Summa.
Confessions
Chapter 1. Concerning that Most Unhappy Time in Which He, Being Deceived, Deceived Others; And Concerning the Mockers of His Confession.
For nine years during this same period, from my nineteenth year until my twenty-eighth, I was deceived and I deceived others. We were false and we made others false through various lusts. We did this openly through the teachings they call liberal arts. We did this secretly under the false name of religion. In one area we were proud. In another we were superstitious. Everywhere we were empty. In the first way we chased the emptiness of popular glory. We sought applause in theaters. We pursued competitive poetry. We competed for crowns of hay. We delighted in the foolishness of spectacles. We gave ourselves to uncontrolled lust. In the second way we wanted to be cleansed from these defilements. We brought food to those called the elect and the holy. In their workshop they would fashion angels and gods from this food through their little vessel. Through these we would be freed. I pursued these things and practiced them with my friends. They were deceived through me and along with me. Let the arrogant mock me. They have not yet been healthily prostrated and crushed by you, my God. But I will confess my shameful acts to your praise. Allow me, I beg you. Grant me to retrace with present memory the past wanderings of my error. Let me offer to you the sacrifice of rejoicing. What am I to myself without you except a guide toward ruin? What am I when things go well for me except one sucking your milk or enjoying you as food that does not perish? What is any man when he is merely man? But let the strong and powerful mock us. We who are weak and needy confess to you.
Chapter 2. He Teaches Rhetoric, the Only Thing He Loved, and Scorns the Soothsayer, Who Promised Him Victory.
In those years I taught the art of rhetoric. I sold my skill with words to the highest bidder. I was conquered by greed. Yet Lord, you know I preferred to have good students, as they are called good ones. I taught them techniques of persuasion without deceit. I did not want them to use these skills against innocent people. Sometimes I hoped they might defend the guilty. God, you watched from afar as I stumbled on slippery ground. You saw my faith flickering like a spark in thick smoke. I displayed this faith in my teaching to those who loved empty things and sought lies. I was their companion. During those years I lived with one woman. She was not my wife in what is called lawful marriage. My restless passion had found her. I lacked wisdom. Yet she was the only one. I kept faith with her in bed. Through my own experience I learned the difference between two kinds of love. One is the measured affection of marriage bound by covenant for the sake of having children. The other is a pact of lustful love where children are born against our wishes. Yet once born, they force us to love them.
I also remember when I decided to enter a competition for theatrical poetry. Some diviner offered his services to me. He asked what fee I would pay him to ensure my victory. I detested and despised such foul rituals. I answered that I would not allow even a fly to be killed for my victory. Not even if that crown were made of immortal gold. He planned to slaughter animals in his sacrifices. Through these rites he seemed ready to summon demons to support me. But I did not reject this evil out of purity toward you, God of my heart. I did not yet know how to love you. I could only think of physical splendors. When the soul sighs for such illusions, does it not commit adultery against you? Does it not trust in lies and feed the winds? Yet clearly I would not allow demons to receive sacrifices on my behalf. But through that superstition I was sacrificing myself to those very demons. What else does it mean to feed the winds? It means to feed them ourselves. That is, to become their pleasure and mockery through our wandering.
Chapter 3. Not Even the Most Experienced Men Could Persuade Him of the Vanity of Astrology to Which He Was Devoted.
