Confessions 3.1–3.21

I came to Carthage, and all around me there hissed a frying pan of disgraceful loves. I was not yet in love, but I loved to love, and from a more hidden want I hated myself for wanting less. I was looking for something to love, in love with loving, and I hated safety and a path without snares; for I had a hunger within, for the inner food, you yourself, my God, and yet with that hunger I was not hungry, but was without desire for incorruptible food, not because I was full of it, but the emptier I was, the more I loathed it. And so my soul was not healthy; covered in sores, it threw itself outward, wretchedly eager to be scratched by contact with things of sense. But if these things had no soul, they would certainly not be loved. To love and to be loved was sweet to me, all the more if I could also enjoy the body of the one I loved. So I defiled the spring of friendship with the filth of lust, and clouded its brightness with the hell of desire; and yet, foul and dishonorable as I was, in my overflowing vanity I longed to be elegant and sophisticated. I rushed also into love, by which I longed to be captured. My God, my mercy, with how much gall you in your goodness sprinkled that sweetness for me! For I was loved, and I reached the bond of enjoyment, and I was gladly tied up in painful knots, so as to be beaten with the burning iron rods of jealousy and suspicions and fears and angers and quarrels.

I was carried away by theatrical shows, full of images of my own miseries and of fuel for my fire. Why is it that a person wants to feel grief there at sad and tragic events which he would not want to suffer himself? And yet as a spectator he wants to feel grief from them, and the grief itself is his pleasure. What is this but pitiable madness? For each one is moved by them the more, the less healthy he is from such passions; although when a person suffers himself it is usually called misery, and when he suffers with others, mercy. But what kind of mercy is it, after all, in fictitious and staged events? For the listener is not called on to help, but only invited to grieve; and the more he grieves, the more he applauds the author of those images. And if those human calamities, whether ancient or invented, are acted in such a way that the spectator does not grieve, he leaves in disgust and criticizes; but if he grieves, he stays, intent and rejoicing.

So tears are loved, and griefs. Certainly everyone wants to rejoice. Or is it that, while no one likes to be miserable, one does like to be merciful, and since that is not without grief, for this one reason griefs are loved? This too comes 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, the monstrous heat of foul lusts, into which it is itself changed and turned by its own will, twisted and thrown down from heavenly clearness? Should mercy then be rejected? By no means. So let griefs sometimes be loved. But beware of uncleanness, my soul, under the protection of my God, “the God of our fathers, praiseworthy and exalted above all forever”; beware of uncleanness. For I do not now lack compassion; but then in the theaters I rejoiced with lovers when they enjoyed one another in disgraceful acts, though they did this only in pretense in the play of the show; and when they lost one another, I was saddened as if merciful; and yet both delighted me. But now I have more pity for one who rejoices in a disgraceful act than for one who is thought to have suffered hardship by losing a pernicious pleasure and forfeiting a miserable happiness. This is certainly the truer mercy, but in it grief does not delight. For though one who grieves over a wretched person is approved for the duty of love, still one who is genuinely merciful would rather there were nothing to grieve over. For if there is such a thing as malevolent benevolence, which is impossible, then someone who truly and sincerely has mercy could wish there to be wretched people so that he could have mercy on them. So some grief is to be approved, but none is to be loved. For this is how you, Lord God, who love souls, have mercy far more deeply and purely than we, and more incorruptibly: you are wounded by no grief. “And who is sufficient for these things?”

But I, wretch that I was, loved to grieve then, and sought for something to grieve over, since in another's misfortune, fictitious and acted in a show, the actor's performance pleased me more and attracted me more strongly the more it drew tears from me. What wonder, when I, an unhappy sheep straying from your flock and impatient of your keeping, was befouled with a disgusting mange? Hence came my love of griefs, not griefs that would pierce me more deeply (for I did not love to suffer such things as I loved to watch), but griefs heard and invented that would scratch me, as it were, on the surface; yet, as with the nails of those who scratch themselves, a burning swelling followed, and rot and horrid pus. Such was my life: was it life, my God?

