Confessions

And how shall I call upon my God, my God and Lord, since surely when I call upon him I am calling him into myself? And what place is there in me where my God could come into me—where God could come into me, the God who “made heaven and earth”? Is it really so, Lord my God? Is there anything in me that can contain you? Or do even heaven and earth, which you made and in which you made me, contain you? Or, since without you nothing that exists would exist, does it follow that whatever exists contains you? Since, then, I too exist, why do I ask you to come into me, when I would not exist unless you were in me? For I am not yet in the underworld—and yet you are there too, for “if I go down into the underworld, you are there.”note

Do heaven and earth, then, contain you, since you fill them? Or do you fill them and something of you is left over, since they do not contain you? And where do you pour whatever of you remains once heaven and earth are filled? Or do you have no need to be contained anywhere, you who contain all things, since what you fill you fill by containing it? For the vessels that are full of you do not hold you steady, since even if they break you are not spilled. And when you are poured out upon us, you do not lie spilled on the ground; you raise us up. You are not scattered; you gather us together. But all the things you fill, you fill with the whole of yourself. Or, since all things cannot contain the whole of you, do they contain a part of you, and do all things contain the same part at once? Or does each thing contain its own part—larger things larger parts, smaller things smaller ones? Is some part of you, then, larger and some part smaller?

What, then, is my God? What, I ask, but the Lord God? “For who is Lord but the Lord? Or who is God but our God?” Highest, best, most powerful, most all-powerful, most merciful and most just, most hidden and most present, most beautiful and most strong, steadfast and beyond grasp, unchanging yet changing all things, never new, never old, making all things new and bringing the proud into decay though they do not know it; always active, always at rest, gathering in yet needing nothing, bearing and filling and protecting, creating and nourishing and perfecting, seeking though you lack nothing. You love, but without burning; you are jealous, yet untroubled; you repent, but without grief; you are angry, yet calm; you change your works but not your plan; you take back what you find, though you never lost it. Never in need, you still rejoice in gains; never greedy, you still demand interest. More than is due is paid to you, so that you become the debtor—and who has anything that is not yours?note

Who will grant me to rest in you? Who will grant me that you come into my heart and make it drunk, so that I forget my evils and embrace my one good—you? What are you to me? Have mercy, so that I may speak. What am I myself to you, that you command me to love you, and if I do not, you are angry with me and threaten me with enormous miseries? Is it a small misery in itself if I do not love you? Ah, me! Tell me, by your mercies, Lord my God, what you are to me. “Say to my soul, ‘I am your salvation.’” Say it so that I may hear. See, the ears of my heart are before you, Lord. Open them and say to my soul, “I am your salvation.” I will run after that voice and take hold of you. “Do not hide your face from me.” Let me die, so that I may not die—so that I may see it.note

The house of my soul is too narrow for you to come into it: let it be enlarged by you. It is in ruins: rebuild it. It has things in it that offend your eyes: I confess it, and I know it. But who will cleanse it? Or to whom but you shall I cry, “Cleanse me from my hidden faults, Lord, and spare your servant from the faults of others”? “I believe, and so I speak,” Lord: you know. Have I not “declared my transgressions” to you “against myself,” my God, “and you forgave the wickedness of my heart”? I do not go to court with you, who are the truth; and I do not want to deceive myself, “so that my wickedness may not lie to itself.” So I do not go to court with you, because “if you mark iniquities, Lord, Lord, who will stand?”note

Yet let me speak before your mercy—let me, who am dust and ashes, speak all the same. For see, it is your mercy I am speaking to, not some man who would mock me. Perhaps you too mock me; but you will turn and have mercy on me. For what is it I want to say, Lord, except that I do not know where I came from into this—shall I call it a dying life, or a living death? I do not know. And the comforts of your mercies took me up, as I have heard from the parents of my flesh, from whom and in whom you formed me in time—for I do not remember. So the comforts of human milk received me; yet neither my mother nor my nurses filled their own breasts, but you, through them, gave me the food of infancy, according to your ordinance and the riches you have laid out down to the very foundation of things.

Later I began to smile as well, first in my sleep, then awake. This was told me about myself, and I believed it, since we see other infants do the same; for I do not remember these things of mine. And see, little by little I began to sense where I was, and I wanted to show my wishes to those who could fulfill them, and I could not, because my wishes were inside and they were outside, and they had no sense by which they could enter into my soul. So I would throw my limbs about and make noises—signs resembling my wishes, the few I could, as best I could; for they did not really resemble them. And when I was not obeyed—either because I was not understood, or so that I would come to no harm—I was indignant that my elders did not submit to me and that free people did not wait on me as slaves, and I took my revenge on them by crying. That infants are like this I have learned from those I have been able to observe; and that I was like this myself, they have shown me, without knowing it, better than my nurses who did know.

And see, my infancy died long ago, and I am alive. But you, Lord, who live forever and in whom nothing dies—for before the beginnings of the ages, and before anything that can even be called “before,” you are; and you are God and Lord of all that you have created; and with you stand the causes of all unstable things, and the unchangeable origins of all changeable things abide, and the eternal reasons of all things without reason and bound by time live on—tell me, your suppliant, God; merciful one, tell me, your miserable one: did my infancy follow some earlier age of mine that had already died? Or was that the time I spent within my mother’s womb? For about that, too, something has been told me, and I have myself seen pregnant women. And what was before that, my sweetness, my God? Was I anywhere, or anyone?

I confess to you, Lord of heaven and earth, and give you praise for my beginnings and my infancy, which I do not remember. And you have granted human beings to infer much about themselves from others, and to believe much about themselves on the authority even of ordinary women. For I existed and lived even then, and already, at the end of infancy, I was looking for signs by which to make my feelings known to others. Where could such a living creature come from, if not from you, Lord? Will anyone be the craftsman of his own making? Or is there some channel drawn from elsewhere through which being and life flow into us, other than your making us, Lord—you for whom being and living are not two different things, because to be supremely and to live supremely are one and the same?

Hear me, God. Woe to the sins of humankind! And it is a human being who says this, and you have mercy on him, because you made him, but you did not make the sin in him. Who reminds me of the sin of my infancy? For no one is clean of sin before you, not even an infant whose life on earth is a single day. Who reminds me? Any tiny little one now, in whom I see what I do not remember about myself? What, then, was my sin at that time? That I gaped for the breast, wailing? For if I did that now—gaping, not for the breast of course, but for the food suited to my years—I would be laughed at and rebuked, quite rightly. So I was doing things then that deserved rebuke; but since I could not understand anyone rebuking me, neither custom nor reason allowed me to be rebuked. For as we grow up we root these things out and throw them away; and I have never seen anyone who knows what he is doing throw out what is good when he clears something out.note

You, then, Lord my God, who gave the infant life and a body—a body which, as we see, you furnished with senses, fitted together with limbs, graced with a shape, and in which, for its wholeness and safety, you implanted all the drives of a living creature—you command me to praise you for these things, and to confess to you, and to “sing to your name, Most High”; for you are God, almighty and good, even if you had made only these things, which no one else can make but you, the One, from whom comes all measure; most beautiful, who give form to all things and order all things by your law. This age of mine, then, Lord, which I do not remember living, about which I have trusted others, and which I have inferred from other infants that I passed through—though that inference is quite reliable—I am reluctant to count as part of this life of mine that I live in this world.note

God, my God, what miseries I experienced there, and how I was made a fool of! For it was set before me as a boy, as the right way to live, that I should obey those who urged me on, so that I might flourish in this world and excel in the arts of the tongue that serve human honor and false riches. Then I was sent to school to learn my letters, and I did not know, poor wretch, what use they were. And yet if I was slow at learning, I was beaten. For our elders approved of this, and many who had lived this life before us had laid down the painful roads we were forced to travel, with labor and sorrow multiplied for the sons of Adam. But we found, Lord, people who prayed to you, and from them we learned to think of you, as best we could, as someone great who could hear us and come to our aid even without appearing to our senses.

Is there anyone, Lord, of so great a soul, clinging to you with so mighty a love—is there anyone, I say (for a certain dullness can also produce this; so there is such a person)—who, clinging to you in devotion, is so greatly moved that he can make as light of the rack and the iron claws and all kinds of such tortures (to escape which people all over the world beg you in great fear), while loving those who dread them most bitterly, as our parents laughed at the torments we boys suffered from our teachers? For we did not fear them any less, nor pray to you any less to escape them; and yet we sinned by writing or reading or thinking about our lessons less than was required of us. For we did not lack memory or intelligence, Lord, which you willed us to have in sufficient measure for our age; but we loved to play, and we were punished for it by people who were certainly doing the same sort of thing.

And yet I sinned, Lord God, orderer and creator of all things in nature, but of sins only the orderer—Lord my God, I sinned by acting against the commands of my parents and of those teachers. For I could later make good use of the letters they wanted me to learn, whatever their motives. I was disobedient not because I chose better things, but from love of play: I loved proud victories in contests, and loved having my ears tickled by false stories so that they itched all the more hotly, while the same curiosity flashed more and more through my eyes toward the shows, the games of grown-ups. Yet those who put on these games enjoy such prestige that almost everyone wishes it for their little ones—whom they nonetheless gladly allow to be beaten if such shows keep them from the studies by which they hope they will one day come to put on such shows themselves.

For I had heard, while still a boy, of the eternal life promised to us through the humility of the Lord our God, who came down to our pride; and I was already being signed with the sign of his cross and seasoned with his salt from the time I left the womb of my mother, who greatly hoped in you. You saw, Lord, when I was still a boy and one day was suddenly burning with fever from a stomach complaint and close to death—you saw, my God, since you were already my guardian, with what surge of feeling and with what faith I begged for the baptism of your Christ, my God and Lord, from the devotion of my mother and of the mother of us all, your Church. And the mother of my flesh was deeply troubled, since with a chaste heart, in your faith, she was in labor still more lovingly with my eternal salvation; and she would already have hurried to have me initiated into the saving sacraments and washed clean, confessing you, Lord Jesus, for the forgiveness of sins—had I not suddenly recovered.note

I ask you, my God—I would like to know, if you too would like it—for what purpose my baptism was put off at that time: was it for my good that the reins on sinning were, so to speak, loosened for me? Or were they not loosened? Why, then, even now do we hear on all sides, about this person and that, “Leave him alone, let him do it: he isn’t baptized yet”? And yet where the body’s health is concerned we do not say, “Let him be wounded some more: he isn’t healed yet.” How much better, then, if I had been healed at once, and if the care of my family and my own had seen to it that the health of my soul, once received, was kept safe in your keeping, since you had given it. Much better indeed. But how many great waves of temptation seemed to loom after boyhood—my mother already knew of them, and she preferred to expose to them the clay from which I would later be formed, rather than the image already fashioned.

Yet in boyhood itself, when there was less to fear for me than in adolescence, I did not love my lessons, and I hated being pushed into them; and yet I was pushed, and good was done to me. I myself did not do good (for I would not have learned unless I was forced, and no one does good against his will, even if what he does is good); nor did those who pushed me do good; but good was done to me by you, my God. For they did not consider to what end I would put what they forced me to learn, except to satisfy the insatiable cravings of a wealthy poverty and a shameful glory. But you, by whom “the hairs of our head are numbered,” used the error of all who pressed me to learn for my benefit, and my own error, in not wanting to learn, you used for my punishment—a punishment I well deserved, so small a boy and so great a sinner.note

But what was the reason why I hated Greek, in which I was being schooled as a small boy? Even now I have not fully worked it out. For I had come to love Latin literature—not what the first teachers teach, but what is taught by those called grammarians. Those first lessons, where one learns to read and write and count, I found no less burdensome and painful than all of Greek. Yet where did this come from, too, if not from sin and the vanity of life, by which I was “flesh, and a breath that goes on its way and does not return”?note

For what is more miserable than a miserable wretch who does not pity himself, who weeps for the death of Dido, which came from loving Aeneas, but does not weep for his own death, which came from not loving you, God, light of my heart, bread for the inner mouth of my soul, power that is wedded to my mind and the inmost recesses of my thought? I did not love you, and I was unfaithful to you, and as I was unfaithful I heard all around me, “Well done! Well done!” For friendship with this world is unfaithfulness to you, and “Well done! Well done!” is said so that a man is ashamed if he is not like that. And for these things I did not weep, and I wept for Dido, “dead, having sought her end by the sword,” while I myself was seeking the lowest ends of your creation, having abandoned you—earth going into earth. And if I were forbidden to read these things, I would grieve, because I could not read what made me grieve. Such is the madness by which this kind of literature is thought more respectable and richer than the lessons in which I learned to read and write.note

But now let my God cry out in my soul, and let your truth say to me, “It is not so, it is not so.” That earlier teaching is certainly better. For see, I am readier to forget the wanderings of Aeneas and everything of that kind than how to write and read. True, curtains hang at the doors of the grammar schools; but they signify not so much the honor of a mystery as the covering-up of error. Let those whom I no longer fear not cry out against me, while I confess to you what my soul desires, my God, and find rest in condemning my evil ways, so that I may love your good ways. Let the sellers and buyers of grammar not cry out against me; for if I put it to them and ask whether it is true that Aeneas once came to Carthage, as the poet says, the less educated will answer that they do not know, and the more educated will even deny that it is true.

Why, then, did I hate Greek literature too, which sings of such things? For Homer too is skilled at weaving such tales and is most sweetly vain; yet to me as a boy he was bitter. I believe Virgil is the same to Greek boys when they are forced to learn him as I was forced to learn Homer. It was the difficulty, clearly—the sheer difficulty of mastering a foreign language—that sprinkled gall, as it were, over all the sweetness of the Greek tales. For I knew none of those words, and I was pressed hard, with savage threats and punishments, to learn them. There was a time, of course, when as an infant I knew no Latin words either; and yet I learned them just by paying attention, without any fear or torment, amid the coaxing of nurses, the jokes of people smiling at me, and the merriment of people playing with me.

“Hear my prayer, Lord,” so that my soul may not faint under your discipline, nor I faint in confessing to you your mercies, by which you rescued me from all my worst ways, so that you might grow sweeter to me than all the seductions I used to follow, and I might love you with all my strength, and clasp your hand with my whole heart, and you might rescue me from every temptation to the very end. For see, Lord, my king and my God: let whatever useful thing I learned as a boy serve you; let what I speak and write and read and count serve you; for when I was learning empty things, you were giving me discipline, and you forgave me the sins of my delight in those empty things. For in them I learned many useful words; but these can also be learned in things that are not empty, and that is the safe road for children to walk.note

But woe to you, river of human custom! Who will stand against you? How long before you dry up? How long will you roll the children of Eve into that great and fearful sea which even those who have climbed aboard the wood can barely cross? Did I not read in you of Jupiter both thundering and committing adultery? Of course he could not do both; but it was so presented that real adultery would have authority for imitation, with false thunder acting as go-between. And which of the gowned schoolmasters listens with a sober ear to a man made of their own dust crying out and saying, “Homer invented these things and transferred human traits to the gods; I would rather he had transferred divine ones to us”? But it is truer to say that he did invent these things, but by attributing divine qualities to wicked men, so that crimes would not be thought crimes, and whoever committed them would seem to be imitating not depraved men but the gods of heaven.note

And yet, you river of hell, the children of men are thrown into you, with fees paid, to learn these things; and it is a great affair when this is done publicly in the forum, in full view of laws that decree salaries on top of the fees; and you pound your rocks and roar, saying, “This is where words are learned, this is where eloquence is acquired—so necessary for persuading people and setting out one’s views.” So we would not know these words—“shower of gold” and “lap” and “trick” and “temples of heaven” and the other words written in that passage—unless Terence brought on stage a worthless young man who sets up Jupiter as his model for debauchery, while he looks at a painting on a wall showing this scene: how Jupiter, they say, once sent a shower of gold into Danaë’s lap, playing a trick on a woman? And see how he stirs himself up to lust, as if taught by heaven: “But what a god!note

Allow me, my God, to say something also about my talent, your gift, and the nonsense on which I wore it down. For a task was set me—one that troubled my soul greatly, with the prize of praise and the fear of disgrace or a beating—to speak the words of Juno, angry and grieving that she could not “turn the king of the Trojans away from Italy,” words I had never heard Juno say. But we were forced to follow, wandering, in the footsteps of poetic fictions, and to say in prose something like what the poet had said in verse. And the one who spoke most admirably was the one in whom, in keeping with the dignity of the character portrayed, the feeling of anger and grief stood out most lifelike, with words fitly clothing the thoughts. What good was it to me, O true life, my God, that my declamation was applauded above those of many of my peers and fellow students? Look, was not all that smoke and wind? Was there nothing else on which my talent and my tongue could be exercised?note

What wonder, then, that I was swept off into vanities like these and went out, away from you, my God, when the men set before me as models were ones who, if they reported some deed of theirs that was not bad with a barbarism or a solecism, were criticized and put to shame; but if they narrated their lusts in correct and properly constructed words, fully and in good order, were praised and took pride in it? You see these things, Lord, and you keep silent, “patient and abundant in mercy and true.” Will you always keep silent? Even now you are drawing out of this most monstrous abyss a soul that seeks you and thirsts for your delights, and whose heart says to you, “I have sought your face; your face, Lord, I will seek.” For to be far from your face is to be in the darkness of passion.note

See, Lord God, and see patiently, as indeed you see, how carefully the children of men observe the conventions of letters and syllables received from those who spoke before them, while they neglect the eternal covenants of everlasting salvation received from you. So much so that someone who holds to or teaches those old agreements about sounds, if against the rules of grammar he pronounces “human” without aspirating the first syllable, displeases people more than if, against your commandments, he hates a human being, though he is one himself. As if he could feel any enemy to be more destructive than the very hatred that rouses him against that enemy; or as if anyone could do more damage by persecuting another than he does to his own heart by hating him. And surely the knowledge of letters is no more inward than the conscience written within us, which tells us that we are doing to another what we would not want to suffer ourselves.note

On the threshold of such ways I lay as a boy, wretched, and this was the wrestling school of that arena, where I was more afraid of committing a barbarism than I was careful, if I committed one, not to envy those who did not. I say this and confess it to you, my God: these were the things for which I was praised by the people whom to please was, for me at that time, to live rightly. For I did not see the whirlpool of filth into which I had been cast out of your sight. And in their eyes, what was fouler than I was by then, when I displeased even such people as these, deceiving with countless lies my tutor and my teachers and my parents, out of love of play, eagerness to watch trivial shows, and a restless urge to imitate them? I even stole from my parents’ storeroom and from their table, either because my greed commanded it, or so that I might have something to give the boys who sold me a share in their games—games which, all the same, they enjoyed just as much as I did.note

And yet, Lord, thanks be to you, the most excellent and best Creator and Ruler of the universe, our God, even if you had willed me to be no more than a child. For even then I existed, I lived and I felt, and I took care of my own well-being—a trace of that most hidden unity from which I came. By an inner sense I guarded the wholeness of my senses, and even in my little thoughts about little things I delighted in the truth. I did not want to be deceived; my memory was strong; I was being furnished with speech; I was comforted by friendship; I shunned pain, humiliation and ignorance. What in such a living creature is not wonderful and praiseworthy? But all these are gifts of my God. I did not give them to myself; and they are good, and all of them together are me. So he who made me is good, and he himself is my good, and I exult before him for all the good things that made me what I was, even as a boy.

I want to call to mind my past foulness and the carnal corruptions of my soul—not because I love them, but so that I may love you, my God. It is for love of your love that I do this, going back over my most wicked ways in the bitterness of recollection, so that you may grow sweet to me—a sweetness that does not deceive, a sweetness happy and secure—and so that you may gather me up from the scattered state in which I was torn to pieces when I turned away from you, the One, and vanished into the many. For there was a time in my youth when I burned to take my fill of the lowest things, and I dared to run wild in a forest of various, shadowy loves; my beauty wasted away, and I rotted before your eyes, pleasing myself and longing to please the eyes of men.

And what was it that delighted me, except to love and to be loved? But the measure was not kept, from mind to mind, where the bright boundary of friendship lies. Instead, mists rose from the muddy lust of the flesh and the bubbling spring of puberty, and they clouded and darkened my heart, so that the clear sky of love could not be told apart from the fog of lust. Both seethed together in confusion, swept my weak youth over the cliffs of craving, and drowned it in a whirlpool of shameful deeds. Your anger had grown strong over me, and I did not know it. I had been deafened by the clanking of the chain of my mortality, the punishment for the pride of my soul; and I went farther from you, and you let me; and I was tossed about and poured out and spilled and boiled over in my fornications, and you were silent. O my joy, so slow in coming! You were silent then, and I went on, farther and farther from you, into more and more barren seeds of sorrow, in proud dejection and restless weariness.

Who might have tempered my misery, turned the fleeting beauties of the lowest things to good use, and set limits to their sweetness, so that the waves of my youth might have spent themselves on the shore of marriage? If they could not find calm there, content with the purpose of having children, as your law prescribes, Lord—you who shape even the offspring of our death, and are able to lay a gentle hand on the thorns that were shut out of your paradise, to soften them; for your omnipotence is not far from us, even when we are far from you—then at least I should have listened more attentively to the voice from your clouds: “Such people will have trouble in the flesh, and I would spare you”; and “It is good for a man not to touch a woman”; and “He who is without a wife thinks about the things of God, how to please God; but he who is joined in marriage thinks about the things of the world, how to please his wife.” These were the voices I should have heeded more attentively, and, cut off for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, I would have waited more happily for your embraces.note

But I, wretched, boiled over, following the surge of my own current and leaving you behind; I went beyond all your laws, and I did not escape your scourges. For what mortal does? You were always there, severe in your mercy, sprinkling all my unlawful pleasures with the bitterest disappointments, so that I might look for pleasure without disappointment—and where I could find that, I would find nothing except you, Lord, nothing except you, who make pain a lesson, and strike in order to heal, and kill us so that we may not die away from you. Where was I? And how far was I exiled from the delights of your house in that sixteenth year of my flesh, when the madness of lust—licensed by human shamelessness, but forbidden by your laws—took up its scepter over me, and I surrendered to it completely?note

In that year my studies were interrupted. I had been brought home from Madauros, the nearby town where I had already begun to live away from home to study literature and oratory, while the money for a longer stay away, at Carthage, was being got together—more by my father’s determination than by his means, for he was a citizen of Thagaste of very modest resources. To whom am I telling this? Not to you, my God; but in your presence I am telling it to my own kind, the human race, however small the portion of it that may come upon these writings of mine. And why do I tell it? Clearly so that I, and whoever reads this, may reflect on what depths we must cry to you from. And what is nearer to your ears than a heart that confesses and a life lived by faith? For who did not praise my father to the skies at that time, because, beyond the means of his household, he spent on his son whatever was needed even for studying so far away?note

But in that sixteenth year, when there was a break in my studies because of the family’s finances and I was on holiday from all schooling and living with my parents, the brambles of lust grew up over my head, and there was no hand to root them out. Worse: when that father of mine saw me at the baths, growing into manhood and clothed in restless youth, he told my mother with joy, as though he were already delighted at the thought of grandchildren—the joy of that drunkenness in which this world forgets you, its Creator, and loves your creation instead of you, drunk on the invisible wine of its own will, perverse and bent toward the lowest things. But in my mother’s breast you had already begun your temple and laid the foundation of your holy dwelling; my father was still a catechumen, and only recently at that.note

Ah me! Do I dare to say that you were silent, my God, when I was going farther from you? Were you really silent to me then? And whose were they if not yours, those words you sang in my ears through my mother, your faithful one? Yet none of it went down into my heart so that I acted on it. For she wanted—and I remember how she warned me in private, with enormous anxiety—that I should not commit fornication, and above all that I should not commit adultery with anyone’s wife. These seemed to me a woman’s warnings, which I would have blushed to obey. But they were yours, and I did not know it; I thought that you were silent and that it was she who spoke—she, through whom you were not silent to me—and in her I despised you: I, her son, the son of your handmaid, your servant.

See the companions with whom I walked the streets of Babylon and rolled in its mud as if in cinnamon and precious ointments. And to make me stick all the faster in its very navel, the invisible enemy trampled on me and seduced me, because I was easy to seduce. For even she who had already fled from the midst of Babylon, though she still moved more slowly in its other quarters—the mother of my flesh—although she had warned me to be chaste, did not likewise take care, in response to what she had heard about me from her husband, to restrain within the bounds of married love what she sensed was already a plague and a danger for the future, if it could not be cut back to the quick.note

There is, after all, beauty in lovely bodies, in gold and silver and all things; in the touch of the flesh, harmony counts for most; and each of the other senses has its own fitting adjustment of bodies. Worldly honor, too, and the power to command and to prevail, have their own splendor—which is also where the eagerness for revenge springs from. And yet, to obtain all these things, we must not go out from you, Lord, or stray from your law. The life we live here also has its allure, because of a certain measure of its own grace and its harmony with all these lowest beauties. Human friendship, too, is sweet with its dear bond, because of the unity it makes out of many minds. For the sake of all these, and things like them, sin is committed, when, through an immoderate leaning toward them—though they are the lowest goods—the better and highest are deserted: you, Lord our God, and your truth, and your law.

So when a crime is being investigated and the question is why it was done, people do not usually believe it until it appears that there could have been a desire to obtain one of those goods we have called the lowest, or a fear of losing one. For they are beautiful and attractive, though compared with the higher goods that bring happiness they are base and lowly. A man has committed murder. Why did he do it? He loved the victim’s wife or his estate; or he wanted to rob him to have something to live on; or he feared losing something of the kind to him; or, having been wronged, he burned to avenge himself. Would he commit murder without a cause, delighting in murder for its own sake? Who would believe it?

What did I, wretched one, love in you, my theft, you nighttime crime of mine in my sixteenth year? You were not beautiful, since you were theft. Or are you anything at all, that I should speak to you? Those pears we stole were beautiful, because they were your creation, most beautiful of all, Creator of all, good God, God the highest good and my true good. Those pears were beautiful, but it was not them that my wretched soul desired. For I had plenty of better ones; those I picked only in order to steal. Once picked, I threw them away, having feasted only on the wickedness, which I enjoyed with delight. For if any of those pears did get into my mouth, what seasoned it there was the crime.

For pride imitates loftiness, whereas you alone are God, exalted above all. And what does ambition seek but honors and glory, whereas you alone are to be honored above all and are glorious forever? The cruelty of the powerful wants to be feared: but who is to be feared except God alone, from whose power what can be seized or stolen away—when, or where, or whither, or by whom? The caresses of the wanton want to be loved: but nothing is more caressing than your love, and nothing is loved more healthfully than your truth, beautiful and radiant beyond all things. Curiosity poses as a zeal for knowledge, whereas you know all things supremely. Even ignorance and stupidity cloak themselves under the names of simplicity and innocence, because nothing is found simpler than you. And what is more innocent than you, since it is the wicked whose own works are their enemies?

So the soul commits fornication when it turns away from you and seeks outside you what it can find pure and clear only when it returns to you. All who put themselves far from you and raise themselves up against you imitate you perversely. But even by imitating you in this way they show that you are the Creator of all nature, and that there is therefore nowhere to go to get away from you altogether. What, then, did I love in that theft? In what way did I imitate my Lord, even if viciously and perversely? Was it that I took pleasure in acting against the law, at least by deceit, since I could not by power—so that, a prisoner, I might imitate a maimed freedom by doing with impunity what was not allowed, in a dark likeness of omnipotence? Here is that slave, fleeing his master and chasing a shadow. O rottenness! O monstrous life, and depth of death!

What shall I give back to the Lord, that my memory recalls these things and yet my soul is not afraid of them? I will love you, Lord, and thank you, and confess your name, because you have forgiven me such great evils, such wicked deeds of mine. I credit it to your grace and your mercy that you have melted away my sins like ice. I credit to your grace also whatever evils I did not do. For what could I not have done, I who loved even a crime for its own sake? And I confess that all has been forgiven me—both the evils I did of my own accord and those I did not do because you were my guide. What man is there who, considering his own weakness, dares to attribute his chastity and innocence to his own strength, so as to love you less—as if he had less need of your mercy, by which you forgive the sins of those who turn to you?note

What fruit did I, wretched, ever have from these things that I now blush to recall—above all from that theft, in which I loved the theft itself and nothing else, when it was itself nothing, and I all the more wretched for it? And yet alone I would not have done it—so I remember my state of mind at the time—alone I would not have done it at all. So in it I also loved the company of those I did it with. Then it is not true that I loved nothing but the theft? No, it is true: nothing else, because that too is nothing. What is it, really? Who is there to teach me, except the one who lights up my heart and sorts out its shadows? What is it?

What was that state of mind? Certainly it was utterly, excessively foul, and woe to me who had it. But still, what was it? “Who understands his sins?” It was a laugh, as though our hearts were being tickled, because we were fooling people who did not think we would do such things and would have strongly objected. Why, then, did it delight me that I was not doing it alone? Is it because no one easily laughs alone? No one easily, it is true; but still, laughter does sometimes overcome people even when they are by themselves, with no one else present, if something very funny strikes the senses or the mind. But I would not have done that alone; alone I would not have done it at all. See, here before you, my God, is the living memory of my soul.note

Who can untie this most twisted and tangled knot? It is foul; I do not want to look at it, I do not want to see it. I want you, justice and innocence, beautiful and lovely to pure eyes, whose fullness never cloys. With you there is deep rest and a life that nothing can disturb. Whoever enters into you enters into the joy of his Lord, and will not fear, and will be at his best in the Best. I slipped away from you, my God, and wandered, straying too far from your steadfastness in my youth, and I became to myself a land of want.note

I was carried away by the shows of the theater, full of images of my own miseries and of fuel for my fire. Why is it that a person wants to feel pain there, watching sad and tragic events that he would not want to suffer himself? And yet as a spectator he wants to feel pain from them, and the pain itself is his pleasure. What is this but a wretched madness? For the less free someone is from such feelings, the more he is moved by them—although when a person suffers himself it is usually called misery, and when he suffers with others, compassion. But what sort of compassion is it, after all, that is felt for fictions on the stage? The listener is not called on to help, only invited to grieve; and the more he grieves, the more he applauds the author of those images.

So tears are loved, and pains. Yet surely every human being wants to rejoice. Or is it that, while no one likes to be miserable, people do like to be compassionate, and since this cannot happen without pain, for this reason alone pains are loved? This too flows from that spring of friendship. But where does it go? Where does it flow? Why does it run down into a torrent of boiling pitch, into the monstrous surges of foul lusts, into which it is itself changed and turned by its own consent, twisted and thrown down from its heavenly calm? Should compassion, then, be rejected? Not at all. So let pains sometimes be loved. But beware of uncleanness, my soul, under the protection of my God, the God of our fathers, worthy of praise and exalted above all forever—beware of uncleanness. For I am not without compassion now; but back then, in the theaters, I shared the joy of the lovers when they enjoyed each other in shameful acts, even though they were only playing it out in the make-believe of the show.note

But I, wretched as I was then, loved to grieve, and I went looking for something to grieve over, when, in someone else’s misfortune—a false one, danced out on the stage—the actor’s performance pleased me more and drew me more strongly, the more it shook tears from me. What wonder, when I, an unhappy sheep straying from your flock and impatient of your care, was disfigured with a foul mange? That was the source of my love of pains—not pains that would pierce me deeply (for I did not love to suffer the kinds of things I loved to watch), but ones which, heard and invented, would scratch me, as it were, on the surface. Yet, as happens with scratching fingernails, a burning swelling followed, and festering, and horrible pus. Such was my life—was it a life, my God?

And your mercy, faithful from afar, hovered over me. Into what wickednesses I wasted away! What sacrilegious curiosity I followed, so that, having deserted you, it led me down to the faithless depths and the deceitful services of demons, to whom I offered my evil deeds in sacrifice! And in all of them you scourged me. I even dared, during the celebration of your solemn rites, within the walls of your church, to desire and to carry through an affair for obtaining the fruits of death. For this you lashed me with heavy punishments, but nothing in proportion to my guilt—O you, my immense mercy, my God, my refuge from the terrible powers that do harm, among whom I wandered with my neck stiff with overconfidence, to go farther and farther away from you, loving my ways and not yours, loving a runaway’s freedom.

