Perversely do all imitate you who set themselves far from you and exalt themselves against you. But even thus, by imitating you, they declare that you are the Creator of all nature, and therefore that there is no place whither one may by any means recede from you. What then did I love in that theft, and in what did I imitate my Lord, even viciously and perversely? Did it please me at least to act against the law by deceit, since I could not by real power, so that, a captive, I might imitate a maimed liberty by doing with impunity what was not permitted—a shadowy likeness of omnipotence? Behold, that is the servant fleeing his lord and pursuing a shadow. O rottenness! O monstrous thing of life and depth of death! Could that be done freely which was not permitted, for no other reason save that it was not permitted?
What shall I render to the Lord, that my memory recalls these things and my soul is not afraid thereat? I will love you, Lord, and give thanks and confess to your name, since you have remitted to me such great evils and nefarious works of mine. To your grace I attribute it, and to your mercy, that you have melted away my sins as if they were ice. To your grace I attribute also whatever evils I have not done: for what could I not have done, who even loved a gratuitous crime? And I confess that all have been remitted me, both the evils I did of my own accord, and those which under your guidance I did not do.
Who among men is there who, considering his own infirmity, dares to attribute his chastity and innocence to his own strength, so as to love you the less, as though your mercy were less necessary to him—that mercy by which you forgive sins to those who turn to you? For whoever, called by you, has followed your voice and avoided those things which he reads me recalling and confessing of myself, let him not deride me, sick, as being healed by that physician through whom it was granted to him not to be sick, or rather to be less sick; and therefore let him love you just as much—nay rather, even more—because through him by whom he sees me freed from such great languors of my sins, through the same he sees himself not entangled in such great languors of sins.
What fruit had I, wretched, at one time in those things which, now recalling them, I blush at, especially in that theft, in which I loved the theft itself, nothing else—since it was itself nothing, and by that very thing I was the more wretched? And yet alone I would not have done it—thus I recall my mind as it then was—alone I would by no means have done it. Therefore I also loved there the fellowship of those with whom I did it. So then I did not love nothing else but the theft; nay rather, nothing else, because that too is nothing. What is it in very truth? Who is there who may teach me, save he who illumines my heart and discerns its shadows?
What is it that comes into my mind to inquire and to discuss and to consider? For if I had then loved those apples which I stole, and had desired to enjoy them, I could even alone, had that sufficed, have committed that wrong by which I might have attained my pleasure, nor would I have needed to kindle the itch of my desire by the rubbing together of guilty minds. But since in those apples there was no pleasure for me, it lay rather in the very crime itself, which the fellowship of those sinning together produced. What was that affection of soul? Surely it was plainly far too base, and woe was me who harboured it. Yet still, what was it? Who understands his own faults?
It was a laughter, as it were a tickling of the heart, because we were deceiving those who did not suppose these things were being done by us and vehemently did not want them done. Why then did it delight me that I did not do it alone? Is it because no one easily laughs alone? No one indeed easily; yet sometimes laughter overcomes even solitary men, each by himself, when no one else is present, if something exceedingly ridiculous meets either the senses or the mind. But that deed I would not have done alone, I would by no means have done it alone. Behold, before you, my God, is the living recollection of my soul: alone I would not have committed that theft, in which what pleased me was not the thing I stole but the very stealing; to do which alone would not have pleased me at all, nor would I have done it.
O friendship too unfriendly, unsearchable seduction of the mind, out of sport and jest an appetite for doing harm and a craving for another's loss, with no desire of gain to myself, no lust for revenge, but only because, when it is said, 「Let us go, let us do it,」 one is ashamed not to be shameless! Who can unravel that most tortuous and entangled knottiness? It is foul; I do not wish to look upon it, I do not wish to see it. You I desire, O justice and innocence, fair and comely to honest eyes, with a satisfaction that never cloys. With you is deep repose and a life untroubled. He who enters into you enters into the joy of his Lord, and shall not fear, and shall be most perfectly content in the most perfect Good.
I flowed away from you and went astray, my God, far too wayward from your steadfastness in my adolescence, and I became to myself a region of want. BOOK THREE. I came to Carthage, and all around me there seethed a cauldron of unholy loves. I did not yet love, yet I was in love with loving, and out of a more hidden need I hated myself for being less needy. I sought what I might love, being in love with loving, and I hated security and a path without snares, for there was within me a famine of that inner food, of yourself, my God. Yet by that famine I was not hungered, but was without any longing for incorruptible nourishment, not because I was full of it, but because the emptier I was, the more I loathed it.
