Confessions 4.1–4.23

Throughout that same period of nine years, from my nineteenth year to my twenty-eighth, we were led astray and led others astray, deceived and deceiving, in various desires: openly through the teachings they call liberal, and secretly under the false name of religion; here proud, there superstitious, everywhere vain. On one side we pursued the emptiness of popular glory, down to theatrical applause and poetry competitions and contests for garlands of hay, the trifles of the shows and the intemperance of lusts; on the other side we sought to be cleansed of these filthy things by bringing food to those who were called the elect and holy, from which, in the workshop of their bellies, they would manufacture for us angels and gods through whom we would be set free. These things I pursued and did with my friends, who were deceived through me and with me. Let the arrogant laugh at me, and those not yet savingly struck down and crushed by you, my God; yet let me confess my disgraces to you in your praise. Allow me, I beg you, and grant me to go round in present memory the past circuits of my error, and to “offer you a sacrifice of jubilation.” For what am I to myself without you but a guide to my own downfall? Or what am I, when all is well with me, but one sucking your milk or feeding on you, the food that does not perish? And what is any human being, since he is only human? But let the strong and powerful laugh at us; and let us, weak and needy, confess to you.

In those years I taught the art of rhetoric, and, overcome by greed, I sold a loquacity that could overcome others. Yet I preferred, Lord, as you know, to have good students, as they are called good, and without guile I taught them guile, not to be used against the life of an innocent person, but sometimes for the life of a guilty one. And you saw from afar, God, my faith slipping on slippery ground and flickering amid much smoke, the faith I showed in that teaching to those who “loved vanity and sought falsehood,” being their companion. In those years I had one woman, not known to me in what is called lawful marriage, but one whom my wandering passion, lacking prudence, had tracked down; yet only one, and I kept faith with her bed. With her I learned by my own experience the difference between the restraint of a marriage covenant, contracted for the sake of begetting children, and the bargain of lustful love, in which offspring is born even against one's wish, though once born it compels love.

I also recall that when I had decided to enter a competition in dramatic poetry, some soothsayer or other sent to ask me what fee I would give him to make me win; and I, detesting and loathing those foul rites, replied that even if the crown were of gold that never perished, I would not allow a fly to be killed for my victory. For he was going to kill living creatures in his sacrifices and, by those honors, seemed likely to invite demons to support me. But I rejected this evil too not out of your chastity, God of my heart. For I did not know how to love you, since I did not know how to think of anything but bodily splendors. And does not a soul that sighs after such fictions commit fornication away from you, and trust in falsehoods, and feed the winds? But of course I did not want sacrifices offered to demons for me, while by that superstition I was sacrificing myself to them. For what else is feeding the winds but feeding them, that is, becoming by one's errors their pleasure and laughingstock?

So I did not stop consulting openly those impostors called astrologers, on the ground that they offered no sacrifice, as it were, and directed no prayers to any spirit for divination. Yet true Christian piety consistently rejects and condemns this too. For “it is good to confess to you, Lord,” and to say, “Have mercy on me; heal my soul, for I have sinned against you,” and not to abuse your indulgence as a license to sin, but to remember the Lord's word: “See, you have been made well; sin no more, lest something worse happen to you.” All this wholesome teaching they try to kill when they say, “The cause of your sinning is inevitably determined by the heavens,” and “Venus did this, or Saturn, or Mars”: evidently so that a human being, flesh and blood and proud rottenness, may be without blame, while the creator and orderer of the heavens and the stars is to be blamed. And who is he but our God, the sweetness and source of justice, who “will render to each according to his works” and “does not despise a contrite and humbled heart”?

