For I knew none of those words, and with savage terrors and penalties it was vehemently urged upon me that I should know them. For at one time, as an infant, I knew no Latin words either, and yet by attending I learned them without any fear or torment, amid the very caresses of nurses and the jests of those who smiled and the merriment of those who played with me. I learned those words, indeed, without the penal burden of those urging me, when my own heart urged me to bring forth its conceptions, which it could not do unless I had learned some words, not from those teaching, but from those speaking, in whose ears I too was bringing to birth whatever I felt. From this it shines forth clearly enough that a free curiosity has greater force for learning these things than a fearful necessity.
But the flow of that free curiosity Thy laws restrain, O God, Thy laws, from the rods of masters even to the trials of martyrs, Thy laws being mighty to mingle wholesome bitternesses, recalling us to Thee from the pestilent pleasantness by which we departed from Thee. Hear, O Lord, my prayer, that my soul faint not under Thy discipline, nor faint I in confessing to Thee Thy mercies, by which Thou hast plucked me out of all my most evil ways, that Thou mayest grow sweet to me above all the seductions which I followed, and that I may love Thee most mightily and embrace Thy hand with all my inmost heart, and that Thou mayest pluck me out of every temptation even unto the end.
For behold, O Lord, my King and my God, let whatever useful thing I learned as a boy serve Thee, let what I speak and write and read and count serve Thee, since when I was learning vanities Thou wast giving me discipline, and in those vanities Thou hast forgiven me the sins of my delights. For in them I learned many useful words; but these can be learned in things not vain as well, and that is the safe path in which boys might walk. But woe to thee, O torrent of human custom! Who shall resist thee? How long wilt thou not be dried up? How long wilt thou roll the sons of Eve into that great and fearful sea, which scarcely those pass over who have mounted the wood? Did I not read in thee both Jove thundering and committing adultery?
And surely these two things could not coexist; yet it came about that real adultery acquired authority to be imitated, with a false thunderclap playing the pander. But what cloak-wearing schoolmaster listens with a sober ear when a man, sprung from the very same dust, cries aloud and says, 'Homer invented these things and transferred what is human to the gods; I should have preferred that he had brought what is divine down to us'? Yet it is more truly said that he did indeed invent these things, but by attributing what is divine to disgraceful men, so that their disgraces might not be thought disgraces, and that whoever committed them might seem to be imitating not lost men but the gods of heaven.
And yet, O river of hell, into you are flung the sons of men, together with fees, that they may learn these things; and it is reckoned a great affair, when this is transacted publicly in the forum, in the sight of laws that decree salaries over and above the fees; and you dash against your rocks and resound, saying:
'From this words are learned; from this is acquired that eloquence so utterly necessary for persuading people of things and for setting forth opinions.' So then, we would never have come to know these words—shower and golden and bosom and deceit and the temples of heaven and the other words written in that passage—had not Terence brought on stage a worthless young man who set Jove before himself as a model of debauchery, while he gazes at a certain picture painted on the wall, in which this scene was depicted: how (so they say) Jove once sent a golden shower into Danaë's bosom, and so deceived the woman. And see how he rouses himself to lust as though by heavenly instruction: 'But what a god!' he says, 'who shakes the temples of heaven with his loftiest thunder. And shall I, a mere mannikin, not do the same?
Indeed I have done that very thing, and gladly.' By no means, by no means is it through this filthiness that those words are more conveniently learned; rather, through those words is that filthiness more confidently perpetrated. I do not accuse the words, as though they were choice and precious vessels; but the wine of error that was poured out to us in them by drunken teachers, and unless we drank, we were beaten, nor were we allowed to appeal to any sober judge. And yet I, O my God, in whose sight my recollection is now secure, gladly learned these things, and miserable as I was I took delight in them, and for this reason I was called a boy of good promise. Suffer me, my God, to say something about my talent, which is your gift, and on what follies it was worn away by me.
For there was set before me a task, quite disquieting to my soul, with the reward of praise and the dread of disgrace or of blows: that I should speak the words of Juno in her anger and grief, because she could not turn the king of the Trojans away from Italy—words which I had never heard Juno speak. But we were compelled to follow, as we wandered, the footsteps of poetic fictions, and to say in prose something such as the poet had said in verse. And he spoke with more praise in whom, befitting the dignity of the character there shadowed forth, a likeness of the emotions of anger and grief stood out more vividly, the words clothing the thoughts suitably. To what purpose, O true life, my God, was that to me? Why, as I recited, was applause raised to me above many of my fellows and schoolmates? Was not all that smoke and wind?