Those studies, too, that were called respectable had their direction, looking toward the quarrelsome law courts, so that I might excel in them—the more deceitful, the more praised. Such is the blindness of human beings, who even glory in their blindness. And I was already at the top of the rhetoric school, and I rejoiced proudly and swelled with conceit—though I was much quieter, Lord, you know it, and kept entirely clear of the “wrecking” done by the Wreckers (for this sinister and devilish name is worn as a badge of sophistication). I lived among them with a shameless kind of shame, because I was not one of them. I was with them, and sometimes enjoyed their friendship, though I always shrank from their deeds—that is, from the wreckings with which they wantonly attacked the modesty of newcomers, harassing it for no reason by mockery and so feeding their own malicious glee. Nothing is more like the behavior of demons than that.note

How I burned, my God, how I burned to fly back from earthly things to you—and I did not know what you were doing with me! For with you is wisdom. Now the love of wisdom has a Greek name, “philosophy,” and it was for this that those pages set me on fire. There are people who lead others astray through philosophy, coloring and painting over their errors with that great, attractive, and honorable name. Nearly all such people, of Cicero’s time and earlier, are singled out and exposed in that book. And there the saving warning of your Spirit, given through your good and devoted servant, is made plain:

So I decided to turn my mind to the holy Scriptures and see what they were like. And look: I see something not disclosed to the proud, nor laid bare to children, but humble at the entrance, lofty further in, and veiled in mysteries. I was not the kind of person who could enter it, or bow my neck to follow its steps. For when I first turned to that Scripture I did not feel as I speak now; it seemed to me unworthy to be compared with the dignity of Cicero. My swollen pride shrank from its plainness, and my sharp eye could not pierce its depths. Yet it was the kind of thing that grows along with little ones. But I scorned to be a little one, and, puffed up with arrogance, I thought myself big.

And so I fell in with people raving in their pride, all too carnal and full of talk. In their mouths were the devil’s snares, a birdlime made by mixing together the syllables of your name, and of the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Paraclete, our Comforter, the Holy Spirit. These names never left their lips, but only as sound and the noise of the tongue; their heart was empty of truth. They kept saying, “Truth, truth,” and said it to me often, yet it was nowhere in them. Instead they spoke falsehoods, not only about you, who truly are the Truth, but also about the elements of this world, your creation—though even the philosophers who spoke truly about those things I ought to have passed beyond for love of you, my Father, supremely good, beauty of all things beautiful.note

Where were you for me then, and how far away? Far from you I was wandering, shut out even from the husks of the pigs, I who was feeding them husks. How much better are the tales of the grammarians and poets than those traps! Verse and poetry and Medea flying are surely more useful than the five elements, variously painted up to match the five caves of darkness—things that do not exist at all, and that kill those who believe in them. Verse and poetry I can even turn into real nourishment. As for Medea flying, even when I recited it I did not assert it, and when I heard it recited I did not believe it. But those things I believed—alas, alas!note

For I did not know that other reality, what truly is, and I was nudged, as if by some cleverness, into siding with foolish deceivers when they asked me where evil comes from, whether God was bounded by a bodily shape and had hair and nails, and whether people should be considered righteous who had many wives at once, and killed human beings, and sacrificed animals. Ignorant of these matters, I was thrown into confusion by them; and while I was moving away from the truth, I seemed to myself to be moving toward it. For I did not know that evil is nothing but a privation of good, to the point where nothing at all remains. (And how could I see this, when my seeing went no further than bodies with my eyes, and no further than phantasms with my mind?)

Nor did I know the true inner justice, which judges not by custom but by the most excellent law of almighty God. By that law the customs of places and times are shaped to suit those places and times, while the law itself is everywhere and always, not one thing here and another there, nor one way now and another then. By it Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses and David were righteous, and all those praised by the mouth of God.

These things I did not know then, nor did I notice them. They struck my eyes on every side, and I did not see. I was writing poems, and I was not allowed to put any foot anywhere I liked: it went differently in one meter and another, and even within a single line the same foot did not belong in every position. Yet the art by which I composed did not have one rule here and another there; it held them all at once. And I did not see that justice, which good and holy people have served, holds all its commands together at once, in a far more excellent and sublime way, and varies in no part, and yet in varied times assigns and commands not everything at once, but what is proper to each. In my blindness I found fault with the devout patriarchs, who not only used the things of the present as God commanded and inspired them, but also foretold the future as God revealed it.

Is it ever, anywhere, unjust to love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself? So shameful acts against nature, such as those of the people of Sodom, are to be detested and punished everywhere and always. Even if every nation committed them, all would be held guilty of the same crime under the divine law, which did not make human beings to use one another in that way. For the very fellowship that ought to exist between us and God is violated when the nature of which he is the author is polluted by perverted lust. But shameful acts against human customs are to be avoided according to the diversity of those customs, so that the agreement a city or nation has confirmed among itself by custom or law may not be violated by the lust of any citizen or foreigner. For every part that does not fit its whole is ugly.note

So too with crimes, where there is a lust to do harm, whether by insult or by injury. Both are done either for revenge, as enemy against enemy; or to gain some advantage that belongs to another, as a robber against a traveler; or to avoid some evil, as against someone who is feared; or out of envy, as the less fortunate against the more fortunate, or as someone who has prospered in something against one he fears may become his equal, or resents as his equal already; or for the sheer pleasure of another’s pain, as with spectators of gladiators, or those who jeer and make fools of anyone at all. These are the chief heads of wickedness. They sprout from the lust for power, the lust of the eyes, and the lust of the senses—from one of them, or two, or all three at once. And so people live badly, against the three and the seven, the ten-stringed harp, your Ten Commandments, O God most high and most sweet. But what shameful acts can touch you, who cannot be corrupted? Or what crimes can be done against you, who cannot be harmed?note

But among shameful acts and crimes and so many iniquities there are also the sins of those who are making progress. These are blamed by good judges by the standard of perfection, yet praised in hope of fruit, like the green blade of the grain. And there are some things that look like a shameful act or a crime, yet are not sins, because they offend neither you, the Lord our God, nor the fellowship of society. Such is the case when things are acquired for the needs of life, suited to the time, though it is uncertain whether it was done from a lust for possessing; or when people are punished by duly constituted authority from zeal to correct them, though it is uncertain whether it was done from a lust to harm. So many deeds that people would think should be condemned are approved by your testimony, and many that people praise are condemned with you as witness. For often the outward look of a deed is one thing, and the mind of the doer, and the unseen circumstance of the moment, quite another.

Not knowing these things, I used to mock those holy servants and prophets of yours. And what was I doing when I mocked them, except making myself mocked by you? Gradually, little by little, I was led into such nonsense as to believe that a fig weeps when it is picked, and that the mother tree weeps milky tears. Yet if some saint ate that fig—picked, of course, by someone else’s crime, not his own—he would mix it into his insides and breathe out angels from it, or rather particles of God, as he groaned and belched in prayer. These particles of the supreme and true God would have stayed bound in that fruit, had they not been set free by the teeth and belly of one of the Elect. And I believed, wretch that I was, that more mercy should be shown to the fruits of the earth than to the human beings for whose sake they grow. For if someone hungry who was not a Manichee asked for food, giving him even a mouthful seemed to deserve something like a death sentence.note

And you sent your hand from on high and drew my soul out of this deep darkness, when my mother, your faithful servant, wept for me to you more than mothers weep over the bodies of their dead. For by the faith and spirit she had from you she saw my death, and you heard her, Lord. You heard her and did not despise her tears, which streamed down and watered the ground beneath her eyes wherever she prayed; you heard her. For where else did that dream come from, by which you consoled her, so that she agreed to live with me and share one table with me in her house? (She had begun to refuse this, turning away from and loathing the blasphemies of my error.) She saw herself standing on a kind of wooden rule, and a radiant young man coming toward her, cheerful and smiling at her, while she was grieving and worn out with grief.

And where did this come from, too? When she told me about the vision, and I tried to twist it to mean rather that she should not despair of becoming what I was, she said at once, without the least hesitation, “No. It was not said to me, ‘Where he is, there you are too,’ but ‘Where you are, there he is too.’” I confess to you, Lord, my recollection, as far as I recall it—and I have often spoken of it: I was more moved by this answer of yours through my mother—that she was not shaken by so plausible a false interpretation, and saw so quickly what was there to be seen, which I certainly had not seen before she spoke—than I was by the dream itself. In that dream the joy of this devout woman, which would come so much later, was foretold so long before, to console her in her present anxiety.

Through that same period of nine years, from my nineteenth year to my twenty-eighth, we were led astray and led others astray, deceived and deceiving in various cravings: openly through the studies they call liberal, secretly under the false name of religion—proud in the one, superstitious in the other, empty in both. On one side we chased the emptiness of popular glory, down to the applause of the theater, and poetry contests, and competitions for crowns of grass, and the trifles of the shows, and unbridled lusts. On the other side we sought to be cleansed of this filth by bringing food to those who were called the Elect and holy, so that in the workshops of their stomachs they might manufacture for us angels and gods, through whom we would be set free. These things I pursued and practiced with my friends, who were deceived through me and with me.

In those years I was teaching the art of rhetoric, and, conquered by craving, I sold the talk that conquers. Yet I preferred, Lord, you know it, to have good students, as “good” is commonly understood, and without guile I taught them guile—not to be used against the life of an innocent man, but sometimes to save the life of a guilty one. And you, God, saw from afar my faith slipping on slippery ground and glimmering through thick smoke—the faith I showed in that teaching to those who loved vanity and sought lies, myself their companion.

I remember, too, that when I had decided to enter a competition for theatrical verse, some soothsayer sent to ask me what fee I would pay him to make me win. But I detested and loathed those foul rites, and answered that even if the crown were of immortal gold, I would not allow a fly to be killed for my victory. For he was going to kill living creatures in his sacrifices, and with those offerings, it seemed, he would invite demons to take my side. But this evil too I rejected not out of any purity toward you, God of my heart. For I did not know how to love you, since I could think of nothing but bodily splendors. Does not a soul that sighs after such fictions commit fornication, away from you, and trust in falsehoods, and feed the winds? And yet, of course, I would not have sacrifices offered to demons on my behalf—while by that superstition I was offering myself to them as a sacrifice.

So I did not stop openly consulting those charlatans they call astrologers, on the grounds that they offered practically no sacrifice and directed no prayers to any spirit for the sake of divination. Yet true Christian piety consistently rejects and condemns this too. For it is good to confess to you, Lord, and to say, “Have mercy on me; heal my soul, for I have sinned against you,” and not to abuse your indulgence as a license to sin, but to remember the Lord’s words: “See, you have been made well; sin no more, so that nothing worse happens to you.” All this saving health they try to kill when they say, “The cause of your sinning is fixed in the heavens, and cannot be avoided,” and “Venus did this, or Saturn, or Mars”—so that, naturally, a human being, flesh and blood and proud corruption, may be without fault, and the creator and ruler of the heavens and the stars may take the blame.note

There was at that time a shrewd man, highly skilled in the art of medicine and very distinguished in it, who as proconsul had with his own hand placed that contest crown on my unsound head—but not as a physician. For of that disease you are the healer, who resist the proud but give grace to the humble. Yet did you fail me even through that old man, or stop healing my soul?note

This you provided for me from him, or through him, and you sketched in my memory what I would later search out for myself. But at that time neither he nor dearest Nebridius, a very good and very chaste young man, who laughed at that whole business of divination, could persuade me to give these things up. For the authority of their authors moved me more, and I had not yet found any certain proof, of the kind I was looking for, to show me beyond doubt that the true things said by those who were consulted were said by luck or lot, not by the art of reading the stars.note

In those years, when I had first begun teaching in the town where I was born, I had gained a friend, made very dear through our shared studies, of my own age and blooming, as I was, in the bloom of youth. He had grown up with me as a boy; we had gone to school together and played together. But as a boy he was not yet a friend in the way he now became—though even now not in the way that true friendship is. For friendship is not true unless you bind it together among those who cleave to one another, through the love poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. Yet it was very sweet, ripened by the warmth of shared pursuits. For I had turned him away from the true faith, which as a young man he did not hold genuinely and deeply, toward those superstitious and destructive fables for which my mother wept over me. Now this man was wandering with me in mind, and my soul could not be without him.note

Who can count up your praises, even those one person has experienced in himself alone? What did you do then, my God, and how unsearchable is the abyss of your judgments! When he was suffering from fever, he lay for a long time unconscious in a deathly sweat, and when his life was despaired of, he was baptized without knowing it. I did not care, assuming that his soul would keep what it had received from me rather than what was being done to his unconscious body. But it was quite otherwise. For he revived and recovered, and at once, as soon as I could speak with him—and I could as soon as he could, since I never left his side and we depended so much on each other—I tried to mock, in front of him, the baptism he had received when he was utterly absent in mind and senses, assuming he would mock it with me. But by now he had learned that he had received it.

And now, Lord, all that has passed, and time has softened my wound. May I hear from you, who are truth, and bring the ear of my heart close to your mouth, so that you may tell me why weeping is sweet to the wretched? Or have you, though you are present everywhere, flung our misery far away from you? Do you remain in yourself, while we are tossed about in our trials? And yet unless we wept into your ears, nothing would be left of our hope. Where, then, does it come from, this sweet fruit plucked from the bitterness of life—groaning and weeping and sighing and lamenting? Is it sweet because we hope that you hear us? That is true of prayers, since they carry a longing to reach you. But is it so in grief for something lost, and in the mourning in which I was then wrapped? For I did not hope that he would come back to life, nor was that what I asked for with my tears; I only grieved and wept.

But why do I say all this? Now is not the time for asking questions but for confessing to you. I was wretched—and wretched is every mind bound by friendship to mortal things. It is torn to pieces when it loses them, and then it feels the wretchedness that made it wretched even before it lost them. That is how I was at that time. I wept most bitterly, and I found my rest in bitterness. So wretched was I, and yet I held that wretched life itself dearer than my friend. For though I wished to change it, I was even less willing to lose it than I had been to lose him; and I do not know whether I would have been willing to lose it even for him, as is told of Orestes and Pylades—if the story is not made up—who were willing to die for each other, or together, since for them not to live together was worse than death.note

What madness, not to know how to love human beings as human beings! What a foolish man, to suffer the human lot without any measure! That is what I was then. And so I seethed, I sighed, I wept, I was distraught; I had neither rest nor any counsel. For I was carrying my soul, torn and bleeding, which would not bear to be carried by me, and I could not find anywhere to set it down. Not in pleasant groves, not in games and songs, not in sweet-scented places, not in lavish banquets, not in the pleasures of the bedroom and the bed, not even, finally, in books and poetry did it find rest. Everything filled me with horror, even the light itself. Whatever was not what he was seemed vile and hateful—except groaning and tears, for in them alone was there some little rest. But whenever my soul was drawn away from them, a great load of misery weighed me down.

Times are not idle, nor do they roll by to no effect through our senses: they work wonders in the mind. See, they came and went, day after day, and by coming and going they planted in me other hopes and other memories. Little by little they patched me up again with my old kinds of pleasure, and that grief of mine gave way before them. What took its place were not, indeed, new griefs, but the causes of new griefs. For why had that grief pierced me so easily and so deeply, if not because I had poured out my soul onto the sand by loving someone who was going to die as though he would never die? What most restored and revived me was the comfort of other friends, with whom I loved what I went on to love: and that was a huge fable and a long lie, by whose adulterous caress our mind, itching in its ears, was corrupted. But that fable did not die for me whenever one of my friends died.note

This is what is loved in friends, and loved so much that a person’s conscience feels guilty if he does not love one who loves him, or does not return the love of one who loves him, seeking nothing from the other’s body but signs of goodwill. Hence the mourning when someone dies, the darkness of grief, the heart drenched as sweetness turns to bitterness, and, from the lost life of the dying, the death of the living. Happy is the one who loves you, and his friend in you, and his enemy for your sake. For he alone loses no one dear to him to whom all are dear in the one who is never lost. And who is that but our God, the God who made heaven and earth and fills them, because by filling them he made them? No one loses you except one who leaves you; and in leaving you, where does he go, where does he flee, except from you at peace to you in anger?

“God of hosts, turn us back and show us your face, and we shall be saved.” For wherever the human soul turns, anywhere but to you, it is fastened to sorrows, even if it is fastened to beautiful things outside you and outside itself. Yet these would be nothing at all if they were not from you. They rise and they set: by rising they begin, as it were, to be; they grow toward completion; and once complete, they grow old and perish. Not all things grow old, but all things perish. So when they rise and strive toward being, the faster they grow in order to be, the more they hurry toward not being. Such is their measure. This much you have given them, because they are parts of things that do not all exist at once, but by passing away and succeeding one another they all together make up the universe of which they are parts. (See, this is how our speech too is accomplished, through sounding signs.note

Do not be vain, my soul, and do not let the ear of your heart be deafened by the din of your vanity. You too, listen: the Word himself calls you to return, and there is the place of undisturbed quiet, where love is not abandoned if it does not itself abandon. See, those things pass away so that others may take their place, and so that the lowest level of the universe may be made up of all its parts. “But do I ever go away anywhere?” says the Word of God. Make your dwelling there; entrust to it whatever you have from there, my soul—at least now that you are worn out with deceptions. Entrust to the truth whatever you have from the truth, and you will lose nothing: what has rotted in you will blossom again, all your sicknesses will be healed, what is fleeting in you will be reshaped and renewed and bound fast to you. It will not drag you down to where it descends, but will stand with you and remain with you before God, who always stands and remains.

Why, turned the wrong way, do you follow your flesh? Let it follow you, once you have turned back. Whatever you sense through it is partial; you do not know the whole of which these are parts, and yet they delight you. But if the sense of your flesh were capable of grasping the whole—if it had not, as your just punishment, itself been given a limited place as a part of the universe—you would want whatever exists in the present to pass away, so that the whole might please you more. For what we say, too, you hear through that same sense of the flesh, and you certainly do not want the syllables to stand still, but to fly past, so that others may come and you may hear the whole. So it always is with all the things that make up a single whole (and the things that make it up do not all exist at once): all of them together delight us more than each one singly, if all of them could be perceived.

If bodies please you, praise God for them, and turn your love back upon their maker, so that in the things that please you, you do not displease him. If souls please you, let them be loved in God, because they too are changeable, and only when fixed in him do they stand firm; otherwise they would go their way and perish. So let them be loved in him. Carry off to him with you as many as you can, and say to them: Let us love him. He made these things, and he is not far away. For he did not make them and then go away: they are from him and in him. See where he is: wherever truth is tasted. He is innermost in the heart, but the heart has wandered away from him. Return to your heart, you transgressors, and cling to him who made you. Stand with him and you will stand; rest in him and you will be at rest. Where are you going, into these rough places? Where are you going?note

Our very Life came down here and took on our death and killed it out of the abundance of his own life. And he thundered, calling us to return from here to him, into that secret place from which he came forth to us—first into the virgin womb, where human nature, mortal flesh, was wedded to him, so that it might not be mortal forever. And from there, “like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, he rejoiced like a giant to run his course.” For he did not delay, but ran, calling out by his words, his deeds, his death, his life, his descent, his ascent—calling us to return to him. And he departed from our sight, so that we might return to him. And he departed from our sight, so that we might return to our heart and find him there. For he went away, and see, he is here. He did not want to stay with us long, and yet he has not left us.note

At that time I did not know these things. I loved lower beauties, and I was sinking into the depths. I used to say to my friends: “Do we love anything except what is beautiful? What, then, is the beautiful? And what is beauty? What is it that draws us to the things we love and wins us over to them? For unless there were grace and form in them, they could in no way move us toward themselves.” And I noticed and saw that in bodies themselves there was one thing that is, as it were, a whole, and beautiful for that reason, and another that is fitting because it is well suited to something else, as a part of the body is to the body as a whole, or a shoe to a foot, and so on. This reflection welled up in my mind from the depths of my heart, and I wrote books On the Beautiful and the Fitting—two or three, I think. You know, God; it has slipped my memory.note

But what moved me, Lord my God, to dedicate those books to Hierius, an orator of the city of Rome? I did not know him by sight, but I had come to love the man for his reputation for learning, which was brilliant; and I had heard some of his sayings, and they had pleased me. But he pleased me more because he pleased others, who extolled him with praise, astonished that a Syrian, first trained in Greek eloquence, had afterward become a wonderful speaker in Latin too, and was deeply learned in the subjects that belong to the pursuit of wisdom. A man is praised, and is loved though absent. Does that love pass from the mouth of the one who praises into the heart of the one who hears? Not at all! Rather, one lover sets another on fire. For this is why someone who is praised is loved: when we believe he is being extolled by a heart that does not deceive—that is, when the one who praises him loves him.note

For that is how I loved people then: by the judgment of people, not by yours, my God, in whom no one is deceived. And yet why was it not the way one loves a famous charioteer, or a beast-hunter in the arena celebrated by the enthusiasm of the crowd, but very differently, seriously, and in the way I would want to be praised myself? For I would not want to be praised and loved as actors are—though I myself praised and loved them—but would rather remain unknown than be famous like that, and even be hated rather than loved like that. Where in a single soul are these weights of so many different kinds of love distributed? What is it that I love in another, which in turn, unless I hated it, I would not reject and repel from myself, since each of us is a human being? For it is not like a good horse, loved by someone who would not want to be a horse even if he could.

But that rhetorician was the kind of man I loved in such a way that I wanted to be like him. I was straying, puffed up with conceit, carried about by every wind, and all the while I was being steered by you, but very secretly. How do I know, and how can I confess to you with certainty, that I loved him more because of the love of those who praised him than for the things for which he was praised? Because if those same people, instead of praising him, had criticized him, and in criticizing and scorning him had told the very same things, I would not have been kindled or stirred toward him. Yet the facts would not have been different, nor the man himself; only the feelings of those who told about him. See where the weak soul lies when it does not yet cling to the solidity of truth: as the breezes of talk blow from the breasts of those who hold opinions, so it is carried and turned, twisted and twisted back, and the light is clouded over for it and the truth is not seen—and yet, look, it is right in front of us.

But I did not yet see the hinge on which so great a matter turns in your craftsmanship, Almighty, who alone do wonders. My mind moved among bodily forms. I defined and distinguished the beautiful, as what is so in itself, and the fitting, as what is becoming because it is suited to something else, and I supported this with bodily examples. And I turned to the nature of the mind, but the false opinion I held about spiritual things would not let me see the truth. The very force of truth burst into my eyes, and I turned my throbbing mind away from incorporeal reality toward lines and colors and swelling magnitudes; and because I could not see these in the mind, I thought I could not see the mind.

For just as there are crimes of violence when that movement of the mind in which impulse resides is corrupt and throws itself about insolently and turbulently, and shameful acts when that affection of the soul by which carnal pleasures are drunk in is unrestrained, so errors and false opinions defile life when the rational mind itself is corrupt. So it was in me then, for I did not know that it must be illuminated by another light in order to share in the truth, since it is not itself the nature of truth. For “you will light my lamp, Lord; my God, you will lighten my darkness,” and of your fullness we have all received. For you are the true light that enlightens everyone who comes into this world, because in you there is no change, nor the shadow of a moment’s turning.note

But I was straining toward you and being driven back by you, so that I might taste death, because you resist the proud. And what could be prouder than to claim, in amazing madness, that I was by nature what you are? For though I was changeable—and this was plain to me from the very fact that I wanted to become wise, so as to become better instead of worse—I still preferred to think that you too were changeable rather than that I was not what you are. So I was driven back, and you resisted my stiff and windy neck. I imagined bodily forms; flesh myself, I blamed the flesh; a wandering spirit, I did not return to you. Wandering, I wandered into things that do not exist—not in you, nor in me, nor in any body. They were not created for me by your truth; they were invented by my vanity out of bodies.

I was about twenty-six or twenty-seven years old when I wrote those volumes. I was turning over in myself bodily fictions that clattered in the ears of my heart—ears that I was straining, sweet truth, toward your inner melody, as I thought about the beautiful and the fitting. I longed to stand and hear you, and to rejoice with joy at the bridegroom’s voice, and I could not, because I was dragged outside by the voices of my error, and by the weight of my pride I kept falling to the depths. For you did not give joy and gladness to my hearing, nor did my bones rejoice, for they had not been humbled.note

And what good did it do me that when I was about twenty, and some writings of Aristotle came into my hands—the ones they call the Ten Categories—I read them by myself and understood them? At their very name, when my teacher, the rhetorician of Carthage, and others who were considered learned spoke of them with cheeks puffed and crackling with conceit, I used to gape in suspense, as if at something great and divine. When I compared notes with people who said they had barely understood them with the help of very learned teachers—who not only explained them aloud but drew many diagrams in the sand—they could tell me nothing more than I had learned reading alone by myself.note

What good did this do me, when it actually did me harm? For I thought that absolutely everything that exists was contained in those ten categories, and so I tried to understand you too, my God, who are wonderfully simple and unchangeable, as if you too were the subject of your greatness or your beauty, so that these were in you as in a subject, as they are in a body. But your greatness and your beauty are you yourself, whereas a body is not great and beautiful by being a body, since even if it were less great and less beautiful, it would still be a body. What I thought about you was falsehood, not truth: figments of my misery, not the foundations of your blessedness. For you had commanded, and so it was happening in me, that the earth should bring forth thorns and thistles for me, and that I should come to my bread only by toil.note

And what good did it do me that I, at that time the most worthless slave of evil cravings, read by myself and understood all the books I could get hold of on the arts they call liberal? I delighted in them, and I did not know where whatever was true and certain in them came from. For I had my back to the light and my face toward the things that are lit, so that my face itself, with which I saw the things that were lit, was not itself lit. Whatever there was on the art of speaking and of reasoning, on the dimensions of figures, on music and on numbers, I understood without great difficulty and with no one teaching me. You know, Lord my God, that quickness of understanding and sharpness of discernment are your gift.

But what good did it do me, when I thought that you, Lord God, Truth, were a vast luminous body, and I a fragment of that body? What extreme perversity! But that is how I was. And I do not blush, my God, to confess to you your mercies toward me and to call upon you—I who did not blush then to profess my blasphemies before people and to bark against you. What good, then, was a mind nimble in those disciplines, and all those knotty books unknotted without the help of any human teacher, when I was going astray, in shameful and sacrilegious ugliness, in the teaching of godliness? Or what great harm did a much slower mind do to your little ones, since they did not go far from you, so that in the nest of your church they might grow their feathers in safety and nourish the wings of love on the food of sound faith? O Lord our God, let us hope in the shelter of your wings: protect us and carry us.

Accept the sacrifice of my confessions from the hand of my tongue, which you formed and stirred up to confess your name; heal all my bones, and let them say, “Lord, who is like you?” For one who confesses to you does not teach you what is happening inside him, because a closed heart does not shut out your eye, nor does human hardness push away your hand. You loosen it when you will, whether in mercy or in punishment, and there is no one who can hide from your heat. But let my soul praise you so that it may love you, and let it confess your mercies to you so that it may praise you.note

Let the restless and the wicked go and flee from you. You see them, and you mark out the shadows; and look, all things are beautiful with them, while they themselves are ugly. And what harm have they done you? Or in what way have they dishonored your rule, which is just and whole from the heavens down to the lowest things? For where did they flee when they fled from your face? Or where do you not find them? But they fled so as not to see you who see them, and so that, blinded, they might stumble against you—for you abandon nothing that you have made—so that the unjust might stumble against you and be justly punished, withdrawing from your gentleness, stumbling against your uprightness, and falling upon your severity. Evidently they do not know that you are everywhere, you whom no place contains, and that you alone are present even to those who go far from you.

Let me set out, in the sight of my God, that twenty-ninth year of my life. A certain bishop of the Manichees had come to Carthage, Faustus by name, a great snare of the devil, and many were entangled in it through the lure of his smooth eloquence. Although I too praised that eloquence, I nonetheless distinguished it from the truth of the things I was eager to learn; I was looking not at the dish in which his speech was served, but at what food of knowledge this Faustus, so celebrated among them, would set before me to eat. For his reputation had told me in advance that he was highly skilled in every respectable branch of learning and especially well versed in the liberal arts. And since I had read a great deal of the philosophers and kept it committed to memory, I compared some of their teachings with those long myths of the Manichees. What seemed more probable to me was what had been said by those who were capable enough to be able to assess the world, even though they never found its Lord.note

For they search out these things with their own minds and with the intelligence you gave them, and they have discovered much, and predicted many years in advance eclipses of the sun and moon—on what day, at what hour, and how great a part would be eclipsed—and their calculation has not deceived them. It turned out just as they predicted. They wrote down the rules they had worked out, and these are read today; and from them it is predicted in what year, in what month of the year, on what day of the month, at what hour of the day, and to what extent of its light the moon or the sun will be eclipsed: and it will happen as predicted.

But they have not known the way, your Word, through whom you made the things they count, and the people who count them, and the sense by which they perceive what they count, and the mind with which they count; and of your wisdom there is no counting. But the only-begotten himself was made for us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification; he was counted among us, and he paid tribute to Caesar. They have not known this way, by which they might come down from themselves to him and through him go up to him. They have not known this way, and they think themselves lofty and shining among the stars; and look, they have fallen to the earth, and their foolish heart has been darkened.note

Still, I kept hold of many true things they had said about the creation itself. Their reasoning made sense to me, confirmed by calculation, by the order of the seasons, and by the visible testimony of the stars. I compared it with the sayings of Mani, who wrote a great deal on these subjects, raving at enormous length; and in him I found no account that made sense of the solstices and equinoxes, or of eclipses, or of anything of the kind I had learned in the books of secular wisdom. There, though, I was ordered to believe; and what I was told did not square with the accounts I had tested by calculation and with my own eyes, but was far different.note

Lord God of truth, does anyone who knows these things please you just for that? Unhappy is the person who knows all of them but does not know you; happy is the one who knows you, even if he does not know them. And whoever knows both you and them is not happier because of them; he is happy because of you alone—if, knowing you, he glorifies you as you are and gives thanks, and does not become futile in his thinking.

But who asked some Mani or other to write about these things too, when piety could be learned without any expertise in them? For you said to humankind, “See: piety is wisdom.” He could have been ignorant of that even if he had known these things perfectly; but since he did not know these things, and yet most shamelessly dared to teach them, he could not possibly have known piety. For it is vanity to profess these worldly matters even when one knows them; piety is to confess to you. So, straying from the path, he talked at length about these things, with the result that once he was refuted by those who had truly learned them, it became plain what his understanding was worth in other matters, which are more hidden. For he did not want to be thought little of; he tried to persuade people that the Holy Spirit, the Comforter and Enricher of your faithful, was personally present in him with full authority.note

When I hear some Christian brother or other who does not know these things and takes one thing for another, I look patiently on a man holding his opinion. I do not see that it harms him, so long as he believes nothing unworthy of you, Lord, Creator of all things, even if he happens to be ignorant of the position and nature of the physical creation. It does harm him, though, if he thinks this belongs to the very form of the teaching of piety, and dares to assert too stubbornly what he does not know. Yet even such weakness, in the cradle of faith, is supported by Love, our mother, until the new self grows up “to maturity” and can no longer be “carried about by every wind of doctrine.”note

For almost the whole nine years in which, a wanderer in mind, I was their hearer, I had been awaiting the arrival of this Faustus with all too eager longing. The others among them whom I happened to meet, who failed when I put questions about such things to them, kept promising me him: once he came and we talked together, these questions—and any greater ones I might have—would be very easily and very clearly resolved. So when he came, I found a gracious man, pleasant in speech, who chattered the very things they usually say, only much more sweetly. But what use to my thirst was this most elegant server of precious cups? My ears were already sated with such things. They did not seem better to me because they were better said, nor true because eloquent; nor did the soul seem wise because the face was fitting and the speech graceful.