There was at that time a shrewd man, highly skilled and very distinguished in the art of medicine, who as proconsul had with his own hand placed that contest crown on my unhealthy head, but not as a physician. For of that disease you are the healer, who “resist the proud but give grace to the humble.” Yet did you fail me even through that old man, or cease to heal my soul? For I had become quite intimate with him and clung to his conversations constantly and attentively (they were without polished diction, but pleasant and weighty from the liveliness of their thought); and when he learned from my talk that I was devoted to the books of the casters of nativities, he warned me kindly and like a father to throw them away and not to waste on that vanity the care and effort needed for useful things. He said that he had learned that art himself, so much so that in his early years he had intended to make it the profession by which he would earn his living; and that, since he had understood Hippocrates, he could certainly have understood those writings too; and yet he had afterwards abandoned them and taken up medicine for no other reason than that he had found them utterly false, and as a serious man he did not want to earn his living by deceiving people. “But you,” he said, “have rhetoric to support you among men, and you pursue this deception out of free interest, not from need of means. So you should all the more believe me about it, since I worked to learn it so thoroughly that I meant to live from it alone.” When I asked him why, then, many true things were foretold by it, he answered as best he could that it was the work of chance, which is spread everywhere throughout nature. For if, when someone consulted the pages of some poet who sang and intended something quite different, a verse often came out marvelously apt to the matter, he said it was no wonder if from a human soul, by some higher instinct and without knowing what was happening within it, not by art but by chance, something sounded that matched the affairs and deeds of the one who asked.

This, then, you provided for me from him or through him, and you sketched in my memory what I would later investigate for myself. But at that time neither he nor my dearest Nebridius, a very good and very chaste young man, who laughed at that whole kind of divination, could persuade me to throw these things away, because the authority of their authors moved me more, and I had not yet found any certain proof, such as I was looking for, that would show me unambiguously that the true things said by astrologers when consulted were said by luck or chance, not by the art of observing the stars.

In those years, when I first began to teach in the town where I was born, I had gained a friend, very dear to me because we shared our studies, of my own age and flowering with me in the flower of youth. He had grown up with me as a boy, and we had gone to school together and played together. But he was not then such a friend as he later became; and even later he was not a friend in the way true friendship is, because it is not true unless you glue it together between those who cling to one another by the “love poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” Yet it was sweet to us, ripened by the warmth of shared studies. For I had also turned him away from the true faith, which as a young man he did not hold genuinely and deeply, into the superstitious and pernicious fables for which my mother wept over me. That man was already wandering in mind with me, and my soul could not be without him. And see, you, who press close upon the backs of those who flee from you, God of vengeance and at the same time fountain of mercies, who turn us to yourself in wonderful ways, see, you took the man away from this life when he had scarcely completed a year in my friendship, a friendship sweet to me above all the sweetnesses of that life of mine.

Who can recount your praises that he has experienced in himself alone? What did you do then, my God, and how unsearchable is the abyss of your judgments! For when he was suffering from fever, he lay long unconscious in a deathly sweat; and when he was despaired of, he was baptized without knowing it. I did not care, presuming that his soul would retain what it had received from me rather than what was being done to the body of one unaware. But it was far otherwise. For he revived and recovered, and at once, as soon as I could speak with him (and I could as soon as he could, since I never left him, and we depended on each other too much), I tried to mock, in his presence, the baptism he had received while utterly absent in mind and sense, thinking that he would mock it with me. But he had already learned that he had received it. And he recoiled from me as from an enemy, and with a wonderful and sudden freedom warned me that if I wanted to be his friend I must stop saying such things to him. I, astonished and disturbed, put off all my impulses until he should first recover and be strong enough in health for me to do what I wanted with him. But he was snatched away from my madness, to be kept with you for my consolation: a few days later, while I was away, the fever returned and he died.

With this grief my heart was darkened, and whatever I looked at was death. My home town was torture to me and my father's house a strange unhappiness, and whatever I had shared with him, without him had turned into a monstrous torment. My eyes looked for him everywhere, and he was not given to them; and I hated all things because they did not have him, nor could they now say to me, “See, he is coming,” as they did when he was alive and absent. I had become a great question to myself, and I asked my soul why it was sad and why it troubled me so much, and it had no answer for me. And if I said, “Hope in God,” it rightly did not obey, because the man, most dear, whom it had lost was truer and better than the phantasm in which it was told to hope. Weeping alone was sweet to me, and it had taken my friend's place in the delights of my mind.

