Confessions 1.1–1.24

“You are great, Lord, and greatly to be praised”: “great is your power, and of your wisdom there is no number.” And a human being, some portion of your creation, wants to praise you: a human being carrying his mortality about with him, carrying about the evidence of his sin and the evidence that you “resist the proud”; and still a human being, some portion of your creation, wants to praise you. You stir him up so that he delights to praise you, because you made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. Grant me, Lord, to know and understand whether it comes first to call upon you or to praise you, and whether knowing you comes first or calling upon you. But who calls upon you without knowing you? For one who does not know you may call upon something else instead of you. Or rather, are you called upon so that you may be known? “But how shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? Or how shall they believe without a preacher?” And “they shall praise the Lord who seek him.” For those who seek him find him, and those who find him will praise him. Let me seek you, Lord, calling upon you, and let me call upon you believing in you, for you have been preached to us. My faith calls upon you, Lord, the faith you gave me, which you breathed into me through the humanity of your Son, through the ministry of your preacher.

And how shall I call upon my God, my God and Lord, since surely when I call upon him I shall be calling him into myself? And what place is there in me into which my God may come into me? Into what place may God come into me, the God “who made heaven and earth”? Is there anything in me, Lord my God, that can contain you? Or do heaven and earth, which you made and in which you made me, contain you? Or, since nothing that exists would exist without you, 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.” So I would not exist, my God, I would not exist at all, unless you were in me. Or rather, I would not exist unless I were in you, “from whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things.” Even so, Lord, even so. Where do I call you to, since I am in you? Or from where would you come into me? For where could I withdraw outside heaven and earth, so that my God might come into me from there, he who said, “I fill heaven and earth”?

Do heaven and earth, then, contain you, since you fill them? Or do you fill them and there is still some of you left over, since they do not contain you? And where do you pour out 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 make you stable, because even if they are broken you are not spilled out. And when you are poured out upon us, you do not lie on the ground; rather you raise us up. You are not scattered; rather you gather us together. But you who fill all things, you fill them all 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 and smaller things smaller? Is some part of you then larger and some smaller? Or are you wholly everywhere, and does nothing contain the whole of you?

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?” Most high, most good, most mighty, most almighty, most merciful and most just, most hidden and most present, most beautiful and most strong, abiding and incomprehensible, unchangeable yet changing all things, never new, never old, renewing all things and “bringing the proud to old age, and they do not know it”; always acting, always at rest, gathering and not in need, bearing and filling and protecting, creating and nourishing and perfecting, seeking though you lack nothing. You love, yet without passion; you are jealous, yet untroubled; you repent, yet without grief; you are angry, yet calm; you change your works but not your plan; you take back what you find and yet never lost; never in need, yet you rejoice in gains; never greedy, yet you demand interest. More than is owed is paid to you, so that you become a debtor, and yet who has anything that is not yours? You pay debts though you owe no one; you forgive debts and lose nothing. And what have we said, my God, my life, my holy sweetness? Or what does anyone say when he speaks of you? And woe to those who are silent about you, since even the talkative are mute.

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? Alas for 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 this voice and lay hold of you. Do not hide your face from me: let me die, so that I may not die, in order to see it.

The house of my soul is too narrow for you to come into it: let it be enlarged by you. It is in ruins: repair 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 secret faults, Lord, and spare your servant from the faults of others”? “I believe, and therefore I speak.” Lord, you know. Have I not declared my offenses against myself to you, my God, “and you forgave the wickedness of my heart”? I do not contend in judgment with you, who are the truth; and I do not want to deceive myself, “lest my iniquity lie to itself.” So I do not contend in judgment with you, because “if you, Lord, mark iniquities, Lord, who shall stand?”