Therefore I never stopped consulting those astrologers whom they call mathematicians. They seemed to offer almost no sacrifices. They directed no prayers to any spirit for the sake of divination. But true Christian piety consistently rejects and condemns this practice. It is good to confess to you, Lord, and to say,"Have mercy on me. Heal my soul, for I have sinned against you."We must not abuse your forgiveness as a license to sin. Instead we must remember the Lord's words:"See, you are made well. Sin no more, lest something worse happen to you."The astrologers try to destroy this entire path to health. They say,"The unavoidable cause of your sinning comes from heaven. Venus did this, or Saturn, or Mars."They want man to be without blame. Flesh and blood and proud corruption would be blameless. But the creator and ruler of heaven and stars would be at fault. Who is this creator except our God? He is sweetness and the source of justice. He"rewards each person according to his deeds."He does"not despise a broken and humble heart."Some have thought that God cannot exist unless he is a fiery body. Others believed in the brightness of immense light stretched everywhere through infinite spaces. Yet they imagined it split on one side by some kind of black wedge. They supposed two opposing kingdoms. They told stories with their fantasies about such principles governing reality. But do not think God is not there just because the sun exists. The sun is like a wheel. It is not an immense space of light. Do not say to yourself,"Therefore God is infinite and immense light."Do not stretch the sun itself and make it have no end in any direction. Do not propose immense light as your God. This is not God.
There was at that time a wise man. He was most skilled in the medical art and most distinguished in it. This man had placed that victory crown on my head with his own hand when I was proconsul. But my head was not healthy. And he did not act as a physician when he did this. You are the healer of that disease. You resist the proud. But to the humble you give grace. Did you fail me even through that old man? Did you stop healing my soul? I had become quite close to him. His conversations were delightful and serious. They had liveliness of thought without elaborate words. I hung on his every word constantly and intently. He learned from our conversations that I was devoted to books of astrology. He warned me kindly and like a father to throw them away. He said I should not waste on that vanity the care and effort that useful things require. He told me he had learned astrology so well that he wanted to make it his profession in his early years. He would have lived by it. If he had understood Hippocrates, he certainly could have understood those writings too. But later he left astrology behind and pursued medicine. The only reason was that he had discovered astrology to be completely false. He was a serious man who did not want to seek his living by deceiving people."But you,"he said,"practice rhetoric to support yourself among men. You pursue this deception as a free study, not from financial necessity. So you ought to believe me about it all the more. I worked so hard to learn it perfectly because I wanted to live by it alone."I asked him what caused many true things to be predicted from astrology. He answered as best he could. The power of chance does this. It is spread throughout the whole nature of things. Suppose someone consults a poet's pages by chance. The poet was singing and thinking of something completely different. Often a verse comes out that remarkably fits the situation. He said this should not be surprising. Something similar happens with the human soul. Some higher instinct works in it. The soul does not know what is happening within itself. Not by art but by chance it sounds out something. And this something harmonizes with the questioner's circumstances and deeds.
You arranged this for me through that man or by means of him. You outlined in my memory what I myself would later seek on my own. But at that time neither he nor my dearest friend Nebridius could persuade me to throw these things away. Nebridius was a very good and very pure young man who mocked that whole art of divination. The authority of those authors influenced me more than my friends did. I had not yet found any reliable proof of the kind I was looking for. I wanted something that would show me without doubt that their true predictions came by chance or luck rather than by the skill of studying the stars.
Chapter 4. Sorely Distressed by Weeping at the Death of His Friend, He Provides Consolation for Himself.
In those years when I first began teaching in the town where I was born, I had acquired a friend through our shared studies. He was very dear to me. He was my age and blooming with the flower of youth. He had grown up with me as a boy. We had gone to school together. We had played together. But he was not yet truly a friend. Not even then was our friendship what true friendship really is. True friendship exists only when you bind together those who cling to you through the love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Nevertheless, our friendship was exceedingly sweet. It was cooked in the heat of similar pursuits. I had turned him away from the true faith, which he did not hold genuinely and deeply as a young man. I led him into superstitious tales and destructive beliefs. My mother wept because of these things. That man now wandered with me in his mind. My soul could not exist without him. But look—you were looming over the backs of your runaways, O God of vengeance and fountain of mercies alike. You turn us to yourself in wondrous ways. Look—you took that man from this life when he had barely completed one year in my friendship. He had been sweeter to me than all the sweetnesses of that life of mine.