Was there really nothing else on which my talent and tongue might be exercised? Your praises, Lord, your praises through your Scriptures would have propped up the tender shoot of my heart, and it would not have been snatched away through empty trifles, a shameful prey to the birds of the air. For it is not in one way only that sacrifice is offered to the transgressor angels. And what wonder if I was carried off into vanities like this, and went away outward from you, my God, when men were set before me to imitate who, if they had recounted some deed of their own, not evil in itself, with a barbarism or solecism, were rebuked and confounded; but if they had narrated their lusts richly and orderly, in correct and duly-following words, they were praised and gloried in it? You see these things, Lord, and keep silence, longsuffering and full of mercy and true.
Will you keep silence for ever? And even now you draw up out of this most monstrous deep the soul that seeks you and thirsts after your delights, whose heart says to you, 'I have sought your face; your face, Lord, will I seek'; for far from your face I was in a darkened affection. For it is not by feet, nor by distances of place, that one goes from you or returns to you; nor did that son of yours seek horses or chariots or ships, or fly away on a visible wing, or accomplish his journey by moving his knee, that, living in a far country, he might lavishly squander what you had given him as he set out—you, his sweet Father, because you had given it, and sweeter still to him in his want as he returned. So then, in lustful affection—that is, in a darkened one—and that is to be far from your face.
See, O Lord my God, and patiently, as you do see, behold how diligently the sons of men observe the conventions of letters and syllables received from earlier speakers, yet neglect the eternal covenants of perpetual salvation received from you; so that one who holds or teaches those old conventions of sounds, if against the grammatical rule he should pronounce 'human' without aspirating the first syllable, displeases men more than if, against your precepts, he should hate a human being, though he himself is human. As though any enemy man could be more pernicious to him than the very hatred by which he is provoked against him; or as though anyone, by persecuting another, could lay him waste more grievously than he lays waste his own heart by his enmity.
And surely the knowledge of letters is not more inward than the conscience written within—that one is doing to another what he himself would not suffer. How secret are you, dwelling on high in silence, God alone great, who by an unwearying law scatter penal blindnesses upon unlawful desires; when a man, seeking a reputation for eloquence, standing before a human judge with a crowd of men surrounding him, while he pursues his enemy with the most monstrous hatred, takes most vigilant care lest by a slip of the tongue he say 'inter hominibus' (among men, ungrammatically), yet takes no care lest by the frenzy of his mind he take a man away from among men. On the threshold of these morals I lay as a wretched boy, and that was the wrestling-place of this sand, where I feared more to commit a barbarism than I guarded against envying, if I committed none, those who did not.
I say these things and confess to you, my God, the things in which I was praised by those whom to please was then for me to live honourably. For I did not see the whirlpool of foulness into which I had been cast away from your eyes. For in their sight what then was fouler than I, when even to such as those I was displeasing by deceiving with innumerable lies my tutor and masters and parents, out of love of play, eagerness to watch trifling shows, and a restless desire to imitate stage performances? I even committed thefts from my parents' cellar and table, either as gluttony commanded, or that I might have something to give to the boys who sold me their game—a game in which they too took equal delight—on these terms. In that game too I myself, vanquished by a vain craving for excellence, often hunted after fraudulent victories.
For what was I so unwilling to suffer, and what would I fiercely upbraid, if I caught someone at it, as that very thing which I did to others; and if, being caught, I was upbraided, I chose rather to rage than to yield? Is this the innocence of boyhood? It is not, Lord; it is not, I beg you, my God. For these very things which, from tutors and masters, from nuts and little balls and sparrows, pass on (as larger ages succeed) to prefects and kings, to gold, estates, and slaves—these very same things pass on entirely, just as harsher punishments succeed the rods. It was therefore the symbol of humility in the stature of boyhood that you, our King, approved, when you said, 'Of such is the kingdom of heaven.'
But nevertheless, Lord, to you, most excellent, the best Creator and Ruler of the universe, our God, thanks would be due even if you had not willed me to be more than a boy. For even then I existed, I lived and felt, and I had care for my own well-being, a trace of that most secret Unity from which I was; I guarded by an inner sense the integrity of my senses, and in those small thoughts about small things I took delight in truth. I was unwilling to be deceived, my memory was vigorous, I was furnished with speech, I was soothed by friendship, I fled pain, abjection, ignorance. What in such a living creature is not wonderful and praiseworthy? But all these are the gifts of my God; I did not give them to myself; and they are good, and all these together am I.