So my eagerness, with which I had waited for the man so long, was indeed delighted by his energy and feeling in debate, and by the apt words that came readily to clothe his thoughts. I was delighted, and I praised and extolled him along with many others—even more than many. But it annoyed me that in the crowd of listeners I was not allowed to put my questions to him and share the burden of them in friendly conversation, exchanging talk back and forth. When I was able to, and together with my friends began to claim his attention at a time when a back-and-forth discussion was not out of place, and put forward some things that troubled me, I learned from experience first of all that he had no experience of the liberal arts except grammar, and that only in the ordinary way.

For once he had shown himself clearly enough to be untrained in the arts in which I had thought he excelled, I began to despair that he could open up and resolve the things that troubled me. Someone ignorant of these could still hold the truth of piety—but only if he were not a Manichee. Their books are full of endlessly long fables about the sky and the stars and the sun and the moon. I no longer thought he could explain precisely—as I very much wanted—by comparing them with the mathematical calculations I had read elsewhere, whether things were really as the Manichees’ books contained, or at least whether an equally good account could be given from them. When I brought these things forward to be considered and discussed, he was modest enough not to dare to take up the burden. He knew that he did not know these things, and he was not ashamed to admit it.

So the zeal I had directed toward Mani’s writings was broken, and I despaired still more of their other teachers, since in many of the things that troubled me this famous man had turned out as he did. I began to spend time with him for the sake of his own passion: he was burning for literature, which I was then already teaching to young men as a professor of rhetoric at Carthage. I read with him either what he wanted to hear or what I thought suited to such a mind. For the rest, all my effort to advance in that sect collapsed completely once I had come to know the man. Not that I separated from them entirely; but, as if finding nothing better, I had decided to be content for the time being with what I had somehow blundered into, unless something more worth choosing should happen to shine out. So that Faustus, who was a snare of death to many, had already begun to loosen the snare in which I was caught, neither willing it nor knowing it.

So you dealt with me so that I was persuaded to go to Rome and to teach there, rather than at Carthage, what I had been teaching. How I was persuaded I will not fail to confess to you, because in these things too your deepest hidden ways and your mercy, ever present to us, should be pondered and proclaimed. I did not want to go to Rome because the friends who urged it promised greater earnings and greater standing—though these things too drew my mind at the time. The greatest reason, almost the only one, was that I heard that young men there studied more quietly and were kept in check by a more orderly discipline: they did not rush wildly and insolently into the school of a teacher who was not their own, and were not admitted at all unless he allowed it. At Carthage, by contrast, the students’ license is disgraceful and unrestrained.

But why I was leaving here and going there, you knew, God, and you did not reveal it to me or to my mother, who wept bitterly at my going and followed me all the way to the sea. But I deceived her as she clung to me with all her strength, determined either to call me back or to come with me. I pretended I did not want to leave a friend until the wind rose and he could sail. And I lied to my mother—and to such a mother! And I got away. For this too you mercifully forgave me, keeping me, full of detestable filth, safe from the waters of the sea for the water of your grace; once I was washed in it, the rivers would dry from my mother’s eyes, with which every day she watered the ground beneath her face before you for my sake. Still, since she refused to go back without me, I barely persuaded her to stay that night in a place close to our ship, a shrine to blessed Cyprian.note

And look—there I was met by the scourge of bodily sickness, and I was already on my way to the underworld, carrying all the evils I had committed against you, against myself, and against others: many and grievous, on top of the bond of original sin by which “in Adam we all die.” For you had not forgiven me any of them in Christ, nor had he undone on his cross the enmities I had contracted with you by my sins. How could he undo them on the cross of a phantom, which is what I had believed of him? As false as the death of his flesh seemed to me, so real was the death of my soul; and as real as the death of his flesh was, so false was the life of my soul, which did not believe it. And as the fevers grew worse, I was going, I was perishing. For where would I have gone, had I left this world then, except into fire and the torments my deeds deserved, in the truth of your order?note

So I do not see how she could have been healed, if such a death of mine had pierced the depths of her love. And where would all those prayers have gone, so many and so frequent, without ceasing? Nowhere but to you. Or would you, God of mercies, despise “the contrite and humbled heart” of a chaste and sober widow, generous in giving alms, attentive to your saints and serving them, letting no day pass without an offering at your altar, coming to your church twice a day, morning and evening, without fail—not for idle tales and old women’s gossip, but so that she might hear you in your sermons and you might hear her in her prayers? Would you despise her tears, with which she asked you not for gold or silver, nor for any unstable or fleeting good, but for the salvation of her son’s soul—you, by whose gift she was what she was? Would you turn them away from your help? Never, Lord.note

So you restored me from that sickness and made the son of your servant well—in body, for the time being—so that there would be someone to whom you could give a better and surer health. Even then, at Rome, I associated with those false and deceiving “saints”: not only with their hearers, among whom was the man in whose house I had fallen ill and recovered, but also with those they call the elect. For it still seemed to me that it is not we who sin, but some other nature in us that sins. It pleased my pride to be beyond blame, and, when I had done something wrong, not to confess that I had done it so that you might heal my soul, since it had sinned against you. Instead I loved to excuse myself and accuse some other thing that was with me and yet was not I.

For the thought had also arisen in me that the philosophers they call the Academics had been wiser than the rest, because they held that everything should be doubted and had concluded that no truth can be grasped by a human being. That, too, is what they seemed to me clearly to have thought, as they are commonly taken to have done; I did not yet understand what they really meant. Nor did I hold back from restraining that same host of mine from the excessive confidence I saw he had in the fabulous stories that fill the Manichees’ books. Yet I was on friendlier terms with them than with other people who had not belonged to that heresy.note

From this came my belief that evil too was some such substance, with its own mass, foul and misshapen and dense—which they called earth—or else thin and fine, like the body of air, which they imagine as a malignant mind creeping through that earth. And because such piety as I had compelled me to believe that a good God had created no evil nature, I set up two masses opposed to each other, both infinite, but the evil one narrower and the good one larger; and from this pestilential beginning the rest of my sacrileges followed. For whenever my mind tried to run back to the Catholic faith, I was thrown back, because the Catholic faith was not what I thought it was.

Next, I did not think the things they had criticized in your Scriptures could be defended; yet at times I did want to discuss each point with someone deeply learned in those books and find out what he thought. For already at Carthage the talks of a certain Elpidius, who spoke and argued in person against these same Manichees, had begun to move me, since he brought forward things from the Scriptures that could not easily be resisted. Their reply seemed weak to me—a reply they did not readily bring out in public, but only to us in private: that the Scriptures of the New Testament had been falsified by somebody or other who wanted to graft the law of the Jews onto the Christian faith; yet they themselves produced no uncorrupted copies. But what most held me captive, and in a way stifled me, as I thought in bodily terms, were those masses; weighed down under them, gasping, I could not breathe the pure and simple air of your truth.note

So I began diligently to do what I had come for, to teach the art of rhetoric at Rome, and first to gather at my house some people to whom, and through whom, I had begun to be known. And look—I discovered that at Rome things happen that I had not had to put up with in Africa. It was indeed made plain to me that those wreckings by dissolute young men did not happen there. “But suddenly,” people said, “to avoid paying their teacher his fee, a crowd of young men conspire together and transfer to another—breakers of faith, for whom justice is cheap compared with love of money.” My heart hated these too, though not “with a perfect hatred.” For perhaps I hated more what I was going to suffer from them than the fact that they were doing wrong to anyone at all.note

So when a request came from Milan to the prefect of the city of Rome to provide that city with a teacher of rhetoric, with travel at public expense granted as well, I myself canvassed for it through those very people drunk with Manichaean vanities—I was going in order to be rid of them, though neither they nor I knew it—so that Symmachus, then prefect, might test me with a set speech and send me. And I came to Milan, to Ambrose the bishop, known throughout the world as among the best, your devout worshiper, whose eloquence in those days vigorously dispensed to your people the richness of your wheat, the gladness of oil, and the sober intoxication of wine. I was led to him by you without knowing it, so that through him I might be led to you knowing it. That man of God received me like a father and welcomed my coming from abroad as a bishop should. And I began to love him—at first not as a teacher of truth, which I utterly despaired of finding in your Church, but as a man who was kind to me.note

For though I did not take pains to learn what he said, but only to hear how he said it—that empty concern was all I had left, since I despaired that any way lay open for a human being to you—the things I neglected came into my mind together with the words I loved; for I could not separate them. And while I opened my heart to take in how eloquently he spoke, there entered with it how truly he spoke—though only step by step. First it began to seem to me that these things too could be defended, and that the Catholic faith, for which I had thought nothing could be said against the Manichees’ attacks, could be maintained without shame. This was especially so after I had heard one riddle from the Old Testament solved, then another, and then many more—passages that killed me when I took them literally.note

Then indeed I strained my mind hard, to see whether I could somehow convict the Manichees of falsehood by some sure proofs. If I had been able to conceive of a spiritual substance, all those contrivances of theirs would at once have been undone and thrown out of my mind; but I could not. Still, as I considered and compared more and more, I judged that most of the philosophers had held far more probable views about the body of this world and all of nature that the bodily senses reach. And so, in the manner of the Academics as they are commonly understood, doubting everything and wavering among all things, I decided that the Manichees at least must be abandoned; I did not think that in the very time of my doubt I should remain in a sect to which I already preferred some philosophers. Yet to those philosophers, because they were without the saving name of Christ, I utterly refused to entrust the cure of my soul’s sickness.

My hope from my youth, where were you all this while, and where had you withdrawn to? Had you not made me, and set me apart from the four-footed beasts, and made me wiser than the birds of the air? Yet I walked through darkness and on slippery ground, and I sought you outside myself, and I did not find the God of my heart. I had come into the depths of the sea; I had lost confidence and despaired of finding the truth. My mother had already come to me, strong in her devotion, following me over land and sea, and secure in you through every danger. In the perils of the sea she even comforted the sailors themselves—who usually comfort inexperienced travelers on the deep when they are frightened—promising them they would arrive safely, because you had promised her this in a vision.

So when she had brought porridge and bread and wine to the shrines of the saints, as was her custom in Africa, and was stopped by the doorkeeper, as soon as she learned that the bishop had forbidden it, she accepted this so devoutly and obediently that I myself marveled at how readily she became an accuser of her own custom rather than a critic of his prohibition.note

I no longer groaned in prayer for you to come to my help; my mind was intent on searching and restless for argument. Ambrose himself I considered a fortunate man by the world’s standards, honored as he was by such great powers; only his celibacy seemed to me a heavy burden. But what hope he carried within him, what struggle he had against the temptations of his own eminence, what comfort he found in adversity, and what savory joys the hidden mouth of his heart tasted as it chewed on your bread—these things I could not guess, and had never experienced. Nor did he know my turmoil or the pit of danger I was in. For I could not ask him what I wanted, in the way I wanted, since crowds of busy people, whose weaknesses he served, shut me off from his ear and his mouth. And when he was not with them, which was only a very little time, he was refreshing either his body with the food it needed or his mind with reading.

But certainly I was given no chance to ask what I longed to ask of that holy oracle of yours, his heart, except when something could be heard briefly. The surges of my turmoil needed to find him completely at leisure, so that they could pour themselves out to him, and they never did. Still, every Lord’s day I heard him among the people, “rightly handling the word of truth,” and more and more I became convinced that all the knots of cunning slander which those deceivers of ours had tied against the divine books could be untied.note

So, since I did not know how this image of yours could exist, I ought to have knocked and asked how it was to be believed, not mockingly attacked it as if it were believed in the way I imagined. The anxiety about what I could hold on to as certain gnawed at my insides all the more sharply, the more ashamed I was that, deluded and deceived for so long by the promise of certainties, I had chattered with childish error and heat about so many uncertain things as if they were certain. That they were false became clear to me only later. But it was certain even then that they were uncertain, and that I had once taken them as certain when I attacked your Catholic Church with blind contentiousness—a Church I had not yet found to teach the truth, but which did not teach what I so fiercely accused it of.

I rejoiced too that the old writings of the Law and the Prophets were no longer set before me to be read with that eye to which they had once seemed absurd, when I criticized your saints for thinking things which in truth they did not think. And I was glad to hear Ambrose often saying in his sermons to the people, as though he were carefully commending it as a rule: “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” For he would draw aside the mystical veil and open up in a spiritual sense passages which, taken literally, seemed to teach something perverse. He said nothing that offended me, though he said things I did not yet know to be true or false. For I kept my heart from assenting to anything, afraid of falling headlong; and by that hanging in suspense I was all the more being strangled. I wanted to be as certain of the things I could not see as I was that seven and three make ten.

From this point on, however, I began to prefer Catholic teaching. I felt that it acted more modestly, and with no deceit at all, in bidding us believe what was not demonstrated (whether because it could be demonstrated, though perhaps not to everyone, or because it could not be demonstrated at all), than the other side did, where credulity was mocked with a rash promise of knowledge, and then so many utterly fabulous and absurd things were commanded to be believed because they could not be demonstrated.

But I believed this sometimes more robustly, sometimes more feebly. Still, I always believed both that you exist and that you care for us, even though I did not know what to think about your substance, or what way led to you, or led back to you. And so, since we were too weak to find the truth by clear reason, and for that reason needed the authority of the holy Scriptures, I had now begun to believe that you would never have given that Scripture such surpassing authority throughout all lands unless you had willed that through it you should be believed in, and through it sought.

I gaped after honors, money, marriage, and you laughed at me. In these cravings I suffered the bitterest hardships—and you were the more gracious to me, the less you let anything that was not you grow sweet to me. Look at my heart, Lord, you who willed that I should remember this and confess it to you. Now let my soul cling to you, the soul you have freed from such sticky birdlime of death. How wretched it was! And you pricked the sore of its wound, so that it might leave everything and turn to you, who are above all things, and without whom all things would be nothing—turn, and be healed.

So away from my soul with those who say to it, “It matters what a person rejoices in. That beggar rejoiced in drunkenness; you in glory.” What glory, Lord? A glory that is not in you. For just as his was not true joy, so that was not true glory either, and it overturned my mind all the more. And he would sleep off his drunkenness that very night; I had gone to sleep with mine and got up with it, and would go to sleep and get up with it again—look, how many days! It does matter what a person rejoices in, I know, and the joy of a faithful hope is incomparably distant from that emptiness. But even then there was a distance between him and me. He was certainly the happier: not only because he was drenched in cheerfulness while I was gutted by cares, but also because he had got his wine by wishing people well, while I was chasing puffed-up vanity by telling lies.

Those of us who lived together as friends groaned together over these things, and I talked of them most of all with Alypius and Nebridius. Alypius was born in the same town as I was, to parents of one of its leading families, and was younger than I. He had studied with me when I first began to teach in our town, and afterward at Carthage. He loved me greatly, because I seemed to him good and learned; and I loved him for his great natural bent toward virtue, which stood out plainly in one so young. But the whirlpool of Carthaginian morals, where frivolous shows are all the rage, had sucked him into a mania for the circus. While he was being wretchedly whirled around in it, and I was teaching rhetoric there in a public school, he did not yet attend my classes as his teacher, because of a quarrel that had arisen between his father and me.note

But it had slipped my mind to take the matter up with him, so that he would not ruin so fine a talent through a blind and headlong enthusiasm for empty games. But you, Lord, who hold the helm of everything you have created, had not forgotten that he was to be, among your sons, a bishop presiding over your sacrament. And so that his correction might be plainly credited to you, you brought it about through me—but without my knowing. For one day, as I sat in my usual place with my students before me, he came in, greeted me, sat down, and turned his attention to what was going on. As it happened, I had a text in hand, and as I was explaining it a comparison with the circus games seemed apt, to make my point more enjoyable and clearer, with biting mockery of those whom that madness had taken captive. You know, our God, that I was not thinking at the time of curing Alypius of that plague.

Still, this was already being stored up in his memory as a medicine for the future. There was another incident too. While he was still a student, already attending my lectures at Carthage, he was in the forum at midday thinking over a speech he was to recite, as students usually practice. You let him be seized as a thief by the custodians of the forum. I think you allowed this, our God, for no other reason than that this man, who was to be so great, might already begin to learn that in hearing cases one person should not readily condemn another through rash credulity. He was walking alone in front of the tribunal with his writing tablets and stylus, when suddenly a young man, one of the students—the real thief—secretly brought an axe and, without Alypius noticing, got in to the lead railings that overlook the silversmiths’ street from above, and began to cut away the lead.

But this was as far as his lesson was to go. For at once, Lord, you came to the aid of his innocence, of which you alone were the witness. As he was being led off either to prison or to punishment, they were met by an architect who had chief responsibility for the public buildings. They were delighted to have run into him of all people, since he used to suspect them when things went missing from the forum—so now at last, they thought, he would know who was doing it. But the man had often seen Alypius at the house of a certain senator whom he regularly went to pay his respects to. He recognized him at once, took him by the hand, led him away from the crowd, and asked the reason for such serious trouble. He heard what had happened, and ordered the whole noisy crowd, grumbling and threatening, to come with him. And they came to the house of the young man who had committed the crime.

It was this Alypius, then, whom I had found at Rome. He clung to me with the strongest bond and set out with me for Milan, both so as not to leave me and to make some use of the law he had learned—more to fulfill his parents’ wishes than his own. He had already sat three times as an assessor, with a self-control that amazed others, while he was the more amazed at those who put gold above integrity. His character was tested not only by the lure of greed but also by the goad of fear. At Rome he was assessor to the Count of the Italian Treasury. At that time there was a very powerful senator to whom many were bound by his favors and many subjected by terror. He wanted to be allowed something or other, as men of his power were used to, that the laws forbade. Alypius resisted. A bribe was promised; in his heart he laughed at it.note

Nebridius too had left his home country near Carthage, and Carthage itself, where he spent most of his time; he had left his father’s excellent estate, left his house, and left his mother, who was not going to follow him. He had come to Milan for no other reason than to live with me in a most ardent pursuit of truth and wisdom. Like me he sighed, like me he wavered: a burning seeker of the happy life and a most penetrating examiner of the hardest questions. So there were the mouths of three needy people, gasping out their want to one another and waiting on you, that you might give them their food in due season. And in all the bitterness which, by your mercy, followed our worldly doings, when we looked for the purpose of our suffering, darkness met us. We turned away groaning and said, “How long is this to go on?” We said this often, and while saying it we did not give those things up, because nothing certain shone out that we could grasp once we had given them up.

And I most of all was amazed, as I anxiously went back over how long a time it had been since my nineteenth year, when I first began to burn with zeal for wisdom, resolving that once I found it I would leave behind all the empty hopes and lying follies of vain cravings. And here I was, already turning thirty, stuck in the same mud, greedy to enjoy present things that were fleeing from me and scattering me, while I kept saying: Tomorrow I will find it. Look, it will appear plainly, and I will hold on to it. Look, Faustus will come and explain everything. O you great men, the Academics! Nothing certain for the conduct of life can be grasped. No—let us search more carefully and not despair. Look, the things in the Church’s books that used to seem absurd are no longer absurd; they can be understood differently, and in a proper sense. I will plant my feet on the step where my parents set me as a boy, until the clear truth is found. But where is it to be sought? When is it to be sought?

Let us dismiss all these empty, pointless things and devote ourselves solely to the search for truth. Life is miserable, death uncertain. Suppose it creeps up on us suddenly: in what state will we leave this world? And where are we to learn what we neglected here? Will we not rather have to pay the penalty for this neglect? Or what if death itself cuts off and ends all care along with all sensation? Then this too must be looked into. But God forbid that it should be so. It is not for nothing, it is not empty, that the towering summit of the Christian faith’s authority is spread across the whole world. Such great things, and such things, would never be done for us by God if the life of the soul were also used up by the death of the body. Why, then, do we hesitate to give up worldly hope and devote ourselves wholly to seeking God and the happy life?

While I was saying these things, and these winds shifted back and forth and drove my heart this way and that, time was passing, and I was slow to turn to the Lord. From day to day I put off living in you, and did not put off dying daily in myself. Loving the happy life, I feared it in its own dwelling-place, and while fleeing from it I sought it. For I thought I would be too miserable if I were deprived of a woman’s embraces. I gave no thought to the medicine of your mercy for healing that weakness, because I had not tried it; and I believed that self-control came from one’s own strength, a strength I was not aware of having. I was so foolish that I did not know that, as it is written, no one can have self-control unless you grant it. And you would surely have granted it, if I had knocked at your ears with inward groaning and with firm faith had cast my care on you.note

Alypius, it is true, kept me from taking a wife, harping on the point that if I did, we could not possibly live together in carefree leisure for the love of wisdom, as we had long desired. For he himself was even then extremely chaste in this respect—remarkably so, since he had had some experience of sexual intercourse at the start of his adolescence. But he had not become attached to it; rather he had regretted and despised it, and from then on lived with complete self-control. I, on the other hand, countered him with the examples of men who had been married and yet had cultivated wisdom, found favor with God, and been faithful and loving to their friends. I was far from their greatness of spirit. Bound by the disease of the flesh and its deadly sweetness, I dragged my chain along, afraid to be released; and as if my wound had been jarred, I pushed away the words of good advice as though they were a hand untying me.

For he was amazed that I, whom he thought highly of, was so stuck in the birdlime of that pleasure that I would insist, whenever we discussed it between us, that I could never lead a celibate life. And when I saw his amazement, I defended myself by saying that there was a great difference between what he had experienced hurriedly and furtively—which he could hardly even remember now, and so could easily despise without any distress—and the delights of my own habit; and if the honorable name of marriage were added to these, he should not wonder why I could not despise that life. So he too began to desire marriage—not at all overcome by lust for that pleasure, but by curiosity. For he said he wanted to know what this thing was, without which my life, which he liked so much, seemed to me not a life but a punishment.

Meanwhile I was being pressed, tirelessly, to marry. I was already making my proposal, and a bride was already being promised, largely through my mother’s efforts, so that once I was married the saving waters of baptism might wash me. She was glad that I was becoming more fit for it day by day, and saw her prayers and your promises being fulfilled in my faith. At my request, and from her own longing, she begged you every day with a strong cry of the heart to show her something in a vision about my future marriage; but you never would. She did see some empty and fanciful things, produced by the pressure of a human spirit preoccupied with the matter, and she told them to me—not with the confidence she used to have when you showed her something, but dismissing them. For she said that by some kind of taste, which she could not explain in words, she could tell the difference between you revealing something and her own soul dreaming.

Many of us friends, too, had been turning things over in our minds, talking together and deploring the turbulent troubles of human life, and we had almost resolved to withdraw from the crowds and live in leisure. We had planned that leisure so that whatever each of us could own we would put into a common fund, making one household out of all of them. Through the sincerity of friendship, nothing would be this one’s or that one’s; instead, one thing would be made out of all, and the whole would belong to each, and everything to everyone. It seemed to us that there could be about ten people in this community, and some of us were very rich—above all Romanianus, from our own town, who had been my close friend from my earliest years, and whom the grave turmoil of his affairs had then drawn to the imperial court. He was the keenest on this plan, and his voice carried great weight in persuading us, because his large fortune far exceeded everyone else’s.note

Meanwhile my sins were multiplying. The woman I had been used to sleeping with was torn from my side as an obstacle to my marriage, and my heart, which clung to her, was cut and wounded and trailed blood. She had gone back to Africa, vowing to you that she would never know another man, and leaving with me the son I had by her. But I, unhappy man, could not even imitate a woman. Impatient of delay—for I was to receive the girl I was courting only after two years—and because I was no lover of marriage but a slave of lust, I procured another woman, certainly not as a wife. So the disease of my soul would be kept alive, as it were, and carried on, intact or even worse, under the escort of a lasting habit, into the realm of married life. Nor was that wound of mine healed, the one made by cutting away the first woman. After the fever and the sharpest pain it began to fester, and it hurt more coldly, so to speak, but more hopelessly.

Praise to you, glory to you, fountain of mercies! I was growing more wretched, and you were coming nearer. Your right hand was already there, at any moment about to snatch me out of the mud and wash me clean, and I did not know it. Nothing called me back from a still deeper whirlpool of carnal pleasures except the fear of death and of your judgment to come, which, through all my shifting opinions, never left my heart. And I used to argue with my friends Alypius and Nebridius about the ends of good and evil. Epicurus, I said, would have won the prize in my mind, had I not believed that after death the soul lives on, and so do the consequences of what we have deserved—which Epicurus refused to believe.note

By now my bad and wicked adolescence was dead, and I was going on into young manhood—the older in years, the more shameful in my emptiness. I could not conceive of any substance except the kind usually seen through these eyes. I did not think of you, God, in the shape of a human body; ever since I had begun to hear something of wisdom, I had always shunned that idea, and I was glad to have found it rejected in the faith of our spiritual mother, your Catholic Church. But what else to think you were did not occur to me.

So I, grown dull of heart and not even clear to myself, thought that whatever was not stretched out over some amount of space, or diffused, or massed together, or swelling, or did not contain or could not contain something of that kind, was nothing at all. For my heart moved among images just like the forms my eyes are used to moving among, and I did not see that the very attention by which I formed those images was not anything of that sort—and yet it could not have formed them unless it were something great. So I thought even of you, life of my life, as vast, penetrating the whole mass of the world through infinite spaces on every side, and beyond it in every direction through immensity without end, so that the earth would have you, the sky would have you, all things would have you, and they would be bounded in you, but you nowhere.

Against those deceived deceivers and talkative mutes—mute, since your Word did not sound from them—it was enough for me, Lord; it was enough, that argument Nebridius used to put forward long ago, back in Carthage, which shook all of us who heard it. What would that race of darkness—whatever it is—which they set against you as an opposing mass, have done to you if you had refused to fight it? If the answer was that it would have done you some harm, then you would be violable and corruptible.note

But even I, at that time—although I said, and firmly believed, that our Lord, the true God, who made not only our souls but our bodies too, and not only our souls and bodies but everyone and everything, could not be defiled or altered or changed in any part—still did not grasp the cause of evil, untangled and made plain. Whatever it was, though, I saw that I had to seek it in a way that would not force me to believe the unchangeable God changeable, lest I myself become the very evil I was looking for. So I sought it without anxiety, certain that what those people said was not true, whom I fled with my whole mind. For I saw that in asking where evil comes from, they were full of malice, since they preferred to think that your substance suffers evil rather than that their own does evil.

I strained to see what I had heard: that the free choice of the will is the cause of our doing evil, and your just judgment the cause of our suffering it. But I could not see it clearly. I tried to lift my mind’s eye out of the depths, and sank again; I tried often, and sank again and again. What lifted me toward your light was this: I knew I had a will as surely as I knew I was alive. So when I willed or did not will something, I was utterly certain that it was I and no one else who willed or did not will it, and I was coming to see more and more that the cause of my sin lay there. But what I did against my will, I saw that I suffered rather than did, and I judged it not a fault but a penalty; and, thinking of you as just, I was quick to admit that I was not unjustly punished by it. But then again I would say: “Who made me? Was it not my God, who is not only good but goodness itself?

For I was striving to find the rest in the same way as I had already found that the incorruptible is better than the corruptible; and so I confessed that you, whatever you were, were incorruptible. For no soul ever could, or ever will be able to, conceive of anything better than you, who are the supreme and highest good. And since the incorruptible is most truly and most certainly to be ranked above the corruptible, as I already ranked it, I could in thought have reached something better than my God—if you were not incorruptible. There, then, where I saw that the incorruptible is to be preferred to the corruptible, I ought to have sought you, and from there to have worked out where evil is—that is, where corruption itself comes from, by which your substance can in no way be harmed.

I was asking where evil comes from, and I was asking in an evil way, and I did not see the evil in my very asking. I set before my spirit’s gaze the whole creation: whatever we can see in it—earth and sea and air and stars and trees and mortal animals—and whatever we do not see in it, such as the firmament of heaven above, and all the angels and all its spiritual beings. But even these my imagination arranged in their various places as if they were bodies.

By now I had also rejected the deceitful predictions and impious ravings of the astrologers. Let your mercies confess to you for this too, my God, from the inmost depths of my soul! For it was you, entirely you—for who else calls us back from the death of every error but the life that cannot die, and the wisdom that lights up needy minds while needing no light itself, the wisdom by which the world is governed, down to the fluttering leaves of the trees?—it was you who took care of my stubbornness. I had fought against Vindicianus, a shrewd old man, and Nebridius, a young man of wonderful spirit: the first declared vehemently, and the second said often, though with some hesitation, that there is no art of foreseeing the future; that human guesses often have the force of chance; and that by saying many things, people say many things that will come true, without knowing it themselves, simply stumbling on them by not keeping quiet. So you provided a man who was a friend—no lazy consulter of astrologers, and not well versed in their literature, but, as I said, a curious consulter—who nevertheless knew something he said he had heard from his father; how much it would do to overturn belief in that art, he did not know.

When I heard this and believed it—for such was the man who told it—all my resistance gave way and collapsed. First I tried to call Firminus himself back from that curiosity. I told him that, had I examined his constellations in order to tell him the truth, I ought certainly to have seen there parents who were leading figures among their own people, a noble family in its own city, free birth, a respectable upbringing, and a liberal education. But if that slave had consulted me on the same constellations—for they were his as well—then, to tell him the truth too, I ought to have seen there a family of the lowest kind, a slave’s condition, and everything else utterly unlike the first case and far removed from it.

With this opening gained, I went on chewing such things over by myself. I did not want any of those same madmen who pursued that trade—whom I already longed to attack and refute with ridicule—to resist me by claiming that Firminus had told me lies, or his father had told him. So I turned my attention to those who are born twins. Most of them come out of the womb one after the other with so small an interval of time between them that, however much force they claim it has in the nature of things, it cannot be caught by human observation, and cannot possibly be recorded in the figures the astrologer will examine in order to pronounce the truth. And his pronouncements will not be true, because, looking at the same figures, he would have had to say the same things about Esau and about Jacob; yet the same things did not happen to both. So he would speak falsely; or if he spoke truly, he would not say the same things—yet he would be looking at the same figures. So it would be not by skill but by luck that he spoke truly.note

So by now, my helper, you had freed me from those chains, and I was asking where evil comes from, and there was no way out. But you did not let any waves of thought carry me away from the faith by which I believed that you exist, that your substance is unchangeable, that you care for human beings and judge them, and that in Christ, your Son, our Lord, and in the holy Scriptures commended by the authority of your Catholic Church, you had laid down the way of human salvation to the life that is to come after this death. With these things safe and unshakably strengthened in my mind, I was asking, in a fever, where evil comes from. What torments my heart suffered in its labor, what groans, my God! And your ears were there, though I did not know it. And when I searched hard in silence, the silent anguish of my mind was a great cry to your mercy.

But you, Lord, “remain forever,” and you are not angry with us forever, for you have taken pity on earth and ashes. It pleased you, in your sight, to reshape what was misshapen in me. You kept stirring me with inward goads, so that I could not rest until you were certain to me by my inner sight. And my swelling went down under the hidden hand of your healing, and my mind’s eye, troubled and darkened, was being healed day by day by the stinging salve of healthy pains.note

First, you wanted to show me how you resist the proud but give grace to the humble, and with what great mercy you have shown human beings the way of humility, in that your Word became flesh and dwelt among them. So through a certain man, swollen with monstrous pride, you procured for me some books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin. And there I read—not in these words, of course, but exactly the same thing, argued by many different kinds of reasoning—that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made. What was made is life in him, and the life was the light of human beings; and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not grasp it.”note

Again, I read there that the Word, God, “was born not of flesh, not of blood, not of the will of a man nor of the will of the flesh, but of God.” But that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” I did not read there.note

And so I also read there of the glory of your incorruption “changed into idols” and various images, “into the likeness of the image of corruptible man, and of birds and four-footed beasts and serpents”—that is, the Egyptian food for which Esau lost his birthright. For your firstborn people honored the head of a four-footed beast instead of you, turning back in their heart to Egypt, and bowing your image, their own soul, before the image of “a calf that eats hay.” I found these things there, and I did not eat them. For it pleased you, Lord, to take away from Jacob the disgrace of being the lesser, so that “the elder would serve the younger”; and you called the Gentiles into your inheritance. And I had come to you from the Gentiles, and I set my mind on the gold which you wanted your people to carry away from Egypt, since it was yours wherever it was.note

And I looked at the other things below you, and I saw that they neither wholly are nor wholly are not. They are, since they are from you; they are not, since they are not what you are. For that truly is which remains unchangeably. But for me, “it is good to cling to God,” because if I do not remain in him, I cannot remain in myself either. But he, “remaining in himself, makes all things new”; and “you are my Lord, since you have no need of my goods.”note

For you, evil does not exist at all—and not only for you, but not for your creation as a whole either, since there is nothing outside it that could break in and corrupt the order you have imposed on it. Among its parts, however, some things are thought evil because they do not fit with certain others; and those same things do not fit with others, and yet are good, and are good in themselves. And all these things that do not fit with one another do fit the lower part of the universe, which we call the earth, with its own cloudy and windy sky suited to it.