Who can count your praises when experienced by just one person alone? What did you do then, my God? How unsearchable is the abyss of your judgments! My friend was suffering from fevers. He lay unconscious for a long time in deadly sweats. When he was given up for lost, he was baptized without knowing it. I didn't care about this. I assumed his soul would keep what it had received from me rather than what was happening to his unconscious body. But it was completely different. He recovered and was saved. As soon as I could speak with him again—which was immediately when he was able, since I never left his side and we depended too much on each other—I tried to joke with him about it. I expected him to laugh with me about the baptism he had received while completely absent in mind and consciousness. Yet he had learned that he had indeed received it. But he recoiled from me as if I were an enemy. With remarkable and sudden boldness, he warned me that if I wanted to be his friend, I must stop saying such things to him. I was stunned and troubled. I put off all my intentions so that he might recover first and regain his strength. Then I could deal with him as I wished. But he was snatched away from my madness so that you might preserve him for my consolation. After a few days, while I was away, the fevers returned and he died.
My heart was darkened by this grief. Everything I looked at was death. My homeland became a torture to me. My father's house became a strange misery. Everything I had shared with him turned into immense torment without him. My eyes searched for him everywhere but he was not given to me. I hated everything because it did not contain him. Nothing could say to me anymore"Look, he is coming"as it used to when he was alive but away. I became a great question to myself. I asked my soul why it was sad and why it troubled me so deeply. It had no answer for me. When I said"Hope in God"it rightly would not obey. The beloved man I had lost was more real and better than the phantom I was ordered to hope in. Weeping alone was sweet to me. It had replaced my friend as the delight of my soul.
Chapter 5. Why Weeping is Pleasant to the Wretched.
Now, Lord, those times have passed. Time has healed my wound. Can I hear from you who are truth itself? Can I bring the ear of my heart close to your mouth so you might tell me why weeping is sweet to those who suffer? Though you are present everywhere, have you cast our misery far from yourself? You remain in yourself. But we are tossed about in trials. Yet if we did not cry out to your ears, nothing would remain of our hope. Where then does this sweet fruit come from the bitterness of life - to groan and weep and sigh and lament? Is this sweet because we hope you will hear us? This makes sense in prayers, because prayers have the desire to reach you. But what about the pain of losing something and the grief that covered me then? I did not hope he would come back to life. I was not asking for this through my tears. I was simply grieving and weeping. I was wretched. I had lost my joy. Is weeping itself a bitter thing? Does it delight us because we are disgusted with the things we once enjoyed, and now we shrink back from them?
Chapter 6. His Friend Being Snatched Away by Death, He Imagines that He Remains Only as Half.
Why do I speak of these things? This is not the time for questioning but for confessing to you. I was wretched. Every soul bound by friendship to mortal things is wretched. It is torn apart when it loses them. Then it feels the misery that was already there before the loss. This was my condition then. I wept most bitterly. I found rest in bitterness. I was so wretched that I held my miserable life dearer than that friend of mine. Though I wanted to change my life, I was less willing to lose it than to lose him. I do not know if I would have been willing to die for him. The story is told of Orestes and Pylades that they wanted to die for each other or together. If this is not fiction, it was because not living together was worse than death for them. But some feeling completely opposite to this arose in me. The weariness of living weighed most heavily on me. Yet I feared dying. I believe that the more I loved him, the more I hated and feared death. Death had taken him from me like the most savage enemy. I thought death would suddenly consume all people since it had been able to take him. This was my complete condition. I remember it well. Look at my heart, my God. Look inside and see that I remember. You are my hope. You cleanse me from the filth of such feelings. You direct my eyes toward you. You pull my feet from the snare. I marveled that other mortals went on living when he was dead. I had loved him as if he would never die. I marveled even more that I continued living when he was dead. I was his other self. Someone spoke well of his friend when he said"Half of my soul."I felt that my soul and his soul had been one soul in two bodies. Life was therefore a horror to me because I did not want to live as half a person. Perhaps I feared dying because I did not want him to die completely. I had loved him greatly.
Chapter 7. Troubled by Restlessness and Grief, He Leaves His Country a Second Time for Carthage.
