders; and my mind ranged through corporeal forms, and I defined and distinguished the beautiful, which is so through itself, and the fitting, which is becoming because adapted to something, and I supported it with corporeal examples. And I turned myself to the nature of the mind; and the false opinion which I held concerning spiritual things did not let me discern the truth.

And the very force of truth thrust itself upon my eyes, and I turned away my quivering mind from the incorporeal reality toward outlines and colours and swelling magnitudes; and because I could not see these in the mind, I supposed I could not see my own mind. And whereas in virtue I loved peace, but in viciousness I hated discord, in the one I marked a unity, in the other a kind of division; and in that unity the rational mind and the nature of truth and of the highest good seemed to me to consist, while in this division of irrational life I supposed there to be I know not what substance and nature of the highest evil—which not only should be substance, but should be life altogether, and yet not be from thee, O my God, of whom are all things—wretch that I was, I held this opinion.

And I called that one the monad, as a mind without any sex, but this one the dyad—anger in crimes, lust in shameful deeds—not knowing what I was saying. For I had neither known nor learned that evil is no substance at all, nor that our very mind is the highest and immutable good. For just as crimes exist if that motion of the soul in which the impulse lies is vicious, and casts itself out insolently and turbulently; and shameful deeds, if that affection of the soul is immoderate by which carnal pleasures are drained; so too errors and false opinions defile the life, if the rational mind itself is vicious.

Such was my mind then, not knowing that it must be illumined by another light, that it might be a partaker of truth, since it is not itself the nature of truth; for thou wilt light my lamp, O Lord; my God, thou wilt enlighten my darkness; and of thy fullness have we all received. For thou art the true light that enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world, for in thee there is no change, neither shadow of a moment's turning. But I was striving toward thee and was repelled by thee, that I might taste death, because thou resistest the proud. And what is prouder than that I should assert, in marvellous madness, that I was by nature that which thou art?

For whereas I myself was mutable, and this was made evident to me by the very fact that I desired to be wise in order that from worse I might become better, I nevertheless chose rather to suppose even thee to be mutable than that I myself should not be that which thou art. And so I was repelled, and thou didst resist my windy stiff neck; and I imagined corporeal forms, and being flesh I accused the flesh, and a spirit walking I returned not to thee, but in walking I walked into those things which neither are, nor are in thee, nor in me, nor in the body, and which were not created for me by thy truth, but were feigned by my own vanity out of body. And I said to thy little faithful ones, my fellow-citizens, from whom I was unknowingly an exile, I said to them, garrulous and inept: 'Why then does the soul err, which God made?' And I was unwilling that it be said to me:

'Why then does God err?' And I contended rather that thy immutable substance was compelled to err than to confess that my own mutable substance had of its own accord strayed and was erring as a punishment. And I was perhaps twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age when I wrote those volumes, turning over within me corporeal fictions that clamoured against the ears of my heart, which I was straining, O sweet Truth, toward thy inner melody, musing on the beautiful and the fitting, and longing to stand and to hear thee and to rejoice with joy because of the bridegroom's voice; and I could not, because I was snatched away outside by the cries of my own error, and by the weight of my own pride I fell into the depths. For thou didst not give joy and gladness to my hearing, nor did the bones exult that had not been humbled.

And what did it profit me that, being about twenty years old, when there had come into my hands certain works of Aristotle which they call the Ten Categories—at whose very name, when my master, the Carthaginian rhetorician, and others who were held to be learned, would mention it with cheeks puffed up with pride, I hung agape as if upon something great and divine—I read them alone and understood them? And when I compared them with those who said that they had scarcely understood them with the help of the most erudite masters, who not only spoke but drew many figures in the dust, they could tell me nothing about them other than what I, reading alone with myself, had come to know.

and the categories seemed to me to speak plainly enough of substances, such as a man is, and of those things which are in them, such as the figure of a man—what its quality is and its stature, how many feet tall, or relationship, whose brother one is, or where one is situated, or when one was born, or whether one stands or sits, or is shod or armed, or does something or suffers something; and whatsoever is found in these nine genera, of which I have set down some by way of example, or in the genus of substance itself, things innumerable.