There is no health in those who are displeased by anything in your creation, just as there was none in me when many of the things you made displeased me. And because my soul did not dare to be displeased with my God, it refused to count as yours whatever displeased it. From there it had wandered into the theory of two substances, and it found no rest, and spoke like a stranger. Coming back from that, it had made itself a god spread through the infinite expanses of all places, and had thought this god was you, and had enshrined it in its heart; and so it had once again become a temple of its own idol, abominable to you. But afterward you cradled my head, though I did not know it, and closed my eyes so that they would not look on vanity. I let go of myself a little, and my madness was lulled to sleep; and I woke up in you, and saw you infinite in another way—and that sight did not come from the flesh.note

Then I looked back at other things, and saw that they owe their existence to you, and that all things are bounded in you—but in another way: not as in a place, but because you hold all things in the hand of your truth. All things are true insofar as they exist, and falsehood is nothing except when something is thought to exist that does not. And I saw that each thing fits not only its own place but also its own time; and that you, who alone are eternal, did not begin to work after countless stretches of time, since no stretches of time, whether those that have passed or those that will pass, would either go or come unless you were working and abiding.

And I knew from experience that it is no wonder that bread, pleasant to a healthy palate, is torment to an unhealthy one, and that light, lovely to clear eyes, is hateful to sore ones. Your justice displeases the wicked—let alone the viper and the worm, which you created good, suited to the lower parts of your creation. The wicked themselves are suited to those lower parts, the more unlike you they are, but suited to the higher parts the more like you they become. And I asked what wickedness was, and I found that it is not a substance, but a perversity of the will, twisted away from the supreme substance—from you, God—toward the lowest things, throwing away its own inner life and swelling outward.

And I marveled that I now loved you, and not a phantom in place of you. Yet I did not stand still to enjoy my God: I was swept up to you by your beauty, and soon torn away from you by my own weight, and I crashed back into these lower things with a groan; and this weight was the habit of the flesh. But the memory of you was with me, and I had no doubt at all that there was one to whom I should cling—only that I was not yet one who could cling. For “the body that decays weighs down the soul, and its earthly dwelling presses down the mind that ponders many things.” And I was entirely certain that “your invisible things, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made—your eternal power and divinity as well.”note

I looked for a way to gain the strength I needed to enjoy you, and I did not find it until I embraced “the mediator between God and humanity, the man Christ Jesus,” “who is over all, God blessed forever,” who calls and says, “I am the way of truth, and the life,” and who mingled with flesh the food I was too weak to take. For “the Word became flesh,” so that your wisdom, through which you created all things, might become milk for our infancy. I was not humble, and so I did not hold on to my humble God, Jesus; nor did I know what his weakness was meant to teach.note

But I thought otherwise. I thought of Christ my Lord only as a man of surpassing wisdom whom no one could equal—especially because, wonderfully born of a virgin to set an example of despising temporal things for the sake of gaining immortality, he seemed through God’s care for us to have earned such great authority as a teacher. But what mystery lay in “the Word became flesh” I could not even guess. I had only gathered from what has been handed down in writing about him—that he ate and drank, slept, walked, rejoiced, grieved, and conversed—that this flesh had not been joined to your Word except together with a human soul and mind. Everyone knows this who knows the unchangeableness of your Word, which I already knew as far as I could, and about which I had no doubt at all.

But at that time, having read those books of the Platonists and been prompted by them to seek a truth without body, I saw “your invisible things, understood through the things that are made.” Though beaten back, I sensed what the darkness of my soul would not let me contemplate. I was certain that you exist and are infinite, yet are not spread out through finite or infinite places; that you truly are, you who are always the same, not other or otherwise in any part or by any motion; and that all other things are from you, on this single, most solid proof: that they exist. Of these things I was certain, yet far too weak to enjoy you. I chattered away as if I were an expert; but had I not sought your way in Christ our Savior, I would have been not expert but expiring. For I had begun to want to be thought wise, though I was full of my own punishment; and I did not weep—worse, I was “puffed up with knowledge.”note

So I seized with the greatest eagerness the venerable pen of your Spirit, and above all the apostle Paul. And those problems vanished in which it had once seemed to me that he contradicted himself, and that the text of his words did not agree with the testimony of the Law and the Prophets. The single face of those pure words appeared to me, and I learned to “rejoice with trembling.” I began, and I found that whatever truth I had read there is said here together with the commendation of your grace: so that whoever sees should not boast as if he had not received—not only what he sees, but even the ability to see (for “what does he have that he did not receive?”);note

My God, let me remember with thanksgiving and confess your mercies toward me. Let my bones be steeped in your love and say, “Lord, who is like you?” “You have broken my chains; let me offer you a sacrifice of praise.” How you broke them I will tell, and all who worship you, when they hear it, will say, “Blessed be the Lord in heaven and on earth; great and wonderful is his name.” Your words had stuck fast in my heart, and I was hemmed in by you on every side. Of your eternal life I was certain, though I had seen it “in a riddle, as in a mirror.” Every doubt had been taken from me about incorruptible substance, and that all substance comes from it; and I desired not to be more certain of you, but more steadfast in you. But as for my life in time, everything was wavering, and my heart had to be cleansed of “the old leaven.”note

For I saw the Church full, and one person went this way, another that. But I was unhappy with what I was doing in the world, and it had become a heavy burden to me, now that my cravings no longer burned as they used to with the hope of honor and money to make me put up with so heavy a slavery. For those things no longer delighted me in comparison with your sweetness and “the beauty of your house, which I have loved.” But I was still tightly bound by a woman. The apostle did not forbid me to marry, though he urged something better, wishing above all that everyone were as he himself was. But I, being weaker, chose the softer place, and because of this one thing I was tossed about in everything else, listless and wasting away with withering cares; for in other matters too, which I did not want to endure, I was forced to conform to married life, to which I was given over and bound.note

So I went to Simplicianus, who had been a father to Ambrose, then bishop, when he received grace, and whom Ambrose truly loved as a father. I told him the winding course of my wandering. When I mentioned that I had read certain books of the Platonists, translated into Latin by Victorinus, once a professor of rhetoric in the city of Rome, who I had heard had died a Christian, he congratulated me for not having fallen upon the writings of other philosophers, full of fallacies and deceptions “according to the elements of this world,” whereas in these books God and his Word are suggested in every way. Then, to urge me toward the humility of Christ, hidden from the wise and revealed to little ones, he recalled Victorinus himself, whom he had known very well when he was in Rome; and what he told me about him I will not pass over in silence.note

O Lord, Lord, who bowed the heavens and came down, who touched the mountains and they smoked, by what ways did you find your way into that heart? He used to read Holy Scripture, Simplicianus said, and studied and searched all the Christian writings with great care. And he would say to Simplicianus—not openly, but privately, as a friend—“You should know that I am already a Christian.” Simplicianus would answer, “I will not believe it or count you among the Christians until I see you in the church of Christ.” But he would laugh and say, “So do walls make Christians?” He often said this, that he was already a Christian, and Simplicianus often gave that answer, and the joke about the walls was often repeated. For he was afraid of offending his friends, proud worshipers of demons; he thought that from the height of their Babylonian dignity, as from the cedars of Lebanon which the Lord had not yet broken, heavy hostility would come crashing down on him.note

At last the hour came for the profession of faith. At Rome this is usually made, in fixed words learned and held in memory, from a raised place in sight of the faithful people, by those who are about to approach your grace. Simplicianus said the presbyters offered Victorinus the chance to make it more privately, as was customarily offered to some who seemed likely to be flustered by shyness; but he preferred to profess his salvation in the sight of the holy congregation. For what he taught in rhetoric was not salvation, and yet he had professed it publicly. How much less, then, should he have feared your gentle flock when pronouncing your Word, he who had not feared crowds of madmen when pronouncing his own words? So when he went up to make his profession, all of them, each as he knew him, called out his name to one another in a clamor of congratulation (and who there did not know him?).

Good God, what happens in a person that makes him rejoice more over the salvation of a soul that had been despaired of, and freed from greater danger, than if there had always been hope for it or the danger had been less? For you too, merciful Father, rejoice more over one who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance. And we listen with great delight when we hear how the sheep that had strayed is carried back on the shoulders of the rejoicing shepherd, and how the coin is returned to your treasury while the neighbors rejoice with the woman who found it; and the joy of the solemn service in your house brings us to tears when it is read in your house about your younger son, that “he was dead and has come back to life; he was lost and has been found.” For you rejoice in us and in your angels, who are holy with a holy love.note

What happens in the soul, then, that it delights more in the things it loves when they are found or restored than if it had always had them? Everything else bears witness too, and the world is full of testimony crying out, “It is so.” The victorious general celebrates a triumph; he would not have won unless he had fought, and the greater the danger in battle, the greater the joy in the triumph. A storm tosses sailors and threatens shipwreck; all grow pale at the death awaiting them. Sky and sea grow calm, and they rejoice exceedingly, because they feared exceedingly. Someone dear to us is sick, and his pulse reports bad news; all who want him well are sick at heart along with him. He recovers, though he does not yet walk with his former strength—and already there is such joy as there never was before, when he walked about healthy and strong.

So it is in shameful and detestable pleasure; so in pleasure that is permitted and lawful; so in the most sincere and honorable friendship; so in the one who “was dead and came back to life, was lost and was found.” Everywhere, greater joy is preceded by greater trouble. What does this mean, Lord my God, when you yourself are eternally your own joy, and some beings around you forever rejoice in you? What does it mean that this part of the world swings between decline and progress, between clashes and reconciliations? Is this their measure, and is this all you gave them, when from the heights of heaven to the depths of the earth, from the beginning of the ages to their end, from the angel to the worm, from the first movement to the last, you set every kind of good thing and all your just works each in its own place, and brought each about in its own time?

Come, Lord, act: rouse us and call us back, kindle us and seize us, blaze and grow sweet; let us love, let us run. Do not many return to you from a deeper pit of blindness than Victorinus did, and draw near and are enlightened, receiving the light? And those who receive it receive from you power to become your children. But if they are less known to the public, even those who know them rejoice less over them. For when joy is shared with many, each one’s joy is richer too, because they warm one another and catch fire from each other. Then, too, those who are known to many carry authority with many toward salvation and lead the way for many who will follow; and so even those who went before them rejoice greatly over them, because they are not rejoicing over them alone.

But when your servant Simplicianus told me this about Victorinus, I burned to imitate him; that, indeed, was why he had told it. And he added that in the time of the emperor Julian a law was passed forbidding Christians to teach literature and oratory; and Victorinus, embracing that law, chose to abandon his school of chatter rather than your Word, by which you “make eloquent the tongues of infants.” He seemed to me not so much brave as fortunate, because he found an opportunity to be free for you. For this I was sighing, bound not by another’s iron but by my own iron will. The enemy held my will, and from it he had made a chain for me and bound me tight. For out of a perverse will came lust; and when lust is served, habit comes; and when habit is not resisted, necessity comes. By these links, as it were, joined one to another—which is why I called it a chain—a hard slavery held me bound.note

So I understood from my own experience what I had read: how “the flesh desires against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh.” I was in both, but more myself in what I approved in myself than in what I disapproved. For in the latter it was now more not I, since to a great extent I suffered it unwillingly rather than did it willingly. And yet habit had grown more combative against me through my own doing, since I had willingly arrived where I did not want to be. And who could rightly object, when just punishment follows the sinner? Nor did I have any longer the excuse by which I used to tell myself that I had not yet despised the world to serve you because my grasp of the truth was uncertain; for now that too was certain. But I, still tied down to earth, refused to serve as your soldier, and I was as afraid of being freed from all my baggage as one ought to be afraid of being weighed down by it.note

So I was weighed down by the burden of the world, sweetly, as often happens in sleep; and the thoughts in which I meditated on you were like the efforts of people who want to wake up but, overcome by the depth of their slumber, sink back down. No one wants to sleep forever, and everyone of sound judgment agrees it is better to be awake; yet a person often puts off shaking off sleep when a heavy torpor lies in his limbs, and though he already dislikes it he enjoys it all the more willingly, even though the time to get up has come. In the same way I was certain that it was better to give myself up to your love than to give in to my own craving. But the one appealed to me and was winning; the other allured me and was binding.

Now I will tell how you released me from the chain of sexual desire, by which I was bound most tightly, and from the slavery of worldly business; and I will confess to your name, Lord, “my helper and my redeemer.” I went about my usual affairs with growing anxiety, and daily I sighed for you. I went often to your church, as far as I had time free from the business under whose weight I groaned. Alypius was with me, idle from his work as a legal expert after a third term as assessor, waiting for clients to whom he could sell his advice again, just as I sold skill in speaking, if that can be supplied by teaching. Nebridius, for his part, had yielded to our friendship and agreed to serve as assistant teacher to Verecundus, a citizen of Milan and a teacher of grammar, the closest friend of us all, who urgently wanted—and by right of friendship demanded—faithful help from among our circle, for he badly needed it.note

One day, then—I do not remember why Nebridius was away—a man named Ponticianus came to our house to see Alypius and me. He was a fellow countryman of ours, in that he was an African, and held a distinguished post at the palace. He wanted something from us, I do not know what, and we sat down to talk. By chance he noticed a book on a game table in front of us. He picked it up, opened it, and found the apostle Paul—quite unexpectedly, for he had supposed it was one of the books that I wore myself out teaching. Then he smiled and looked at me with congratulation and surprise at having suddenly found these writings, and these alone, before my eyes. For he was a Christian and a baptized believer, and often prostrated himself before you, our God, in church, in frequent and lengthy prayers.

From there his talk rolled on to the flocks in the monasteries, and their way of life, fragrant with your sweetness, and the fruitful wastes of the desert—of all of which we knew nothing. There was even a monastery at Milan, outside the city walls, full of good brothers under the care of Ambrose, and we had not known it. He went on and kept talking, and we sat silent and intent. Then it happened that he told how once—at Trier, it seems—while the emperor was held by the morning show at the circus, he and three companions went out for a walk in the gardens next to the walls. There, as they happened to stroll in pairs, one went off with him, and the other two likewise went off on their own. But those two, wandering about, came upon a cottage where some of your servants lived, poor in spirit, the kind to whom the kingdom of heaven belongs; and there they found a book in which the life of Antony was written.note

This was what Ponticianus told us. But you, Lord, while he was speaking, were turning me back toward myself, taking me from behind my own back, where I had put myself so as not to look at myself; and you set me before my own face, so that I would see how ugly I was, how twisted and filthy, spotted and covered with sores. I saw, and I was horrified, and there was nowhere to flee from myself. If I tried to turn my gaze away from myself, he went on telling what he was telling, and you again set me opposite myself and thrust me before my own eyes, so that I would discover my wickedness and hate it. I had known it, but I pretended not to, and held it down, and forgot it.

I had thought that the reason I was putting off, from day to day, scorning worldly hope and following you alone was that nothing certain appeared to me by which to steer my course. And now the day had come when I was stripped bare before myself, and my conscience rebuked me: “Where is your tongue now? You used to say, of course, that because the truth was uncertain you would not throw off the baggage of vanity. Look, now it is certain, and still that baggage weighs on you, while others, with freer shoulders, grow wings—men who were not worn out with searching as you were, nor spent ten years and more pondering these things.” So I was gnawed within and violently confounded with a horrible shame, while Ponticianus spoke of such things. When he had finished his story and the business for which he had come, he went away, and I went back to myself. What did I not say against myself? With what whips of argument did I not flog my soul to make it follow me as I tried to go after you?

Then, in that great quarrel of my inner house, which I had stirred up fiercely with my soul in our private chamber, my heart, troubled in face as much as in mind, I burst in on Alypius. I cry out: “What is wrong with us? What is this? What did you hear? The unlearned rise up and seize heaven, and we, with our learning—look where we wallow in flesh and blood! Is it because they have gone ahead that we are ashamed to follow, and not ashamed not even to follow?” I said something like this, and my turmoil tore me away from him, while he stared at me in stunned silence. For I did not sound like myself. My forehead, cheeks, eyes, color and tone of voice spoke my mind more than the words I uttered. There was a small garden at our lodging, which we had the use of, as of the whole house, for our host, the owner of the house, did not live there.

In short, in the very heat of my hesitation I did many things with my body that people sometimes want to do and cannot—if they lack the limbs themselves, or if these are bound with chains, or weakened by illness, or hindered in some other way. If I tore my hair, if I struck my forehead, if I locked my fingers and clasped my knee, I did it because I willed it. Yet I could have willed and not done it, if my limbs had not been able to move and obey. So I did many things where willing was not the same as being able; and I did not do what pleased me more, with an incomparable longing, and what I could have done as soon as I willed—because as soon as I willed, I would surely will it.

Where does this monstrous thing come from? And why is it so? Let your mercy shine on me, and let me ask, in case the hidden places of human punishment and the darkest sufferings of the children of Adam can answer me. Where does this monstrous thing come from? And why is it so? The mind commands the body, and it obeys at once; the mind commands itself, and it resists. The mind commands the hand to move, and it is so easy that command can hardly be told apart from obedience; yet the mind is mind, and the hand is body. The mind commands the mind to will; it is not something other, and yet it does not do it. Where does this monstrous thing come from? And why is it so, I ask, that the mind, which would not command unless it willed, commands itself to will, and does not do what it commands? But it does not will wholly; so it does not command wholly.

Let them perish from your presence, God, as they are perishing—the empty talkers and deceivers of the mind who, noticing two wills in the act of deliberating, insist that there are two natures belonging to two minds, one good, the other evil. They themselves are truly evil when they think these evil things; and these same people will be good if they think true things and consent to the truth, so that your apostle may say to them: “Once you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” For in wanting to be light, not in the Lord but in themselves, by supposing that the nature of the soul is what God is, they have become thicker darkness, since in their horrible arrogance they have gone farther away from you, the true light that enlightens every person coming into this world. Pay attention to what you are saying, and blush; come to him and be enlightened, and your faces will not blush.note

For if there are as many opposing natures as there are wills resisting each other, there will be not two but more. If someone deliberates whether to go to their meeting or to the theater, they cry out: “Look—two natures: a good one leads this way, an evil one leads back that way. Otherwise where does this hesitation between opposing wills come from?” But I say both are evil, the one that leads to them and the one that leads back to the theater. They, however, believe that only the one by which people go to them is good. What, then, if one of us deliberates, and wavers between two wills quarreling within him, whether to go to the theater or to our church? Won’t they waver too about how to answer?

So let them no longer say, when they perceive two wills opposing each other in one person, that two opposing minds, from two opposing substances and two opposing principles, are fighting, one good and the other evil. For you, truthful God, disprove them, refute them and convict them—as in the case where both wills are evil: when someone deliberates whether to kill a man by poison or by the sword; whether to seize this estate belonging to someone else or that one, when he cannot take both; whether to buy pleasure through extravagance or keep his money through greed; whether to go to the circus or to the theater, if both are showing on the same day. I add a third: or to go and steal from someone’s house, if the chance arises. And I add a fourth: or to go and commit adultery, if the opportunity opens up at the same time. If all of these come together at one moment of time, and all are desired equally, though they cannot be done at once, they tear the mind apart with four wills opposing one another—or even more, given the great abundance of things that people desire. Yet they do not usually speak of so great a multitude of different substances.

So I was sick and tormented, accusing myself far more bitterly than usual, turning and twisting in my chain until it would break completely—a chain that now held me only slightly, but held me all the same. And you pressed upon me in my hidden depths, Lord, in your severe mercy, redoubling the whips of fear and shame, so that I would not give up again, leaving that thin, slight remnant unbroken, to grow strong again and bind me more tightly. For I kept saying within myself, “Let it be now, let it be now,” and with the word I was already moving toward the decision. I was almost doing it, and I did not do it; yet I did not slip back into my old ways, but stood close by and caught my breath. And I tried again, and I was very nearly there, and very nearly; now, now I was touching it and holding it.

What held me back were trifles of trifles and the vanities of the vain, my old mistresses; they plucked at my garment of flesh and whispered, “Are you sending us away?” and “From this moment we will not be with you, ever again,” and “From this moment this and that will not be allowed you, ever again.” And what they suggested by what I have called “this and that”—what they suggested, my God—may your mercy turn it away from the soul of your servant! What filth they suggested, what disgrace! But now far less than half of me was listening to them—not as if they were openly contradicting me, coming out to meet me head-on, but muttering, as it were, behind my back, and furtively plucking at me as I went, to make me look back. Still, they slowed me down as I hesitated to tear myself away and shake myself free of them and leap across to where I was being called, while violent habit said to me, “Do you think you will be able to live without them?”

But by now it said this very half-heartedly. For in the direction in which I had turned my face, and where I trembled to cross, there was opening up the chaste dignity of Self-Control, serene and cheerful, but not in a loose way, honorably coaxing me to come and not to hesitate, and stretching out devout hands to receive and embrace me, hands full of flocks of good examples. There were so many boys and girls, there were many young people and people of every age, grave widows and aged virgins, and in all of them Self-Control herself, by no means barren, but a fruitful mother of children, of joys, by you, Lord, her husband. And she smiled at me with a smile of encouragement, as if to say: “Can’t you do what these men and these women can? Or can these men and women do it by themselves, and not in the Lord their God? The Lord their God gave me to them. Why do you stand on yourself, and so cannot stand? Throw yourself on him! Do not be afraid.

But when deep reflection had dragged up from the secret depths and heaped up all my misery in the sight of my heart, a huge storm arose, bringing a huge downpour of tears. And to pour it all out with its own cries, I got up and left Alypius—solitude seemed to me better suited to the business of weeping—and withdrew farther off, so that even his presence could not be a burden to me. That was how I was then, and he sensed it; for I had said something, I think, in which the sound of my voice was already heavy with weeping, and in that state I had got up. So he stayed where we had been sitting, utterly astonished. I flung myself down, I do not know how, under a fig tree, and gave free rein to my tears, and the rivers of my eyes burst out, a sacrifice acceptable to you. And not in these words, but to this effect, I said many things to you: “And you, Lord—how long?note

Then, marking the place with my finger or some other sign, I closed the book, and with a calm face now I told Alypius. And he, in turn, told me in this way what was happening within him, which I did not know. He asked to see what I had read. I showed him, and he looked beyond what I had read. I did not know what followed. What followed was this: “Welcome the one who is weak in faith.” He applied this to himself and disclosed it to me. And strengthened by such an admonition, without any turbulent hesitation, he joined me in the good decision and purpose, which suited his character very well, for in character he had long been far, far better than I. Then we go in to my mother and tell her: she rejoices.note

O Lord, I am your servant; I am your servant and the son of your maidservant. You have broken my chains; I will offer you a sacrifice of praise. Let my heart and my tongue praise you, and let all my bones say, “Lord, who is like you?” Let them say it; and answer me, and say to my soul, “I am your salvation.” Who am I, and what kind of man am I? What evil has there not been in my deeds—or, if not in my deeds, in my words—or, if not in my words, in my will? But you, Lord, are good and merciful, and your right hand looked into the depth of my death and drained from the bottom of my heart the abyss of corruption. And this was the whole of it: not to will what I willed, and to will what you willed.

And I decided, in your sight, not to snatch the service of my tongue abruptly from the marketplace of talk, but to withdraw it gently, so that boys who were studying not your law, not your peace, but lying follies and the battles of the courts, would no longer buy from my mouth weapons for their madness. And conveniently, only a very few days remained until the vintage holidays, and I decided to put up with them, so as to leave in the ordinary way and, redeemed by you, not come back to put myself up for sale. So our plan was known before you, but not before anyone else except our own people. And we had agreed among ourselves that it should not be spread about to anyone—although, as we climbed up from the valley of weeping and sang the song of ascents, you had given us sharp arrows and devastating coals against the deceitful tongue that opposes under the guise of advice, and devours by loving, as it does with food.note

You had pierced our heart with your love, and we carried your words fixed deep within us. And the examples of your servants, whom you had made shining out of black and living out of dead, gathered into the lap of our thought, burned and consumed our heavy sluggishness, so that we would not sink into the depths; and they set us so strongly on fire that every breath of contradiction from a deceitful tongue could only inflame us more fiercely, not put us out. Yet because, for the sake of your name, which you have made holy throughout the earth, our vow and purpose would surely also find people to praise it, it seemed like boasting not to wait for the holidays, now so close, but to leave a public profession, standing before the eyes of all, ahead of time; so that everyone’s faces would turn toward what I had done, observing how I had wanted to get ahead of the vintage holiday so near at hand, and they would say a great deal about me, as though I had sought to seem great.

What is more, that very summer my lungs had begun to give way under too much literary labor: I breathed with difficulty, pains in my chest showed they were injured, and they refused to produce a clear or sustained voice. At first this had upset me, because it was forcing me, almost out of necessity, to lay down the burden of that teaching post, or at least, if I could be treated and recover, to take a break from it. But when the full will to be still and see that you are the Lord had arisen in me and become firm—you know it, my God—I even began to be glad that I had this, too, as a truthful excuse, to soften the offense of people who, for the sake of their children, never wanted me to be free. So, full of such joy, I endured that interval of time until it ran out—I do not know whether it was even twenty days—yet they were endured with fortitude, because the craving that used to share the heavy business with me had gone, and I would have been left crushed if patience had not taken its place.

Verecundus was wasting away with anxiety over this good of ours, because he saw that, owing to the ties that held him so very tightly, he would be left out of our fellowship. He was not yet a Christian, though his wife was a believer; yet she herself, a fetter tighter than all the rest, held him back from the journey we had set out on, and he said he did not want to be a Christian in any other way than the one that was impossible for him. He very kindly offered that, for as long as we stayed there, we should stay on his property. You will repay him, Lord, at the recompense of the just, for you have already repaid him with that very lot. For although we were away, being already in Rome, he was seized by a bodily illness, and during it became a Christian and one of the faithful, and departed this life. So you had mercy not only on him but also on us, so that we would not be tormented by unbearable grief, thinking of our friend’s outstanding kindness toward us and yet unable to count him in your flock. Thanks be to you, our God! We are yours.

So Verecundus was troubled then, but Nebridius shared our joy. For although he too, not yet a Christian, had fallen into that pit of most pernicious error, believing that the flesh of your Son, the Truth, was a phantom, he was emerging from it and was in this state: not yet steeped in any sacraments of your Church, but a most ardent seeker of the truth. Not long after our conversion and our rebirth through your baptism, when he too had become one of the Catholic faithful, serving you in perfect chastity and self-control in Africa among his own people, and his whole household had become Christian through him, you released him from the flesh. And now he lives in Abraham’s bosom. Whatever it is that is meant by that bosom, there my Nebridius lives, my sweet friend, and your son, Lord, adopted from a freedman: there he lives. For what other place is there for such a soul? He lives in that place about which he used to ask me, a poor inexperienced little man, so many questions.

And the day came when I was released in fact from the profession of rhetoric, from which I had already been released in thought; and it was done. You rescued my tongue from where you had already rescued my heart; and I blessed you, rejoicing, and set out for the country house with all my people. What I did there in my writing—writing now at your service, yet still breathing of the school of pride, as if pausing for breath—is witnessed by the books of dialogues held with those who were present and with myself alone before you; and what I did with Nebridius in his absence is witnessed by my letters. And when would I have enough time to recall all your great kindnesses toward us in that period, especially as I am hurrying on to other, greater things?note

What cries I raised to you, my God, when I read the Psalms of David, songs of faith, sounds of devotion that shut out a swollen spirit—I, a novice in true love of you, a catechumen on holiday at a country house with Alypius, also a catechumen, and my mother staying close by us: a woman in dress, a man in faith, an old woman in serenity, a mother in love, a Christian in devotion! What cries I raised to you in those psalms, and how they set me on fire toward you, and how I burned to recite them, if I could, to the whole world, against the arrogance of the human race! And yet they are sung throughout the world, and there is no one who can hide from your heat. With what violent and bitter pain I was indignant with the Manichees, and yet pitied them in turn, because they did not know those sacraments, those medicines, and were madly raging against the very antidote that could have made them sane!

I shuddered with fear, and at the same moment I burned with hope and with rejoicing in your mercy, Father. And all this poured out through my eyes and my voice when your good Spirit turned toward us and said to us: “Children of men, how long will you be heavy of heart? Why do you love emptiness and seek after lies?” For I had loved emptiness and sought after lies. And you, Lord, had already glorified your Holy One, raising him from the dead and setting him at your right hand, from where he would send from on high his promise, the Paraclete, the Spirit of truth. And he had already sent him, but I did not know it. He had sent him because he had now been glorified, rising from the dead and ascending into heaven. Before that, “the Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus had not yet been glorified.” And the prophecy cries out: “How long will you be heavy of heart? Why do you love emptiness and seek after lies?note

I read: “Be angry, and do not sin.” And how I was moved, my God—I who had already learned to be angry with myself over the past, so as not to sin in future; and rightly angry, because it was not some other nature, a race of darkness, that was sinning in me, as those say who are not angry with themselves, and “store up wrath for themselves on the day of wrath and of the revelation of your just judgment.” My good things were no longer outside, nor were they sought with eyes of flesh under this sun. For those who want to find their joy outside themselves easily grow empty and spill themselves out on things that are seen and temporal, and with starving thoughts they lick at their images.note

And at the next verse I cried out with the deep cry of my heart: “Oh, in peace! Oh, in the Selfsame!” Oh, what did it say? “I will lie down and take my sleep!” For who will stand against us when the saying that is written comes to pass: “Death is swallowed up in victory”? And you are supremely the Selfsame, you who do not change, and in you is the rest that forgets all toils; for there is no other with you, nor are there other things to be gained which are not what you are; but you, Lord, have set me singly in hope. I read and I burned, and I could not find what to do for those deaf dead, of whom I had been one—a plague, a bitter, blind barker against writings honeyed with the honey of heaven and luminous with your light; and I wasted away with grief over the enemies of this Scripture.note

When shall I recall everything from those days of holiday? But I have not forgotten, nor will I keep silent about, the harshness of your scourge and the wonderful swiftness of your mercy. You were tormenting me then with toothache, and when it grew so bad that I could not speak, it came into my heart to urge all my friends who were present to pray for me to you, the God of salvation in every sense. I wrote this on a wax tablet and gave it to be read to them. As soon as we had knelt with simple devotion, that pain fled. But what pain? And how did it flee? I was terrified, I confess, my Lord, my God. For I had experienced nothing like it since my earliest years. And your promptings were driven deep into me; and rejoicing in faith, I praised your name. And that faith would not let me be at ease about my past sins, which had not yet been forgiven me through your baptism.

When the vintage holidays were over, I gave notice that the people of Milan should provide another word-seller for their students, both because I had chosen to serve you and because, with my difficulty in breathing and the pain in my chest, I was no longer equal to that profession. And by letter I made known to your bishop, the holy man Ambrose, my former errors and my present intention, asking him to advise me what I should read above all from your books, to become readier and fitter to receive so great a grace. He told me to read the prophet Isaiah—because, I believe, he foretells the gospel and the calling of the Gentiles more plainly than the others. But I did not understand the first passage I read, and, supposing the whole book to be like that, I put it aside, to return to it when I was better practiced in the Lord’s language.