And your faithful mercy hovered over me from afar. In what iniquities I wasted away! And I followed a sacrilegious curiosity, so that, as I deserted you, it led me down to the depths of faithlessness and the deceitful services of demons, to whom I sacrificed my evil deeds; 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 on an affair for procuring the fruits of death; for which you struck me with heavy punishments, but nothing in comparison with my guilt, O you my immense mercy, my God, my refuge from the terrible harmful things among which I wandered with a stiff neck, withdrawing far 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 litigious law courts, so that I might excel in them, and be the more praised the more deceitful I was. So great is the blindness of human beings, who even glory in their blindness! And I was already top of the class in the school of rhetoric, and I rejoiced proudly and swelled with conceit, though I was far more restrained, Lord, as you know, and completely removed from the “overturnings” carried out by the Overturners (for this ill-omened and devilish name is a sort of badge of sophistication), among whom I lived with a shameless shame, because I was not like them. I was with them and sometimes enjoyed their friendship, though I always abhorred what they did, that is, the overturnings with which they wantonly assailed the modesty of strangers, harassing it for no reason by mockery and so feeding their malicious amusements. Nothing is more like the doings of demons than that. What, then, could they be more truly called than Overturners, since they had themselves first been overturned and perverted, mocked and seduced by deceiving spirits in secret, in the very thing by which they love to mock and deceive others?

Among these, at that unstable age, I was studying the books of eloquence, in which I wanted to excel for a damnable and windy end, out of the joys of human vanity; and in the usual course of study I had come to a book by a certain Cicero, whose tongue almost everyone admires, though not his heart. But that book of his contains an exhortation to philosophy and is called Hortensius. That book changed my affections and turned my prayers to you yourself, Lord, and made my wishes and desires different. Suddenly every vain hope became worthless to me, and with an incredible burning of heart I longed for the immortality of wisdom, and I had begun to rise up to return to you. For it was not to sharpen my tongue, which I seemed to be buying with my mother's money, in my nineteenth year, my father having died two years before; it was not to sharpen my tongue that I used that book, nor was it its style that had persuaded me, but what it said.

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.” But the love of wisdom has a Greek name, philosophy, and it was with this that those writings set me on fire. There are those who lead people astray through philosophy, coloring and painting over their errors with that great, attractive, and honorable name; and almost all who were such in that time and earlier are noted and exposed in that book; and there too is made clear that saving warning of your Spirit through your good and devout servant: “See that no one deceives you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elements of this world and not according to Christ; for in him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.” And at that time, as you know, light of my heart, since these apostolic words were not yet known to me, I was delighted in that exhortation by this alone: that I was stirred up by that discourse to love and seek and pursue and hold and strongly embrace not this or that sect, but wisdom itself, whatever it might be; and I was set on fire and burned. And this alone checked me in so great a blaze: that the name of Christ was not there. For this name, by your mercy, Lord, this name of my Savior, your Son, my tender heart had devoutly drunk in with my mother's very milk and kept deep within; and whatever lacked this name, however learned and polished and truthful, did not carry me away completely.

So I decided to turn my mind to the Holy Scriptures and see what they were like. And see, I behold something not discovered by the proud nor laid bare to children, but lowly in its approach, lofty in its advance, and veiled in mysteries; and I was not the kind of person who could enter into it or bow my neck to its steps. For I did not feel then as I speak now when I turned to that Scripture; it seemed to me unworthy to be compared with the dignity of Cicero. For my swollen pride shrank from its measure, and my sharp sight did not penetrate its inner meaning. Yet it was the kind of thing that grows up with little ones; but I scorned to be a little one, and, puffed up with pride, I thought myself grown up.

