Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 1 part 6/22

But yet I had not clearly found out whether the alternations of longer and shorter days and nights, and of night itself and day, and the eclipses of the lights, and whatever of that sort I had read in other books, could be expounded also according to his words; so that, if perchance it could, it might remain uncertain to me whether the matter stood thus or thus, but I should set his authority before my faith on account of his believed sanctity. And through almost those same nine years, in which I, a soul wandering, listened to them, with too eager a longing I awaited this Faustus' coming.

For the rest of them, whom I might chance to fall in with, who failed at the questions concerning such matters which I put to them, kept promising me him, by whose coming and conferred conversation these things, and any greater questions I might perhaps raise, would most thoroughly be unravelled for me. So when he came, I found a man pleasant and agreeable in words, and prattling much more sweetly those very things which they are wont to say. But what to my thirst was a most elegant cup-bearer of precious goblets? My ears were already sated with such things, nor did they therefore seem to me better because they were better spoken, nor true because eloquent, nor the soul wise because the countenance was comely and the eloquence graceful.

But those who promised him to me were no good judges of matters, and therefore he seemed to them prudent and wise, because he delighted them as he spoke. I perceived, however, another kind of men who held even the truth itself suspect, and were unwilling to acquiesce in it, if it were set forth in trim and copious speech. But me thou hadst already taught, O my God, by wondrous and hidden ways; and therefore I believe that thou hadst taught me, because it is true, and there is no other teacher of the true besides thee, wheresoever and whencesoever it shines forth. From thee, then, I had already learned that nothing ought to seem to be spoken truly because it is spoken eloquently, nor false because the signs of the lips sound unpolished;

and again, neither true because it is uttered without polish, nor false because the speech is splendid; but that wisdom and folly are just like wholesome and unwholesome foods, while ornate and unadorned words are like elegant and rustic vessels, in either of which both kinds of food can be served. Therefore my eagerness, with which I had so long awaited that man, was indeed delighted with the movement and feeling of his disputing, and with words apt and readily occurring for clothing his thoughts. I was delighted, and along with many, or even above many, I praised and extolled him;

but I took it ill that, in the assembly of his hearers, I was not allowed to press upon him and to share with him the cares of my questions by conferring familiarly and by giving and receiving discourse. But when I was able, and began to engage his ears together with my friends, and that at a time when it was not unbecoming to discourse by turns, and I brought forward certain things which troubled me, I found the man, first of all, untrained in the liberal disciplines, except grammar, and that too only in the customary manner.

And because he had read some of Cicero's orations and a very few books of Seneca, and certain works of the poets, and such volumes of his own sect as were composed in Latin and in orderly fashion, and because he had the daily practice of conversation, from these sources he derived an eloquence that was the more pleasing and the more seductive through the governance of his wit and a certain natural charm. Is it not so, as I recall, O Lord my God, judge of my conscience? Before You is my heart and my remembrance, You who were then dealing with me in the hidden secret of Your providence, and were already turning my shameful errors round before my face, that I might see and hate them.

For after that man had shown himself sufficiently unskilled in those arts in which I had supposed him to excel, I began to despair that he could open up and resolve for me the things that troubled me; of which indeed a man could be ignorant and yet hold the truth of piety, but only if he were not a Manichee. For their books are full of the longest fables about heaven and the stars and the sun and the moon; and these I no longer thought he could subtly explain to me—which was assuredly what I desired—when the calculations of numbers that I had read elsewhere were set side by side, namely whether things were rather as was contained in the books of the Manichees, or whether at least an equal account could be rendered from that source.

Yet when I brought these matters forward to be considered and discussed, he modestly indeed did not dare to take up the burden itself. For he knew that he did not know these things, and was not ashamed to confess it. He was not one of those many talkative men whom I had endured, who tried to teach me these things and yet said nothing. This man indeed had a heart, even if not right toward You, and yet not over-incautious toward himself. He was not altogether ignorant of his own ignorance, and was unwilling to be entangled by rash disputing in matters from which there would be for him no exit and no easy return: even on this account he pleased me the more. For the self-restraint of a confessing mind is more beautiful than the things I desired to know. And such I found him in all the more difficult and subtle questions.