Then, when the time came for me to give in my name, we left the country and went back to Milan. Alypius too resolved to be reborn in you along with me. He had already put on the humility fitting for your sacraments, and was so strong a master of his body that he trod the icy soil of Italy barefoot, with unusual daring. We also took with us the boy Adeodatus, born of me in the flesh from my sin. You had made him well. He was about fifteen years old, and in intelligence he surpassed many serious and learned men. I confess your gifts to you, Lord my God, creator of all things, well able to give form to our deformities; for in that boy I had nothing of mine except the sin. That he was being brought up by us in your discipline—you inspired us to that, no one else. I confess your gifts to you. There is a book of mine entitled On the Teacher: he converses with me there.note

Not long before, the church of Milan had begun to practice this kind of consolation and encouragement, the brothers singing together with great fervor, in voice and heart. It was only a year, or not much more, since Justina, mother of the boy emperor Valentinian, had been persecuting your man Ambrose for the sake of her heresy, into which she had been led by the Arians. The devout people kept watch in the church, ready to die with their bishop, your servant. There my mother, your handmaid, taking the lead in anxiety and vigils, lived on prayers. We, still cold, untouched by the heat of your Spirit, were nonetheless stirred by the alarm and turmoil of the city. It was then that the singing of hymns and psalms after the custom of the Eastern regions was instituted, so that the people should not waste away in the weariness of grief; and from then until today it has been kept, with many, indeed nearly all, of your flocks throughout the rest of the world following it.note

Then, in a vision, you revealed to your bishop whom I have mentioned the place where the bodies of the martyrs Protasius and Gervasius lay hidden. For so many years you had kept them incorrupt in the treasury of your secret counsel, so that at the right moment you might bring them out to check a woman’s fury—but a royal woman’s. For when they had been uncovered and dug up and were being carried with fitting honor to Ambrose’s basilica, not only were those tormented by unclean spirits healed, the demons themselves confessing it, but also a certain citizen, blind for many years and very well known to the city, asked the cause of the people’s tumultuous joy, and when he heard it, leapt up and begged his guide to lead him there. Brought there, he was allowed to touch with his handkerchief the bier of your saints, whose death is precious in your sight. When he had done so and put it to his eyes, at once they were opened.note

You who make those of one mind dwell in one house joined to us also Evodius, a young man from our own town. While serving as an imperial agent, he had been converted to you and baptized before us, and, leaving the service of the world, had girded himself for yours. We were together, meaning to live together in holy resolve. We were looking for the place where we could most usefully serve you, and together we were going back to Africa. And when we were at Ostia on the Tiber, my mother died. I pass over much, because I am in great haste. Accept my confessions and thanksgivings, my God, for countless things, even in silence. But I will not pass over whatever my soul brings to birth about that servant of yours, who brought me to birth both in the flesh, that I might be born into this temporal light, and in her heart, that I might be born into eternal light. I will speak not of her gifts, but of your gifts in her; for she had not made herself, nor brought herself up.note

And yet, as your servant told me, her son, a love of wine had crept up on her—crept up on her. For when, as the custom was, her parents told her, as a sober girl, to draw wine from the cask, she would dip the cup in through the opening at the top, and before pouring the neat wine into the flask she would sip a little with the tips of her lips—no more, because her taste refused it. She did this not from any craving for drink, but from the overflowing high spirits of youth, which bubble up in playful impulses and are usually held down in the years of childhood by the weight of their elders. So, adding to that little a little more each day—for “whoever despises small things falls little by little”—she had slipped into such a habit that she was eagerly gulping down little cups nearly full of wine. Where then was that shrewd old woman, and her forceful prohibition? Could anything prevail against a hidden disease, unless your medicine, Lord, kept watch over us?note

So she was brought up modestly and soberly, made subject by you to her parents rather than by her parents to you. When she reached full marriageable age, she was given to a husband, and served him as her lord, and strove to win him for you, speaking of you to him through her character, by which you made her beautiful, and respectfully lovable and admirable to her husband. She bore his wrongs to their marriage bed in such a way that she never had any quarrel with her husband over it. For she waited for your mercy upon him, that believing in you he might become chaste. Besides this, he was as remarkable for kindness as he was hot in anger. But she knew not to resist an angry husband, not only in deed but not even in word. Once she saw that he had cooled and calmed down, and the moment was right, she would give an account of what she had done, if he had perhaps been roused without due thought.

Her mother-in-law too, who at first was set against her by the whispers of malicious maids, she so won over by her attentions, persevering in patience and gentleness, that the older woman of her own accord reported to her son the meddling tongues of the maids, by which domestic peace between herself and her daughter-in-law was being disturbed, and asked for them to be punished. So after he, obeying his mother, and concerned for the discipline of the household and the harmony of his family, had punished with the whip those who had been reported, at the discretion of the one who reported them, she promised that anyone who spoke ill of her daughter-in-law to her, thinking to please her, must expect the same reward from her. After that no one dared, and they lived together in a memorable sweetness of goodwill.

This too was a great gift you had given to that good servant of yours, in whose womb you created me, my God, my mercy: wherever she could, she showed herself such a peacemaker between any souls at odds and in conflict that, although she heard many very bitter things from each about the other—the kind of thing swollen, undigested discord tends to belch out, when the indigestion of hatreds is breathed out in sour talk to a friend who is present about an enemy who is absent—she would nevertheless report nothing of either to the other except what might help to reconcile them.

Finally, near the very end of his life in time, she won her husband too for you; and once he was a believer she did not lament in him what she had endured when he was not yet one. She was also the servant of your servants. Whoever of them knew her praised and honored and loved you greatly in her, because they sensed your presence in her heart, the fruits of her holy way of life bearing witness. For she had been “the wife of one husband,” had repaid her parents in kind, had managed her household devoutly, and was “well attested for good works.” She had brought up her children, laboring to give birth to them again each time she saw them straying from you. Lastly, Lord, to all of us—for by your gift you allow us, your servants, to speak—who before she fell asleep were already living together in you, having received the grace of your baptism, she gave such care as if she had borne us all, and served us as if she had been born of us all.note

And when our conversation had reached this point—that the pleasure of the bodily senses, however great, in however great a bodily light, seemed, beside the delight of that life, not worth comparing, nor even mentioning—raising ourselves with a more burning love toward the Selfsame, we passed step by step through all bodily things, and through heaven itself, from which the sun and moon and stars shine upon the earth. And still we climbed, inwardly, thinking and speaking and marveling at your works. And we came to our own minds, and we went beyond them, to reach the region of unfailing abundance, from which you feed Israel forever on the food of truth. And there life is Wisdom, through whom all these things come to be, both those that have been and those that will be; and Wisdom itself does not come to be, but is as it was, and so will be always.

So we were saying: If for anyone the tumult of the flesh fell silent; if the images of earth and water and air fell silent; if the heavens too fell silent, and the soul itself fell silent to itself and passed beyond itself by not thinking of itself; if dreams fell silent, and imagined revelations, every tongue and every sign, and whatever comes to be by passing away—if for anyone all this fell wholly silent (for if anyone hears them, all these things say, “We did not make ourselves; he made us who abides forever”); if, having said this, they now fell quiet, since they have lifted up the ear to him who made them, and he alone should speak, not through them but through himself, so that we might hear his word, not through a tongue of flesh, nor through the voice of an angel, nor through the sound of thunder, nor through the riddle of a likeness, but might hear him himself, whom we love in these things, him himself without these things (just as now we reached out and in swift thought touched the eternal Wisdom that abides above all things); if this were to continue, and other visions of a far lower kind were withdrawn, and this one alone were to seize and absorb and hide away its beholder in inward joys, so that eternal life should be like that moment of understanding for which we sighed—would not this be:note

I was saying such things, even if not in this way or in these words; yet, Lord, you know that on that day, as we were talking of such things, and this world with all its delights grew worthless to us as we spoke, she said: “Son, for my part, I no longer find delight in anything in this life. What I am still doing here, and why I am here, I do not know, now that my hope in this world is spent. There was one thing for which I wanted to linger a little in this life: to see you a Catholic Christian before I died. My God has granted me this more abundantly, so that I see you even despising earthly happiness and become his servant. What am I doing here?”

But I, thinking of your gifts, invisible God, which you send into the hearts of your faithful, and from which wonderful harvests spring, rejoiced and gave thanks to you, recalling what I knew: how anxious she had always been about the tomb she had provided and prepared for herself beside her husband’s body. Because they had lived in great harmony, she also wanted—so little is the human mind able to grasp divine things—this to be added to that happiness and remembered among people: that it had been granted to her, after her journey across the sea, that the united dust of husband and wife should be covered by one earth. But when this emptiness had begun, through the fullness of your goodness, to leave her heart, I did not know; and I rejoiced, marveling that she had shown herself so to me (although in that conversation of ours at the window, when she said, “What am I doing here now?”, she did not appear to desire to die in her own country).

I closed her eyes, and an immense sadness flooded into my heart and was overflowing into tears; and at the same moment my eyes, under the violent command of my mind, drank their spring back until it was dry; and in such a struggle it went very badly with me. Then, when she breathed her last, the boy Adeodatus cried out in lamentation, and, checked by all of us, fell silent. In the same way something childish in me too, which was slipping into tears, was checked by the grown-up voice of my heart and fell silent. For we did not think it fitting to mark that funeral with tearful laments and groans, because these usually bewail some misery of the dying, or their complete extinction, as it were. But she was neither dying miserably nor dying altogether. We held this for certain from the evidence of her character, and from her “unfeigned faith,” and on sure grounds.note

What was it, then, that grieved me so deeply within, if not the fresh wound from the sudden rupture of our habit of living together, so very sweet and dear? I was glad, indeed, of her testimony: in that very last illness, responding tenderly to my attentions, she called me a dutiful son, and recalled with great affection and love that she had never heard from my mouth a harsh or insulting word hurled at her. But still, my God, who made us, what likeness, what comparison, was there between the honor I paid her and her service to me? And so, because I was losing such great comfort in her, my soul was wounded, and my life was torn apart, as it were, since it had been made one life from hers and mine.

So when the boy had been checked from weeping, Evodius took up the psalter and began to sing a psalm, to which the whole household responded: “I will sing of mercy and judgment to you, Lord.” When people heard what was happening, many brothers and devout women gathered; and while those whose task it was were seeing to the funeral in the customary way, I, in a part of the house where I decently could, with those who thought I should not be left alone, discussed what suited the occasion; and with this balm of truth I soothed a torment known to you, though they did not know it, listening attentively and thinking I was without any feeling of grief. But in your ears, where none of them could hear, I rebuked the softness of my feeling and held back the flood of my sorrow; and it gave way to me a little. Then it was carried along again by its own force—not as far as bursting into tears, nor as far as a change of expression—but I knew what I was crushing down in my heart.note

And see, the body was carried out; we go, we come back, without tears. For not even in those prayers which we poured out to you when the sacrifice of our redemption was offered for her, with the body already placed beside the grave before it was lowered, as is the custom there—not even in those prayers did I weep. But all day long I was deeply sad in secret, and with troubled mind I asked you, as best I could, to heal my pain; and you did not—impressing on my memory, I believe, even by this one lesson, how strong the bond of all habit is, even against a mind that no longer feeds on a deceptive word. It also seemed good to me to go and bathe, because I had heard that baths (balnea) got their name from the Greeks’ calling them balanion [“bath”], because it drives anxiety from the mind.note

And from there, little by little, I brought back my former thoughts of your handmaid, of her devout conduct toward you and her holy tenderness and compliance toward us, of which I had suddenly been deprived; and I wanted to weep in your sight about her and for her, about myself and for myself. And I let go the tears I had been holding back, to flow as much as they would, spreading them as a bed beneath my heart. And it rested on them, because your ears were there, not those of some person who would put a proud interpretation on my weeping.

But I, my heart now healed of that wound, for which I afterwards rebuked my fleshly feelings, pour out to you, our God, for that servant of yours a very different kind of tears, flowing from a spirit shaken by considering the dangers of every soul that dies in Adam. Although she, made alive in Christ, even before she was released from the flesh, so lived that your name is praised in her faith and conduct, yet I do not dare to say that from the time you regenerated her through baptism no word came out of her mouth against your commandment. And it was said by the Truth, your Son: “Whoever says to his brother, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to the fire of hell.” And woe even to the praiseworthy life of human beings, if it is examined with mercy set aside! But because you do not search out faults relentlessly, we hope with confidence for some place with you.note

So I, my praise and my life, God of my heart, setting aside for a while her good deeds, for which I give you thanks with joy, now pray to you for my mother’s sins. Hear me through the medicine of our wounds, who hung on the tree and, sitting at your right hand, intercedes with you for us. I know that she acted mercifully and from her heart forgave their debts to her debtors. You too forgive her her debts, if she contracted any in so many years after the water of salvation. Forgive, Lord, forgive, I beg you; do not enter into judgment with her. Let mercy triumph over judgment, because your words are true and you have promised mercy to the merciful. That they might be so, you gave it to them—you who will have mercy on whom you have mercy, and will show mercy to whom you have been merciful.note

And I believe you have already done what I ask; but “accept, Lord, the freely offered words of my mouth.” For when the day of her release was close at hand, she gave no thought to having her body lavishly wrapped or embalmed with spices; she did not long for a chosen monument or care about a grave in her homeland. These were not the things she charged us with. She desired only to be remembered at your altar, which she had served without missing a single day, for she knew that from it is dispensed the holy victim by whom the record that stood against us was cancelled, by whom the enemy was defeated—the one who tallies up our offenses and looks for something to charge us with, and found nothing in him in whom we conquer. Who will pour back into him that innocent blood? Who will repay him the price with which he bought us, so as to take us away from him? To the sacrament of this price of ours your handmaid bound her soul with the chain of faith.note

So let her rest in peace with her husband. She was married to no one before him and to no one after him; she served him, bearing fruit for you with patience, so as to win him for you as well. And inspire, my Lord, my God, inspire your servants, my brothers, your sons, my masters, whom I serve with heart and voice and pen, so that as many as read these words may remember at your altar Monica, your servant, together with Patricius, once her husband, through whose flesh you brought me into this life—how, I do not know.note

Let me know you, you who know me; let me know you “even as I am known.” Strength of my soul, enter into it and fit it to yourself, so that you may have and hold it “without spot or wrinkle.” This is my hope; that is why I speak, and in this hope I rejoice, whenever my joy is sound. As for the other things of this life, the more we weep over them, the less they deserve our tears; and the less we weep over them, the more they deserve them. For see, “you have loved the truth,” since “whoever does the truth comes to the light.” I want to do it in my heart, before you, in confession, and in my writing, before many witnesses.note

And indeed, Lord, to your eyes the abyss of human conscience lies bare: what in me could be hidden from you, even if I were unwilling to confess to you? I would be hiding you from myself, not myself from you. But now that my groaning bears witness that I am displeasing to myself, you shine out, and please, and are loved and longed for, so that I blush for myself and cast myself away and choose you, and may please neither you nor myself except through you. To you, then, Lord, I lie open, whatever I am. And with what fruit I confess to you, I have said. Nor do I do it with words and sounds of the flesh, but with words of the soul and the cry of thought, which your ear knows.

What, then, have I to do with human beings, that they should hear my confessions—as if they were going to heal all my diseases? A race curious to learn about other people’s lives, lazy about correcting their own! Why do they ask to hear from me what I am, when they do not want to hear from you what they are? And when they hear from me about myself, how do they know whether I am telling the truth, since “no one knows what goes on in a human being except the human spirit that is within him”? But if they hear from you about themselves, they will not be able to say, “The Lord is lying.” For what is hearing from you about oneself but knowing oneself? And who, moreover, knows and says, “It is false,” unless he himself is lying?note

Yet you, my inmost physician, make clear to me with what fruit I do this. For the confessions of my past wrongs—which you have forgiven and covered, to make me happy in you, changing my soul by faith and by your sacrament—when they are read and heard, stir up the heart so that it does not fall asleep in despair and say, “I cannot,” but wakes up in the love of your mercy and the sweetness of your grace, through which every weak person is made strong who through it becomes aware of his own weakness. And good people are delighted to hear of the past wrongs of those who are now free of them—delighted not because they are wrongs, but because they were and are no more.

But with what fruit do they want this? Do they wish to rejoice with me when they hear how near I come to you by your gift, and to pray for me when they hear how far I am held back by my own weight? To such people I will reveal myself. For it is no small fruit, Lord my God, that many should give you thanks for us and many should pray to you for us. Let a brotherly mind love in me what you teach is to be loved, and grieve in me over what you teach is to be grieved over. Let it be a brotherly mind that does this, not a stranger’s—not that of the “strangers’ children, whose mouth has spoken emptiness, and whose right hand is a right hand of wrongdoing”—but that brotherly mind which, when it approves of me, rejoices over me, and when it disapproves of me, is saddened for me, because whether it approves or disapproves, it loves me. To such people I will reveal myself. Let them breathe freely at my good, and sigh over my bad.note

This is the fruit of my confessions—not what I was but what I am: to confess this not only before you, in a secret exultation that trembles and a secret grief that hopes, but also in the ears of the believing sons of men, companions in my joy and sharers in my mortality, my fellow citizens and fellow pilgrims, those who go before me, those who follow, and those who walk beside me on the way. These are your servants, my brothers, whom you have willed to be your sons, my masters, whom you have commanded me to serve if I want to live with you and from you. And this word of yours would have meant little to me if it had only commanded by speaking and had not also gone ahead by doing. So I do it in deeds and in words; I do it under your wings, in very great danger—except that under your wings my soul is subject to you, and my weakness is known to you.

For it is you, Lord, who judge me. Although “no one knows the things of a human being except the human spirit within him,” there is yet something in a human being that not even the human spirit within him knows. But you, Lord, know everything about him, for you made him. And I, though in your sight I despise myself and count myself dust and ashes, still know something about you that I do not know about myself. Certainly “we see now through a mirror, in a riddle,” not yet “face to face.” And so, as long as I am on pilgrimage away from you, I am more present to myself than to you; and yet I know that you cannot be harmed in any way, whereas I do not know which temptations I can resist and which I cannot.note

And what is this? I asked the earth, and it said, “I am not he”; and everything in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the depths and the creeping things with living souls, and they answered, “We are not your God; look above us.” I asked the breezes that blow, and the whole air with its inhabitants said, “Anaximenes is mistaken; I am not God.” I asked the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars: “Nor are we the God you seek,” they say. And I said to all the things that stand around the doors of my flesh, “Tell me about my God, since you are not he; tell me something about him.” And they cried out with a loud voice, “He made us.” My questioning was my attention, and their answer was their beauty.note

Is not this beauty apparent to everyone whose senses are sound? Then why does it not say the same thing to all? Animals small and great see it, but they cannot question it, for in them reason is not set as judge over the reports of the senses. Human beings, however, can question it, so that they may clearly see “the invisible things of God, understood through the things that have been made”; but by loving these things they become subject to them, and once subject they cannot judge. Nor do these things answer those who question them unless those who question also judge. Nor do they change their voice—that is, their beauty—if one person merely sees while another sees and questions, so as to appear one way to the first and another way to the second; rather, appearing the same way to both, it is mute to the one and speaks to the other. Or rather, it speaks to all, but only those understand who compare the voice received from outside with the truth within.

What, then, do I love, when I love my God? Who is he who is above the head of my soul? Through my soul itself I will climb up to him. I will pass beyond that power of mine by which I cling to the body and fill its frame with life. It is not by that power that I find my God; otherwise “the horse and the mule, which have no understanding,” would find him too, since it is the same power by which their bodies also live. There is another power, by which I not only give life to my flesh but also give it sensation—the flesh the Lord fashioned for me, commanding the eye not to hear and the ear not to see, but the one to be that through which I see, the other that through which I hear, and assigning to each of the other senses its own seat and its own function. These various things I do through them, I, one single mind.note

There all things are kept distinct and sorted by kind, each brought in by its own entrance: light and all colors and the shapes of bodies through the eyes; every kind of sound through the ears; all smells through the entrance of the nostrils; all tastes through the entrance of the mouth; and from the sense of the whole body, what is hard, what soft, what hot or cold, smooth or rough, heavy or light, whether outside the body or within it. All these are received, to be recalled and reconsidered when needed, by the great recess of memory and by its secret and indescribable folds, whatever they are. All these enter it, each by its own door, and are stored in it. Yet the things themselves do not enter; rather, the images of things perceived are there, ready for the thought that recalls them. How these images were fashioned, who can say? Yet it is plain by which senses they were seized and stored within.

I do these things within, in the vast hall of my memory. For there sky and earth and sea are at hand for me, together with everything I have been able to perceive in them, except what I have forgotten. There I also meet myself and recall myself—what I did, when and where, and how I felt when I did it. There is everything I remember, whether I experienced it myself or believed it on others’ word. From the same store I also weave, now one and now another, likenesses of things, whether experienced by me or believed on the basis of what I have experienced, and join them to the past; and from these I also weave future actions and events and hopes, and I consider all these again as if they were present. “I will do this and that,” I say to myself in that vast bosom of my mind, full of images of so many and such great things, and this or that follows.

Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, my God—a vast and boundless inner chamber. Who has ever reached its bottom? And this is a power of my mind and belongs to my nature, and yet I myself do not grasp all that I am. Is the mind, then, too narrow to hold itself? Then where is that part of itself that it does not hold? Outside itself, and not in itself? Then how does it not hold it? Great wonder rises in me at this; astonishment seizes me.

But these are not the only things that this immense capacity of my memory carries. Here too is everything learned from the liberal arts that has not yet slipped away—set apart, as it were, in an inner place that is no place. And of these I carry not images, but the things themselves. For what grammar is, what skill in debate is, how many kinds of question there are—whatever I know of these is in my memory, not in such a way that I have kept an image and left the thing outside. Nor did it sound and pass away, like a voice that leaves through the ears an impression, a trace by which it can be recalled as if it were sounding when it no longer sounds; nor like a smell which, as it passes and fades into the winds, affects the sense of smell and so conveys into memory an image of itself that we can call up again by remembering; nor like food, which certainly has no taste once in the stomach and yet in memory still has a kind of taste; nor like something perceived by bodily touch, which memory pictures even when it is separated from us.

But when I hear that there are three kinds of question—whether a thing is, what it is, and of what sort it is—I do hold images of the sounds of which these words are made, and I know that they passed through the air with a noise and now no longer exist. But the things themselves that those sounds signify I have neither reached by any bodily sense nor seen anywhere except in my mind; and what I have stored in memory is not their images but the things themselves. Let them say, if they can, where they came into me from. For I run through all the doors of my flesh and cannot find by which of them they entered.

So we find that learning these things—things whose images we do not draw in through the senses, but which we perceive within, without images, as they are in themselves—is nothing other than this: by thinking, to gather together, as it were, what memory held scattered and in disorder, and by paying attention to see that they are placed, as it were, close at hand in memory itself, where before they lay hidden, scattered and neglected, so that now they readily come forward to an attention grown familiar with them. And how many things of this kind my memory carries, things already found and, as I said, placed as if close at hand—things we are said to have learned and to know!

Memory also contains the principles and countless laws of numbers and dimensions, none of which any bodily sense has imprinted on it, since they have no color, make no sound, have no smell, and have been neither tasted nor touched. I have heard the sounds of the words by which they are signified when they are discussed; but the sounds are one thing, the principles another. For the sounds are different in Greek and in Latin, but the principles are neither Greek nor Latin nor any other kind of language. I have seen lines drawn by craftsmen, some of them very fine, like a spider’s thread; but the lines I mean are something else: they are not images of the lines the eye of my flesh reported to me. Anyone knows them who has recognized them within, without thinking of any body whatsoever. I have also perceived with all the senses of the body the numbers of the things we count; but the numbers by which we count are different: they are not images of those, and therefore they truly are.

All these I hold in memory, and I hold in memory how I learned them. I have also heard many utterly false arguments against them, and I hold them in memory too. Even though these are false, it is not false that I remember them. And I remember too that I distinguished between those truths and these falsehoods that are urged against them; and I see that distinguishing them now is one thing, and remembering that I often distinguished them, when I often thought about them, is another. So I remember that I have often understood these things; and what I now distinguish and understand I store in memory, so that later I may remember that I understood it now. So I remember that I remembered; just as later, if I recall that I was able to remember these things now, it will certainly be by the power of memory that I recall it.

The same memory also contains the feelings of my mind—not in the way the mind itself has them when it undergoes them, but in another, very different way, as befits the power of memory. For I remember that I was glad without being glad; I recall my past sadness without being sad; I recollect that I was once afraid, without fear; and I am mindful of a former craving without craving. Sometimes, on the contrary, I remember my past sadness with gladness, and my gladness with sadness. This is not surprising in the case of the body, for the mind is one thing and the body another. So if I remember a past bodily pain with joy, that is not so strange.

But look: when I say that there are four disturbances of the mind—craving, gladness, fear, sadness—it is from memory that I bring this out. And whatever I can say in discussing them, by dividing each into the species of its own genus and defining them, it is there that I find what to say and from there that I bring it out; and yet I am not disturbed by any of these disturbances when I call them to mind by remembering. Even before I recollected and reconsidered them, they were there; that is why they could be drawn out from there by recollection. Perhaps, then, just as food is brought up from the stomach by chewing the cud, so these are brought up from memory by recalling. Why, then, does the one who discusses them—that is, who remembers them—not taste in the mouth of thought the sweetness of gladness or the bitterness of grief? Or is the unlikeness just this, that the likeness is not complete? For who would willingly speak of such things if, every time we named sadness or fear, we were forced to grieve or be afraid?note

But whether this happens through images or not, who could easily say? I name a stone, I name the sun, when the things themselves are not present to my senses; but their images are certainly at hand in my memory. I name bodily pain, and it is not present to me when nothing hurts; yet unless its image were present in my memory, I would not know what I was saying, nor could I tell it apart from pleasure when discussing it. I name bodily health when I am healthy in body; the thing itself is indeed present to me. Yet unless its image were also in my memory, I could in no way recall what the sound of this word meant; nor would the sick recognize what had been said when health was named, unless the same image were held by the power of memory, though the thing itself was absent from their bodies. I name the numbers by which we count: see, they are present in my memory—not their images, but the numbers themselves.

What about when I name forgetfulness and likewise recognize what I name—how could I recognize it unless I remembered it? I do not mean the sound of the word, but the thing it signifies. If I had forgotten that, I would certainly be unable to recognize what the sound meant. So when I remember memory, memory itself is present to itself through itself. But when I remember forgetfulness, both memory and forgetfulness are present: memory, by which I remember, and forgetfulness, which I remember. But what is forgetfulness except the absence of memory? How, then, is it present so that I remember it, when while it is present I cannot remember? And yet if what we remember we retain in memory, and if, unless we remembered forgetfulness, we could never recognize on hearing the word the thing it signifies, then forgetfulness is retained by memory. So it is present so that we do not forget—the very thing whose presence makes us forget.

I, certainly, Lord, am laboring over this, and laboring over myself. I have become to myself a land of hardship and heavy sweat. For we are not now searching out the regions of the sky, or measuring the distances of the stars, or inquiring into how the earth is balanced. It is I who remember, I, the mind. It is not so surprising if whatever I am not is far from me; but what is nearer to me than myself? And look, the power of my memory is beyond my grasp, though without it I cannot even speak of myself. What, then, am I to say, when I am certain that I remember forgetfulness? Am I to say that what I remember is not in my memory? Or am I to say that forgetfulness is in my memory so that I may not forget? Both are utterly absurd. What about a third possibility?

Great is the power of memory, something awe-inspiring, my God: a deep and boundless manifoldness. And this is the mind, and this is I myself. What, then, am I, my God? What is my nature? A life varied, many-sided, and utterly immeasurable. Look at the fields and caves and caverns of my memory, countless and countlessly full of countless kinds of things—some present as images, like all bodies; some present in themselves, like the arts; some present as I know not what notions or notations, like the feelings of the mind (which memory keeps even when the mind is not undergoing them, although whatever is in memory is in the mind). Through all of these I run and fly this way and that; I even go as deep as I can, and there is no end anywhere. So great is the power of memory, so great the power of life in a human being who lives as a mortal! What then shall I do, you my true life, my God?

For the woman had lost her coin and searched for it with a lamp; and unless she had remembered it, she would not have found it. For when it was found, how would she know whether it was the one, if she did not remember it? I remember having searched for and found many things I had lost. That is how I know this: when I was looking for one of them and someone said to me, “Is this it, perhaps?” “Is it that?” I kept saying, “No,” until what I was looking for was offered to me. If I had not remembered it, whatever it was, I would not have found it even when it was offered to me, because I would not have recognized it. And it is always like this when we look for something lost and find it. But if some thing is lost to the eyes and not to memory—any visible body, say—its image is kept within, and it is searched for until it is restored to sight. And when it has been found, it is recognized from the image that is within.note

But what about when memory itself loses something, as happens when we forget and try to recall? Where do we look, in the end, except in memory itself? And there, if one thing happens to be offered in place of another, we reject it until the thing we are looking for turns up. And when it turns up, we say, “That’s it”—which we would not say unless we recognized it, and we would not recognize it unless we remembered it. So we had certainly forgotten it. Or had it not slipped away entirely, and was the part still held being used to seek the other part? Memory sensed that it was not turning over together what it used to turn over together; limping, as it were, with its habit cut short, it demanded the return of what was missing. It is like when we see someone we know, or think of them, and try to recall the name we have forgotten: whatever else occurs to us does not connect, because it is not the name we are used to thinking of together with that person, and so it is rejected until the right one comes, in which our familiar knowledge can rest, evenly matched.

How, then, do I seek you, Lord? For when I seek you, my God, I seek the happy life. Let me seek you so that my soul may live. For my body lives by my soul, and my soul lives by you. How, then, do I seek the happy life? For I do not have it until I can say, “Enough—it is there.” Here I must say how I seek it: whether through recollection, as though I had forgotten it and still keep hold of the fact that I have forgotten it; or through a desire to learn something unknown, either something I never knew, or something I have so forgotten that I do not even remember having forgotten it. Is not the happy life the very thing that everyone wants, so that there is absolutely no one who does not want it? Where did they come to know it, that they want it so? Where did they see it, that they should love it? Certainly we have it, in some way I do not know.

Is it the way someone who has seen Carthage remembers it? No. For the happy life is not seen with the eyes, because it is not a body. Is it the way we remember numbers? No. Whoever has numbers in his knowledge does not still seek to attain them; but the happy life we have in our knowledge, and so we love it, and yet we still want to attain it, so that we may be happy. Is it the way we remember eloquence? No. It is true that when they hear this name, people recall the thing itself even if they are not yet eloquent, and many want to be (which shows that it is in their knowledge). Yet they have noticed other people being eloquent through the bodily senses, and have been delighted, and long to be so themselves—though they would not be delighted except from an inner knowledge, and they would not want to be so unless they were delighted. But the happy life we do not experience in others through any bodily sense. Is it the way we remember joy? Perhaps so.

Where, then, and when did I experience my happy life, so that I remember it and love it and long for it? And not only I, or I and a few others: we all without exception want to be happy. If we did not know it with a sure knowledge, we would not want it with so sure a will. But what is this? If two people are asked whether they want to serve in the army, it may be that one of them answers that he does and the other that he does not. But if they are asked whether they want to be happy, both would at once say, without any hesitation, that they wish it; and the one wants to serve and the other does not for no other reason than to be happy. Is it, perhaps, that one finds joy in this and another in that? So all agree that they want to be happy, just as they would agree if they were asked whether they want to rejoice—and it is joy itself that they call the happy life.

Far be it, Lord, far be it from the heart of your servant who confesses to you—far be it from me to think myself happy in any joy whatever. For there is a joy that is not given to the ungodly, but to those who worship you for your own sake, whose joy you yourself are. And this is the happy life: to rejoice toward you, in you, because of you. This is it, and there is no other. Those who think there is another pursue another joy, and not the true one. Yet their will is not turned away from some image of joy.