Good therefore is he who made me, and he himself is my good, and I exult to him for all the good things by which, even as a boy, I existed. For in this I sinned, that not in him, but in his creatures—in myself and the rest—I sought pleasures, sublimities, truths, and so rushed headlong into pains, confusions, errors. Thanks be to you, my sweetness and my honour and my trust, my God, thanks be to you for your gifts; but do you preserve them for me. For so will you preserve me, and the things you have given me will be increased and perfected, and I myself shall be with you, since that I exist at all you have given me. BOOK TWO. I wish to recall my past foulnesses and the carnal corruptions of my soul, not because I love them, but that I may love you, my God.
For love of your love I do this, recalling my most wicked ways in the bitterness of my reflection, that you may grow sweet to me—a sweetness not deceitful, a sweetness happy and secure—and gathering me back from the dispersion in which I was torn piecemeal, while, turned away from you the One, I melted away into the many. For at one time, in my youth, I burned to be sated with things below, and I dared to grow wild with various and shadowy loves, and my comeliness wasted away and I rotted before your eyes, pleasing myself and desiring to please the eyes of men. And what was it that delighted me, save to love and to be loved?
But the measure was not kept, from soul to soul, where lies the luminous boundary of friendship; rather, mists exhaled from the muddy concupiscence of the flesh and from the bubbling spring of puberty, and they clouded and darkened my heart, so that the serenity of love could not be distinguished from the murk of lust. Both seethed together in confusion and swept my feeble age over the precipices of desires, and plunged me into the whirlpool of disgraceful deeds. Your wrath had grown strong over me, and I knew it not. I had become deaf with the clanking of the chain of my mortality, the punishment of my soul's pride; and I went farther from you, and you let me be; and I was tossed about and poured out and dissolved and bubbled over through my fornications, and you kept silence. O my joy, too long delayed!
You kept silence then, and I went on, far away from you, into more and more barren seeds of sorrows, with proud dejection and restless weariness. Who might have set my misery to measure, and turned the fleeting beauties of these lowest things to good use, and fixed bounds to their sweetnesses, so that the waves of my age might surge as far as the marriage shore, if calm could not be in them, content with the end of begetting children, as your law prescribes, O Lord—you who also shape the propagation of our death, able to lay a gentle hand to temper the thorns shut out of your paradise? For your omnipotence is not far from us, even when we are far from you. Or at the very least I should have heeded more vigilantly the sound of your clouds:
'Such shall have tribulation in the flesh; but I spare you'; and 'It is good for a man not to touch a woman'; and 'He who is without a wife is anxious about the things of God, how he may please God; but he who is joined in marriage is anxious about the things of the world, how he may please his wife.' These voices, then, I should have heeded more vigilantly, and, made a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, I should the more happily have awaited your embraces. But I boiled over, wretched man, following the rush of my own current, having forsaken you, and I transgressed all your lawful bounds, nor did I escape your scourges—for what mortal does?
For you were always present, mercifully raging, and sprinkling with most bitter offences all my unlawful delights, that so I might seek to take delight without offence; and where I might do so, I could find nothing except you, Lord—except you, who fashion sorrow in your precept, and strike that you may heal, and slay us lest we die away from you. Where was I, and how far was I banished from the delights of your house, in that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when the madness of lust took up its sceptre over me—lust licentious by the shamelessness of the human heart, yet unlawful by your laws—and I gave it all my hands?
My family took no care to catch me as I fell headlong into marriage; their only care was that I should learn to make a speech as good as possible and to persuade by oratory. And in that year indeed my studies were interrupted, while, after I had been brought back from Madaura—in which neighbouring town I had already begun to travel abroad for the sake of acquiring literature and oratory—the means for a longer sojourn at Carthage were being prepared, by the high spirit rather than the wealth of my father, a citizen of Thagaste of very slender means. To whom do I tell these things? For it is not to you, my God, but in your presence I tell them to my own kind, to the human race, however small a portion may chance upon these writings of mine. And to what end this?
Namely, that I and whoever reads these things may consider out of what depth one must cry to you. And what is nearer to your ears than a confessing heart and a life out of faith? For who at that time did not extol with praises that man my father, because, beyond the means of his household, he spent on his son whatever was needful even for one travelling far for the sake of studies? For many citizens far wealthier did no such business for their children; while meanwhile that same father took no pains about how I might grow up toward you, or how chaste I might be, so long as I was eloquent—or rather, deserted from your cultivation, O God, who are the one true and good Lord of your field, my heart.