What did this profit me, when indeed it harmed me, since I attempted to understand even thee, O my God, marvellously simple and immutable, by thinking that whatsoever exists was wholly comprehended under those ten predicaments—so that I attempted to understand thee as if thou too wert a subject of thy own greatness or beauty, so that these were in thee as in a subject, as in a body, whereas thy greatness and thy beauty are thyself; but a body is not great and beautiful by that which makes it a body, since even if it were less great and less beautiful, it would nonetheless be a body? For it was falsehood that I thought concerning thee, not truth, and the fictions of my misery, not the firm foundations of thy blessedness.

For thou hadst commanded, and so it was brought about in me, that the earth should bring forth thorns and thistles for me, and that with labour I should come to my bread. And what did it profit me that all the books of the arts which they call liberal I—then a most worthless slave of evil lusts—read by myself and understood, whatsoever of them I was able to read? And I rejoiced in them, and knew not whence came whatever was true and certain therein. For I had my back to the light and my face to the things that are illumined; whence my very face, by which I beheld the things illumined, was not itself illumined.

Whatsoever I understood, without great difficulty and with no man teaching me, concerning the art of speaking and of disputing, concerning the dimensions of figures, and of music, and of numbers, thou knowest, O Lord my God; for both the quickness of understanding and the keenness of discerning are thy gift. But I did not therefore sacrifice to thee; and so it availed me not for use, but rather for destruction, because I took pains to have so good a part of my substance in my own power, and I kept not my strength for thee, but departed from thee into a far country, to squander it on harlot lusts. For what did a good thing profit me, when I did not use it well?

For I did not perceive that those arts are understood only with the greatest difficulty even by the studious and the gifted, until I tried to expound them to such men, and he was found to be most excellent among them who followed me, as I expounded, with no slowness. But what did this profit me, who supposed that thou, O Lord God, the Truth, wast a luminous and immense body, and I a fragment of that body? Excessive perversity! But such I was, and I am not ashamed, O my God, to confess to thee thy mercies toward me, and to call upon thee—I who was not ashamed then to profess my blasphemies before men, and to bark against thee.

What, then, did it then profit me that a wit nimble through those teachings, and so many most knotty books unravelled with no support of human instruction, when in the doctrine of piety I was erring deformedly and with sacrilegious foulness? Or what did so much slower a wit harm thy little ones, since they did not depart far from thee, so that in the nest of thy Church they might safely grow their feathers and nourish the wings of charity with the food of sound faith? O Lord our God, under the covering of thy wings let us hope, and protect us and carry us. Thou wilt carry; thou wilt carry both the little ones and even unto grey hairs thou wilt carry, since our firmness, when it is thou, then is it firmness; but when it is our own, it is infirmity.

Our good lives ever with thee, and because we have turned away from it, we are turned perverse. Let us now return, O Lord, that we be not overturned; for our good lives with thee without any defect—which good is thou thyself—and we fear not that there be no place to which we may return, since from it we fell headlong; but in our absence our house, thy eternity, does not fall. BOOK FIVE. Receive the sacrifice of my confessions from the hand of my tongue, which thou hast formed and roused, that it may confess to thy name; and heal all my bones, and let them say: O Lord, who is like unto thee?

For he who confesses to thee does not teach thee what is done within him, since a closed heart shuts not out thine eye, nor does the hardness of men repel thy hand; but thou dost loose it when thou wilt, either pitying or punishing, and there is none that can hide himself from thy heat. But let my soul praise thee, that it may love thee; and let it confess to thee thy mercies, that it may praise thee. Thy whole creation never ceases nor is silent in thy praises—neither the spirit of every man by a mouth turned toward thee, nor the animals and corporeal things by the mouth of those who consider them—so that our soul may rise up out of its weariness toward thee, leaning upon the things which thou hast made, and passing over to thee who hast made these things wonderfully; and there is refreshment and true strength. Let the restless and the unjust go and flee from thee.