So it is not certain that all want to be happy, since those who do not want to rejoice in you—which alone is the happy life—do not really want the happy life. Or do all want it, but because “the flesh desires against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh,” so that they do not do what they want, they fall back on what they are able to do and are content with that—because what they are not able to do, they do not want enough to be able to do it? For I ask everyone whether they would rather rejoice in truth or in falsehood. They are as quick to say they would rather rejoice in truth as they are to say they want to be happy. For the happy life is joy in the truth. That is, it is joy in you, who are the truth, O God, my light, the health of my face, my God.note

But why does truth give birth to hatred? Why did your servant, who preached the truth, become their enemy, when the happy life is loved, and it is nothing but joy in the truth? Surely it is because truth is loved in such a way that those who love something else want what they love to be the truth; and since they would not want to be deceived, they do not want to be shown that they are wrong. So they hate the truth for the sake of the very thing they love in place of the truth. They love truth when it shines, and hate it when it rebukes. Because they do not want to be deceived and do want to deceive, they love it when it reveals itself, and hate it when it reveals them. So it will pay them back: those who do not want to be revealed by it, it will reveal against their will, and it will not reveal itself to them.note

See how far I have ranged through my memory looking for you, Lord, and I have not found you outside it. Nor have I found anything about you that I did not remember from the time I first learned of you; for since I learned of you I have not forgotten you. Where I found truth, there I found my God, truth itself, which I have not forgotten since I learned it. So since I learned of you, you abide in my memory, and there I find you when I call you to mind and delight in you. These are my holy delights, which you gave me in your mercy, looking upon my poverty.

But where in my memory do you abide, Lord—where do you abide there? What resting place have you fashioned for yourself? What sanctuary have you built for yourself? You have granted my memory the honor of your abiding in it; but in what part of it you abide—that is what I am considering. When I called you to mind, I passed beyond the parts of it that beasts also have, because I did not find you there among the images of bodily things. And I came to the parts where I have stored the feelings of my mind, and I did not find you there either.

Where, then, did I find you, so as to learn of you? For you were not in my memory before I learned of you. Where, then, did I find you, so as to learn of you, if not in you, above me? And there is no place anywhere; we go back and we come forward, and there is no place anywhere. O Truth, everywhere you preside over all who consult you, and you answer all at once, even those who consult you about different things. You answer clearly, but not all hear clearly. All consult you about what they want, but they do not always hear what they want. Your best servant is the one who is less intent on hearing from you what he himself wanted than on wanting what he has heard from you.

When I cling to you with all of myself, there will be no more pain or toil for me anywhere, and my life will be alive, wholly full of you. But now—since the one you fill you lift up, and I am not full of you—I am a burden to myself. My joys, which ought to be wept over, contend with my sorrows, which ought to be rejoiced in, and I do not know which side will win. My evil sorrows contend with my good joys, and I do not know which side will win. Ah, me! Lord, have mercy on me! Ah, me! See, I do not hide my wounds. You are the physician, I am sick; you are merciful, I am miserable. Is not human life on earth a trial? Who would want troubles and hardships? You command that they be endured, not loved. No one loves what he endures, even if he loves enduring it. For though he may be glad that he endures, he would still rather there were nothing to endure.note

Certainly you command me to refrain from the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the ambition of the world. You commanded me to refrain from sleeping with a woman, and in the matter of marriage itself you advised something better than what you allowed. And since you gave me the power, it was done, even before I became a minister of your sacrament. But there still live in my memory, of which I have said so much, the images of such things, which my habit fixed there. They come at me while I am awake, but then they lack strength; in sleep, however, they bring me not only to pleasure but even to consent and to something very like the act. And the illusion of the image has so much power in my soul and in my flesh that false visions persuade me when asleep to what true ones cannot when I am awake. Am I not myself then, Lord my God?note

Is your hand not able, almighty God, to heal all the sicknesses of my soul, and by your more abundant grace to quench even the lustful stirrings of my sleep? You will increase your gifts in me more and more, Lord, so that my soul may follow me to you, freed from the birdlime of lust, so that it may not be in rebellion against itself, and so that even in sleep it may not only not commit these shameful corruptions through sensual images to the point of the flesh’s discharge, but not even consent to them. For that nothing of the sort should please it—not even so little as could be checked with a nod, even in the chaste feeling of one asleep—and not only in this life but even at this age: this is no great thing for the Almighty, for you who are able to do more than we ask or understand.note

There is another evil of the day—would that it were enough for the day! For we repair the daily wear and tear of the body by eating and drinking, until you destroy both food and stomach, when you will kill need with a wonderful fullness and clothe this corruptible body with everlasting incorruption. But now this necessity is sweet to me, and I fight against that sweetness so as not to be captured. I wage a daily war by fasting, often bringing my body into subjection, and my pains are driven out by pleasure. For hunger and thirst are pains of a sort: they burn, and like a fever they kill, unless the medicine of food comes to the rescue. And since this is at hand, thanks to the comfort of your gifts, in which earth and water and sky serve our weakness, our affliction is called a delight.note

You have taught me this: to come to taking food as I would to taking medicine. But while I pass from the discomfort of need to the rest of fullness, in that very passage the snare of desire lies in wait for me. For the passage itself is a pleasure, and there is no other way to pass over to where necessity compels us to go. And though health is the reason for eating and drinking, a dangerous delight attaches itself like a servant following behind, and often tries to go on ahead, so that what I say or intend to do for health’s sake is done for its sake. Nor is the measure the same for both: what is enough for health is too little for pleasure. And it often becomes unclear whether it is the necessary care of the body still asking for support, or a deceptive, pleasure-seeking craving offering its services.

I hear the voice of my God commanding: “Do not let your hearts be weighed down with overindulgence and drunkenness.” Drunkenness is far from me; you will have mercy, so that it does not come near me. But overindulgence sometimes creeps up on your servant; you will have mercy, so that it is put far from me. For no one can be self-controlled unless you grant it. You give us many things when we pray, and whatever good we received before we prayed, we received from you; and that we should later recognize this, we also received from you. I have never been a drunkard, but I have known drunkards made sober by you. So it was your doing that those who never were drunkards are not, and your doing that those who were are not so forever, and your doing too that both know whose doing it was.note

You have taught me, good Father, that “to the pure all things are pure,” but that “it is wrong for anyone to eat what causes offense”; that “everything you have created is good, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving”; that “food does not commend us to God”; that “no one should judge us in matters of food or drink”; and that “the one who eats should not despise the one who does not, and the one who does not eat should not judge the one who does.” I have learned these things. Thanks to you, praise to you, my God, my teacher, who knock at my ears and shed light on my heart. Rescue me from every temptation. It is not the uncleanness of food that I fear, but the uncleanness of craving. I know that Noah was permitted to eat every kind of meat that was fit for food; that Elijah was restored by eating meat; and that John, endowed with wonderful abstinence, was not defiled by the living creatures—that is, the locusts—that he took for food.note

Set among these temptations, then, I struggle every day against the desire to eat and drink. For this is not something I can resolve to cut off once and for all and never touch again, as I was able to do with sleeping with a woman. So the reins of the throat must be held with a moderate slackening and tightening. And who is there, Lord, who is not carried a little beyond the limits of necessity? Whoever he is, he is great; let him magnify your name. But I am not he, for I am a sinful man. Yet I too magnify your name, and he who has overcome the world intercedes with you for my sins, counting me among the weak members of his body; for your eyes have seen what is imperfect in him, and in your book all will be written.note

About the allure of scents I am not much troubled. When they are absent I do not look for them; when they are present I do not refuse them; and I am ready to do without them always. So it seems to me; perhaps I am deceived. For this too is a darkness to be lamented, in which the capacity that is in me is hidden from me, so that my mind, questioning itself about its own strength, does not think it can easily trust itself. For what is in it is usually hidden unless experience brings it to light. And no one ought to feel sure, in this life, which is called one long trial, that someone who could change from worse to better may not also change from better to worse. My one hope, my one confidence, my one firm promise is your mercy.

The pleasures of the ear had entangled and subdued me more tightly, but you set me loose and freed me. Now, I confess, when your words give life to sounds sung with a sweet and skilled voice, I do rest in them a little—not so as to cling to them, but so that I can rise up when I wish. Yet together with the words by which they live and gain admission to me, they seek a place of some dignity in my heart, and I can hardly offer them a fitting one. For sometimes I seem to myself to give them more honor than is proper, when I feel that our minds are moved to the flame of devotion more religiously and more ardently by the holy words themselves when they are sung this way than if they were not; and that all the feelings of our spirit, in their variety, have their own proper modes in voice and song, by some hidden kinship with which they are stirred.

But sometimes, guarding too anxiously against this very deception, I err by too much severity—at times so much that I would want every melody of the sweet chants to which David’s Psalter is set banished from my ears and from those of the church itself. And the safer course seems to me the one I remember often being told about Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, who had the reader of the psalm use so slight an inflection of the voice that it was closer to speaking than to singing. And yet when I remember the tears I shed at the church’s songs in the early days of my recovered faith, and how even now I am admonished not by the singing but by the things that are sung, when they are sung with a clear voice and the most fitting melody, I acknowledge once more the great usefulness of this practice.note

There remains the pleasure of these eyes of my flesh, about which I will make my confessions for the ears of your temple to hear, brotherly and devout ears, so that we may bring to an end the temptations of the desire of the flesh that still assail me as I groan and long to be clothed with my dwelling that is from heaven. The eyes love beautiful and varied shapes, bright and pleasant colors. Let these not hold my soul; let God hold it, who made these things very good indeed—but he is my good, not they. And they touch me while I am awake all day long, and no rest from them is given me, as rest is given from sounds of singing, and sometimes from all sounds, in silence. For light itself, the queen of colors, bathing everything we see, wherever I may be during the day, caresses me as it glides in upon me in countless ways, while I am doing something else and not paying attention to it.note

O light that Tobit saw when, with these eyes of his closed, he taught his son the way of life and went ahead of him on the feet of love, never straying; or that Isaac saw, when his fleshly eyes were heavy and veiled with old age, and it was granted him to bless his sons not by recognizing them, but to recognize them by blessing them; or that Jacob saw, when he too, blinded by great age, with a luminous heart shed light on the tribes of the people to come, prefigured in his sons, and laid his hands, mystically crossed, on his grandsons by Joseph—not as their father corrected him from outside, but as he himself discerned within. This is the light: it is one, and all who see it and love it are one. But this bodily light I was speaking of seasons the life of this world for its blind lovers with an enticing and dangerous sweetness.note

How countless are the things people have added, by all kinds of arts and crafts, to entice the eyes—in clothes, shoes, vessels and artifacts of every sort, in pictures too and images of every kind—things that go far beyond necessary and moderate use and any devout meaning. Outwardly they pursue what they make; inwardly they abandon the one who made them and destroy what they were made to be. But I, my God and my glory, even from this sing you a hymn and offer praise as a sacrifice to the one who sacrifices for me. For the beautiful designs that pass through people’s souls into skilled hands come from that Beauty which is above souls, for which my soul sighs day and night. But those who make and pursue outward beauties draw from it their standard for approving them, not their standard for using them.

To this is added another form of temptation, dangerous in more ways. For besides the desire of the flesh, which lies in the delight of all the senses and pleasures, and whose slaves perish as they go far from you, there is in the soul, through these same bodily senses, a certain empty and curious craving—not to take pleasure in the flesh, but to gain experience through the flesh—cloaked under the name of knowledge and learning. Because it lies in the appetite for knowing, and the eyes are chief among the senses for knowing, it is called in the divine word “the desire of the eyes.” Seeing belongs properly to the eyes; yet we use this word for the other senses too, when we apply them to knowing. We do not say, “Hear how it glows,” or “Smell how it shines,” or “Taste how it gleams,” or “Feel how it glitters”: all these are said to be seen.

From this one can see more clearly what, in the work of the senses, belongs to pleasure and what to curiosity. Pleasure pursues what is beautiful, melodious, fragrant, tasty and soft; but curiosity pursues even their opposites, for the sake of trying them—not to undergo discomfort, but out of a lust for experiencing and knowing. What pleasure is there in looking at a mangled corpse that makes you shudder? And yet if one is lying somewhere, people flock to it, to be saddened, to turn pale. They are even afraid of seeing it in their dreams—as if anyone had forced them to look at it while awake, or some report of its beauty had persuaded them. So too with the other senses, which it would take long to go through. From this disease of craving, all sorts of marvels are put on display in the shows. From this, people go on to probe the workings of nature, which is not apart from us,, which it does no good to know and which people want to know for nothing but the knowing. From this, too, comes any inquiry by magic arts undertaken with the same aim of perverted knowledge.

In this immense forest, so full of traps and dangers, see how much I have cut away and driven from my heart, as you have granted me to do, God of my salvation. And yet when do I dare to say—since so many things of this kind clamor all around our daily life—when do I dare to say that nothing of the sort draws me to watch it and catches me with idle interest? True, the theaters no longer carry me away, nor do I care to know the courses of the stars, nor has my soul ever sought answers from the shades of the dead; I detest all sacrilegious rites. Yet, Lord my God, to whom I owe humble and simple service, with what scheming suggestions the enemy works on me to ask you for some sign! But I beg you, by our King and by our homeland, Jerusalem, simple and chaste, that just as consent to such things is far from me, so it may always be far, and ever farther.

Yet in how many tiny and contemptible things our curiosity is tempted every day, and how often we slip—who can count? How often, when people tell idle stories, we at first put up with them, as it were, so as not to offend the weak, and then little by little we listen gladly. I no longer watch a dog chasing a hare when it happens at the circus; but out in the country, if I happen to pass by, that chase may well distract me even from some important thought and turn me toward it—not forcing me to turn my mount aside, but turning the inclination of my heart. And unless you quickly warn me, having already shown me my weakness, either to rise to you from the sight itself by some reflection, or to despise the whole thing and pass on, I grow empty and dull. What about when I am sitting at home and a lizard catching flies, or a spider entangling them as they rush into its webs, often holds my attention? Just because the animals are small, is it not the same thing going on?

Shall we count this too among things to be despised? Or will anything bring us back to hope except your mercy, which we know, since you have begun to change us? And you know how far you have changed me: you who first heal me of the lust to vindicate myself, so that you may be gracious to all my other iniquities too, and heal all my diseases, and redeem my life from corruption, and crown me with compassion and mercy, and satisfy my desire with good things; you who crushed my pride by fear of you and tamed my neck to your yoke. And now I carry it, and it is light to me, because so you promised and so you have done; and truly it was so, and I did not know it, when I was afraid to take it on.note

But, Lord—you who alone rule without pride, because you alone are the true Lord, who have no lord over you—has this third kind of temptation also left me, or can it ever leave me in this whole life: the wish to be feared and loved by people, for no other reason than to get from it a joy that is no joy? It is a wretched life and an ugly boastfulness. From this, above all, comes failing to love you and to fear you chastely; and so you “resist the proud but give grace to the humble,” and you thunder over the ambitions of the world, and the foundations of the mountains tremble. So, because certain duties of human society make it necessary for us to be loved and feared by people, the adversary of our true happiness presses on us, scattering everywhere among his snares his “Well done!note

We are tempted by these temptations every day, Lord; we are tempted without ceasing. Our daily furnace is the human tongue. In this area too you command self-control of us. Give what you command, and command what you will. You know the groaning of my heart to you over this, and the rivers of my eyes. For I do not easily work out how far I am cleansed of this plague, and I greatly fear my hidden faults, which your eyes know but mine do not. In the other kinds of temptation I have at least some means of examining myself; in this one, almost none. For with the pleasures of the flesh and with the superfluous curiosity for knowing, I can see how far I have gained the power to restrain my mind when I do without those things, whether by choice or because they are absent. Then I ask myself how much more or less it bothers me not to have them.note

What, then, do I confess to you, Lord, in this kind of temptation? What but that I am delighted by praise? Yet more by the truth itself than by praise. For if I were offered the choice whether I would rather be praised by everyone while mad or mistaken about everything, or be blamed by everyone while steadfast and utterly certain in the truth, I see which I would choose. Yet I would wish that the approval of another’s mouth did not even increase my joy in any good of mine. But it does increase it, I admit—and not only that: blame diminishes it. And when I am troubled by this misery of mine, an excuse slips in on me; what sort it is, you know, God, for it leaves me uncertain.

Look: in you, Truth, I see that I ought to be moved by my praises not for my own sake but for my neighbor’s good. Whether I am so, I do not know. In this matter I know myself less than I know you. I beg you, my God, show me to myself as well, so that I may confess to my brothers, who will pray for me, whatever wound I find in myself. Let me question myself again, more carefully. If it is my neighbor’s good that moves me when I am praised, why am I less moved when someone else is unjustly blamed than when I am? Why am I stung more by an insult hurled at me than by one hurled with the same injustice at someone else in my presence? Do I not know this either? Or does it remain that I deceive myself and do not practice the truth before you in my heart and on my tongue?

I am needy and poor, and I am better when, in secret groaning, I am displeased with myself and seek your mercy, until what is lacking in me is restored and made complete, into the peace the eye of the arrogant does not know. But words coming from the mouth, and deeds that become known to people, carry a most dangerous temptation from the love of praise, which collects begged votes of approval for a kind of private eminence. It tempts me even when I rebuke it in myself, by the very fact that I rebuke it; and often a person glories more vainly in his very contempt of vainglory—and so he no longer glories in contempt of glory, for he does not despise it while he glories.

Within, too, within there is another evil in the same kind of temptation, by which those who are pleased with themselves become empty, even though they do not please others, or even displease them, and do not try to please them. But those who please themselves greatly displease you—not only when they are pleased with things that are not good as if they were good, but also with your good things as if they were their own; or even as yours, but as if earned by their own merits; or even as coming from your grace, yet not rejoicing in it together with others but begrudging it to them. In all these and similar dangers and toils you see the trembling of my heart; and I feel that my wounds are healed by you again and again, rather than that they are not inflicted on me.

Where have you not walked with me, Truth, teaching me what to beware of and what to seek, when I brought to you what I could see here below and consulted you? I surveyed the world outside with my senses as best I could, and I observed the life my body has from me, and my senses themselves. From there I entered the recesses of my memory, those manifold and spacious chambers, wonderfully full of countless riches; and I considered and was awestruck, and I could discern none of these things without you, and I found that none of them was you. Nor was I myself you, I the discoverer, who went through them all and tried to distinguish them and to value each according to its worth—receiving some things from the wavering senses and questioning them, feeling other things mingled with myself, distinguishing and counting the messengers themselves, and in the broad wealth of memory handling some things, storing some away, digging some out.

And so I have considered the sicknesses of my sins under the threefold craving, and I have called on your right hand to save me. For I saw your splendor with a wounded heart, and, beaten back, I said, “Who can reach that?” I am cast away from the sight of your eyes. You are the Truth presiding over all things; but I, in my greed, did not want to lose you, yet wanted to possess a lie along with you—just as no one wants to speak falsely in such a way that he himself does not know what is true. So I lost you, because you do not consent to be possessed together with a lie.

Whom could I find to reconcile me to you? Was I to go canvassing the angels? With what prayer? With what rites? Many who tried to return to you and could not do it by themselves have, I hear, attempted this, and fell into a desire for curious visions, and were thought fit to be deluded. For in their exaltation they sought you, puffing out their chests with the arrogance of learning rather than beating them; and through the likeness of their hearts they drew to themselves the powers of this air, conspirators and partners in their pride, by whom they were deceived through magical powers. They were seeking a mediator through whom they might be purified, and there was none. For it was the devil, transforming himself into an angel of light; and he greatly enticed proud flesh, because he himself had no fleshly body. For they were mortal and sinners, while you, Lord, to whom they wanted to be reconciled, are immortal and without sin.note

But the true Mediator, whom in your secret mercy you showed to humankind and sent, so that by his example they might learn humility itself—that “mediator between God and humans, the man Christ Jesus”—appeared between mortal sinners and the immortal Righteous One: mortal with humans, righteous with God. He appeared so that, since the wages of righteousness are life and peace, through a righteousness joined to God he might make void the death of the ungodly whom he makes righteous, a death he chose to share with them. He was shown to the saints of old, so that they might be saved through faith in his passion to come, as we are through faith in his passion past. For insofar as he is man, he is mediator; but insofar as he is the Word, he is not in the middle, because he is equal to God, and God with God, and together one God.

How you have loved us, good Father, who “did not spare your only Son but handed him over” for us, the ungodly! How you have loved us, for whom he, “not thinking it robbery to be equal” to you, “became subject even to death on a cross”—he alone free among the dead, having power to lay down his life and power to take it up again; for us, before you, both victor and victim, and victor because victim; for us, before you, both priest and sacrifice, and priest because sacrifice; making us your children instead of slaves, by being born of you and serving you. Rightly is my hope strong in him, that you will heal all my diseases through him who sits at your right hand and intercedes with you for us; otherwise I would despair.note

Terrified by my sins and by the weight of my misery, I had turned it over in my heart and considered fleeing into solitude; but you forbade me and strengthened me, saying: “Christ died for all, so that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for all.” See, Lord, I cast my care on you, that I may live, and “I will consider the wonders of your law.” You know my ignorance and my weakness: teach me and heal me. That only Son of yours, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” has redeemed me with his blood. Let the proud not slander me, for I think on the price paid for me; I eat and drink it and give it out to others; and, poor as I am, I long to be filled with it among those who “eat and are filled. And those who seek him will praise the Lord.”note

Lord, since eternity is yours, can you be unaware of what I am telling you, or see in time what happens in time? Why, then, do I set before you such a string of stories? Certainly not so that you may learn them from me; rather, I am stirring up my affection toward you, and that of those who read these things, so that we may all say, “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised.” I have said it already and I will say it again: “I do this for love of your love.” For we pray too, and yet the Truth says, “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” So we lay bare our affection to you by confessing to you our miseries and your mercies upon us, so that you may free us completely, since you have begun, and we may cease to be miserable in ourselves and be made happy in you. For you have called us to be poor in spirit, and meek, and mourning, and hungry and thirsty for righteousness, and merciful, and pure in heart, and peacemakers.note

But when am I equal to telling, with the tongue of my pen, all your encouragements and all your terrors, your consolations and your guidance, by which you led me to preach your word and dispense your sacrament to your people? And even if I am equal to telling these things in order, the drops of time are precious to me. For a long time I have been burning to meditate on your law, and in it to confess to you my knowledge and my ignorance, the first glimmers of your illumination and the remnants of my darkness, until weakness is swallowed up by strength. And I do not want the hours I find free from the need to restore the body and the mind’s attention, and from the service we owe to others—and the service we do not owe and yet render—to trickle away into anything else.

Lord my God, attend to my prayer, and let your mercy hear my desire, for it does not burn for me alone but wants to be of use to brotherly love; and you see in my heart that this is so. Let me offer you in sacrifice the service of my thought and my tongue, and give me what I may offer you. For I am needy and poor; you are rich to all who call on you, you who, free of care, take care of us. Circumcise my lips, inner and outer, from all rashness and all falsehood. Let your Scriptures be my chaste delight; let me not be deceived in them, nor deceive others from them. Lord, attend and have mercy, Lord my God, light of the blind and strength of the weak, and at once light of those who see and strength of the strong: attend to my soul, and hear it crying out of the deep. For unless your ears are present even in the deep, where shall we go? To whom shall we cry?

Lord, have mercy on me and hear my desire. For I think it does not spring from the earth—not from gold and silver and precious stones, or fine clothes, or honors and powers, or pleasures of the flesh, nor from the necessities of the body and of this life of our pilgrimage—all of which are added to us as we seek your kingdom and your righteousness. See, my God, where my desire comes from. The unjust have told me of delights, but not like your law, Lord: see, that is where my desire comes from. See, Father—look and see and approve; and may it please you, in the sight of your mercy, that I find grace before you, so that the inner meaning of your words may be opened to me when I knock.note

Let me hear and understand how “in the beginning you made heaven and earth.” Moses wrote this; he wrote it and went away; he passed from here, from you to you, and he is not before me now. If he were, I would take hold of him and ask him and beg him, through you, to open these things to me; and I would lend the ears of my body to the sounds bursting from his mouth. If he spoke in Hebrew, it would strike my senses in vain, and none of it would touch my mind; but if in Latin, I would know what he was saying. But how would I know whether he was telling the truth? And even if I knew this, would I know it from him?

Look—heaven and earth exist! They cry out that they were made, for they change and vary. But whatever was not made and yet exists has nothing in it that was not there before; and that is what changing and varying is. They also cry out that they did not make themselves: “We exist because we were made. So we did not exist before we existed, so as to be able to make ourselves.” And the voice in which they speak is their very self-evidence. You, then, Lord, made them: you who are beautiful, for they are beautiful; you who are good, for they are good; you who are, for they are. Yet they are not beautiful, nor good, nor do they exist, in the way that you, their maker, are; compared with you they are neither beautiful nor good, nor do they exist. We know this—thanks be to you—and our knowledge, compared with your knowledge, is ignorance.

But how did you make heaven and earth? What was the machinery of so vast a work of yours? For you did not work like a human craftsman, who forms one body out of another at the discretion of a mind able to impose, in one way or another, a form it sees within itself with an inner eye (and where would it get that ability, if you had not made it?). And it imposes that form on something that already exists and has being, such as earth or stone or wood or gold or anything of that kind. And where would these come from, if you had not established them?

But how did you speak? Was it in the way the voice came from the cloud, saying, “This is my beloved Son”? That voice was uttered and passed away; it began and it ended. The syllables sounded and passed, the second after the first, the third after the second, and so on in order, until the last came after the rest, and silence after the last. From this it is clear and plain that the motion of some created thing produced it, itself temporal, serving your eternal will. And these words of yours, made for a moment, the outer ear reported to the understanding mind, whose inner ear is attuned to your eternal Word. But the mind compared these words, sounding in time, with your Word, eternal in its silence, and said, “It is different, far different; far different it is.note

And so you call us to understand the Word, God with you who are God, which is spoken eternally, and in which all things are spoken eternally. For it is not that what was being said comes to an end and something else is said, so that everything may be said in turn; rather, all things are said at once and eternally. Otherwise there would already be time and change, and not true eternity or true immortality. This I know, my God, and I give you thanks. I know it, I confess to you, Lord, and whoever is not ungrateful to sure truth knows it with me and blesses you. We know, Lord, we know that insofar as anything is not what it was and is what it was not, to that extent it dies and comes to birth. So nothing of your Word gives way or takes another’s place, since it is truly immortal and eternal. And therefore by the Word, coeternal with you, you say at once and eternally all that you say, and whatever you say shall come to be comes to be.

Why is this, I ask, Lord my God? I see it in some fashion, but how to put it into words I do not know—except that everything that begins to be and ceases to be begins and ceases at the moment when, in the eternal reason, it is known that it ought to begin or cease; and in that reason nothing begins and nothing ceases. That reason is your Word, which is also the Beginning, because it also speaks to us. So it says in the gospel, speaking through the flesh; and this sounded outwardly in human ears, so that it might be believed, and sought inwardly, and found in the eternal truth, where the good and only Teacher teaches all his disciples. There I hear your voice, Lord, telling me that the one who speaks to us is the one who teaches us, while one who does not teach us, even if he speaks, does not speak to us. And what teaches us, if not unchanging truth?note

In this Beginning, God, you made heaven and earth—in your Word, in your Son, in your power, in your wisdom, in your truth—speaking in a wonderful way and making in a wonderful way. Who will grasp it? Who will tell it? What is that which gleams through to me and strikes my heart without wounding it? I shudder and I burn: I shudder insofar as I am unlike it; I burn insofar as I am like it.

Look—are they not full of their old selves, those who say to us, “What was God doing before he made heaven and earth? If he was idle,” they say, “and was not working at anything, why did he not stay that way forever after, just as he had always refrained from work before? For if some new movement arose in God, and a new will, to establish a creation he had never established before, how is that true eternity, where a will arises that was not there before? For God’s will is not a creature; it comes before creation, since nothing would be created unless the Creator’s will came first. So his will belongs to God’s very substance. And if something arose in God’s substance that was not there before, that substance is not truly called eternal. But if God’s will that creation should exist was eternal, why is creation not eternal too?”

Those who say these things do not yet understand you, O Wisdom of God, light of minds; they do not yet understand how the things that come to be through you and in you come to be. They try to grasp eternal things, but their heart still flutters among the past and future movements of things, and is still empty.

But if someone’s flighty mind wanders among images of times gone by, and marvels that you, God almighty, all-creating and all-sustaining, maker of heaven and earth, refrained from so great a work through countless ages before you made it, let him wake up and pay attention, for what he marvels at is false. For how could countless ages have passed that you had not made, since you are the author and founder of all ages? Or what times could there have been that were not founded by you? Or how could they have passed, if they had never been? Since, then, you are the maker of all times, if there was any time before you made heaven and earth, why is it said that you were refraining from work? For you had made that very time, and times could not pass before you made times. But if there was no time before heaven and earth, why do people ask what you were doing then?

Nor do you precede times in time; otherwise you would not precede all times. You precede all past times in the loftiness of an eternity that is always present, and you surpass all future times, because they are future, and when they have come, they will be past. But you are the same, and your years will not fail. Your years neither go nor come; ours go and come, so that all of them may come. Your years all stand at once, because they stand still; those that go are not pushed out by those that come, because they do not pass away. But these years of ours will all be only when all of them are no more. Your years are one day, and your day is not “every day” but “today,” because your today does not give way to tomorrow; nor does it follow yesterday.

And yet we speak of a long time and a short time, and we say this only of the past or the future. For example, we call a hundred years ago a long time past, and likewise a hundred years from now a long time to come; a short past, say, when we speak of ten days ago, and a short future when we speak of ten days from now. But how can something be long or short that does not exist? For the past no longer exists and the future does not yet exist. So let us not say “It is long,” but say of the past “It was long,” and of the future “It will be long.” My Lord, my light, will your truth not laugh at human beings here too? For the past time that was long—was it long when it was already past, or while it was still present?

Let us see, then, human soul, whether present time can be long; for it has been given to you to perceive and measure spans of time. What will you answer me? Is a hundred present years a long time? First see whether a hundred years can be present. If the first of them is going on, that year is present, but the other ninety-nine are future and so do not yet exist. If the second year is going on, one is already past, another present, the rest future. And so with any year in the middle of this hundred that we take as present: before it will be past years, after it future ones. So a hundred years cannot be present. See at least whether the one year that is going on is itself present. If its first month is going on, the rest are future; if the second, the first has already passed and the rest do not yet exist.

See: present time, which alone we found might be called long, has shrunk to the span of barely a single day. But let us examine that too, for not even one day is wholly present. It is made up of twenty-four hours of night and day; the first of these has the rest in the future, the last has them in the past, and any of those in between has past hours before it and future ones after it. And that one hour itself goes by in fleeting particles: whatever of it has flown away is past, whatever remains of it is future. If we can conceive of any bit of time that cannot be divided into even the tiniest parts of moments, that alone is what may be called present; and yet it flies so swiftly from future into past that it is not extended by the slightest delay. For if it is extended, it is divided into past and future; but the present has no extent. Where, then, is the time that we may call long? Is it the future?

And yet, Lord, we perceive intervals of time, and compare them with one another, and call some longer and others shorter. We even measure how much longer or shorter one time is than another, and we answer that this one is double or triple, and that one single, or that this one is just as long as that. But it is times as they pass that we measure, when we measure them by perceiving them. As for past times, which no longer exist, or future ones, which do not yet exist—who can measure them? Unless perhaps someone will dare to say that what does not exist can be measured. So while time is passing, it can be perceived and measured; but once it has passed, since it does not exist, it cannot.

I am inquiring, Father, not asserting. My God, guard me and guide me. Who is there to tell me that there are not three times—past, present, and future—as we learned as children and have taught children, but only the present, since those other two do not exist? Or do they exist too, but time comes out of some hidden place when it turns from future into present, and withdraws into some hidden place when it turns from present into past? For where did those who sang of the future see it, if it does not yet exist? What does not exist cannot be seen. And those who tell of the past would surely not be telling the truth if they did not see it with the mind; and if the past were nothing, it could not be seen at all. So both future and past things exist.