So I fell among men proudly raving, exceedingly carnal and talkative, in whose mouths were the snares of the devil and a birdlime made from a mixture of 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 mouths, but only as far as the sound and noise of the tongue; otherwise their heart was empty of truth. And they said, “Truth, truth,” and said it to me a great deal, and it was nowhere in them; but they spoke falsehood not only about you, who are truly the Truth, but also about the elements of this world, your creation, about which I ought to have passed beyond even the philosophers who spoke the truth, for love of you, my Father, supremely good, beauty of all beautiful things. O Truth, Truth, how deeply even then the marrow of my mind sighed for you, when they sounded your name to me often and in many ways, by voice alone and in many huge books! And those were the dishes on which, while I hungered for you, they served up to me the sun and moon, your beautiful works, but still your works, not you, and not even your first works. For your spiritual works come before these bodily ones, however bright and heavenly. But I hungered and thirsted not even for those first works, but for you yourself, the Truth, “in whom there is no change nor shadow of turning.” And on those dishes they still set before me splendid phantasms, compared with which it would have been better to love this sun, which is at least real to these eyes, than those false things, by which the mind is deceived through the eyes. And yet, because I thought they were you, I ate, not greedily indeed, because you did not taste in my mouth as you are (for you were not those empty fictions), nor was I nourished by them, but rather drained. Food in dreams is very like the food of those who are awake, yet sleepers are not nourished by it, for they are asleep. But those things were not like you in any way, as you have now told me, because they were bodily phantasms, false bodies; and these real bodies which we see with the eye of flesh, whether heavenly or earthly, are more certain than they. We see them as the beasts and birds do, and they are more certain than when we imagine them. And again, we imagine them with more certainty than when from them we conjecture other greater and infinite bodies, which do not exist at all. On such empty things was I then fed, and not fed. But you, my love, for whom I faint so that I may be strong, are neither these bodies which we see, even in the sky, nor those which we do not see there, because you created these, and you do not count them among your highest creations. How far, then, you are from those phantasms of mine, phantasms of bodies that do not exist at all! Images of bodies that do exist are more certain than they, and bodies more certain than the images; yet you are not bodies. Nor are you the soul, which is the life of bodies (so the life of bodies is better and more certain than bodies); but you are the life of souls, the life of lives, living yourself, and you do not change, life of my soul.

Where were you to me then, and how far away? And I was wandering far away from you, shut out even from the husks of the pigs whom I fed with husks. For how much better were the tales of the grammarians and poets than those traps! For verse and song and Medea flying are certainly more useful than the five elements variously painted to match the five caves of darkness, which do not exist at all and kill the one who believes in them. For verse and song I can turn into real nourishment; and though I sang of Medea flying, I did not assert it, and though I heard it sung, I did not believe it; but those things I did believe. Woe, woe! By what steps was I led down into the depths of hell, toiling and burning for lack of truth, since I sought you, my God (I confess it to you, who had mercy on me even before I confessed), not by the understanding of the mind, by which you willed me to surpass the beasts, but by the sense of the flesh. But you were more inward than my inmost self and higher than my highest. I came upon that bold woman, lacking prudence, Solomon's riddle, sitting on a seat at her door and saying, “Eat hidden bread gladly and drink sweet stolen water.” She seduced me because she found me living outside, in the eye of my flesh, and ruminating within myself such things as I had devoured through it.

For I did not know that other reality, what truly is, and I was, as it were, sharply prodded into siding with foolish deceivers when they asked me where evil comes from, and whether God was bounded by a bodily form and had hair and nails, and whether those were to be thought righteous who had many wives at once and killed people and offered animal sacrifices. Ignorant of these things, I was disturbed by them, and while I was withdrawing from the truth I thought I was going toward it, because I did not know that evil is nothing but the privation of good, down to the point where there is nothing at all. How could I see this, when the seeing of my eyes went no further than bodies and of my mind no further than phantasms? I did not know that God is spirit, not something with limbs extending in length and breadth, nor something whose being is bulk; because bulk is less in its part than in its whole, and if it is infinite, it is less in some part bounded by a definite space than in its infinity, and it is not wholly everywhere, as spirit is, as God is. And what it was in us by which we exist, and by which Scripture says we are “in the image of God,” I was entirely ignorant.

And I did not know the true inner justice that judges not by custom but by the most upright law of almighty God, by which the customs of regions and times were shaped to suit those regions and times, while that law itself is everywhere and always the same, not one thing in one place and another in another; by which Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses and David, and all those praised by the mouth of God, were righteous. But they are judged unrighteous by the unskilled, who judge “by man's day” and measure the customs of the whole human race by the part that is their own custom. It is as if someone in an armory, not knowing what fits which limb, wanted to cover his head with a greave and shoe his foot with a helmet, and complained that they did not fit well; or as if, on a day when a public holiday was declared from the afternoon hours, someone were angry that he was not allowed to put something up for sale, since it had been allowed in the morning; or as if in a single house he saw something handled by some slave which the one who serves the cups is not permitted to do, or something done behind the stables that is forbidden before the dining table, and were indignant that, since there is one dwelling and one household, the same thing is not allowed everywhere and to everyone. Such are those who are indignant when they hear that something was permitted to the righteous in that age which is not permitted to the righteous in this one, and that God commanded one thing to them and another to these for temporal reasons, though both served the same justice; while in one person, on one day, and in one house they see one thing suiting one limb and another another, and something long permitted no longer permitted after an hour, and something allowed or commanded in one corner which is forbidden and punished in the one next to it. Is justice then varied and changeable? No; but the times over which it presides do not run alike, for they are times. But human beings, whose life on earth is short, since they cannot by their senses connect the causes of earlier ages and other peoples, of which they have no experience, with those of which they have experience, though in a single body or day or house they can easily see what suits which limb, at which moments, in which parts or persons, take offense at the former and submit to the latter.