What madness it is not to know how to love people with proper human affection! What foolishness for a person to suffer human troubles without restraint, as I was doing then! So I burned with passion. I sighed. I wept. I was thrown into confusion. There was no rest and no clear thinking. I was carrying around my own soul, torn and bleeding. It could not bear being carried by me. I could find no place to set it down. It found no peace in pleasant groves. It found no peace in games and songs. It found no peace in fragrant places. It found no peace in elaborate banquets. It found no peace in the pleasure of bed and couch. Finally, it found no peace even in books and poetry. Everything filled me with horror, even the light itself. Whatever was not what he had been was wicked and hateful to me. Only groaning and tears brought any relief. In these alone I found some small rest. But when my soul was pulled away from even this, a great burden of misery weighed me down. I knew it should be lifted up to you, Lord, and healed there. But I neither wanted this nor was able to do it. This was especially because when I thought about you, you were nothing solid and firm to me. You were not really there. Instead there was an empty phantom. My error was my god. If I tried to place my soul there so it might rest, it would slip through the emptiness. Again it would crash down on me. I had become for myself a wretched place where I could neither remain nor leave. Where could my heart flee from my own heart? How could I escape from myself? Where could I go that I would not follow myself? And yet I fled from my homeland. My eyes would look for him less in places where they were not accustomed to seeing him. So I left the town of Thagaste and came to Carthage.
Chapter 8. That His Grief Ceased by Time, and the Consolation of Friends.
Time does not stand still. It does not roll by without purpose. Time works wonders in the mind through our senses. Days came and went before me. As they came and passed, they planted new images in my mind. They gave me different memories. Little by little, they restored me to the kinds of pleasures I had known before. My grief gradually gave way to these pleasures. Yet other sorrows did not follow. Instead came the seeds of future sorrows. Why had that pain penetrated me so easily and reached into my very depths? It was because I had poured out my soul upon the sand. I had loved someone destined to die as if he would never die. What restored and refreshed me most were the comforts of other friends. With them I loved what I had loved instead of you. This was nothing but an enormous lie. It was a long deception. Through its seductive caressing, it corrupted our minds that itched for pleasure in our ears. But this lie would not die for me when one of my friends died. There were other things about my friends that captured my heart even more. We would talk together and laugh together. We would do kind favors for each other in turn. We would read sweet-sounding books together. We would joke around together. We would engage in serious matters together. Sometimes we would disagree without hatred, as if a person were debating with himself. These very rare disagreements would season our many moments of harmony. We would teach each other things. We would learn from each other. We would miss absent friends with distress. We would welcome returning friends with joy. These signs and others like them flowed from hearts that loved and were loved in return. They came through the mouth, through the tongue, through the eyes, and through a thousand delightful gestures. Like kindling, they would set our souls on fire. They would make many people into one.
Chapter 9. That the Love of a Human Being, However Constant in Loving and Returning Love, Perishes; While He Who Loves God Never Loses a Friend.
This is what we love in friends. We love them so deeply that our human conscience stands guilty if we fail to love someone who loves us back, or if we fail to return the love of someone who loves us. We seek nothing from their body except signs of goodwill. This is why we grieve when someone dies. This is why sorrow brings darkness. This is why sweetness turns to bitterness and soaks the heart. This is why the death of the dying becomes the death of the living when we lose their life. Blessed is the one who loves you. Blessed is the one who loves a friend in you. Blessed is the one who loves an enemy for your sake. Only such a person loses no one dear to them. All who are dear to them are dear in the one who cannot be lost. And who is this one but our God? He is the God who made heaven and earth and fills them. By filling them he made them. No one loses you unless they abandon you. When someone abandons you, where do they go? Where do they flee except from you when you are gracious to you when you are angry? Where do they not find your law in their punishment? Your law is truth. Truth is you.
Chapter 10. That All Things Exist that They May Perish, and that We are Not Safe Unless God Watches Over Us.