But when, in that sixteenth year, leisure having intervened because of domestic necessity, I began to be free from all schooling and to be with my parents, the thornbrakes of lusts grew up over my head, and there was no hand to root them out. Nay rather, when that father of mine saw me in the baths, growing into manhood and clothed with restless adolescence, as though already from this he longed for grandchildren, he joyfully told my mother—joyful with that intoxication in which this world forgot you its Creator and loved your creature instead of you, drunk with the invisible wine of a will perverse and bent down toward the depths. But in my mother's heart you had already begun your temple and the beginning of your holy habitation; for that father was still only a catechumen, and that but recently.
And so she started up with pious trepidation and trembling; and although I was not yet a believer, she nevertheless feared the crooked ways in which those walk who set their back, and not their face, toward you. Woe is me! and do I dare to say that you kept silence, my God, when I went farther from you? Did you then keep silence to me? And whose were those words, if not yours, spoken through my mother, your faithful one, which you sang into my ears? Yet nothing of it went down into my heart, that I should do it. For she wished—and I remember it in secret—and warned me with enormous solicitude, that I should not fornicate, and above all that I should not commit adultery with anyone's wife. These seemed to me womanish admonitions, which I should have blushed to obey.
But those words were yours, and I knew it not, and thought you were silent and that she was speaking—she through whom you were not silent to me; and in her you were despised by me, by me, her son, the son of your handmaid, your servant. But I knew it not, and went headlong with such great blindness that among my coevals I was ashamed to be of less disgrace, since I heard them boasting of their wickednesses and glorying the more, the more shameful they were; and it was pleasing to do it, not only for the lust of the deed, but also for the praise. What is worthy of vituperation save vice?
I, lest I should be vituperated, became more vicious; and where there was no occasion by which, having committed it, I might be made equal to the lost, I pretended to have done what I had not done, lest I should seem more abject the more innocent I was, and lest I should be held more worthless the more chaste I was. Behold with what companions I made my way through the streets of Babylon, and wallowed in its mire as in cinnamon and precious unguents. And that I might cleave the more tenaciously to its very centre, the invisible enemy trod me down and seduced me, because I was easy to be seduced.
For she too—my mother according to the flesh, who had already fled from the midst of Babylon, yet went more slowly in its outskirts—just as she had admonished me to chastity, so she took care to restrain within the bounds of conjugal affection that which she had heard about me from her husband, and which she now perceived to be pestilential and dangerous for the future, if it could not be cut back to the quick.
She did not take care of this, because there was a fear lest my hope should be hampered by a conjugal fetter—not that hope which my mother had in you for the age to come, but the hope of letters, which both my parents too much wished me to know: he, because he thought almost nothing of you, but vain things of me; she, however, because she reckoned that those customary studies of learning would be not only no detriment, but even of some help, toward attaining you. For so I conjecture, recalling as I can the characters of my parents.
The reins were even loosened to me for play, beyond the temper of severity, unto the dissolution of various afflictions; and in all things there was a fog cutting off from me, my God, the serenity of your truth, and my iniquity came forth as if out of fatness. Theft your law certainly punishes, Lord, and the law written in the hearts of men, which not even iniquity itself blots out—for what thief patiently endures a thief? Not even a rich one endures one driven by want. And I willed to commit theft, and did so, compelled by no neediness except poverty of justice and surfeit of iniquity. For I stole that of which I had abundance, and far better; nor did I wish to enjoy the thing I sought by theft, but the very theft and sin.
There was a pear tree near our vineyard, laden with fruit attractive neither in form nor in flavour. To shake this tree and carry off its fruit, we worthless young fellows set out at the dead of night, having (as our pestilential custom was) prolonged our play in the open spaces; and we took thence huge loads, not for our own banquets, but rather to throw to the pigs—even if we did eat some of it—so long as there might be done by us that which pleased us for the very reason that it was not permitted. Behold my heart, O God, behold my heart, which you have pitied in the bottom of the abyss. Let my heart now tell you what it sought there, that I should be gratuitously evil, and that there should be no cause of my malice except malice itself. It was foul, and I loved it;
I loved to perish, I loved my own defect—not that toward which I was failing, but my very defect itself I loved: a foul soul, leaping away from your firmament into destruction, craving not some shameful thing, but shame itself. For there is beauty in fair bodies, and in gold and silver and all things; and in the contact of flesh agreeableness avails much, and to each of the other senses there is its own fitting modification of bodies. Temporal honour too has its grace, and the power of commanding and overcoming, whence also the appetite for vengeance arises; and yet, in attaining all these, we must not depart from you, Lord, nor turn aside from your law.