And thou seest them and distinguishest the shadows, and behold, all things are beautiful with them, yet they themselves are foul. And what harm have they done thee? Or in what have they dishonoured thy rule, which is just and whole from the heavens unto the uttermost things? For whither have they fled, when they fled from thy face? Or where dost thou not find them? But they fled, that they might not see thee seeing them, and, blinded, might stumble against thee—because thou dost not forsake anything of those things which thou hast made—the unjust stumbled against thee and were justly thwarted, withdrawing themselves from thy gentleness and stumbling against thy uprightness and falling upon thy severity. Clearly they know not that thou art everywhere, whom no place encloses round about, and thou alone art present even to those who go far from thee.

Let them therefore turn back and seek thee; for not as they have forsaken their Creator, so hast thou forsaken thy creature. Let them themselves turn back, and behold, there thou art in their heart—in the heart of those who confess to thee and cast themselves upon thee and weep upon thy bosom after their difficult ways; and thou, gentle, dost wipe away their tears, and they weep the more and rejoice amid their weeping, since thou, O Lord, not any man, flesh and blood, but thou, O Lord, who didst make them, dost remake and comfort them. And where was I when I was seeking thee? And thou wast before me, but I had departed even from myself, nor did I find myself: how much less thee! Let me declare in the sight of my God that twenty-ninth year of my age.

There had now come to Carthage a certain bishop of the Manichaeans, Faustus by name, a great snare of the devil, and many were entangled in him by the allurement of his sweet speech. Although I already praised this, yet I distinguished it from the truth of the matters which I was eager to have discerned; nor did I look at the kind of vessel of speech, but at what knowledge that Faustus, so renowned among them, would set before me to feed upon. For fame had spoken of him beforehand to me, that he was most skilled in all the honourable doctrines and most excellently learned in the liberal disciplines.

And since I had read many things of the philosophers and retained them committed to memory, I compared certain of them with those long fables of the Manichaeans; and the things which those men said seemed to me the more probable, who were able to prevail so far as to be able to estimate the world, although they by no means found its Lord. For thou art great, O Lord, and lookest upon the lowly, but the lofty thou knowest from afar; nor dost thou draw near except to the contrite of heart, nor art thou found by the proud, not even if by curious skill they should number the stars and the sand and measure the starry regions and trace out the paths of the heavenly bodies.

For by their own mind and by the wit which thou hast given them they seek out these things, and they have found out many things and foretold them many years beforehand—eclipses of the lights, the sun and the moon, on what day, at what hour, in what part they would come to pass—and the calculation did not deceive them. And so it came to pass as they foretold; and they wrote down the rules they had traced out, and they are read to this day, and from them it is foretold in what year and in what month of the year and on what day of the month and at what hour of the day and in what fraction of its light the moon or the sun shall be eclipsed: and so it shall come to pass as it is foretold.

And men who do not know these things marvel and are amazed at them, and those who know them exult and are puffed up; and through impious pride, withdrawing and falling away from thy light, they foresee an eclipse of the sun so long beforehand, yet their own present eclipse they do not see—for they do not religiously seek whence they have the wit by which they seek these things—and finding that thou hast made them, they do not give themselves to thee that thou mayest preserve what thou hast made; and such as they had made themselves, they slay themselves before thee, and they butcher their own exaltations like birds, and their curiosities like the fishes of the sea by which they wander the secret paths of the abyss, and their luxuries like the cattle of the field, that thou, O God, a consuming fire, mayest devour their dead cares, recreating them unto immortality.

But they have not known the Way, thy Word, through whom thou madest the things which they number, and them that number, and the sense by which they discern the things they number, and the mind from which they number; and of thy wisdom there is no number. But the Only-begotten himself is made unto us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification, and was numbered among us, and paid tribute unto Caesar. They have not known this Way, by which they might descend to him from themselves and through him ascend to him. They have not known this Way, and they suppose themselves to be lofty with the stars and shining, and lo, they have fallen down to the earth, and their foolish heart is darkened.