And therefore my soul was not in good health, and ulcerous it cast itself abroad, miserably eager to be scratched by the touch of sensible things. Yet if these had no soul, they would surely not be loved. To love and to be loved was sweet to me, the more so if I also enjoyed the body of the one I loved. Thus I defiled the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, and I clouded its brightness with the hell of lust; and yet, foul and dishonourable as I was, with abounding vanity I longed to be thought elegant and refined. I rushed even into love, by which I longed to be captured.
My God, my mercy, with how much gall did you sprinkle that sweetness for me, and how good was your doing! For I was loved, and I came to the bond of enjoyment, and I was bound up rejoicing in fetters of misery, that I might be scourged with the burning iron rods of jealousy and suspicions and fears and angers and quarrels. The theatrical spectacles snatched me away, full of the images of my own miseries and the tinder of my own fire. What is it that man wishes to grieve there over mournful and tragic things, which he himself would nevertheless not wish to suffer? And yet the spectator wishes to suffer grief from them, and that very grief is his pleasure. What is this but a pitiable madness?
For each man is the more moved by these things the less he himself is sound from such affections; although, when he himself suffers, it is wont to be called misery, but when he suffers along with others, it is called compassion. But what kind of compassion, after all, is there in feigned and theatrical matters? For the hearer is not provoked to come to anyone's aid, but only invited to grieve; and he favours the author of those images the more, the more he grieves. And if those calamities of men, whether ancient or false, are so enacted that he who watches does not grieve, he departs from there disdainful and finding fault; but if he grieves, he stays attentive and rejoicing. Tears, then, and griefs are loved. Surely every man wishes to rejoice.
Or is it that, although no one wishes to be wretched, yet one wishes to be compassionate, and because this is not without grief, for this one reason are griefs loved? This too is from that spring of friendship. But whither does it go? Whither does it flow? Why does it run down into a torrent of boiling pitch, the monstrous surges of foul lusts, into which that friendship is itself changed and turned, by its own inclination twisted away from heavenly serenity and cast down? Shall compassion then be rejected? By no means. Therefore let griefs sometimes be loved. But beware of uncleanness, O my soul, under the guardianship of my God, the God of our fathers, praiseworthy and exalted above all unto all ages — beware of uncleanness.
For not even now am I without compassion; but then, in the theatres, I rejoiced with lovers when they enjoyed one another through shameful deeds, even though they were enacting these things in imagination in the play of the spectacle; and when they lost one another, I, as though compassionate, was made sorrowful; and yet both delighted me. But now I pity more the one who rejoices in his shameful deed than the one who is supposed to suffer hardship through the loss of a ruinous pleasure and the forfeiting of a wretched felicity. This surely is the truer compassion, but in it grief gives no delight. For although he who grieves over the wretched is approved by the office of charity, yet he who is genuinely compassionate would assuredly prefer that there be nothing for him to grieve over.
For if there were a malevolent benevolence — which cannot be — then he too who truly and sincerely shows mercy might wish there to be wretched people, that he might pity them. Some sorrow therefore may be approved, but none is to be loved. For you, O Lord God, who love souls, show mercy far more purely and incorruptibly than we do, in that you are wounded by no grief. And who is sufficient for these things? But I then, wretched, loved to grieve, and sought that there might be something for me to grieve over, when in another's misery, false and play-acted, that action of the actor pleased me the more and allured me the more vehemently, by which tears were drawn forth from me. What wonder, when, an unhappy sheep straying from your flock and impatient of your keeping, I was disfigured with a foul scab?
And thence came my loves of griefs — not such as would pierce me more deeply, for I did not love to suffer such things as I loved to behold, but such as, heard of and feigned, would scratch me as it were on the surface; which loves, however, like the nails of those who scratch, were followed by a burning swelling and corruption and horrid putrefaction. Was such a life of mine truly a life, my God? And from afar your faithful mercy flew hovering over me. Into what iniquities I wasted away, and pursued a sacrilegious curiosity, so that, forsaking you, it led me down to the depths of faithlessness and to the deceiving services of demons, to whom I sacrificed my evil deeds, and in all things you scourged me!