Yet allow me to speak before your mercy, me, “dust and ashes”; allow me still to speak, since, see, it is your mercy I am speaking to, and not a human being 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, dying life or living death? I do not know. And the comforts of your mercies received me, as I have heard from the parents of my flesh, from whom and in whom you formed me in time; for I myself do not remember. So the comforts of human milk received me; and neither my mother nor my nurses filled their own breasts, but you gave me the nourishment of infancy through them, according to your ordinance and the riches you have laid down even to the very foundation of things. You also gave me not to want more than you gave, and gave to those who nursed me the will to give me what you gave them; for with an ordered affection they wanted to give me what they had in abundance from you. For the good that came to me from them was good for them; yet it was not from them but through them, since all good things are from you, God, and “from my God is all my salvation.” This I noticed afterwards, when you cried out to me through these very things that you bestow, within and without. For at that time I knew how to suck and to be content with what pleased me, and to cry at what hurt my flesh, nothing more.

Afterwards I began to smile as well, first in sleep, then awake. This was told me about myself and I believed it, since we see other infants do so; for I do not remember these things of my own. 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 the wishes were inside and they were outside, and by none of their senses could they enter into my soul. So I threw about my limbs and my cries, signs resembling my wishes, the few I could make and such as I could make; for they were not really like them. And when I was not obeyed, either because I was not understood or because it would have harmed me, I was indignant with my elders for not submitting to me, and with free people for not serving me, and I took revenge on them by crying. That infants are like this I have learned from those I could learn from; and that I was like this myself my nurses, without knowing it, have shown me better than those who knew.

And see, my infancy died long ago, and I am alive. But you, Lord, who both live forever and in whom nothing dies, since before the beginnings of the ages and before everything 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 irrational and temporal things live: tell me, your suppliant, God, and in your mercy tell me, your wretched one, whether my infancy followed some earlier age of mine that had already died. Is it the one I spent in my mother's womb? For about that too something has been told me, and I have myself seen pregnant women. And what before that, my sweetness, my God? Was I anywhere, or anyone? For I have no one to tell me this: neither father nor mother could, nor the experience of others, nor my own memory. Or do you laugh at me for asking such things, and command me to praise you and confess to you for what I do know?

I confess to you, Lord of heaven and earth, giving praise to you for my beginnings and my infancy, which I do not remember; and you have granted a human being to infer these things about himself from others and to believe much about himself even on the authority of mere 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 being come from, if not from you, Lord? Or will anyone be the craftsman of his own making? Or is there any channel drawn from elsewhere by which being and life flow into us, except that you make us, Lord, for whom being and living are not two different things, because to be supremely and to live supremely are one and the same? For you are supreme and you do not change, and today is not completed in you, and yet it is completed in you, because all these things too are in you; for they would have no way of passing if you did not contain them. And since “your years do not fail,” your years are a single today. How many of our days and our fathers' days have already passed through your today, and received from it their measure and whatever existence they had; and still others will pass and receive, and exist in whatever way they will. “But you are the same,” and all of tomorrow and beyond, and all of yesterday and before, you will make today, you have made today. What is it to me if someone does not understand this? Let him too rejoice and say, “What is this?” Let him rejoice even so, and love to find you by not finding, rather than by finding not to find you.

Hear me, God. Woe to the sins of human beings! And a human being says this, and you have mercy on him, because you made him, and you did not make the sin in him. Who reminds me of the sin of my infancy? For “no one is clean from sin before you, not even an infant whose life on earth is a single day.” Who reminds me? Some little child, anyone at all, in whom I see what I do not remember of myself? What then was my sin at that time? That I gaped for the breast, crying? For if I did that now, gaping not for the breast but for food suited to my years, I would be laughed at and rebuked, quite rightly. So then I was doing things that deserved rebuke, but since I could not understand the one rebuking me, neither custom nor reason allowed me to be rebuked. For as we grow we root these things out and throw them away; and I have never seen anyone who, when cleaning something, knowingly throws away what is good. Or were these things good, for that time of life: to cry for things that would have been harmful if given, to be bitterly indignant at people who were not subject to me, free people and elders, and those who gave me birth, and many others besides who were wiser and did not obey at a nod of my will, and to try to hurt them by striking out as hard as I could, because commands were not obeyed which would have been obeyed to my harm? So it is the weakness of infants' limbs that is innocent, not the infants' minds. I have seen and known a jealous little one: he could not yet speak, and he glared, pale, with a bitter look at his foster brother. Who does not know this? Mothers and nurses say they cure such things by who knows what remedies. Unless this too is innocence: not to tolerate a sharer, one in the greatest need and still living on that one food, at a fountain of milk flowing richly and in abundance. But these things are gently tolerated, not because they are nothing or small, but because they will pass away as age advances. You may prove this by the fact that the very same things cannot be borne calmly when they are caught in someone older.