These things I did not know then and did not notice; they struck my eyes on every side and I did not see. I composed poems, and I was not allowed to place any foot anywhere I liked, but differently in one meter and another, and not the same foot in every place even in a single line; and yet the art by which I composed did not have one rule here and another there, but held them all at once. And I did not see that the justice which good and holy men served held all that it commands together at once, far more excellently and sublimely, and varied in no part, though in varying times it assigned and commanded not all things at once but what was proper to each. And in my blindness I blamed the holy fathers, not only for using present things as God commanded and inspired them, but also for foretelling future things as God revealed them.

Is it ever, anywhere, unjust to love God with all one's heart and with all one's soul and with all one's mind, and to love one's neighbor as oneself? So those shameful acts that are against nature, such as those of the Sodomites, are to be detested and punished everywhere and always. If all nations did them, they would all be held guilty of the same crime by the divine law, which did not make human beings to use one another in this way. For the very fellowship that we ought to have with God is violated when the same nature of which he is the author is polluted by the perversity of lust. But shameful acts against human customs are to be avoided according to the diversity of customs, so that an agreement of a city or nation among itself, confirmed 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 unseemly. But when God commands something against the custom or agreement of any people, even if it was never done there, it must be done; and if it has been dropped, it must be restored; and if it had not been established, it must be established. For if a king may command in the city he rules something that neither anyone before him nor he himself had ever commanded, and it is not against the fellowship of that city to obey him (indeed, it is against that fellowship not to obey, for it is a general agreement of human society to obey its kings), how much more must God, ruler of all creation, be served without hesitation in whatever he commands! For just as among the authorities of human society the greater authority is placed above the lesser to be obeyed, so is God above all.

So too with crimes of violence, where there is a lust to harm, whether by insult or by injury, and both either for revenge, as enemy against enemy; or to gain some advantage belonging to another, as the robber against the traveler; or to avoid some evil, as against one who is feared; or from envy, as the less fortunate against the more fortunate, or one who has prospered in something against one he fears will become his equal or grieves to see as his equal; or for the mere pleasure of another's harm, as spectators of gladiators, or those who laugh at and mock anyone at all. These are the chief kinds of iniquity, which sprout from the lust of ruling, of seeing, and of feeling, either one or two of them or all at once; and people live wickedly against the three and the seven, the “psaltery of ten strings,” your Decalogue, God most high and most sweet. But what shameful acts can there be against you, who cannot be corrupted? Or what crimes against you, who cannot be harmed? But you punish what people commit against themselves, because even when they sin against you they act wickedly against their own souls, and “iniquity lies to itself,” whether by corrupting and perverting their nature, which you made and ordered, or by using permitted things immoderately, or by burning for things not permitted, for the use that is against nature. Or they are held guilty for raging against you in mind and words, and “kicking against the goad”; or when, having broken the bounds of human society, they boldly rejoice in private alliances or divisions, according as anything has pleased or offended them. And these things happen when you are forsaken, fountain of life, who are the one true creator and ruler of the universe, and when with private pride a single false thing is loved in a part. So it is by humble devotion that one returns to you, and you cleanse us from evil habit, and are gracious to the sins of those who confess, and “hear the groans of the prisoners,” and loose us from the chains we have made for ourselves, provided we no longer raise against you the horns of a false freedom, through greed to have more and at the cost of losing everything, loving our own private good more than you, the good of all.

But among shameful acts and crimes and so many iniquities there are the sins of those who are making progress, which are blamed by those who judge well according to the rule of perfection, and yet praised in hope of fruit, like the green blade of the grain. And there are some things that resemble a shameful act or a crime and yet are not sins, because they offend neither you, the Lord our God, nor the fellowship of society: as when things suited to the use of life and to the time are acquired, and it is uncertain whether it is from lust of possession; or when acts are punished by lawful authority out of a desire to correct, and it is uncertain whether it is from lust to harm. So many deeds that might seem to people to deserve disapproval are approved by your testimony, and many praised by people are condemned with you as witness, since often the appearance of the deed is one thing, and the intention of the doer another, and the circumstances of the hidden time another. But when you suddenly command something unusual and unforeseen, even something you once forbade, although for the time you hide the reason for your command and although it is against the agreement of some human society, who would doubt that it must be done, since that human society is just which serves you? But blessed are those who know that you commanded it. For all things are done by those who serve you either to show what is needed at present or to foretell things to come.