And so, with my zeal for the writings of Mani broken, and despairing the more of the rest of their teachers, since in many of the matters that troubled me that famous man had so shown himself, I began to spend my life with him in pursuit of that study with which he himself was aflame for those letters which, as a rhetorician of Carthage, I was then already teaching to young men; and to read with him either such things as he, having heard of them, desired, or such as I judged suited to a mind like his.

Moreover, all my striving by which I had resolved to advance in that sect utterly fell away once I had come to know that man—not so that I should be wholly separated from them, but, as though finding nothing better than that into which I had somehow already plunged, I had resolved for the time being to be content, unless perchance something more to be chosen should shine forth. Thus that Faustus, who had been to many a snare of death, had now begun—neither willing nor knowing it—to loosen the snare in which I had been caught. For Your hands, my God, in the hidden depth of Your providence, did not forsake my soul; and by the blood of my mother's heart, through her tears day and night, sacrifice was offered to You for me, and You dealt with me in wondrous ways. You did this, my God.

For by the Lord are a man's steps directed, and He shall choose his way. Or what procuring of salvation is there apart from Your hand restoring what You have made? You dealt with me therefore, that I should be persuaded to go to Rome and rather teach there what I was teaching at Carthage. And how I was persuaded of this I will not pass over confessing to You, since in these matters too the most profound depths of You and Your most present mercy toward us are to be pondered and proclaimed.

I did not wish to go to Rome because greater gains and greater dignity were promised me by friends who urged this—though these things too then drew my mind—but that was the chief and almost the sole reason: that I heard the young men there studied more quietly and were kept in check by a more orderly discipline, so that they did not rush in at random and insolently into the school of one whose master they did not attend, nor were they admitted at all unless he permitted it. Whereas at Carthage there is a foul and unrestrained license of the students: they break in shamelessly and with almost frenzied face disturb the order which each man has established for his pupils to advance.

They do many injurious things with a marvelous stupidity, deserving to be punished by the laws, were not custom their patroness—custom which shows them the more wretched in that they now do as if lawfully what by Your eternal law will never be lawful, and think they do it with impunity, whereas they are punished by the very blindness of their doing, and suffer incomparably worse things than they do. Therefore the manners which, when a student, I had refused to make my own, those, as a teacher, I was compelled to endure in others; and so it pleased me to go where all who knew said such things were not done.

But You, my hope and my portion in the land of the living, for the changing of my earthly place for the salvation of my soul, were both applying goads at Carthage by which I should be torn away thence, and setting before me the enticements of Rome by which I should be drawn—through men who love a dead life, here doing mad things, there making empty promises; and to correct my steps You were secretly using both their perversity and my own. For both those who disturbed my peace were blind with a foul frenzy, and those who invited me to other things savored of earth; while I myself, who here detested true misery, there sought after false felicity.

But why I should depart hence and go thither, You knew, O God, yet did not reveal it to me nor to my mother, who wept bitterly over my departure and followed me down to the sea. But I deceived her as she clung to me violently, that she might either recall me or go with me; and I feigned that I was unwilling to desert a friend until, with a fair wind risen, he should set sail. And I lied to my mother—and to such a mother—and escaped: for this too You mercifully pardoned me, keeping me, full of execrable filth, safe from the waters of the sea unto the water of Your grace, by which, when I was washed, the rivers of my mother's eyes would be dried—those tears with which she daily watered the ground beneath her face for me.

And yet, as she refused to return without me, I scarcely persuaded her to remain that night in a place near our ship, where there was a shrine in memory of blessed Cyprian. But that night I secretly set out, while she did not remain, but stayed in prayer and weeping. And what was she begging of You, my God, with so many tears, but that You would not allow me to sail? But You, taking counsel on high and hearing the very hinge of her desire, did not regard what she then asked, that You might make of me what she always asked.

The wind blew and filled our sails, and withdrew the shore from our sight, on which in the morning she was frantic with grief, and with complaints and groaning filled Your ears, who disregarded these things, since You were both snatching me away by my desires to put an end to those very desires, and chastising her carnal longing with the just scourge of sorrows. For she loved my presence with her after the manner of mothers, but far more than many; and she did not know what joys You were about to make for her out of my absence. She did not know, and therefore wept and wailed, and by those torments was convicted in her of the remnant of Eve, seeking with groaning what with groaning she had brought forth.