So you, Lord my God, who gave the infant life and a body, which, as we see, you furnished with senses, fitted together with limbs, adorned with form, and in which you implanted all the impulses of a living being for its wholeness and safety: you command me to praise you for these things and to confess to you and “to sing to your name, Most High,” because 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 is every measure, the most beautiful, who forms all things and orders all things by your law. This age, then, Lord, which I do not remember living, about which I have believed others and which I have inferred that I passed from other infants, though that inference is quite trustworthy, I am reluctant to count as part of this life of mine that I live in this world. For as far as the darkness of my forgetting is concerned, it is equal to the life I lived in my mother's womb. But if “I was conceived in iniquity and in sins my mother nourished me in the womb,” where, I beg you, my God, where, Lord, was I, your servant, where or when was I innocent? But see, I pass over that time: what have I now to do with a time of which I recall no trace?

Did I not, moving on from infancy, come to boyhood? Or rather, did boyhood come into me and succeed infancy? Nor did infancy depart; for where did it go? And yet it was no longer there. For I was no longer an infant who could not speak, but already a boy who spoke. And I remember this; and how I had learned to speak I realized later. For it was not that my elders taught me, offering me words in some fixed order of instruction as they did the alphabet a little later; but I myself, with the mind you gave me, my God, when I wanted to express the feelings of my heart with groans and various sounds and various movements of my limbs, so that my will would be obeyed, and could not express everything I wanted to everyone I wanted to, I pondered in memory. When they named something and, as they said the word, moved their body toward something, I saw and grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they wanted to point it out. That they meant this was made plain by the movement of their bodies, the natural language, as it were, of all peoples, made by the face and the glance of the eyes, by the action of the other limbs, and by the tone of voice that shows the mind's feeling in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding things. So little by little I gathered what things the words stood for, which I heard often, set in their places in various sentences; and once my mouth had been trained to these signs, I began to express my own wishes by them. Thus I shared with those among whom I lived the signs for expressing our wishes, and I entered more deeply into the stormy fellowship of human life, depending on the authority of my parents and the nod of my elders.

God, my God, what miseries and mockeries I experienced there, since the right way for a boy to live was set before me as obeying those who urged me to flourish in this world and to excel in the arts of the tongue, which serve human honor and false riches! Then I was sent to school to learn letters, and I, poor wretch, did not know what use there was in them. And yet if I was slow at learning, I was beaten. For this was approved by my elders, and many who had lived this life before us had built the hard roads along which we were forced to pass, with labor and sorrow multiplied for the sons of Adam. But we found, Lord, people who prayed to you, and we learned from them to think of you, as far as we could, as someone great who, even without appearing to our senses, could hear us and help us. For as a boy I began to pray to you, my help and my refuge, and in calling upon you I broke the knots of my tongue; and small as I was, I prayed to you with no small feeling that I might not be beaten at school. And when you did not hear me, which was not to make me foolish, my beatings, then a great and heavy evil to me, were laughed at by grown-ups, even by my own parents, who wanted no harm to come to me.