Not knowing these things, I mocked those holy servants and prophets of yours. And what was I doing when I mocked them, but getting myself mocked by you, led gradually and little by little to such nonsense as to believe that a fig weeps when it is picked, and that its mother tree weeps milky tears? Yet if some saint ate that fig, picked, of course, by another's crime and not his own, he would mix it with his insides and breathe out angels from it, or rather particles of God, as he groaned and belched in prayer; and those particles of the supreme and true God would have remained bound in that fruit unless they were released by the teeth and belly of the elect saint. And I believed, wretch that I was, that more mercy should be shown to the fruits of the earth than to human beings, for whom they grow. For if someone hungry asked for it who was not a Manichee, giving him a mouthful would seem to deserve capital punishment.

And “you sent your hand from on high” and rescued my soul from this deep darkness, when my mother, your faithful one, wept to you for me more than mothers weep for the bodily deaths of their children. For she saw my death by the faith and the spirit which she had from you, and you heard her, Lord. You heard her and did not despise her tears when they streamed down and watered the ground beneath her eyes in every place where 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 to share the same table in the house? She had begun to refuse this, turning away from and loathing the blasphemies of my error. For she saw herself standing on a wooden rule, and a young man coming toward her, radiant, cheerful, and smiling at her, while she was grieving and worn out with grief. When he asked her the reasons for her sadness and her daily tears (in order to teach, as is usual, not to learn), and she answered that she was mourning my perdition, he told her to be at ease and admonished her to pay attention and see that where she was, there I was too. And when she looked, she saw me standing beside her on the same rule. Where did this come from, unless your ears were at her heart, O good and almighty one, who care for each one of us as if you cared for him alone, and for all as for each?

Where did this come from as well: that when she had told me the vision and I tried to twist it to mean that she should rather not despair of becoming what I was, she said at once, without any hesitation, “No. For I was not told, ‘Where he is, there you will be too,’ but, ‘Where you are, there he will be too.’” I confess to you, Lord, my memory of it, as far as I recall (and I have often spoken of it): I was more moved by this answer of yours through my mother, who was not disturbed by so plausible a false interpretation and saw so quickly what was to be seen, which I certainly had not seen before she spoke, than by the dream itself, by which the joy that this devout woman would have so much later was foretold so long before, to console her present anxiety. For nearly nine years followed in which I rolled in that “mire of the deep” and darkness of falsehood, often trying to rise and being dashed down more heavily; while that chaste widow, devout and sober, such as you love, now more hopeful indeed, but no less given to weeping and groaning, did not cease at all her hours of prayer to lament for me to you; and her prayers entered into your sight, and yet you still left me to be rolled and enveloped in that darkness.

And meanwhile you gave another answer, which I recall. (I pass over much, because I am hurrying on to the things that press me more to confess to you, and much I do not remember.) You gave another answer, then, through your priest, a certain bishop brought up in the church and well trained in your books. When that woman asked him to be so kind as to talk with me, refute my errors, unteach me what was evil and teach me what was good (for she used to do this whenever she found suitable people), he refused, very wisely, as I realized later. For he answered that I was still unteachable, because I was puffed up with the novelty of that heresy and had already upset many unskilled people with some petty questions, as she had told him. “But,” he said, “leave him there. Only pray to the Lord for him; he will discover by reading what that error is and how great its impiety.” At the same time he also told her that he too, as a small boy, had been handed over to the Manichees by his mother, who had been led astray, and that he had not only read but even copied out almost all their books, and it had become clear to him, without anyone arguing against him or refuting him, how much that sect was to be avoided; and so he had left it. When he had said this and she would not accept it, but pressed him all the more with entreaties and floods of tears to see me and discuss with me, he, now somewhat irritated, said, “Go away from me. As you live, it cannot be that the son of these tears should perish.” She often recalled in her conversations with me that she took this as if it had sounded from heaven.