God of all power, turn us back to you. Show us your face and we will be saved. Wherever the human soul turns, it becomes stuck in pain. This happens everywhere except when it turns to you. The soul gets stuck in beautiful things outside of you and outside of itself. Yet these beautiful things would not exist at all unless they came from you. They rise up and fall down. When they rise up they begin to exist. They grow until they reach completion. Once they are complete they grow old and die. Not everything grows old. But everything dies. When things rise up and try to exist, the faster they grow into being, the faster they rush toward not being. This is their nature. You have given them only so much because they are parts of things that do not all exist at the same time. Instead, by leaving and following one another, together they make up the whole universe of which they are parts. Look how our speech works in exactly this same way through sounds that carry meaning. A speech cannot be complete unless each word goes away after it has sounded its parts so that another word can follow. My soul should praise you from these things, God who created everything. But my soul must not get stuck to them with the glue of love through the body's senses. These things are going where they were always going—toward not existing. They tear the soul apart with diseased longings. The soul wants to exist and loves to rest in the things it loves. But in those things there is no place to rest. They do not stay still. They run away. Who can chase after them with physical senses? Who can grasp them even when they are right here? Physical sensation is slow because it is physical sensation. That is simply its nature. It is good enough for other things it was made for. But it is not good enough to hold onto things that race by from their proper beginning to their proper end. In your word by which all things are created, there they hear this command: from here to there and no further.
Chapter 11. That Portions of the World are Not to Be Loved; But that God, Their Author, is Immutable, and His Word Eternal.
Do not be empty, my soul, and do not grow deaf in the ear of your heart through the noise of your vanity. Listen, you too: the Word itself calls out for you to return. There is the place of unshakeable rest where love is never abandoned unless it abandons first. See how those things pass away so that others may take their place. The lowest creation holds together through all its parts."Do I go anywhere?"says the Word of God. There establish your dwelling place. There entrust whatever you have from that source, my soul, weary at last from deceptions. Entrust to Truth whatever you have from Truth, and you will lose nothing. Your corruptions will bloom again. All your sicknesses will be healed. Your unstable parts will be reformed and renewed and bound to you. They will not carry you down to where they descend. Instead they will stand with you and remain with the God who stands and remains forever.
Why do you pursue your flesh in its perverted state? Let it follow you in its converted state instead. Whatever you experience through your flesh exists only in part. You do not know the whole of which these are merely parts. Yet these parts still delight you. But suppose your fleshly senses were capable of grasping the whole. Suppose they had not received their just limitation as punishment for your condition. Then you would want everything that exists to pass through the present moment. You would want this so that all things might please you more fully. Consider what happens when we speak. You hear our words through these same fleshly senses. You certainly do not want the syllables to remain static. You want them to fly past so that others may come. Only then can you hear the complete message. This is always the pattern. When many parts form a single thing, and those parts cannot all exist simultaneously, the whole delights us more than any individual part. This is true when we can perceive the whole. But far better than all created things is the one who made them all. He is our God. He does not depart from us. No one succeeds him.
Chapter 12. Love is Not Condemned, But Love in God, in Whom There is Rest Through Jesus Christ, is to Be Preferred.
If bodies please you, praise God through them. Turn your love back to their maker. Do not become displeasing to God in the very things that please you. If souls please you, love them in God. They too are changeable. They find stability only when fixed in him. Otherwise they would drift away and perish. Therefore love them in him. Carry with you to him whatever souls you can. Say to them:"Let us love him. Let us love him. He made these things and he is not far away. He did not make them and then depart. They exist from him and in him. Look where he is—wherever truth gives understanding. He dwells intimately in the heart. But the heart has wandered from him."Return to your heart, you rebels. Cling to the one who made you. Stand with him and you will stand firm. Rest in him and you will have peace."Where are you going along these rough paths? Where are you going? The good that you love comes from him. As long as it relates to him, it is good and sweet. But it will justly become bitter when it is unjustly loved while deserting him—whatever comes from him."Why do you still keep walking these difficult and wearisome roads? There is no rest where you seek it. Seek what you are seeking—but it is not there where you are looking. You seek the blessed life in the region of death. It is not there. How can there be blessed life where there is not even life?"