I dared even, in the celebration of your solemnities, within the walls of your church, to lust and to transact the business of procuring the fruits of death: for which you scourged me with grievous penalties, yet nothing in comparison with my fault, O you my exceeding great mercy, my God, my refuge from the terrible harms in which I wandered with overweening neck, to recede far from you, loving my own ways and not yours, loving a fugitive liberty. Those studies too, which were called honourable, had their aim set upon the litigious forum, that I might excel in them, the more praised the more fraudulent I was. So great is the blindness of men who even glory in their blindness.
And I was now of higher standing in the school of rhetoric, and I rejoiced proudly and was swollen with conceit, although far more sedate, Lord (you know it), and altogether removed from the destructions which the 「Destroyers」 used to wreak — for this sinister and devilish name was, as it were, a badge of urbanity — among whom I lived with a shameless shame, because I was not such as they: and yet I was with them, and at times took delight in their friendships, though I always shrank from their deeds, that is, from the destructions by which they wantonly assailed the modesty of strangers, harassing it gratuitously by mockery, and thereby feeding their malicious gladness. Nothing is more like the doings of demons than that practice.
What therefore could be truer than that they should be called 「Destroyers,」 being themselves plainly destroyed first and perverted by the deceitful spirits who secretly mock and seduce them in that very thing wherein they love to deride and deceive others? Among these I, at that then immature age, was learning the books of eloquence, in which I longed to excel for a damnable and windy end through the joys of human vanity; and by the now customary order of study I had come to a book of a certain Cicero, whose tongue nearly all admire, his heart not so much. But that book of his contains an exhortation to philosophy and is called the Hortensius. That book indeed changed my disposition, and changed my prayers toward you yourself, O Lord, and made my vows and desires other than they were.
Suddenly every vain hope became worthless to me, and with an incredible ardour of heart I longed for the immortality of wisdom, and I began to rise up, that I might return to you. For it was not to sharpen my tongue (which is what I seemed to be purchasing with my mother's payments, since I was then in the nineteenth year of my age, my father having died two years before) — not, then, to sharpen my tongue did I apply that book; nor had it persuaded me of its manner of speaking, but of what it spoke. How I burned, my God, how I burned to fly back from earthly things to you, and I knew not what you were doing with me! For with you is wisdom. But the love of wisdom has the Greek name philosophy, with which those writings set me on fire.
There are those who seduce through philosophy, colouring and rouging their errors with a great and flattering and honourable name; and almost all who in those and earlier times were such are noted in that book and pointed out, and there is made manifest that salutary admonition of your Spirit through your good and pious servant: 「See that no one deceive you through philosophy and vain seduction, after the tradition of men, after the elements of this world, and not after Christ;」 for in him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.
And I at that time — you know it, light of my heart — since these apostolic words were not yet known to me, was nevertheless delighted in that exhortation by this alone: that it stirred me to love and seek and pursue and hold fast and embrace strongly not this or that sect, but wisdom itself, whatever it might be; and by that discourse I was roused and kindled and burned. And this alone checked me amid so great a blaze, that the name of Christ was not there; for this name, according to your mercy, O Lord, this name of my Saviour, your Son, my tender heart had piously drunk in with my mother's very milk, and deeply retained; and whatever was without this name, however learned and polished and truthful, did not wholly carry me away.
And so I resolved to bend my mind toward the holy Scriptures and to see what they were like. And behold, I see a thing not comprehended by the proud nor laid bare to children, but lowly in its gait, lofty in its progress, and veiled in mysteries; and I was not such as could enter into it, or bow my neck to its steps. For I did not feel, when I attended to that Scripture, as I now speak; but it seemed to me unworthy to be compared with the dignity of Cicero. For my swelling pride shrank from its manner, and my sharpness did not penetrate its inner parts. Yet truly it was such as would grow up with little ones; but I disdained to be a little one, and, swollen with arrogance, seemed to myself a great man.
And so I fell in with men proudly raving, too carnal and full of talk, in whose mouths were the snares of the devil and a birdlime compounded by the mingling of the syllables of your name, and of the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Paraclete, our Comforter, the Holy Spirit. These names did not depart from their mouths, but only as far as the sound and the noise of the tongue; for the rest, their heart was empty of truth. And they said, 「Truth, truth,」 and they spoke much of it to me, and nowhere was it in them, but they spoke falsehoods, not only about you, who truly are the Truth, but also about these elements of the world, your creation, concerning which, even though the philosophers spoke truly, I ought to have passed beyond them for love of you, my Father, supremely good, the beauty of all things beautiful.
