Great are you, O Lord, and greatly to be praised: great is your power, and of your wisdom there is no number. And man wishes to praise you, man who is some portion of your creation, and man who carries about his mortality, carrying about the testimony of his sin and the testimony that you resist the proud; and yet man wishes to praise you, man who is some portion of your creation. You stir us up, that it may delight us to praise you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
Grant me, O Lord, to know and to understand whether it is first to call upon you or to praise you, and whether to know you or to call upon you. But who calls upon you not knowing you? For one not knowing may call upon one thing instead of another. Or are you rather called upon, that you may be known? But how shall they call upon him in whom they have not believed? Or how shall they believe without one to preach? And they shall praise the Lord who seek him.
Hear, O God. Woe to the sins of men! And man says these things, and you have mercy on him, since you made him and did not make the sin in him. Who reminds me of the sin of my infancy, since no one is clean from sin before you, not even the infant whose life is of one day upon the earth? Who reminds me? Is it perhaps some little child now, in whom I see what I do not remember of myself?
Your law surely punishes theft, O Lord, and the law written in the hearts of men, which not even iniquity itself blots out: for what thief endures a thief with an even mind? Not even a wealthy one. I wished to commit theft, and I did so, compelled by no want except by poverty and disgust of righteousness and a fullness of iniquity. For I stole that of which I had abundance, and far better.
Among these I, at a tender age, had learned grammar and took great delight in it, not on account of any usefulness of the learning, but on account of vainglory. But at that time I read a certain book of Cicero, whose language nearly all admire, but not so his heart. Yet that book changed my disposition, and changed my prayers toward you yourself, O Lord, and made my vows and desires other than they were.
In those years, at the time when I first began to teach in the town in which I was born what I had learned, friendship had won me a certain companion, made sweet to us by the delight of close fellowship. His death tore my heart apart, and whatever was my life had become death to me, because he was. I marvel that I was living when he, whom I had loved as though he would never die, was dying. The greater grief was this: that he who had gone before me had died, whom I could not meet, that he might see or hear us.
And I came to Milan, to Bishop Ambrose, known to the whole world as one of the best, your devout worshiper, whose eloquence then vigorously ministered to your people the richness of your wheat, and the gladness of your oil, and the sober intoxication of your wine. To him I was being led by you without my knowing it, that through him I might knowingly be led to you. That man of God received me as a father, and loved my pilgrimage in a manner fitting a bishop.
We used to confer among ourselves and talk and conclude: now indeed this laborious life displeases us; but when shall we choose something better? Or do we await some great fortune to be given us? I would marry a wife, if it would not be too troublesome, one with some dowry; thus I would be content, I would seek no more. We would be a few friends together, and, conducting our more burdensome affairs through different territories with no heavy burden, we would procure our sustenance.
And thence admonished to return to my very self, I entered into my inmost being with you as my guide, and I was able, because you had become my helper. I entered and saw, with whatever eye of my soul, above that same eye of my soul, above my mind, an unchangeable light—not this common light, visible to all flesh, nor as if of the same kind, only greater, as though this light should shine far more brightly and fill all things with its magnitude.
But when from a hidden depth deep reflection drew up and gathered together all my misery in the sight of my heart, a mighty storm arose, bringing a mighty downpour of tears. And I could not hold them back, nor did I remember what it was that I was bewailing, but I stood beneath a certain fig tree and gave free rein to my tears. And I heard a voice from a neighboring house, with singing, of one saying and frequently repeating, as it were of a boy or a girl: "Take up and read, take up and read."
The day was drawing near on which she was to depart from this life—a day that you knew, but we did not. It came about, as I believe, by your contrivance through your hidden ways, that she and I stood alone together, leaning at a certain window from which the garden of the house that lodged us could be looked out upon, there at Ostia on the Tiber, where, withdrawn from the crowds after the labor of a long journey, we were renewing our strength for the voyage ahead.
Late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! And behold, you were within me, and I was outside, and there I sought you, and upon those beautiful things which you have made I rushed in my deformity. You were with me, and I was not with you. Those things held me far from you, things which, if they were not in you, would not exist at all. You called and cried out, and broke through my deafness; you flashed forth, you shone, and you put my blindness to flight.
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; but if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I do not know. Yet I confidently affirm that I know this: that if nothing passed away there would be no past time, and if nothing were approaching there would be no future time, and if nothing existed there would be no present time. How, then, do those two times, the past and the future, exist, when the past is already no longer and the future is not yet?