Life itself came down here. It took our death and killed death with the abundance of its own life. It thundered and called out for us to return from here to him. We must go back to that secret place where he came from to reach us. He came from the virgin womb where human nature married him. Mortal flesh wed him so it would not remain mortal forever. From there he came out like a bridegroom from his wedding chamber. He rejoiced like a giant running his course. He did not delay but ran forward. He called out through words and deeds and death and life and descent and ascent. He called for us to return to him. He departed from our eyes so we would return to our hearts and find him there. He withdrew but look—here he is. He chose not to stay with us long but he did not abandon us. He withdrew to that place from which he never departed. The world was made through him. He was in this world. He came into this world to save sinners. My soul confesses to him. He heals my soul because it sinned against him. Sons of men, how long will your hearts be heavy? Even after Life descended, do you still refuse to ascend and live? But where are you climbing when you are already on high and have set your mouth in heaven? Come down so you may go up. Come down so you may ascend to God. You fell by climbing up against him. Tell them these things so they will weep in the valley of weeping. Then carry them with you to God. You speak these things to them from his Spirit if you speak them burning with the fire of love.
Chapter 13. Love Originates from Grace and Beauty Enticing Us.
I did not understand these things then. I loved beautiful things that were beneath me. I was going into the depths. I said to my friends:"Do we love anything unless it is beautiful? What then is beauty? What is it that attracts us and draws us to the things we love?"If there were no grace and form in them, they could not move us toward themselves at all. I noticed and saw that in physical bodies themselves, one thing exists as a complete whole and is therefore beautiful. But another thing is fitting because it matches something else perfectly. A part of the body fits the whole body. A shoe fits the foot. Other things work the same way. This thinking bubbled up in my mind from the depths of my heart. I wrote books called"On the Beautiful and the Fitting."I think there were two or three books. You know this, God, because it has slipped from my memory. We do not have those books anymore. They have wandered away from us somehow.
Chapter 14. Concerning the Books Which He Wrote On the Fair and Fit, Dedicated to Hierius.
But what moved me, Lord my God, to write those books to Hierius, the Roman orator of the city? I did not know his face. Yet I loved the man because of his reputation for learning, which was famous. I had heard certain words of his. They had pleased me. But he pleased me more because he pleased others. They praised him highly. They marveled that a Syrian man had first mastered Greek eloquence. Later he had become a wonderful speaker in Latin as well. He was most knowledgeable in matters pertaining to the study of wisdom. This pleased me. A man is praised and loved though absent. Does that love enter the heart of the listener from the mouth of the one praising him? Far from it. Rather, one lover kindles another. For the one who is praised is loved when he is believed to be proclaimed by the praiser's truthful heart. That is, when one who loves him gives the praise.
Back then I loved people based on human judgment. I did not love them based on your judgment, my God, in which no one is deceived. But why didn't I want to be like a famous charioteer or a hunter celebrated by popular acclaim? I wanted something different and more serious. I wanted to be praised the way I myself wished to be praised. Yet I would not want to be praised and loved like actors are. Even though I myself praised and loved actors. I would choose to remain hidden rather than be famous like them. I would rather be hated than loved in that way. Where are these different weights of various loves distributed in one soul? What is it that I love in another person that I would hate and reject in myself if I didn't despise it? We are both human beings after all. A good horse is not loved by someone who would refuse to be that horse even if he could. The same must be said about an actor who shares our human nature. Do I therefore love in another man what I hate being myself since I am human? Man himself is a great mystery. You have numbered even his hairs, Lord, and they are not diminished in you. Yet his hairs are more easily counted than his feelings and the movements of his heart.