Is there anyone, Lord, of so great a spirit, clinging to you with such immense love, is there anyone, I say (for a kind of dullness can also do this), is there anyone, then, who by clinging to you in devotion is so greatly moved that he thinks so little of the rack and the hooks and such various tortures, to escape which people pray to you in great fear all over the world, that he loves those who dread them most bitterly, just as our parents laughed at the torments we boys suffered from our teachers? For we did not fear them any less, or pray to you any less to escape them; and yet we sinned by writing or reading or thinking about our lessons less than was demanded of us. For we did not lack memory or ability, Lord, which you willed us to have sufficiently for that age; but we loved to play, and we were punished for it by those who were certainly doing the same sort of thing. But the trifles of adults are called business, while when boys do the same sort of thing they are punished by adults; and no one pities the boys, or the adults, or both. Unless, perhaps, some good judge of things approves of my being beaten because as a boy I played ball and the game kept me from learning my letters quickly, letters with which, as an adult, I would play a more disgraceful game. Or was the very man who beat me doing anything different? If he was beaten by a fellow teacher in some trivial dispute, he was more tormented by bile and envy than I was when beaten at ball by a playmate.

And yet I sinned, Lord my God, orderer and creator of all natural things, but only the orderer of sins; Lord my God, I sinned by acting against the commands of my parents and those teachers. For I could later have made good use of the letters that my elders wanted me to learn, whatever their motive. For I was not disobedient because I chose better things, but out of love of play, loving proud victories in contests and having my ears tickled with false stories so that they itched more hotly, the same curiosity flashing more and more through my eyes toward the shows, the games of adults. Yet those who put on these shows are so distinguished by that rank that almost everyone wishes it for their little ones; and yet they gladly let them be beaten if such shows keep them from the study by which they want them to reach the point of putting on such shows. Look on these things mercifully, Lord, and deliver us who now call upon you; deliver also those who do not yet call upon you, so that they may call upon you and you may deliver them.

For even as a boy I had heard 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 suddenly burned with fever from a stomach seizure and was near death, you saw, my God, since you were already my guardian, with what urgency of mind and 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 distressed, since with a chaste heart in your faith she was in more loving labor for my eternal salvation; and she would have hastened to have me initiated into the saving sacraments and washed, confessing you, Lord Jesus, for the forgiveness of sins, had I not suddenly recovered. So my cleansing was postponed, as though I must necessarily be further defiled if I lived, since, evidently, after that washing the guilt in the filth of sins would be greater and more dangerous. So I already believed, as did she and the whole household, except my father alone; yet he did not overcome in me the right of my mother's devotion so as to keep me from believing in Christ, as he had not yet believed. For she was anxious that you, my God, should be my father rather than he; and in this you helped her to prevail over her husband, whom she, the better of the two, served, because in this too she was serving you, who certainly command it.

I ask you, my God, I would like to know, if you also would have it so, for what purpose my baptism was put off at that time: was it for my good that the reins of sinning were, as it were, loosened for me, or were they not loosened? Why is it, then, that even now we hear on all sides about one person and another: “Let him alone, let him do it; he is not yet baptized”? And yet in the health of the body we do not say, “Let him be wounded more; he is not yet healed.” How much better it would have been if I had been healed quickly, and if by my family's diligence and my own it had been arranged that the health of my soul, once received, should be kept safe under your protection, who had given it. Much better indeed. But how many and how great were the waves of temptation that seemed to threaten after boyhood! My mother already knew them, and she preferred to entrust to them the clay from which I might later be formed rather than the image itself.

Yet in boyhood itself, for which less was feared on my account than for adolescence, I did not love letters and I hated being pressed to learn them; and yet I was pressed, and good was done to me, though I did not do good: for I would not have learned unless I had been forced. For no one does good against his will, even if what he does is good. Nor did those who pressed 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 satisfying the insatiable desires 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 used my own error, who did not want to learn, for my punishment, a punishment which so small a boy and so great a sinner well deserved. So you did me good by means of those who did not do good, and you justly repaid me for my own sin. For you have commanded, and so it is, that every disordered mind is its own punishment.