And yet, after accusing my deceit and cruelty, she turned again to entreating You for me, and went off to her accustomed tasks, and I to Rome. And behold, I was received there with the scourge of bodily sickness, and was already going down to the lower regions, bearing all the evils I had committed both against You and against myself and against others—many and grievous, over and above the bond of original sin, by which we all die in Adam. For You had not yet forgiven me any of them in Christ, nor had He cancelled by His cross the enmities I had contracted with You by my sins. For how should He cancel them on the cross of a phantasm, such as I had believed Him to be?

Therefore, as false as the death of His flesh seemed to me, so true was the death of my soul; and as true as was the death of His flesh, so false was the life of my soul, which did not believe it. And as the fevers grew worse, I was now going and perishing. For whither should I go, if I then departed hence, but into fire and torments worthy of my deeds in the truth of Your order? And this she did not know, yet she prayed for me though absent. But You, everywhere present, heard her where she was, and where I was had mercy on me, that I might recover the health of my body, though still insane in my sacrilegious heart. For I did not even desire Your baptism in so great a peril, and I was a better boy when I begged it of my mother's piety, as I have already recalled and confessed.

But I had grown up to my own disgrace, and in my madness mocked the counsels of Your medicine, You who did not suffer me, being such, to die twice. With which wound, if my mother's heart had been smitten, it would never have been healed. For I cannot sufficiently express what feeling she had toward me, and with how much greater anxiety she travailed with me in spirit than she had brought me forth in flesh. I do not therefore see how she could have been healed, had such a death of mine pierced through the bowels of her love. And where would have been those many prayers, so frequent and without intermission? Nowhere but with You.

Or would You, O God of mercies, despise the contrite and humbled heart of a chaste and sober widow, frequent in almsgiving, dutiful and serving Your saints, letting no day pass without an oblation at Your altar, coming twice a day, morning and evening, to Your church without any intermission—not for vain tales and old wives' gossip, but that she might hear You in Your discourses and that You might hear her in her prayers? Could You despise and repel from Your aid the tears of such a one, with which she sought from You not gold and silver, nor any unstable or fleeting good, but the salvation of her son's soul—You by whose gift she was such?

By no means, O Lord; nay rather, You were present and heard her, and were doing things in the order in which You had predestined them to be done. Far be it that You should deceive her in those visions and answers of Yours which I have already mentioned and which I have not mentioned, which she held in her faithful breast, and, ever praying, pressed upon You as Your own bonds. For You deign, since Your mercy endures forever, even to become a debtor by Your promises to those to whom You forgive all debts. You restored me therefore from that sickness, and made whole the son of Your handmaid, then for the time in body, that there might be one to whom You should give a better and surer salvation. And even then at Rome I was joined to those false and deceiving saints:

for I was joined not only to their hearers, of whose number was also the man in whose house I had fallen ill and recovered, but even to those whom they call the elect. For it still seemed to me that it is not we who sin, but some other nature, I know not what, that sins in us; and it delighted my pride to be beyond fault, and, when I had done some evil, not to confess that I had done it, so that You might heal my soul because it had sinned against You, but I loved to excuse myself and to accuse some other thing, I know not what, which was with me and yet was not I.

But in truth I was wholly myself, and my impiety against myself had divided me; and that was the more incurable sin, by which I deemed myself no sinner; and it was an execrable iniquity to wish You, almighty God—You in me unto my destruction—rather to be overcome than myself by You unto my salvation. Not yet therefore had You set a watch before my mouth and a door of restraint about my lips, that my heart might not turn aside to evil words, to make excuses in sins with men that work iniquity; and therefore I still consorted with their elect, but yet, despairing that I could profit in that false doctrine, I now held more loosely and negligently even those very tenets with which, if I found nothing better, I had resolved to be content.

For there had arisen in me a thought that those philosophers whom they call Academics had been more prudent than the rest, because they had judged that we must doubt of all things and had decreed that no truth can be comprehended by man. For so they too seemed to me clearly to have held, as they are commonly reputed, though I did not yet understand their intent. Nor did I dissemble in restraining that same host of mine from the excessive confidence which I perceived he had about those fabulous matters of which the books of the Manichees are full. Yet I used their friendship more familiarly than that of other men who had not been in that heresy.