But that teacher of rhetoric belonged to a type I loved so much that I wanted to be like him. I was lost in pride. I was carried about by every wind. You guided me in ways too hidden for me to see. How do I know this? How can I confess this to you with certainty? I had loved him more for the praise of those who admired him than for the actual things they praised him for. If those same people had criticized him instead of praising him—if they had told the same stories while condemning and scorning him—I would not have been fired with enthusiasm for him. I would not have been stirred up. The facts would have been no different. The man himself would have been no different. Only the feelings of those telling the stories would have been different. Here lies the weakness of the soul. It does not yet cling to the solid foundation of truth. The soul is carried and turned this way and that according to how the winds of human opinion blow from the hearts of those who think they know. It is twisted back and forth. The light grows dim for it. It cannot see the truth. And look—the truth stands right before us. It would have been something great for me if that man had come to know my speaking and my studies. If he had approved of them, I would have burned with even more passion. If he had disapproved, my heart would have been wounded—my heart so empty and lacking your solid strength. And yet I delighted in turning over in my mind that beautiful and fitting piece I had written to him. I held it before the gaze of my contemplation. I admired it even though no one else praised it.
Chapter 15. While Writing, Being Blinded by Corporeal Images, He Failed to Recognise the Spiritual Nature of God.
But I could not yet see the heart of such a great matter in your art, Almighty God, who alone works wonders. My mind wandered through physical forms. I defined and distinguished between"beautiful"as what pleases by itself and"fitting"as what is suited to something else. I supported these definitions with examples from the physical world. I turned to examine the nature of the soul. But the false opinion I held about spiritual things prevented me from seeing the truth. The very power of truth burst upon my eyes. Yet I turned my trembling mind away from incorporeal reality back to outlines and colors and swelling sizes. Since I could not see these things in the soul, I thought I could not see my soul at all. When I loved peace in virtue, I hated discord in vice. In virtue I noticed unity. In vice I noticed a kind of division. In that unity appeared to me the rational mind and the nature of truth and the highest good. In that division I wretchedly imagined some substance and nature of the highest evil. This evil would not only be substance but would be life itself. Yet it would not come from you, my God, from whom all things come. I called that unity a monad, like a mind without gender. I called this division a dyad—anger in crimes and lust in shameful acts. I did not know what I was saying. I had not learned that no substance is evil. Nor had I learned that our own mind is not the highest and unchangeable good.
Just as crimes occur when the soul's impulse is corrupt and throws itself about insolently and chaotically, and just as shameful acts occur when the soul's passion is unrestrained as it drinks in fleshly pleasures, so too do errors and false beliefs contaminate life when the rational mind itself is corrupt. This was my condition then. I did not know that the mind must be illuminated by another light to share in truth. The mind is not itself the nature of truth. For you will light my lamp, Lord. My God, you will illuminate my darkness. From your fullness we have all received. You are the true light that illuminates every person coming into this world. In you there is no change or shadow of turning.
But I was trying to reach you. You pushed me away so I might taste death. You resist the proud. What could be more prideful than my wild madness in claiming I was naturally what you are? I was changeable. This was clear to me. I longed to be wise precisely so I could become better instead of worse. Yet I preferred to think even you were changeable rather than admit I was not what you are. So you pushed me away. You resisted my stubborn pride. I imagined physical forms. Flesh accused flesh. I was a wandering spirit who had not yet returned to you. In my wandering I walked among things that do not exist. Not in you. Not in me. Not in the body. Your truth did not create these things for me. My vanity shaped them from bodily matter. I spoke to your little faithful ones, my fellow citizens from whom I unknowingly lived in exile. I was chattering and foolish. I said to them,"Why does the soul that God made go astray?"But I did not want anyone to ask me,"Why does God go astray?"I preferred to argue that your unchangeable substance was forced into error rather than confess that my changeable nature had wandered off by choice and was suffering the penalty of error.
I was perhaps twenty-six or twenty-seven years old when I wrote those volumes. I was turning over in my mind physical fantasies that clamored in the ears of my heart. Sweet Truth, I was straining those ears toward your inner melody. I was thinking about"the beautiful and the fitting."I longed to stand and hear you and to rejoice with joy at the voice of the bridegroom. But I could not. The voices of my error carried me away outside myself. The weight of my pride made me fall into the depths. You did not give joy and gladness to my hearing. My bones did not exult because they had not been humbled.