But why I hated Greek, which I was taught as a little boy, is not clear enough to me even now. For I had come to love Latin, not the elementary lessons of the first teachers, but what those called grammarians teach. The first lessons, in which one learns to read and write and count, I found no less burdensome and painful than all of Greek. Yet where did this too come from, except from sin and the vanity of life, by which I was “flesh, a wind that goes and does not return”? For those first letters were surely better, because more certain, by which there came to be in me, and has come to be, and I still have it, the ability both to read whatever I find written and to write whatever I wish myself, than those in which I was forced to memorize the wanderings of some Aeneas or other, forgetting my own wanderings, and to weep for Dido dead because she killed herself for love, while meanwhile I bore dry-eyed, most wretched, my own death in these things, away from you, God my life.

For what is more wretched than a wretch who does not pity himself, and who weeps for the death of Dido, which came about through loving Aeneas, but does not weep for his own death, which came about through not loving you, God, light of my heart, bread of the inner mouth of my soul, and power that weds my mind and the bosom of my thought? I did not love you, and I committed fornication away from you, and as I committed fornication, “Well done! Well done!” sounded all around me. For “the friendship of this world is fornication” away from you; and “Well done! Well done!” is said so that one is ashamed not to be like that. And I did not weep for this; and I wept for Dido, “dead, who sought her end by the sword,” while I myself followed after the lowest of your creatures, having abandoned you, earth going into earth. And if I had been forbidden to read these things, I would have grieved, because I would not be reading what made me grieve. Such madness is thought a more honorable and richer learning than that by which I learned to read and write.

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 far better.” For see, I am more ready to forget the wanderings of Aeneas and everything of that kind than to forget 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 of error. Let them not cry out against me, those whom I no longer fear, while I confess to you what my soul desires, my God, and find rest in rebuking 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 the question to them whether it is true, as the poet says, that Aeneas once came to Carthage, the less learned will answer that they do not know, and the more learned will even deny that it is true. But if I ask with what letters Aeneas's name is written, all who have learned these things will answer me truly, according to the agreement and convention by which people have settled these signs among themselves. Likewise, if I ask which of these one would forget with greater harm to this life, reading and writing or those poetic fictions, who does not see what anyone will answer who has not utterly forgotten himself? So I sinned as a boy when I preferred those empty things to these more useful ones in my affection, or rather hated these and loved those. For “one and one are two, two and two are four” was a hateful chant to me, while the wooden horse full of armed men, and the burning of Troy, and “the very ghost of Creusa” were a most delightful spectacle of vanity.

Why, then, did I also hate Greek literature, which sings of such things? For Homer too was skilled at weaving such tales, and is most sweetly vain; and 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. The difficulty, clearly, the difficulty of learning a foreign language thoroughly, sprinkled gall, as it were, over all the Greek charms of the fabulous stories. For I did not know any of those words, and I was pressed hard with savage threats and punishments to know them. Now, as an infant I certainly knew no Latin either, and yet I learned it by paying attention, without any fear or torment, amid the coaxing of nurses and the jokes of those who smiled at me and the joy of those who played with me. I learned it without the painful burden of people pressing me, since my own heart pressed me to bring forth what it had conceived, which would not have been possible unless I had learned some words, not from people teaching, but from people talking, into whose ears I in turn brought forth whatever I felt. From this it is quite clear that free curiosity has greater power for learning these things than fearful compulsion. But compulsion restrains the free flow of curiosity by your laws, God, your laws, from the teachers' canes to the trials of the martyrs; for your laws have power to mix in wholesome bitternesses that call us back to you from the pestilent pleasure by which we withdrew from you.

“Hear my prayer, Lord,” so that my soul may not fail under your discipline, and that I may not fail in confessing to you your mercies, by which you rescued me from all my most evil ways, that you might become sweet to me above all the seductions I pursued, and that I might love you most strongly and clasp your hand with all my heart, and that you might rescue me from every temptation to the end. For see, you, 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 vain things, you gave me discipline, and you forgave me the sins of my delight in those vain things. I learned many useful words in them; but they can also be learned in things that are not vain, and that is the safe way in which boys should walk.