Nor did I defend it any longer with my former animosity, but yet their familiarity—for Rome concealed more of them—made me slower to seek something else, especially as I despaired of being able to find the truth in Your Church, O Lord of heaven and earth, Creator of all things visible and invisible, from which they had turned me away. And it seemed to me very base to believe that You had the figure of human flesh and were bounded by the bodily lineaments of our members. And since, whenever I wished to think of my God, I knew not how to think save of bodily masses—for nothing seemed to me to exist that was not of such a kind—this was the greatest and almost the sole cause of my inevitable error.

For from this I also believed evil to be a certain substance of such a kind, and to have its own mass, foul and deformed, whether gross, which they called earth, or thin and subtle, such as is the body of air—which they imagine to be a malignant mind creeping through that earth. And because some sort of piety compelled me to believe that the good God created no evil nature, I set up two masses opposed to one another, each infinite, but the evil one narrower, the good one larger; and from this pestilent beginning the other sacrileges followed me. For when my mind tried to recur to the Catholic faith, it was struck back, because that was not the Catholic faith which I supposed to be such.

And I seemed to myself the more pious if I believed You, my God—to whom Your mercies confess out of me—to be infinite at least on the other sides, although on the one side, where the mass of evil was opposed to You, I was compelled to confess You finite, than if on all sides I should suppose You bounded by the form of a human body. And it seemed to me better to believe that You had created no evil—which to me, in my ignorance, appeared not only some substance but even corporeal, because I knew not how to think of mind save as a subtle body, which yet was diffused through spaces of place—than to believe that the nature of evil, such as I supposed, came from You.

Our Savior Himself too, Your only-begotten, I supposed to have been put forth for our salvation, as it were out of the mass of Your most luminous substance, so that I believed nothing else of Him save what I could imagine in my vanity. Such a nature of His, therefore, I judged could not be born of the Virgin Mary, unless it were mingled with flesh. But how it could be mingled and not defiled, I did not see, such as I pictured it to myself. I feared therefore to believe Him incarnate, lest I should be compelled to believe Him defiled by the flesh. Now Your spiritual ones will smile at me gently and lovingly, if they read these confusions of mine; but yet such was I.

Furthermore, the things which they reprehended in Your Scriptures I did not think could be defended; yet sometimes indeed I desired to confer on each point with someone most learned in those books, and to test what he might think thereof. For already the discourses of a certain Elpidius, speaking and disputing face to face against those same Manichees, had begun to move me even at Carthage, when he brought forth such things from the Scriptures as could not easily be withstood. And the response of those men seemed feeble to me—which indeed they did not readily put forth in public, but rather to us in secret, when they said that the Scriptures of the New Testament had been falsified by I know not whom, who wished to insert the law of the Jews into the Christian faith, while they themselves produced no uncorrupted copies.

But those masses, while I pondered corporeal things, chiefly held me captive and in some manner stifled and weighed me down, so that, gasping beneath them, I could not breathe in the clear and simple air of Your truth. Diligently, therefore, I had begun to do that for which I had come, namely to teach the art of rhetoric at Rome, and first to gather at my house some by whom and through whom I had begun to become known. And behold, I learn that other things are done at Rome which I did not endure in Africa. For it was made plain to me that in truth those acts of subversion by abandoned young men were not done there:

"but suddenly," they say, "lest they pay the fee to their master, many young men conspire and transfer themselves to another—deserters of faith, and to whom, for love of money, justice is held cheap." These too my heart hated, though not with a perfect hatred. For perhaps I hated them more for what I was to suffer from them than for what they did unlawfully to anyone. Certainly, however, such men are base, and they commit fornication away from You by loving the fleeting mockeries of times and filthy gain, which, when it is grasped, defiles the hand—and by embracing the fleeing world, despising You who abide and recall and forgive the human soul, a harlot, when she returns to You.

And now I hate such depraved and distorted men, although I love them as those to be corrected, that they may prefer to money the very learning which they learn, and to that may prefer You, God, the truth and abundance of the certain good and most chaste peace. But then I was more unwilling to suffer them as evil for my own sake than I was willing for them to become good for Your sake. And so, after a message was sent from Milan to Rome, to the prefect of the city, that a master of rhetoric should be provided for that city, with public conveyance even granted, I myself canvassed—through those very men drunk with Manichean vanities (to be rid of whom I was going, though neither of us knew it)—that, a discourse being proposed and I approved, the prefect Symmachus, then in office, might send me.