O Truth, Truth, how inwardly even then did the marrow of my soul sigh after you, when they sounded you to me frequently and in manifold ways by mere voice and by many huge books! And these were the dishes on which, while I hungered for you, the sun and the moon were served up to me — your fair works, but your works nonetheless, not you, nor even the first of your works. For your spiritual works are prior to these corporeal ones, however shining and heavenly. But I hungered and thirsted not even after those prior works, but after you yourself, O Truth, in whom there is no change nor shadow of turning. And still there were set before me in those dishes splendid phantasms, than which it were even better to love this sun, at least true to these eyes, than those false things to a soul deceived through the eyes.
And yet, because I thought it was you, I ate — not indeed greedily, because you did not taste in my mouth as you are (for you were not those empty figments), nor was I nourished by them, but rather drained the more. Food in dreams is most like to the food of waking men, by which nevertheless the sleeping are not nourished; for they sleep. But those things were in no way even like to you, as you have now spoken to me, because they were corporeal phantasms, false bodies, than which more certain are these true bodies which we see by fleshly sight, whether heavenly or earthly. These we see together with cattle and birds, and they are more certain than when we imagine them. And again we imagine them more certainly than from them we surmise other greater and infinite things, which are altogether nothing at all.
On such empty things I then fed, and yet was not fed. But you, my love, into whom I faint that I may be strong, are not these bodies which we see, although in heaven, nor those which we do not see there, for you created them, nor do you reckon them among your highest creations. How far, then, are you from those phantasms of mine, phantasms of bodies which are altogether not at all! More certain than these are the imaginations of those bodies which do exist, and more certain than these imaginations are the bodies themselves, which nevertheless you are not. Nor are you the soul, which is the life of bodies — therefore the life of bodies is better and more certain than bodies — but you are the life of souls, the life of lives, living by yourself and unchanging, the life of my soul. Where, then, were you for me at that time, and how far away?
And far did I journey in exile from you, shut out even from the husks of the swine which I fed with husks. For how much better are the little fables of the grammarians and poets than those snares! For verse and song and Medea flying are surely more useful than the five elements variously rouged on account of the five caverns of darkness, which are altogether nothing and slay him who believes them. For verse and song I even turn to true nourishment; but flying Medea, although I sang of her, I did not assert; and though I heard her sung, I did not believe. But those other things I believed — woe, woe!
By what steps was I led down into the depths of hell, toiling indeed and seething for want of truth, when I sought you, my God — to you I confess, who had mercy on me even when I did not yet confess — when I sought you not according to the understanding of the mind, by which you willed me to surpass the beasts, but according to the sense of the flesh! But you were more inward than my inmost and higher than my highest. I stumbled upon that bold woman, lacking prudence, the riddle of Solomon, sitting upon a stool at the doors and saying: 「Eat gladly hidden loaves, and drink stolen sweet water.」 She seduced me, because she found me dwelling abroad in the eye of my flesh and ruminating within myself on such things as I had devoured through that eye.
For I knew nothing else, that which truly is, and I was, as it were, sharply moved to side with those foolish deceivers, when it was asked of me whence comes evil, and whether God was bounded by a bodily shape and had hair and nails, and whether those were to be judged righteous who had many wives at once and killed men and offered sacrifices of animals. Over these things, being ignorant of the matter, I was perturbed, and, receding from the truth, I seemed to myself to be going toward it, because I did not know that evil is nothing but the privation of good, even down to that which is altogether nothing. And how could I see this, whose seeing reached only to bodies with the eyes, and to phantasms with the mind?
I did not know that God is a spirit, who has no members extended in length and breadth, nor for whom being is a mass; for a mass is less in a part than in its whole, and even if it be infinite, it is less in some part bounded by a fixed space than throughout the infinite, and it is not whole everywhere, as a spirit is, as God is. And what there might be in us, according to which we are, and why in Scripture we are said to be after the image of God, I was utterly ignorant.
And I did not know that true justice is the inner justice, which judges not from custom, but from the most upright law of Almighty God, by which the morals of regions and of days were to be formed according to those regions and days, although that law itself was everywhere and always, not one thing in one place and another in another, nor one way at one time and another at another; according to which Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses and David were righteous, and all those praised by the mouth of God;
but they are judged unrighteous by the unskilled, who judge from the human day and measure the universal morals of the human race by the part of their own custom; just as if someone unacquainted with armour, ignorant of what is fitting for which limb, should wish his head to be covered with a greave and his foot to be shod with a helmet, and should grumble that they do not aptly fit; or as if, on one day when business has been suspended from the afternoon hours, someone should fume that he is not permitted to put up for sale what was permitted in the morning; or as if in one house he should see something handled by some servant which the one who serves the cups is not allowed to do, or something done behind the stables which is forbidden in front of the table, and should be indignant that, though there is one dwelling and one household, the same thing is not granted everywhere and to everyone.