And the life we live here has its own allurement, because of a certain measure of its own comeliness and its congruence with all these lowest fair things. Human friendship too is sweet with a dear bond, because of the unity made of many souls. On account of all these things and the like, sin is admitted, while through an immoderate inclination toward these—which are the lowest goods—the better and highest goods are forsaken: you, O Lord our God, and your truth and your law. For these lowest things too have their delights, but not like my God, who made all things, because in him the just man delights, and he himself is the delight of the upright in heart.
So then, when it is asked concerning a crime, for what cause it was done, it is not usually believed, unless it appears that there could have been either an appetite for attaining some one of those goods which we have called the lowest, or a fear of losing them. For they are fair and comely, although in comparison with the higher and beatific goods they are abject and lowly. A man committed homicide. Why did he do it? He loved the other's wife, or his estate; or he wished to plunder, that he might live; or he feared to lose some such thing from the other; or, injured, he burned to avenge himself. Would he have committed homicide without cause, delighted by the homicide itself? Who would believe it? For even of a certain senseless and exceedingly cruel man it was said that he was evil and cruel rather gratuitously; yet a cause was named:
'lest,' he says, 'through idleness his hand or mind should grow numb.' Why that too? Why so? Namely, that by that exercise of crimes, the city once seized, he might attain honours, commands, riches, and be free from the fear of laws and from difficulty of affairs on account of the poverty of his household and the consciousness of his crimes. So not even Catiline himself loved his crimes, but rather something else, for the sake of which he was doing them. What did I, wretched, love in you, O my theft, O that crime of mine, that nocturnal deed of the sixteenth year of my age? For you were not beautiful, since you were a theft. Or are you indeed anything, that I should speak to you?
Fair were those pears which we stole, since they were your creature, O most fair of all, Creator of all, good God, God the highest good and my true good; fair were those pears, but it was not them that my wretched soul desired. For I had abundance of better; but those I plucked, only that I might steal. For once plucked, I threw them away, having feasted there only on iniquity, which I gladly enjoyed. For even if any of those pears entered my mouth, the seasoning there was the crime. And now, O Lord my God, I ask what it was that delighted me in the theft; and behold, there is no beauty:
I do not say beauty such as is in equity and prudence, nor such as is in the mind of man and in memory and the senses and the vegetative life, nor such as the stars are, fair and comely in their places, and the earth and sea full of offspring which by being born succeed those that pass away; not even such as is in a certain defective and shadowy beauty of beguiling vices. For pride too imitates loftiness, whereas you alone are God most high above all. And ambition—what does it seek but honours and glory, whereas you are to be honoured above all and glorious for ever? And the cruelty of the mighty wishes to be feared: but who is to be feared except the one God, from whose power what can be snatched or withdrawn, and when, or where, or whither, or by whom?
And the caresses of the wanton wish to be loved: but neither is anything more caressing than your charity, nor is anything loved more healthfully than that truth of yours, beautiful and luminous above all. And curiosity seems to affect a zeal for knowledge, whereas you supremely know all things. Ignorance too and stupidity is cloaked under the name of simplicity and innocence, because nothing simpler than you is found. And what more innocent than you, since to the wicked their own works are enemies? And sloth, as it were, craves rest: but what rest is sure except the Lord? Luxury desires to be called satiety and abundance: but you are fullness and the unfailing store of incorruptible sweetness. The lavishing of prodigality holds out a shadow of liberality:
but you are the most abounding giver of all goods. Avarice wishes to possess many things: and you possess all things. Envy contends over excellence: what is more excellent than you? Anger seeks vengeance: who avenges more justly than you? Fear shudders at unaccustomed and sudden things adverse to the things that are loved, while it takes precaution for security: but to you what is unaccustomed, what sudden? Or who separates from you what you love? Or where is firm security except with you? Sadness pines away over things lost, in which cupidity used to take pleasure, because it would have it so that, as from you nothing can be taken away, so neither from itself. Thus the soul fornicates when it is turned away from you, and seeks outside you the things which it does not find pure and clear, except when it returns to you.