Chapter 16. He Very Easily Understood the Liberal Arts and the Categories of Aristotle, But Without True Fruit.
What good did it do me that around age twenty, when I got my hands on certain works of Aristotle called the Ten Categories, I read them alone and understood them? When my teacher of rhetoric at Carthage mentioned their name with his cheeks puffed up in pompous pride, and when other supposedly learned men did the same, I hung on their words in suspense as if these works contained something magnificent and divine. But when I compared my understanding with those who claimed they could barely grasp these texts even with the most erudite masters—masters who not only spoke but drew many diagrams in the dust—they could tell me nothing more than what I had learned by reading alone by myself. The works seemed to speak quite clearly to me about substances, such as man. They explained what exists in those substances, such as a man's physical form and what it looks like. They covered his height and how many feet tall he is. They discussed his family relationships and whose brother he might be. They told where he is positioned. They explained when he was born. They described whether he stands or sits. They noted whether he wears shoes or armor. They covered whether he does something. They explained whether something happens to him. Whatever countless things are found in these nine categories—of which I have given some examples—or in the category of substance itself, the works addressed them all.
What good did this do me when it actually harmed me? I was trying to understand even you, my God, who are wonderfully simple and unchangeable. I thought everything could be completely grasped through those ten categories. I attempted to understand you as if you were subject to your own greatness or beauty. I imagined these qualities existed in you like properties in a subject. I thought of them as existing in a body. But your greatness and your beauty are you yourself. A body is not great and beautiful simply because it is a body. Even if a body were less great and less beautiful, it would still be a body. What I was thinking about you was falsehood, not truth. These were fantasies born of my misery, not foundations of your blessedness. You had commanded it. So it was happening in me that the earth brought forth thorns and thistles for me. I came to my bread only through toil.
What good did it do me that I read and understood all those books of the liberal arts by myself when I was a wretched slave to evil desires? I could read whatever I was able to get my hands on. I delighted in these books. But I had no idea where the truth and certainty in them came from. My back was turned to the light. My face was turned toward the things that were lit up. So my very face, through which I saw the illuminated things, was not itself illuminated. You know, Lord my God, that I understood without great difficulty and without any human teacher everything about the art of speaking and reasoning. I grasped everything about the dimensions of figures and about music and numbers. Both the quickness of understanding and the sharpness of perception are your gift. But I did not offer sacrifice to you for these abilities. So they served not for my benefit but rather for my destruction. I was eager to have such a good portion of my substance under my control. I did not preserve my strength for you. Instead I departed from you into a far country to squander it on the lusts of prostitutes. What good was a good thing to me if I did not use it well? I did not realize that even studious and talented people find these subjects extremely difficult to understand. This only became clear when I tried to explain the same subjects to them. The most excellent student was the one who could follow my explanations without falling behind.
But what good did this do me when I thought that you, Lord God of truth, were a bright and vast body, and I was just a fragment of that body? What tremendous perversity! But that's how I was. I am not ashamed, my God, to confess to you your mercies within me and to call upon you. I was not ashamed then to proclaim my blasphemies to other people and to bark against you. What good did my quick mind do me then through those teachings? What good came from unraveling so many knotted books without any human teacher's help when I wandered in such ugly and sacrilegious shame in the doctrine of godliness? Or what harm did a much slower mind do your little ones when they did not depart far from you? They remained safe in the nest of your Church to grow their feathers. They nourished the wings of love with the food of sound faith. O Lord our God, we hope in the shadow of your wings. Protect us and carry us. You will carry both the little ones and the gray-haired. You will carry them. Our strength exists only when you are our strength. When it is our own strength, it is weakness. Our good lives forever with you. Because we have turned away from that place, we have become perverted. Let us return now, Lord, so that we are not overturned. Our good lives with you without any failure. You yourself are that good. We will not fear that there is no place to return to because we fell from there. Even with us absent, our house does not fall. Your eternity remains.