And they say many true things concerning the creature, yet the Truth, the Maker of the creature, they do not piously seek, and therefore they do not find it; or if they find it, knowing God, they do not honour him as God, nor give thanks, but become vain in their imaginations, and say that they are wise, ascribing to themselves the things that are thine; and thereby they strive, with most perverse blindness, to ascribe to thee even the things that are their own—namely, fastening lies upon thee who art the Truth—and they change the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of corruptible man, and of birds and of four-footed beasts and of creeping things, and they turn thy truth into a lie, and worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator.

Yet many true things spoken by them out of the creature itself I retained, and the reasoning was presented to me by means of numbers and the order of times and the visible attestations of the stars; and I compared them with the sayings of Manichaeus, who wrote much about these matters, raving most copiously, and there was offered to me no account either of the solstices and equinoxes, or of the eclipses of the lights, or of anything of the sort which I had learned in the books of secular wisdom. There, however, I was bidden to believe, and it did not square with those calculations explored by numbers and by my own eyes, but was far different. Surely, O Lord God of truth, whosoever knows these things, is he therefore pleasing to thee? For unhappy is the man who knows all those things but knows not thee; but blessed is he who knows thee, even if he knows not those things.

But he who knows both thee and those things is not more blessed on account of those things, but is blessed on account of thee alone—if, knowing thee, he glorifies thee as thee, and gives thanks, and becomes not vain in his imaginations.

For just as he is better who knows how to possess a tree and gives thee thanks for the use of it, although he knows not how many cubits high it is or how widely spread, than he who measures it and numbers all its branches, yet neither possesses it nor knows or loves its Creator; so the faithful man, to whom the whole world of riches belongs, and who, as having nothing, yet possesses all things by cleaving to thee whom all things serve—although he know not so much as the circling courses of the Bears—it is foolish to doubt that he is surely better than the measurer of heaven and numberer of the stars and weigher of the elements, who is yet neglectful of thee, who hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight.

But yet who required some Manichaean or other even to write these things, without skill in which piety could be learned? For thou hast said to man: Behold, piety is wisdom. Which he might be ignorant of, even though he knew these things perfectly; but these things, since he did not know them, daring most impudently to teach them, he could by no means know that piety at all. For it is vanity even to profess these worldly things when known, but it is piety to confess to thee. Whence that wanderer spoke much of these things to this end, that, being convicted by those who had truly learned them, it might be manifestly known what his understanding was in the rest, which are more hidden.

For he was unwilling to be esteemed of small account, but attempted to persuade men that the Holy Spirit, the Comforter and Enricher of thy faithful, was personally in himself with plenary authority. And so, when he was found to have spoken falsely about the heaven and the stars and the motions of the sun and the moon—although these things do not pertain to the doctrine of religion—nevertheless it would sufficiently stand out that his daring had been sacrilegious, since he uttered these things not only when unknown but even false, with so insane a vanity of pride that he strove to ascribe them to himself as though to a divine person.

For when I hear some Christian brother, this one or that, who is ignorant of these things and holds one thing for another, I patiently regard the man as one holding an opinion; nor do I see it to harm him, when he believes nothing unworthy concerning thee, O Lord, Creator of all, if perchance he be ignorant of the position and disposition of the corporeal creature. But it does harm if he reckons that this pertains to the very form of the doctrine of piety, and dares the more obstinately to affirm what he is ignorant of. Yet even such a weakness, in the cradle of faith, is borne by charity the mother, until the new man rise up into a perfect man and cannot be carried about by every wind of doctrine.

But in that man who was the teacher, the author, the leader and prince of those to whom he urged such things, who dared to act so that those who followed him should suppose they were following not any common man, but thy Holy Spirit—who would judge that such madness, wherever he should be convicted of having spoken falsely, was not to be detested and cast far away?