Let me search further, Lord, my hope; let my attention not be thrown into confusion. For if future and past things exist, I want to know where they are. And if I cannot yet manage that, I do know this: wherever they are, they are not there as future or past, but as present. For if they are future there too, they are not there yet; if they are past there too, they are no longer there. So wherever they are, whatever they are, they exist only as present. Yet when past events are truly told, what is brought out of memory is not the things themselves, which have passed away, but words formed from their images, which those things, as they passed through the senses, fixed in the mind like footprints.

However this mysterious foreknowledge of the future may work, nothing can be seen except what exists. And what already exists is not future but present. So when future things are said to be seen, it is not the things themselves that are seen, which do not yet exist—that is, which are future—but perhaps their causes or signs, which already exist. So these are not future but present to those who see them, and from them future things are predicted, as conceived in the mind. These conceptions in turn already exist, and those who predict the future look at them as present within themselves. Let the vast multitude of things offer me an example. I look at the dawn; I announce that the sun will rise. What I look at is present; what I announce is future—not the sun, which already exists, but its rising, which does not yet exist. And yet unless I pictured that rising in my mind, as I do now while I speak of it, I could not predict it.

You, then, ruler of your creation—what is the way in which you teach souls what is to come? For you taught your prophets. What is that way in which you teach the future, you to whom nothing is future? Or rather, do you teach present things about the future? For what does not exist certainly cannot be taught. That way is far beyond my sight: it is too strong for me. By myself I cannot reach it; but by you I can, when you grant it, sweet light of my hidden eyes.

What is now plain and clear is that neither future nor past things exist, and it is not properly said, “There are three times, past, present, and future.” Perhaps it would be properly said, “There are three times: a present of past things, a present of present things, a present of future things.” For these three are somehow in the soul, and I do not see them anywhere else: the present of past things is memory; the present of present things is direct sight; the present of future things is expectation. If we are allowed to speak this way, I see three times, and I admit that there are three. Let people even say, “There are three times, past, present, and future,” as custom misuses the words—let them say it. See, I do not mind, I do not object, I do not find fault, so long as what is said is understood: that neither what is future exists now, nor what is past. For few are the things we say properly, and many we say improperly; but what we mean is recognized.

I said a little earlier, then, that we measure times as they pass, so that we can say that this span of time is double that single one, or that this is as much as that, and whatever else we can report about the parts of time by measuring. So, as I was saying, we measure times as they pass; and if someone asks me, “How do you know?” I would answer: I know because we measure them, and we cannot measure what does not exist, and past and future do not exist. But how do we measure present time, when it has no extent? It is measured, then, while it passes; once it has passed, it is not measured, for there will be nothing to measure. But from where, by what way, and to where does it pass while it is being measured? From where, if not from the future? By what way, if not through the present? To where, if not into the past? So: out of what does not yet exist, through what has no extent, into what no longer exists.

My mind is on fire to understand this most tangled riddle. Do not shut them away, Lord my God, good Father—I beg you through Christ—do not shut away from my longing these things, so familiar and so hidden; let it get inside them, and let them grow clear in the light of your mercy, Lord. Whom shall I ask about them? And to whom could I more fruitfully confess my ignorance than to you, who do not find tiresome my studies, burning so fiercely for your Scriptures? Give what I love; for I do love, and this too you have given. Give, Father, you who truly know how to give good gifts to your children; give, since I have undertaken to understand, and there is toil before me until you open it. I beg you through Christ, in the name of him, the Holy of Holies: let no one shout me down. I too have believed, and therefore I speak. This is my hope, for this I live: to contemplate the delight of the Lord.note

I heard a learned man say that the movements of the sun, moon, and stars are themselves time, and I did not agree. For why should not the movements of all bodies be time instead? If the lights of heaven stopped and a potter’s wheel kept turning, would there be no time by which we could measure its turns and say either that they took equal intervals, or, if it moved sometimes more slowly and sometimes faster, that some turns lasted longer and others less? And while we said this, would we not also be speaking in time? Would there be long syllables in our words and short ones, unless the long had sounded for a longer time and the short for a shorter? God, grant human beings to see in a small thing the notions common to things both small and great. The stars and lights of heaven are there “for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years.”note

I want to know the power and nature of time, by which we measure the movements of bodies and say, for example, that this movement lasts twice as long as that one. For here is my question. “Day” refers not only to the sun’s stay above the earth, in the sense in which day is one thing and night another, but also to its whole circuit from east back to east, in the sense in which we say, “So many days have passed” (for “so many days” includes their nights, and the stretches of night are not counted separately). Since, then, a day is completed by the movement of the sun and its circuit from east to east, I ask whether the day is the movement itself, or the duration in which it is completed, or both. If it were the first, then it would be a day even if the sun completed that course in a span of time as short as one hour.

Do you command me to agree if someone says that time is the movement of a body? You do not. For I hear that no body moves except in time: you say so. But I do not hear that the movement of a body is itself time: you do not say so. For when a body moves, I measure by time how long it moves, from when it starts to move until it stops. And if I did not see when it began, and it keeps moving so that I do not see when it stops, I cannot measure it, except perhaps from when I begin to watch until I stop. If I watch for a long time, I can only report that it is a long time, not how long, because when we say “how long,” we say it by comparison, as in “this is as long as that,” or “this is double that,” and anything else of that kind.

And I confess to you, Lord, that I still do not know what time is; and again I confess to you, Lord, that I know I am saying these things in time, and that I have been speaking about time for a long while now, and that this very “long while” is long only by a duration of time. How then do I know this, when I do not know what time is? Or perhaps I do not know how to say what I know? How wretched I am, who do not even know what I do not know! Look, my God: before you, I do not lie. As I speak, so is my heart. You will light my lamp, Lord my God; you will light up my darkness.

Press on, my mind, and attend with all your strength. God is our helper: he made us, and not we ourselves. Attend where truth begins to dawn. Suppose, for instance, a bodily voice begins to sound, and sounds, and keeps sounding, and then it stops; now there is silence, and that voice is past, and is a voice no longer. It was future before it sounded, and could not be measured, because it did not yet exist; and now it cannot, because it no longer exists. So it could be measured then, while it was sounding, because then it existed to be measured. But even then it was not standing still: it was going, passing away. Or was that exactly why it could be measured? For in passing, it stretched over some span of time in which it could be measured, since the present has no span. If, then, it could be measured then—suppose another voice has begun to sound and is still sounding, in one continuous tone without any break. Let us measure it while it is sounding.note

“Deus creator omnium” [God, creator of all things]: this line of eight syllables alternates short and long syllables. So the four short ones—the first, third, fifth, and seventh—are single in relation to the four long ones—the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth. Each long one has double the time of each short one. I say the line aloud and I report that it is so, as far as it is perceived by plain sense. As far as sense is plain, I measure the long syllable by the short one and perceive that it has twice as much. But when one sounds after the other—if the first is short and the second long—how shall I hold on to the short one, and how shall I lay it against the long one to measure it, so as to find that the long one has twice as much, since the long one does not begin to sound until the short one has stopped sounding? And do I measure the long one itself while it is present, when I do not measure it until it has ended? Yet its ending is its passing away. What is it, then, that I measure? Where is the short syllable I measure with? Where is the long one I measure?

It is in you, my mind, that I measure times. Do not interrupt me—that is, do not interrupt yourself with the jostling crowd of your impressions. In you, I say, I measure times. The impression that things make on you as they pass, and that remains when they have passed—that is what I measure, as something present, not the things that passed by to produce it. It is this I measure when I measure times. So either this is what times are, or it is not times that I measure. What about when we measure silences, and say that this silence lasted as long as that sound did? Do we not stretch our thought out to the measure of the sound, as if it were sounding, so that we can report something about the intervals of silence in a span of time? For even when voice and mouth are still, we run through poems and verses and any kind of speech in our thoughts, and any measured movements whatever, and we report on the spans of time—how long this is compared with that—exactly as if we were saying them aloud.

But how is the future, which does not yet exist, diminished or used up? Or how does the past, which no longer exists, grow—unless because in the mind that does this there are three things? For the mind expects, attends, and remembers, so that what it expects passes through what it attends to into what it remembers. Who, then, denies that future things do not yet exist? Yet there is already in the mind an expectation of future things. And who denies that past things no longer exist? Yet there is still in the mind a memory of past things. And who denies that present time has no extension, since it passes in an instant? Yet attention endures, and through it what is about to be present passes on into being absent. So it is not future time that is long, since it does not exist; a long future is a long expectation of the future. Nor is past time long, since it does not exist; a long past is a long memory of the past.

I am about to recite a song I know. Before I begin, my expectation stretches over the whole of it. But once I have begun, as much of it as I pluck off into the past, my memory stretches over that too; and the life of this action of mine is stretched out two ways—into memory, because of what I have said, and into expectation, because of what I am about to say. Yet my attention is present, and through it what was future is carried across to become past. The more this goes on and on, the shorter expectation becomes and the longer memory, until all expectation is used up, when the whole action is finished and has passed into memory.

But since your mercy is better than lives, see: my life is a stretching. And your right hand has taken me up in my Lord, the Son of Man, the mediator between you, the One, and us, the many—many in many ways and through many things—so that through him I may lay hold of the one by whom I have been laid hold of, and may be gathered up from my old days to follow the One. Forgetting what lies behind, not stretched apart toward things that will come and pass away but stretched forward to what lies ahead, not by stretching apart but by concentration, I press on toward the prize of the call from above, where I may hear the voice of praise and contemplate your delight, which neither comes nor passes away. But now my years are spent in groaning; and you, Lord, my Father, are my comfort; you are eternal.note

And I will stand and be made firm in you, in my mold, your truth. I will not put up with the questions of people who, from a disease that is its own punishment, thirst for more than they can hold, and ask, “What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?” or “What came into his mind to make something, when he had never made anything before?” Grant them, Lord, to think carefully about what they are saying, and to discover that “never” cannot be said where there is no time. So when he is said never to have made anything, what else is being said but that he made nothing at any time? Let them see, then, that there can be no time without a creature, and let them stop this empty talk. Let them also stretch forward to what lies ahead, and understand that you are before all times, the eternal creator of all times, and that no times are coeternal with you, nor is any creature, even if there is one above times.

Lord my God, what is that deep recess of your high secret, and how far from it have the consequences of my offenses cast me? Heal my eyes, and let me rejoice together in your light. Certainly, if there were a mind so powerful in knowledge and foreknowledge that all things past and future were known to it as well as one very familiar song is known to me, that mind would be exceedingly wonderful, astonishing to the point of awe. For nothing done and nothing still to come in all the ages would be hidden from it—just as, when I sing that song, it is not hidden from me what and how much of it has gone by since the beginning, and what and how much remains until the end. But far be it from you, maker of the universe, maker of souls and bodies—far be it from you to know all things future and past in that way. Far, far more wonderfully do you know them, and far more mysteriously.

My heart, Lord, is busy with much in this poverty of my life, stirred by the words of your holy Scripture. And so, most of the time, the neediness of human understanding is lavish with words, because seeking talks more than finding, asking takes longer than obtaining, and the hand that knocks works harder than the hand that receives. We hold the promise: who will break it? “If God is for us, who can be against us?” “Ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks will find, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.” These are your promises; and who need fear being deceived when Truth makes the promise?note

The lowliness of my tongue confesses to your loftiness that you made heaven and earth: this heaven that I see, and this earth I tread on, from which comes this earth that I carry—you made them. But where is the heaven of heaven, Lord, of which we have heard in the words of the psalm, “The heaven of heaven is the Lord’s, but the earth he has given to the children of men”? Where is the heaven we do not see, compared with which all that we see is earth? For this whole bodily universe, which is not whole in every part, has received a beautiful form even in its lowest parts, and our earth is at its bottom. But compared with that heaven of heaven, even the heaven of our earth is earth. And it is not absurd to call both these great bodies earth, compared with that heaven—whatever it is—which belongs to the Lord and not to the children of men.note

And surely this earth was invisible and unformed, and there was an abyss of some unfathomable depth, over which there was no light, because it had no appearance at all. That is why you commanded it to be written that “darkness was over the abyss.” What is that but the absence of light? For where would light have been, if there had been any, except over it, rising above it and lighting it up? So where there was not yet light, what was the presence of darkness but the absence of light? Darkness, then, was over it, because light was absent above it—just as where there is no sound, there is silence. And what is it for silence to be there but for sound not to be there? Did you not, Lord, teach this soul that confesses to you? Did you not, Lord, teach me that before you formed that formless matter and shaped it into distinct things, there was nothing—no color, no shape, no body, no spirit?note

What, then, was it to be called, so that it might somehow be conveyed even to slower minds, if not by some ordinary word? And what can be found in all the parts of the world closer to complete formlessness than earth and abyss? For, in keeping with their lowest rank, they have less beauty than the higher things, which are all shining and full of light. Why, then, should I not take it that the formlessness of matter—which you had made without beauty of form so that from it you might make a beautifully formed world—was conveyed to human beings so aptly that it was called “invisible and unformed earth”?

When thought looks here for something the senses can grasp, it says to itself: “It is not an intelligible form, like life or justice, since it is the matter of bodies; nor is it perceptible to the senses, since in what is invisible and unformed there is nothing to be seen or perceived.” While human thought says this to itself, should it try either to know it by not knowing it, or not to know it by knowing it?

As for me, Lord, if I am to confess to you with my mouth and my pen all that you have taught me about this matter: once I heard its name without understanding it, from people who told me about it without understanding it themselves, and I pictured it with countless varied forms—and so I was not picturing it at all. My mind turned over foul and horrible forms in jumbled order, but forms nonetheless; and I called it formless not because it lacked form, but because it had such a form that, if it appeared, my senses would turn away from it as strange and unfitting, and human weakness would be thrown into confusion. But what I was picturing was formless not by the lack of all form but by comparison with more beautiful things. And true reason urged me to strip away completely every last remnant of any form whatsoever, if I wanted to conceive of something wholly formless; and I could not.

And where would it have got whatever being it had so as to receive these visible and ordered forms—where would it have got whatever being it had, if not from you, from whom all things are, to whatever extent they are? But the more unlike you a thing is, the further it is from you—not in place. So you, Lord, who are not one thing at one time and another at another, nor one way now and another way then, but the Selfsame, the Selfsame, the Selfsame—“holy, holy, holy, Lord God almighty”—in the Beginning, which is from you, in your Wisdom, which was born of your substance, made something, and made it out of nothing. For you made heaven and earth not out of yourself; otherwise it would be equal to your only-begotten Son, and through that equal to you as well. And it would in no way be right for something that was not from you to be equal to you.note

But that heaven of heaven is yours, Lord; whereas the earth, which you gave to the children of men to see and touch, was not such as we now see and touch. For it was invisible and unformed, and it was an abyss over which there was no light; or, darkness was over the abyss—that is, more than in the abyss. For this abyss of waters, now visible, has even in its depths a light proper to its appearance, somehow perceptible to the fish and to the creatures that crawl along its bottom. But that whole thing was close to nothing, because it was still entirely formless; yet it was already something that could be formed. For you, Lord, made the world from formless matter, which you made out of no thing as an almost-nothing, so that from it you might make the great things that we, the children of men, marvel at.

And so the Spirit, the teacher of your servant, when he records that you made heaven and earth in the beginning, is silent about times and says nothing about days. For surely the heaven of heaven, which you made in the beginning, is some intellectual creature. Although it is in no way coeternal with you, the Trinity, it nevertheless shares in your eternity. It firmly restrains its own changeableness through the sweetness of its most blessed contemplation of you, and, clinging to you without any lapse from the moment it was made, it rises above all the whirling succession of times. But this formlessness, the invisible and unformed earth, is not itself counted among the days either. For where there is no form and no order, nothing comes and nothing passes away; and where this does not happen, there are certainly no days, and no succession of spans of time.note

O Truth, light of my heart, do not let my darkness speak to me! I slid down into these things and was darkened; but even from here, even from here, I loved you dearly. I went astray, and I remembered you. I heard your voice behind me, calling me to come back, and I scarcely heard it for the noise of the restless. And now, look, I am coming back, burning and panting, to your fountain. Let no one stop me: I will drink it, and live it. Let me not be my own life: I lived badly from myself; I was death to myself. In you I come back to life. You speak to me; you converse with me. I have believed your books, and their words are deeply mysterious.

You have already told me, Lord, in a loud voice in my inner ear, that you are eternal, “who alone have immortality,” since you are not changed by any form or motion, and your will does not vary with the times; for a will that is now one thing and now another is not immortal. This is clear to me in your sight; let it grow clearer and clearer, I pray, and in that revelation let me remain, sober, under your wings.note

Again you have told me in a loud voice in my inner ear that not even that creature is coeternal with you whose delight you alone are. Drinking you in with unwavering chastity, it never and nowhere shows its changeableness; with you always present to it, to whom it holds fast with all its affection, it has no future to wait for and carries nothing over into the past to remember, and so it is altered by no change and stretched out into no times. O blessed creature—if such there is—in clinging to your blessedness, blessed in you, its eternal indweller and illuminator! Nor do I find anything that I would more gladly call “the heaven of heaven, which is the Lord’s” than your house, which contemplates your delight without any failing that would make it go out to something else: a pure mind, most harmoniously one in the settled peace of holy spirits, citizens of your city in the heavens above these heavens.

Let the soul whose wandering has taken it far away understand this—if it now thirsts for you, if its tears have now become its bread while every day it is asked, “Where is your God?”, if it now asks one thing of you and seeks it: to dwell in your house all the days of its life. And what is its life but you? And what are your days but your eternity, like your years, which do not fail, because you are always the same? From this, then, let the soul that is able understand how far above all times you are eternal, since your house, which has never wandered away, though it is not coeternal with you, yet by clinging to you unceasingly and unfailingly undergoes no succession of times.note

Look: there is something formless in these changes of the last and weakest things. And who will tell me—unless it is someone who wanders and tumbles about in the emptiness of his own heart with his fantasies—who but such a person will tell me that, if all form were diminished and used up, and only the formlessness remained through which a thing was changed and turned from form to form, it could display the succession of times? That is utterly impossible, because without variety of motions there are no times, and there is no variety where there is no form.

Having considered these things—as far as you grant it, my God, as far as you rouse me to knock and open to me when I knock—I find two things you made that are without times, though neither is coeternal with you. One is so formed that, without any break in contemplation, without any interval of change, changeable yet unchanged, it enjoys your eternity and unchangeableness to the full. The other was so formless that it had no form from which it could change into another form, whether of motion or of rest, so as to be subject to time. But you did not leave this formless; for before any day, in the beginning, you made heaven and earth—these two things I have been speaking of.

This is my sense for now, my God, when I hear your Scripture saying, “In the beginning God made heaven and earth; but the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss,” without mentioning on which day you made these things. This is my sense for now, because of that heaven of heaven, the intellectual heaven, where understanding means knowing all at once—not in part, not in a riddle, not through a mirror, but wholly, openly, face to face; not now this and now that, but, as I said, knowing all at once, without any succession of times. And it is because of the invisible and unformed earth, which is also without any succession of times—the succession that usually brings now this and now that; for where there is no form, there is no this and that anywhere.note

Wonderful is the depth of your words! See, their surface lies before us, coaxing the little ones; but wonderful is their depth, my God, wonderful their depth! To gaze into it brings a shudder—the shudder of reverence and the trembling of love. I hate its enemies fiercely. Oh, that you would slay them with a two-edged sword, so that they would no longer be its enemies! For this is how I love them: I want them slain to themselves, so that they may live to you. But look, there are others, not critics but admirers of the book of Genesis, who say: “That is not what the Spirit of God, who wrote these things through his servant Moses, meant these words to convey. He did not mean what you say, but something else—what we say.” To them, with you as judge, God of us all, I answer as follows.

Will you say that what Truth tells me in a loud voice in my inner ear is false—about the true eternity of the Creator: that his substance in no way varies with times, and that his will is not outside his substance? From this it follows that he does not will now this and now that, but wills once, all at once and always, everything that he wills—not again and again, nor now these things and now those; nor does he will later what he did not will before, or cease to will what he willed before. For such a will is changeable, and nothing changeable is eternal; but our God is eternal. Again, it tells me in my inner ear that the expectation of things to come becomes direct sight when they have come, and that same sight becomes memory when they have passed. Now every act of attention that varies in this way is changeable, and nothing changeable is eternal; but our God is eternal.

What, then, will you say, you who contradict me? Are these things false? “No,” they say. What then? Is it false that every formed nature, or matter capable of form, exists only from him who is supremely good because he supremely is? “We do not deny that either,” they say. Then what? Do you deny that there is a certain sublime creature, clinging with such chaste love to the true and truly eternal God that, although it is not coeternal with him, it does not come loose from him or slip away into any variation and succession of times, but rests in the truest contemplation of him alone? For you, God, show yourself to one who loves you as much as you command, and you are enough for it; and so it does not turn away from you, nor toward itself. This is the house of God—not earthly, nor made of any heavenly bodily mass, but spiritual and sharing in your eternity, because it is without stain forever.

For we find no time before it, since “wisdom was created before all things.” Yet this is certainly not that Wisdom which is fully coeternal and equal to you, our God, its Father, through which all things were created, and which is the Beginning in which you made heaven and earth. Rather, it is the wisdom that was created: namely, the intellectual nature, which is light by contemplating light. For it too, although created, is called wisdom. But as great as the difference between the light that illuminates and the light that is illuminated, so great is the difference between the Wisdom that creates and this wisdom that was created—just as between the righteousness that makes righteous and the righteousness that has come about by being made righteous. (For we too are called your righteousness; one of your servants says, “so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”)note

Hence it is from you, our God, in such a way that it is plainly something other than you, and not the Selfsame. Although we find time not only not before it but not even in it—since it is fit always to see your face and never turns aside from it (which is why it is not altered by any change)—yet changeableness itself is in it, by which it would grow dark and cold, if it did not cling to you with great love and shine and burn from you like a perpetual noon. O house full of light and beauty, I have loved your beauty and the dwelling place of the glory of my Lord, your builder and owner! Let my wandering sigh for you; and I ask the one who made you to possess me too in you, since he made me too. I have gone astray like a lost sheep; but on the shoulders of my shepherd, your builder, I hope to be carried back to you.

What do you say to me, you contradictors whom I was addressing, who nevertheless believe that Moses was a devout servant of God and that his books are oracles of the Holy Spirit? Is not this the house of God—not coeternal with God, yet in its own way eternal in the heavens—where you look in vain for the successions of times, because you do not find them? For it transcends every stretching and every whirling span of time, since its good is to cling to God always. “It is,” they say. Then which of the things my heart cried out to my God, when it heard within the voice of his praise—which of them, tell me, do you claim is false? Is it that there was formless matter, where, since there was no form, there was no order?

For it is with these people that I want to talk a little in your presence, my God—those who grant that all these things are true, which your truth does not keep silent within my mind. As for those who deny them, let them bark as much as they like and deafen themselves; I will try to persuade them to be quiet and to open a way for your word to reach them. But if they refuse and push me away, I beg you, my God, do not be silent to me. Speak truly in my heart; for you alone speak so.

For they say: “Even if these things are true, Moses was not thinking of these two things when, by the Spirit’s revelation, he said, ‘In the beginning God made heaven and earth.’ By the name ‘heaven’ he did not mean that spiritual or intellectual creature that always contemplates the face of God, nor by the name ‘earth’ formless matter.” What then? “What we say,” they reply, “is what that man meant; that is what he expressed in those words.” What is that? “By the name ‘heaven and earth,’” they say, “he wanted first to signify this whole visible world, universally and briefly, so as afterward, by counting out the days, to set out one by one, as it were, everything that it pleased the Holy Spirit to declare in this way.

What if someone else were to say that this same formlessness and confusion of matter was first suggested by the name “heaven and earth,” because from it this visible world, with all the natures that plainly appear in it—a world often called “heaven and earth”—was established and completed?

There is still another view that someone else might put forward, if he wished: that when we read, “In the beginning God made heaven and earth,” the words heaven and earth do not mean natures, invisible and visible, already complete and formed. Rather, these names designate the still formless beginning of things, matter capable of being formed and created. For in it, jumbled together and not yet distinguished by qualities and forms, were already the things that now, set out in their proper order, are called heaven and earth—the one a spiritual, the other a bodily creation.

Having heard and weighed all these views, I do not want to fight about words; that is of no use except to ruin those who listen. But the law is good for building up, if one uses it lawfully, because its goal is love from a pure heart, a good conscience and sincere faith. And our Master knows on which two commandments he hung the whole law and the prophets. Since I confess these things so ardently, my God, light of my eyes in secret, what harm is it to me if these words can be understood in different ways, so long as the meanings are true? What harm is it to me, I say, if I take the writer to have meant something other than what someone else takes him to have meant?note

For it is true, Lord, that you made heaven and earth. And it is true that the Beginning is your wisdom, in which you made all things. It is true, too, that this visible world has heaven and earth as its great parts—a brief summing-up of all the natures that have been made and established. And it is true that everything changeable suggests to our understanding a certain formlessness, by which it takes on form or by which it is changed and turned. It is true that what clings so closely to the unchangeable form that, though changeable, it does not change, is subject to no passage of time. It is true that formlessness, which is next to nothing, cannot undergo the successions of time. It is true that the thing from which something is made can, by a certain manner of speaking, already bear the name of what is made from it; so whatever formlessness heaven and earth were made from could be called heaven and earth.

From all these truths—which are not doubted by those to whom you have granted an inner eye to see such things, and who firmly believe that Moses your servant spoke in the spirit of truth—from all these, then, one person takes one meaning, saying: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth” means that in his Word, coeternal with himself, God made the intelligible and the sensible creation, or the spiritual and the bodily. Another takes another, saying: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth” means that in his Word, coeternal with himself, God made this whole mass of the bodily world, with all the evident and familiar natures it contains.

Likewise, as regards the understanding of the words that follow, out of all those truths one person takes one meaning, saying: “But the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss” means that the bodily thing God made was still formless matter of bodily things, without order, without light. Another takes another, saying: “But the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss” means that this whole, which was called heaven and earth, was still formless and dark matter, from which the bodily heaven and the bodily earth were to be made, with everything in them that is known to the bodily senses. Another takes another, saying: “But the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss” means that this whole, which was called heaven and earth, was still formless and dark matter, from which were to be made the intelligible heaven (called elsewhere “the heaven of heaven”) and the earth—that is, all bodily nature, a name under which this bodily heaven too is understood; in other words, the matter from which every creature, invisible and visible, was to be made.

Now suppose someone tries to resist these last two opinions in this way: “If you will not allow that this formlessness of matter is what is meant by the name heaven and earth, then there was something God had not made, out of which he was to make heaven and earth. For Scripture does not tell us that God made this matter—unless we understand it to be signified by the words heaven and earth, or by the word earth alone, when it says, ‘In the beginning God made heaven and earth.’ Then what follows, ‘But the earth was invisible and unformed,’ even if it chose to call formless matter by that name, we would still understand to mean nothing but the matter God made in what was written just before:

Having heard and examined all this, as far as my weakness can grasp it—and I confess that weakness to you, my God, who know it—I see that two kinds of disagreement can arise when something is reported in signs by truthful messengers: one, if the disagreement concerns the truth of the matter; the other, if it concerns the intention of the one reporting it. For it is one thing to ask what is true about the making of creation, another to ask what Moses, that outstanding servant in the household of your faith, wanted his reader and hearer to understand by these words. As for the first kind, let all who think they know what is false depart from me. As for the second, let all who think that Moses said what is false likewise depart from me.

But which of us has so found that will—among so many truths that meet those who seek in those words, understood now one way, now another—that he can say as confidently that Moses meant this, and wanted this to be understood in that narrative, as he says confidently that this is true, whether Moses meant it or something else? See, my God: I your servant, who have vowed you a sacrifice of confession in these writings and pray that by your mercy I may pay you my vows—see how confidently I say that in your unchangeable Word you made all things, invisible and visible. Do I say with the same confidence that Moses had nothing else in view but this when he wrote, “In the beginning God made heaven and earth”? No—for though I see this as certain in your truth, I do not see in the same way, in his mind, that he was thinking it when he wrote these words.

Let no one trouble me now by telling me, “Moses did not mean what you say, but what I say.” If he asked me, “How do you know that Moses meant what you draw out of these words of his?” I ought to take it calmly, and I might answer as I answered above, or somewhat more fully if he were more stubborn. But when he says, “He did not mean what you say, but what I say,” and yet does not deny that what each of us says is true—O life of the poor, my God, in whose bosom there is no contradiction, rain soothing gentleness into my heart, so that I may bear such people patiently.

Listen, best of judges, God, truth itself—listen to what I shall say to this objector; listen. For I speak before you and before my brothers, who use the law lawfully, to its end, which is love. Listen and see what I shall say to him, if it pleases you. These are the brotherly and peaceable words I return to him: “If we both see that what you say is true, and we both see that what I say is true, where, I ask, do we see it? Certainly not I in you, nor you in me, but both of us in the unchangeable truth itself, which is above our minds. Since, then, we do not quarrel about the very light of the Lord our God, why do we quarrel about the thoughts of our neighbor, which we cannot see as unchangeable truth is seen—when, even if Moses himself had appeared to us and said, ‘This is what I meant,’ we would not see it even then, but believe it?

And yet, my God, height of my lowliness and rest of my labor, who hear my confessions and forgive my sins: since you command me to love my neighbor as myself, I cannot believe less of Moses, your most faithful servant, than I would wish and long to be given to me by you as a gift, had I been born at the time he was and had you placed me where you placed him, so that through the service of my heart and tongue those writings might be given out which, so long afterward, were to benefit all nations and, from so lofty a height of authority, to prevail throughout the whole world over the words of all false and proud teachings.

For just as a spring in a small place is more abundant, and supplies its flow to more streams over wider spaces, than any one of the streams led from that same spring through many places, so the narrative of your steward, meant to benefit many who would speak about it, wells up from a small measure of speech in floods of clear truth, from which each person draws for himself whatever truth he can about these matters—one this, another that—through the longer windings of discussion.

But others, for whom these words are no longer a nest but shady thickets, see fruit hidden in them; they fly about rejoicing, chirp as they search it out, and pluck it. For when they read or hear these words, they see, eternal God, that you surpass all past and future times in your stable permanence, and yet that there is nothing in temporal creation that you did not make. And your will, because it is what you are, was in no way changed, nor did some will arise that had not been before, when you made all things. You made them not out of yourself, as your likeness, the form of all things, but out of nothing, as a formless unlikeness, which was to be formed through your likeness by returning to you, the One, according to the ordered capacity given to each thing in its own kind. And so all things were to become very good, whether they remain close to you or, at a distance that grows by degrees, through times and places, bring about or undergo beautiful variations.

One of them fixes his attention on the words “In the beginning God made,” and looks to Wisdom, the Beginning, because it also speaks to us. Another likewise attends to the same words and understands “beginning” as the start of created things, taking “In the beginning he made” as if it said “At first he made.” And among those who understand “in the beginning” to mean that you made heaven and earth in wisdom, one believes that the matter capable of being made into heaven and earth is itself called heaven and earth; another, that natures already formed and distinct are meant; another, that one formed nature, a spiritual one, is meant by the name heaven, and another, formless, of bodily matter, by the name earth.

But the one who takes “In the beginning he made” only as if it said “At first he made” has no way to understand heaven and earth truly unless he understands the matter of heaven and earth—that is, of the entire creation, intelligible and bodily. For if he wants it to mean the entire creation already formed, he could rightly be asked: if God made this first, what did he make afterward? He will find nothing after the whole, and so he will have to hear, unwillingly, “How ‘first,’ if nothing afterward?” But when he says it was first formless, then formed, he is not absurd, provided he is able to distinguish what comes before by eternity, what by time, what by preference, and what by origin: by eternity, as God is before all things; by time, as the flower before the fruit; by preference, as the fruit before the flower; by origin, as the sound before the song. Of these four, the first and the last I mentioned are very hard to understand, the middle two very easy.