Such are those who are indignant when they hear that in that age something was permitted to the righteous which in this age is not permitted to the righteous, and that God commanded one thing to those and another to these for temporal reasons, although both served the same justice; though in one man, and in one day, and in one house, they see one thing suited to one limb and another to another, and one thing permitted a while ago, after an hour not permitted, something allowed or commanded in that corner which in this one nearby is forbidden and punished. Is justice then various and changeable? No; but the times, over which it presides, do not run alike; for they are times.
But men, whose life upon earth is brief, because by their perception they are not able to weave together the causes of former ages and of other nations, of which they have had no experience, with those of which they have had experience; whereas in one body, or one day, or one house, they can easily see what is fitting for which limb, at which moments, for which parts or persons — in those former matters they take offence, in these latter they comply. These things I then did not know and did not notice, and they struck my eyes on every side, and I did not see. And I sang songs, and it was not permitted me to place any foot anywhere I pleased, but in one metre and another differently and differently, and in any one verse not the same foot in all places; and the very art by which I sang did not have one thing in one place and another elsewhere, but all things at once.
And I did not behold that justice, which good and holy men served, far more excellently and sublimely holds all things together that it enjoins, and in no part variously, yet in various times distributing and enjoining not all things at once but each its own. And I, blind, reproached the pious patriarchs, not only for using present things as God commanded and inspired, but also for foretelling future things as God revealed. Is it ever or anywhere unjust to love God with all the heart and with all the soul and with all the mind, and to love one's neighbour as oneself? Therefore shameful deeds which are against nature are everywhere and always to be detested and punished, such as were those of the Sodomites.
If all nations were to do such things, they would be held bound by the same crime under the divine law, which did not make men so as to use one another in this manner. For that very fellowship which ought to exist between us and God is violated, when that same nature, of which He is the author, is polluted by the perversity of lust. But those shameful deeds which are against the customs of men are to be avoided according to the diversity of customs, so that a covenant established among themselves by the custom or law of a city or nation be not violated by the lust of any citizen or stranger. For every part which does not harmonize with its whole is base. But when God commands anything against the custom or covenant of any people, even though it was never done there, it must be done; and if omitted, it must be restored; and if it had not been instituted, it must be instituted.
For if it is permitted to a king, in the city over which he reigns, to command something which neither anyone before him nor he himself had ever commanded, and obedience is not against the fellowship of his city — nay rather, not to obey is against the fellowship, for it is a general compact of human society to obey its kings — how much more must God, the ruler of all creation, be obeyed without hesitation in the things which He commands! For as among the powers of human society the greater power is set above the lesser for obedience, so God is above all.
Likewise in misdeeds, where there is a lust of doing harm, whether by insult or by injury, and either of these for the sake of revenge, as an enemy against an enemy; or to gain some advantage beyond, as a robber against a traveller; or to escape an evil, as against one who is feared; or out of envy, as the more wretched against the more fortunate, or one prospered in some matter against him whom he fears to have made equal to himself, or grieves to be his equal; or from the mere pleasure in another's harm, as the spectators of gladiators, or mockers, or those who make sport of any persons.
These are the heads of iniquity, which sprout from the lust of ruling and of beholding and of feeling, either from one or from two of them, or from all together; and men live wickedly against the three and the seven, the psaltery of ten strings, your Decalogue, O God most high and most sweet. But what shameful deeds against you, who cannot be corrupted? Or what crimes against you, who cannot be harmed? But this you punish, what men commit against themselves; because, even when they sin against you, they act impiously against their own souls, and iniquity belies itself, either by corrupting and perverting its nature, which you made and ordained, or by using immoderately permitted things, or by burning after things not permitted, in that use which is against nature.
Or they are held guilty in mind and in words, raging against you and kicking against the goad; or, when the bounds of human society are burst, they boldly rejoice in private leagues or breaches, according as each thing has pleased or offended. And these things come to pass when you are forsaken, O fountain of life, who are the one and true Creator and Ruler of the universe, and when by private pride a part is loved, the one false thing.