And I came to Milan to Ambrose the bishop, known to the whole world among the best of men, Your devout worshiper, whose eloquence then strenuously dispensed to Your people the fatness of Your wheat and the gladness of Your oil and the sober inebriation of Your wine. To him I was led by You unknowingly, that by him I might be led to You knowingly. That man of God received me in fatherly fashion, and loved my coming with a bishop's kindness. And I began to love him, at first indeed not as a teacher of the truth—which I utterly despaired of in Your Church—but as a man kindly toward me.

I listened studiously as he disputed before the people, not with the intention which I ought, but as it were examining his eloquence, whether it answered to his fame, or flowed greater or less than was reported; and I hung intent upon his words, but stood by careless and contemptuous of the matters, and was delighted with the sweetness of his discourse—more learned indeed, yet less cheering and soothing than was that of Faustus, as regards the manner of speaking. But as to the matters themselves, there was no comparison: for the one wandered through Manichean falsehoods, while the other taught salvation most healthfully. But salvation is far from sinners, such as I then was. And yet I was drawing near little by little, and unknowingly.

For since I was not anxious to learn what he said, but only to hear how he said it—this empty care had remained to me, despairing that a way to You lay open to man—there came into my mind, together with the words which I loved, the matters too which I neglected. For I could not separate them. And while I opened my heart to receive how eloquently he spoke, there entered in likewise how truly he spoke—gradually indeed.

For first these very matters too began now to seem to me defensible, and the Catholic faith, on behalf of which I had supposed nothing could be said against the assailing Manichees, I now judged could be asserted without impudence—especially when, once and again and more often, I heard some riddle resolved out of the Old Testament writings, where, when I took them according to the letter, I was slain. And so, when very many passages of those books were expounded spiritually, I now reproached that despair of mine, at least insofar as I had believed that the law and the prophets could in no way be withstood against those who detested and derided them.

Nor yet did I therefore feel that the Catholic way was to be held by me, because it too could have its learned defenders who copiously and not absurdly refuted objections; nor was that which I held therefore to be condemned, because the parts of the defense were made equal. For thus the Catholic faith did not seem to me vanquished, in such a way that it did not yet appear victorious either. Then indeed I bent my mind strongly, to see if in any way I could convict the Manichees of falsity by some certain proofs. For if I could conceive a spiritual substance, at once all those contrivances would be dissolved and cast out of my mind: but I could not.

Yet concerning the very body of this world and all nature which the sense of the flesh could reach, I judged—the more I considered and compared—that most philosophers had held views far more probable. And so, after the manner of the Academics, as they are reputed, doubting of all things and fluctuating among all, I resolved that the Manichees were indeed to be abandoned, not thinking that in that very time of my doubting I ought to remain in that sect, to which I now preferred certain philosophers—to which philosophers, nevertheless, because they were without the saving name of Christ, I altogether refused to entrust the cure of my soul's languor.

I resolved therefore to be for so long a catechumen in the Catholic Church, commended to me by my parents, until something certain should shine forth by which I might direct my course. BOOK SIX. My hope from my youth, where were You to me, and whither had You withdrawn? Had not You indeed made me and set me apart from the four-footed beasts and the birds of heaven? You had made me wiser, and yet I walked through darkness and slippery places, and sought You outside myself, and did not find the God of my heart; and I had come into the deep of the sea, and distrusted and despaired of finding the truth. By now my mother had come to me, strong in piety, following me by land and by sea, and secure in You amid all perils.

For even through the perils of the sea she consoled the very sailors, by whom the inexperienced travelers of the deep are wont to be consoled when they are alarmed, promising them arrival with safety, because You had promised her this in a vision. And she found me in peril indeed, gravely so, by despair of tracking out the truth; yet when I had indicated to her that I was now no longer a Manichee, but neither a Catholic Christian, she did not leap up with joy as though she had heard something unexpected, since she was already secure on that part of my misery in which she wept for me to You as for one dead but to be raised, and offered me on the bier of her thought, that You might say to the widow's son: Young man, I say to you, arise—and that he might revive and begin to speak, and that You might deliver him to his mother.