Amid this diversity of true opinions, may truth itself bring forth harmony, and may our God have mercy on us, so that we use the law lawfully, for the end of the commandment, pure love. And so, if anyone asks me which of these your servant Moses meant, these would not be my confessions if I did not confess to you, “I do not know.” And yet I know that those opinions are true—apart from the fleshly ones, about which I have said what I thought; though even those little ones, who are of good hope, are not frightened by these words of your book, which speak of lofty things humbly and of much in few words. But all of us who, as I acknowledge, see and speak what is true in these words—let us love one another, and together love you, our God, the fountain of truth, if it is truth itself we thirst for and not empty things. And let us so honor that same servant of yours, the steward of this Scripture, full of your Spirit, as to believe that when he wrote these things, by your revelation, he had in view what most excels in them, both in the light of truth and in the fruit of usefulness.

So when one person says, “He meant what I mean,” and another, “No, what I mean,” I think it more reverent to say: “Why not both, rather, if both are true? And if anyone sees a third, or a fourth, or any other true meaning at all in these words, why not believe that he saw all of them—he through whom the one God tempered the sacred writings to the understanding of the many who would see in them things true and diverse?” Certainly for my part—and I declare it fearlessly from my heart—if I were writing something to stand at the summit of authority, I would rather write so that my words would echo whatever truth anyone could grasp about these things, than set down one true meaning so plainly as to exclude the others, in which no falsehood could offend me.

Finally, Lord, you who are God and not flesh and blood: even if a human being saw less, could anything be hidden from your good Spirit, who “will lead me into the land of uprightness”—anything that you yourself were going to reveal in these words to later readers, even if the man through whom they were spoken perhaps had in mind only one of many true meanings? If so, then let the one he had in mind be higher than the rest. But to us, Lord, show either that one or any other true one you please, so that whether you disclose to us what you disclosed to that man of yours or something else on the occasion of the same words, it may still be you who feed us, and not error that deceives us. See, Lord my God, how much we have written about a few words—how much, I ask you! What strength of ours, what length of time, would be enough for all your books at this rate?note

I call on you, my God, my mercy, who made me and did not forget me when I forgot you. I call you into my soul, which you are preparing to receive you through the longing you breathed into it. Do not abandon me now when I call on you, for before I called you came to meet me, and pressed on me, more and more insistently, with voices of many kinds, so that I heard from far off, and turned, and called on you as you were calling me. For you, Lord, wiped out all my bad deserts, so as not to repay my hands, by which I fell away from you; and you came before all my good deserts, so as to repay your own hands, by which you made me. For before I was, you were, and there was no me for you to grant being to; and yet see, I am—out of your goodness, which came before all that you made me and all that you made me from.

For it is out of the fullness of your goodness that your creation exists: so that a good which would profit you nothing, and which, not being made of your own substance, would not be equal to you, should nonetheless not be lacking, since it could be made by you. For what claim did heaven and earth, which you made in the beginning, have on you? Let the spiritual and the bodily natures, which you made in your wisdom, say what claim they had on you, that even things only begun and formless, each in its own kind, spiritual or bodily, should depend on it—things drifting toward excess and toward a far unlikeness to you. The spiritual, even formless, is more excellent than a formed body would be; the bodily, even formless, more excellent than if it were nothing at all. And so, formless, they would have hung upon your Word, unless through that same Word they were called back to your unity and formed, and so, from you, the one supreme good, all became very good.

What claim had bodily matter on you, that it should be even invisible and unformed, when it would not have been even that unless you had made it? And so, since it did not exist, it could have no claim on you to exist. Or what claim had the first beginning of spiritual creation on you, that it should even drift, dark, like the abyss, unlike you—unless through that same Word it were turned toward the same one who made it, and, enlightened by him, became light, conformed, though not as an equal, to the Form that is equal to you? For just as for a body to be is not the same as to be beautiful (otherwise it could not be ugly), so for a created spirit to live is not the same as to live wisely; otherwise it would be unchangeably wise. But it is good for it always to cling to you, lest the light it gained by turning toward you it lose by turning away, and slip back into a life like the dark abyss.

As for what you said in the first acts of creation, “Let there be light, and there was light,” I do not think it unfitting to understand this of the spiritual creation, because there was already life of a sort for you to enlighten. But just as it had no claim on you to be a life of the kind that could be enlightened, so, once it existed, it had no claim on you to be enlightened. For its formlessness would not please you unless it became light—not by merely existing, but by gazing on the light that enlightened it and clinging to it—so that both its living at all and its living happily it might owe to nothing but your grace, turned by a change for the better toward that which can change neither for better nor for worse. That is what you alone are, because you alone simply are; for you, to live is not one thing and to live happily another, because you are your own happiness.note

What, then, would be lacking to the good that you are to yourself, even if these things had not existed at all, or had remained formless? You made them not out of need but out of the fullness of your goodness, restraining them and turning them toward form—not as though your joy were to be completed by them. For to you, who are perfect, their imperfection is displeasing, so that they may be perfected by you and please you; but not as though you were imperfect and were yourself to be perfected by their perfection. For your good Spirit was borne above the waters, not borne up by them as though he rested on them; for those in whom your Spirit is said to rest, he makes to rest in himself. But it was your incorruptible and unchangeable will, sufficient in itself for itself, that was borne above that life which you had made.

Look: there appears to me, as in a riddle, the Trinity, which is what you are, my God. For you, Father, in the Beginning of our wisdom—which is your Wisdom, born of you, equal to you and coeternal, that is, in your Son—made heaven and earth. And we have said much about the heaven of heaven, and about the earth invisible and unformed, and about the dark abyss, in view of the wandering lapses of its spiritual formlessness, had it not turned to him from whom it had life of whatever kind, and by his illumination become a beautiful life, and been the heaven of that heaven which was made afterward between water and water. And already I held the Father, under the name of God, who made these things, and the Son, under the name of the Beginning, in whom he made them; and believing, as I did believe, that my God is a Trinity, I searched in his holy words—and look: “your Spirit was borne above the waters.”note

But what was the reason—O Light that tells the truth, I bring my heart close to you: do not let it teach me empty things; scatter its darkness and tell me, I beg you by love, our mother, I beg you, tell me—what was the reason that only after heaven had been named, and the earth invisible and unformed, and darkness over the abyss, did your Scripture at last name your Spirit? Was it because he had to be introduced in such a way that he could be said to be borne above? That could not be said unless the thing above which your Spirit could be understood to be borne were mentioned first. For he was not borne above the Father or the Son, nor could he rightly be said to be borne above if he were borne above nothing. So first there had to be stated what he was borne above, and then he who was fittingly mentioned in no other way than by being said to be borne above. Why then was it not fitting for him to be introduced in any other way than by being said to be borne above?

From here let anyone who can follow with his understanding your apostle, who says that your love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us; who teaches about spiritual things and shows the way of love that surpasses all; and who bends his knees to you for us, that we may know the knowledge of the love of Christ that surpasses all. That is why he who surpasses all was, from the beginning, borne above the waters. To whom shall I tell it, and how shall I tell of the weight of craving, pulling down into the sheer abyss, and of the lifting up by love through your Spirit, who was borne above the waters? To whom shall I tell it? How shall I tell it? For these are not places in which we are plunged and from which we rise. What could be more like, and what more unlike?note

The angel flowed away, the soul of man flowed away, and they would have shown the abyss of the whole spiritual creation in the dark depths, had you not said from the beginning, “Let there be light,” and there was light; and had not every obedient intelligence of your heavenly city clung to you and rested in your Spirit, who is borne unchangeably above everything changeable. Otherwise even the heaven of heaven itself would be a dark abyss in itself; but now it is light in the Lord. For even in the wretched restlessness of spirits that flow away and show their own darkness, stripped of the garment of your light, you show clearly enough how great a rational creature you have made: nothing less than you suffices for its happy rest—and so not even itself suffices. For you, our God, will light up our darkness; from you our garments arise, and our darkness will be like noonday.

Was neither the Father nor the Son borne above the waters? If this means as in a place, like a body, then neither was the Holy Spirit; but if it means the pre-eminence of unchangeable divinity above everything changeable, then Father and Son and Holy Spirit were all borne above the waters. Why then was this said only of your Spirit? Why was it said of him alone, as though there were a place where he was—he who is not a place—he of whom alone it is said that he is your gift? In your gift we rest; there we enjoy you. Our rest is our place. Love lifts us up there, and your good Spirit raises our lowliness from the gates of death. In your good will is our peace. A body strives by its own weight toward its own place. Weight does not tend only downward, but toward its own place.

Happy the creature that has known nothing else—though in itself it would have been something else—had it not, by your gift which is borne above everything changeable, been lifted up as soon as it was made, with no interval of time, by that call in which you said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. For in us there is a distinction in time, in that we were darkness and shall be made light; but of that creature it is said what it would have been had it not been illumined. And it is spoken of as if it had first been fluid and dark, so that the cause might appear by which it came to be otherwise: that is, turned toward the unfailing Light, it became light. Let whoever can, understand; let him ask it of you. Why should he trouble me, as if I were the one who enlightens every human being who comes into this world?

Who will understand the almighty Trinity? And who does not speak of it—if indeed it is of it that he speaks? Rare is the soul that, when it speaks of it, knows what it is saying. People argue and fight, and no one sees that vision without peace. I would like people to reflect on these three things in themselves. These three are something far other than that Trinity; but I mention them as a place where they may exercise themselves, and test themselves, and perceive how far away they are. The three I mean are these: to be, to know, to will. For I am, and I know, and I will. I am, knowing and willing; I know that I am and that I will; and I will to be and to know. So in these three, how inseparable a life there is—one life, one mind, one essence—how inseparable, finally, the distinction, and yet a distinction: let whoever can, see it.

Go forward in confession, my faith; say to the Lord your God, “Holy, holy, holy, O Lord my God; in your name we have been baptized, Father and Son and Holy Spirit; in your name we baptize, Father and Son and Holy Spirit.” For among us too, in his Christ, God made heaven and earth: the spiritual and the carnal members of his Church. And our earth, before it received the form of teaching, was invisible and unformed, and we were covered by the darkness of ignorance, since you disciplined man for his iniquity, and your judgments are a great abyss.

And yet still by faith, not yet by sight; for in hope we have been saved. But hope that is seen is not hope. Still deep calls to deep, but now in the voice of your waterfalls. Still even he who says, “I could not speak to you as to spiritual people, but as to carnal,” does not himself yet think he has laid hold of it; forgetting what lies behind, he stretches out toward what lies ahead, and groans under his burden, and his soul thirsts for the living God as the deer for springs of water, and he says, “When shall I come?”—longing to be clothed with his dwelling that is from heaven. And he calls to the lower deep, saying, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be reformed in the newness of your mind,” and, “Do not become children in your minds, but be infants in malice, so that you may be mature in your minds,” and, “O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?” But now not in his own voice; it is in yours, who sent your Spirit from on high through him who ascended on high and opened the floodgates of his gifts, so that the rush of the river might gladden your city.note

And I say, “Where is my God?” See, this is where you are. I breathe a little in you, when I pour out my soul above myself in a voice of rejoicing and confession, the sound of one keeping festival. And still it is sad, because it slips back and becomes an abyss—or rather it feels that it is still an abyss. My faith, which you lit in the night before my feet, says to it, “Why are you sad, my soul, and why do you trouble me? Hope in the Lord.” His word is a lamp to your feet. Hope and persevere, until the night passes, the mother of the wicked; until the wrath of the Lord passes, for we too were once children of wrath, we who were darkness—and we still drag its remnants about in the body that is dead because of sin; until the day breathes and the shadows are removed. Hope in the Lord: in the morning I will stand and gaze; I will always confess to him.note

Or who but you, our God, made for us a firmament of authority above us in your divine Scripture? For heaven will be folded up like a book, and now it is stretched out above us like a skin. For your divine Scripture has a more exalted authority now that those mortals through whom you dispensed it to us have met their death. And you know, Lord, you know how you clothed human beings with skins when through sin they became mortal. So you stretched out the firmament of your book like a skin—your words, all in harmony, which you placed above us through the ministry of mortals. For by their very death the solid strength of authority in your words, published through them, is stretched out on high above everything beneath it, which while they lived here was not stretched out so high. You had not yet stretched out the heaven like a skin; you had not yet spread the fame of their death everywhere.note

Let us look, Lord, upon the heavens, the work of your fingers; clear from our eyes the cloud with which you have veiled them. There is your testimony, giving wisdom to little ones. Perfect, my God, your praise from the mouth of infants and nursing babies. For we know no other books that so destroy pride, that so destroy the enemy and the defender who resists your reconciliation by defending his own sins. I do not know, Lord, I do not know any other words so pure, that so persuaded me to confession, and bent my neck gently to your yoke, and invited me to worship you freely. Let me understand them, good Father; grant me this, for I am placed beneath them, since it is for those placed beneath them that you made them firm.note

There are other waters above this firmament, immortal, I believe, and set apart from earthly corruption. Let them praise your name; let them praise you, the peoples of your angels above the heavens, who have no need to look up at this firmament and come to know your word by reading. For they always see your face, and there they read, without the syllables of time, what your eternal will wills. They read, they choose, and they love; they are always reading, and what they read never passes away. For by choosing and loving they read the very unchangeableness of your counsel. Their book is not closed, nor is their scroll rolled up, because you yourself are this to them, and are so forever; for you set them in order above this firmament, which you made firm above the infirmity of the lower peoples, so that they might look up at it and come to know your mercy, proclaiming in time you who made times. For your mercy, Lord, is in heaven, and your truth reaches to the clouds.note

For how you are absolutely, you alone know—you who are unchangeably, and know unchangeably, and will unchangeably. Your essence knows and wills unchangeably, your knowledge is and wills unchangeably, and your will is and knows unchangeably. Nor does it seem right in your sight that, as the unchangeable Light knows itself, so it should be known by the changeable thing it illumines. So my soul is like earth without water before you, because just as it cannot illumine itself from itself, so it cannot satisfy itself from itself. For so with you is the fountain of life, as in your light we shall see light.note

Who gathered the embittered into one society? For they all have the same end, temporal and earthly happiness, for the sake of which they do everything, though they toss about in a countless variety of cares. Who, Lord, but you, who said that the waters should be gathered into one gathering and the dry land appear, thirsting for you? For the sea is yours, and you made it, and your hands formed the dry land. For it is not the bitterness of wills but the gathering of waters that is called the sea. For you restrain even the evil cravings of souls and fix limits, how far the waters may be allowed to advance, so that their waves break against themselves; and so you make the sea by the order of your rule over all things.note

But souls that thirst for you and appear before you, set apart from the society of the sea by a different end, you water from a hidden and sweet spring, so that the earth too may yield its fruit. And it yields its fruit; and at your command, the command of its Lord God, our soul sprouts works of mercy according to its kind, loving its neighbor by helping with bodily needs, having in itself seed according to its likeness. For from our own weakness we feel compassion so as to come to the aid of the needy, helping them in the way we would want help brought to us if we were in the same need—not only in easy things, as with seed-bearing grass, but also in protective help of stout strength, like a fruit-bearing tree: that is, doing good by rescuing one who suffers wrong from the hand of the powerful, and by giving the shade of protection with the stout strength of just judgment.note

So, Lord, so, I pray you, let it spring up—as you are doing, as you are giving cheerfulness and the means—let truth spring up from the earth, and let justice look down from heaven, and let there be lights in the firmament. Let us break our bread for the hungry and bring the homeless poor into our house; let us clothe the naked and not despise those of our own flesh and blood. When these fruits have sprung from the earth, see that it is good, and let our light break forth in its season; and, from this lower harvest of action, attaining to the delights of contemplation, holding fast to the word of life above, let us appear like lights in the world, cleaving to the firmament of your Scripture.note

of wisdom, like the greater light, for those who delight in the light of clear truth, as at the beginning of the day; to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit, like the lesser light; to another faith; to another gifts of healing; to another the working of miracles; to another prophecy; to another the discernment of spirits; to another various kinds of tongues—and all these are like stars. For all these are the work of one and the same Spirit, distributing to each individually as he wills, and making the stars appear in manifestation for the common good. But the word of knowledge, which contains all the sacraments that vary with the times like the moon, and the other gifts of knowledge listed after it like stars—as far as they fall short of that brightness of wisdom in which the day mentioned above rejoices, so far are they at the beginning of the night.note

“But first wash yourselves, be clean, remove the wickedness from your souls and from the sight of my eyes, so that the dry land may appear. Learn to do good, give judgment for the orphan and do justice for the widow, so that the earth may bring forth green pasture and fruit-bearing trees. And come, let us reason together,” says the Lord, “so that there may be lights in the firmament of heaven, and they may shine upon the earth.” That rich man asked the good teacher what he should do to gain eternal life. Let the good teacher—whom he thought a man and nothing more (but he is good because he is God)—let him tell him that if he wants to come to life he must keep the commandments: separate from himself the bitterness of malice and wickedness; not kill, not commit adultery, not steal, not bear false witness; so that the dry land may appear and bring forth honor for mother and father and love of neighbor.note

But you, the chosen race in the firmament of the world, who have left everything to follow the Lord: go after him and put the strong to shame; go after him, you beautiful feet, and shine in the firmament, so that the heavens may tell his glory, dividing between the light of the perfect—though not yet like that of the angels—and the darkness of the little ones—though not of the hopeless. Shine over all the earth; and let the day, bright with the sun, pour forth to the day the word of wisdom, and the night, shining with the moon, announce to the night the word of knowledge. The moon and stars shine for the night, but the night does not darken them, since they give it light according to its small capacity.note

Let the sea too conceive and bring forth your works, and let the waters bring forth creeping things with living souls. For by separating the precious from the worthless you have become the mouth of God, through which he might say, “Let the waters bring forth”—not a living soul, which the earth will bring forth, but “creeping things with living souls, and birds flying above the earth.” For your sacraments, God, have crept through the works of your saints amid the waves of the world’s temptations, to steep the nations in your name in your baptism. And meanwhile great wonders were done, like great sea creatures, and the voices of your messengers flew above the earth, close to the firmament of your book, which was set over them as their authority, beneath which they were to fly wherever they went.note

Am I lying, or mixing things together in confusion, and failing to distinguish the luminous knowledge of these things in the firmament of heaven from the bodily works in the surging sea and under the firmament of heaven? For of those things whose knowledge is solid and bounded, without increase through generations—like the lights of wisdom and knowledge—the bodily workings are many and varied, and, growing one from another, they multiply in your blessing, God. For you have consoled the weariness of mortal senses, so that in the mind’s understanding one thing may be figured and expressed in many ways through bodily motions. The waters brought these forth, but in your Word. The needs of peoples estranged from the eternity of your truth brought these forth, but in your gospel; for it was these very waters that cast them up, waters whose bitter sickness was the reason they came forth in your Word.

And all things are beautiful because you make them, and look—you who made all things are more beautiful beyond telling. If Adam had not fallen away from you, there would not have flowed from his womb that salt water of the sea—the human race, deeply curious, stormily swollen, and restlessly fluid—and so there would be no need for your stewards to perform, bodily and perceptibly, amid many waters, mystical deeds and words (for this is how I now understand the creeping things and the birds). Instructed and initiated by these, people who are subject to bodily sacraments would make no further progress unless the soul came alive spiritually on another level, and after the word of initiation looked toward its completion.

And so, in your Word, it is not the depth of the sea but the earth, separated from the bitterness of the waters, that brings forth—not creeping things with living souls, and birds, but a living soul. For it no longer needs baptism, as the nations need it, and as it did need it when it was covered with waters; for there is no other way into the kingdom of heaven since you established that it should be entered this way. Nor does it look for great wonders to produce faith. For it is not that it will not believe unless it sees signs and wonders, since now the faithful earth is separated from the waters of the sea, bitter with unbelief; and tongues are a sign not for believers but for unbelievers. So the earth which you founded above the waters has no need of this kind of flying creature either, which the waters brought forth at your Word. Send your word into it through your messengers; for it is their works we tell of.note

So let your ministers now work on the earth—not as in the waters of unbelief, proclaiming and speaking through miracles and sacraments and mystical words, where ignorance, the mother of wonder, is made attentive through fear of hidden signs (for such is the way into faith for the children of Adam who have forgotten you, while they hide themselves from your face and become an abyss)—but let them work also as on the dry land, separated from the whirlpools of the abyss, and let them be a pattern for the faithful, living before them and rousing them to imitation. For in this way they hear not only so as to listen but also so as to act: “Seek God, and your soul will live,” so that the earth may bring forth a living soul; “Do not be conformed to this world; restrain yourselves from it.” By avoiding, the soul lives; by craving, it dies.note

But your Word, God, is the fountain of eternal life, and it does not pass away. So in your Word that departure is checked, when it is said to us, “Do not be conformed to this world,” so that the earth, in the fountain of life, may bring forth a living soul: in your Word, through your evangelists, a self-restrained soul, by imitating the imitators of your Christ. For this is what “according to its kind” means, since a man is moved to emulation by his friend: “Be as I am,” he says, “for I also am as you are.” So in the living soul there will be good beasts, in gentleness of conduct.note

For see, Lord our God, our Creator: when our affections have been restrained from love of the world—the affections by which we were dying through living badly—and the soul has begun to be a living soul through living well, and your word has been fulfilled which you spoke through your apostle, “Do not be conformed to this world,” there will follow also what you added at once, saying, “but be reformed in the newness of the spirit of your mind”—no longer according to kind, as though imitating a neighbor who goes before us, nor living by the authority of a better human being. For you did not say, “Let humankind be made according to its kind,” but, “Let us make humankind in our image and likeness,” so that we may test what your will is.note

His judging all things means that he has authority over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky, over all cattle and wild beasts, over all the earth and all creeping things that creep upon the earth. He does this through the understanding of the mind, by which he perceives the things that are of the Spirit of God. Otherwise, man, though set in honor, did not understand; he was compared to the senseless beasts and became like them.

And so the human being whom you made in your image did not receive authority over the lights of heaven, nor over that hidden heaven itself, nor over day and night, which you named before the founding of the sky, nor over the gathering of the waters, which is the sea. What he received was authority over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky, over all cattle and all the earth and all creeping things that creep upon the earth.

But what is this, and what kind of mystery? See, Lord, you bless human beings, that they may increase and multiply and fill the earth. Are you not hinting something to us by this, so that we may understand something? Why did you not bless in this way the light, which you called day, nor the firmament of heaven, nor the lights, nor the stars, nor the earth, nor the sea? I would say, our God, who created us in your image—I would say that you willed to bestow this gift of blessing on humankind alone, had you not blessed the fish and the whales in the same way, that they might increase and multiply and fill the waters of the sea, and that the birds might multiply upon the earth. Again, I would say that this blessing belongs to those kinds of things that propagate by generating from themselves, if I found it given to trees and shrubs and to the animals of the earth.

What then shall I say, my light, my truth? That this is empty, that it was said this way to no purpose? Not at all, Father of loving-kindness; far be it from the servant of your Word to say that. And if I do not understand what you mean by this utterance, let better people make better use of it—that is, people of more understanding than I—each as far as you have given them to be wise. But may my confession too be pleasing in your eyes, in which I confess to you that I believe, Lord, you did not speak this way in vain; nor will I keep silent about what the occasion of this reading suggests to me. For it is true, and I do not see what prevents me from understanding the figurative sayings of your books in this way. For I know that what is understood in one way by the mind can be signified in many ways through the body, and that what is signified in one way through the body can be understood in many ways by the mind.

So if we think of the natures of things themselves, not allegorically but literally, the words “increase and multiply” apply to everything that is generated from seed. But if we treat these words as set down figuratively (which I think is rather what Scripture intended, since it surely does not assign this blessing only to the offspring of water creatures and of human beings without reason), then we do find multitudes elsewhere too: in creatures spiritual and bodily, as in heaven and earth; in souls just and unjust, as in light and darkness; in the holy authors through whom the law was delivered, as in the firmament made firm between water and water; in the society of embittered peoples, as in the sea; in the zeal of devout souls, as in the dry land; in works of mercy in this present life, as in seed-bearing plants and fruit-bearing trees; in spiritual gifts made manifest for the common good, as in the lights of heaven; and in passions shaped toward self-control, as in the living soul. In all these we find multitudes, abundance and growth.

I want also to say, Lord my God, what the next passage of your Scripture calls to my mind, and I will say it without fear. For I shall say what is true, with you inspiring me to say what you willed me to say from these words. I do not believe that I speak the truth with anyone but you inspiring me, since you are the truth, and every man is a liar; and so whoever speaks a lie speaks from what is his own. Therefore, to speak the truth, I speak from what is yours. See, you have given us for food every seed-bearing plant that yields seed on the whole earth, and every tree that has in it the fruit of its seed. And not to us alone, but also to all the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth and the serpents; but to the fish and the great whales you did not give these things.

Those who rejoice in this food are fed by it; those whose god is their belly do not rejoice in it. For in those who provide these things, too, the fruit is not what they give but the spirit in which they give it. So I see plainly what that man who served God and not his own belly rejoices in; I see it, and I rejoice with him wholeheartedly. He had received from the Philippians what they had sent by Epaphroditus; yet I see what it is he rejoices in. And what he rejoices in is what feeds him. For, speaking in truth, he says: “I rejoiced greatly in the Lord that at last you have blossomed again in your concern for me, as you were concerned before, but had grown weary.” These people, then, had withered in long weariness and had, as it were, dried up from bearing this fruit of good work; and he rejoices for them, because they have blossomed again, not for himself, because they relieved his need.note

What, then, do you rejoice in, great Paul? What do you rejoice in, what feeds you, you who are renewed in the knowledge of God according to the image of the one who created you, you living soul of such self-control, you winged tongue speaking mysteries? For to such living creatures this food is owed. What is it that feeds you? Joy. Let me hear what follows: “Nevertheless,” he says, “you did well in sharing my affliction.” This is what he rejoices in, this is what feeds him: that they did well, not that his hardship was relieved—he who says to you, “In affliction you have made room for me,” because he knows how both to have plenty and to suffer need in you, who strengthen him.note

Is it for his own needs—since he said, “you sent for my needs”—is that why he rejoices? It is not. And how do we know this? Because he himself goes on to say, “Not that I seek the gift, but I seek the fruit.” I have learned from you, my God, to distinguish between gift and fruit. The gift is the thing itself that someone gives when sharing these necessities: money, food, drink, clothing, shelter, help. The fruit, however, is the good and upright will of the giver. For the good Teacher did not say only, “whoever receives a prophet,” but added, “in the name of a prophet”; nor did he say only, “whoever receives a righteous man,” but added, “in the name of a righteous man.” For so the one will receive a prophet’s reward, and the other a righteous man’s reward.note

And so I will say what is true before you, Lord. When unlearned people and unbelievers—for whose initiation and winning over the sacraments of initiation and great wonders and miracles are necessary, which we believe are signified by the name of fish and whales—take in your servants to refresh them bodily or to help them in some need of this present life, yet do not know why this should be done or what it is for, then neither do the former feed the latter, nor are the latter fed by the former. For the former do not do these things with a holy and upright will, and the latter do not rejoice in their gifts, since they do not yet see any fruit in them. For the mind is fed by what it rejoices in. And that is why fish and whales do not eat the food that only the earth brings forth, once it has been separated and set apart from the bitterness of the sea’s waves.

And you saw, God, all that you had made, and behold, it was very good; for we too see them, and behold, all things are very good. In each kind of your works, when you had said that they should be made and they were made, you saw this one and that one, that it was good. I have counted seven times that it is written that you saw that what you made was good; and this is the eighth, that you saw all that you had made, and behold, it was not only good but very good, taken all together. For individually they were only good, but all together they were both good and very good. Every beautiful body says this too: a body made up of members that are all beautiful is far more beautiful than the individual members, by whose perfectly ordered union the whole is completed, even though they too are beautiful individually.

And I looked closely to find whether it was seven or eight times that you saw that your works were good, when they pleased you; and in your seeing I found no times by which I could understand that you saw what you had made so many times. And I said, “Lord, is not this Scripture of yours true, since you, who are truthful and Truth itself, gave it forth? Why then do you tell me that there are no times in your seeing, while this Scripture of yours tells me that day by day you saw that what you had made was good, and when I counted them, I found how many times?” To this you say to me—for you are my God, and you speak with a strong voice in the inner ear of your servant, breaking through my deafness and crying out: “O human being, what my Scripture says, I say.

And I heard, Lord my God, and I licked up a drop of sweetness from your truth, and I understood that there are some who are displeased with your works. They say that you made many of them under the compulsion of necessity, such as the structures of the heavens and the arrangements of the stars. These, they say, you did not make from what is yours; they had already been created elsewhere and from some other source, and you drew them together, fitted them and wove them into one when you were building the walls of the world out of your defeated enemies, so that, bound fast by that construction, they could not rebel against you again. Other things, they say, you neither made nor even put together—all flesh, all the tiniest living creatures, and whatever holds the earth by its roots—but a hostile mind, another nature not founded by you and opposed to you, generates and forms these things in the lower regions of the world.note

But those who see them through your Spirit—you see in them. So when they see that things are good, you see that they are good; and whatever pleases for your sake, it is you who please in it; and what pleases us through your Spirit pleases you in us. For what human being knows the things of a human being except the human spirit that is within? So too no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. “But we,” he says, “have received not the spirit of this world but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may know the things given to us by God.” And I am prompted to say: “Surely no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.note

Thanks be to you, Lord! We see heaven and earth—whether the higher and lower parts of the bodily world, or spiritual and bodily creation—and in the adornment of these parts, of which either the whole mass of the world or the whole of creation consists, we see light made and divided from the darkness. We see the firmament of heaven: whether the first body of the world, between the spiritual waters above and the bodily waters below, or this expanse of air—for this too is called heaven—through which the birds of heaven wander between the waters that float above it as vapor and fall as dew even on clear nights, and the heavy waters that flow upon the earth. We see the beauty of the gathered waters across the plains of the sea, and the dry land, whether bare or given form so as to be visible and ordered, the mother of plants and trees.

Your works praise you so that we may love you, and we love you so that your works may praise you. They have a beginning and an end in time, a rising and a setting, a growing and a waning, form and privation. So they have, in succession, morning and evening, partly hidden, partly evident. For they were made by you from nothing, not from you—not from some matter that was not yours, or that existed before, but from matter created along with them, that is, created by you at the same time, because you gave form to its formlessness without any interval of time. For while the matter of heaven and earth is one thing and the form of heaven and earth another, you made the matter from absolutely nothing and the form of the world from formless matter; yet you made both at once, so that form followed matter with no gap of delay.

We have also looked into what you willed to figure by having these things made, or written, in such an order; and we have seen that each thing is good and all things together are very good in your Word, in your only Son: heaven and earth, the head and the body of the church, in predestination before all time, without morning and evening.

But the seventh day is without evening and has no setting, because you sanctified it to endure forever. You rested on the seventh day after your very good works, though you made them while remaining at rest; and the voice of your book tells us this beforehand, so that we too, after our works—which are very good because you gave them to us—may rest in you in the Sabbath of eternal life.

For then too you will rest in us, just as now you work in us; and that rest of yours will be through us, just as these works of yours are through us. But you, Lord, are always working and always at rest. You do not see in time, nor are you moved in time, nor do you rest in time; and yet you make the seeing of things in time, and time itself, and the rest that comes after time.

So we see these things that you have made because they exist; but they exist because you see them. And we see outwardly that they exist, and inwardly that they are good; but you saw them made in the very place where you saw that they were to be made. And we, at a later time, were moved to do good, after our heart had conceived from your Spirit; at an earlier time we were moved to do evil, forsaking you. But you, God, the one Good, have never ceased to do good. And there are some good works of ours, given by your gift, but they are not everlasting; after them we hope to rest in your great holiness. But you, the Good that needs no other good, are always at rest, because your rest is you yourself. And what human being will give another human being the understanding of this? What angel will give it to an angel? What angel to a human being?