And now, Lord, those things have passed, and my wound has been softened by time. May I hear from you, who are the Truth, and move the ear of my heart close to your mouth, so that you may tell me why weeping is sweet to the wretched? Or have you, though present everywhere, cast our misery far from you, and you remain in yourself, while we are tossed about in trials? And yet unless we wept into your ears, nothing of our hope would remain. How is it, then, that sweet fruit is plucked from the bitterness of life, to groan and weep and sigh and lament? Is what is sweet there the hope that you hear us? That is rightly so in prayers, because they have the desire to reach you. But is it so in grief over something lost, and in the mourning in which I was then enveloped? For I did not hope that he would come back to life, nor did I ask this with my tears; I only grieved and wept. For I was wretched, and I had lost my joy. Or is weeping too a bitter thing, and does it delight us out of disgust for the things we used to enjoy, at the time when we shrink from them?

But why do I speak of these things? For now is not the time for inquiring but for confessing to you. I was wretched, and wretched is every mind bound by friendship with mortal things; it is torn apart when it loses them, and then it feels the wretchedness by which it was wretched even before it lost them. So I was at that time, and I wept most bitterly and found rest in bitterness. So wretched was I, and I held that wretched life itself dearer than my friend. For although I wanted to change it, I would not have wanted to lose it more than him; and I do not know whether I would have wanted to lose it even for him, as is told, if it is not invented, of Orestes and Pylades, who wanted to die for each other or together, because not to live together was worse than death for them. But in me some feeling had arisen quite contrary to this: a most heavy weariness of living and a fear of dying. I believe that the more I loved him, the more I hated and feared death, which had taken him from me, as a most savage enemy, and I thought it would suddenly consume all people, since it had been able to take him. That is exactly how I was, I remember. See my heart, my God, see within; see, because I remember, my hope, who cleanse me from the uncleanness of such feelings, directing my eyes to you and plucking my feet from the snare. For I wondered that other mortals lived, since he whom I had loved as though he would never die was dead; and I wondered still more that I, who was his other self, lived when he was dead. Someone put it well when he called his friend “half of his soul.” For I felt that my soul and his soul had been one soul in two bodies; and so life was a horror to me, because I did not want to live as half; and perhaps that is why I feared to die, lest he whom I had loved so much should die wholly. O madness that does not know how to love human beings humanly!

O foolish man, who suffers human things without measure! That is what I was then. So I seethed, sighed, wept, was troubled, and there was neither rest nor counsel. For I carried my soul, torn and bleeding, impatient of being carried by me, and I found nowhere to set it down. It found no rest in pleasant groves, nor in games and songs, nor in sweet-smelling places, nor in elaborate banquets, nor in the pleasure of the bedroom and the couch, nor, finally, in books and poems. Everything was horrible, even the light itself, and whatever was not what he was, was wicked and wearisome, except groaning and tears; for in them alone was there some little rest. But when my soul was taken away from them, a great burden of misery weighed me down. To you, Lord, it should have been lifted to be healed, I knew; but I neither wanted to nor was able to, the more so because when I thought of you, you were not something solid and firm for me. For it was not you, but an empty phantasm, and my error was my god. If I tried to set my soul down there to rest, it slipped through the void and came crashing down on me again, and I remained to myself an unhappy place where I could neither stay nor leave. For where could my heart flee from my heart? Where could I flee from myself? Where would I not follow myself? And yet I fled from my home town. For my eyes looked for him less where they had not been used to seeing him; and from the town of Thagaste I came to Carthage.

Times do not stand idle, nor do they roll by without effect through our senses; they work wonderful works in the mind. See, they came and went day after day, and by coming and going they planted in me other hopes and other memories, and little by little they patched me up again with my former kinds of pleasure, to which that grief of mine gave way. But what followed were, if not other griefs, at least the causes of other griefs. For why had that grief penetrated me so easily and so deeply, unless because I had poured out my soul onto the sand by loving a man who would die as though he would never die? What most restored and revived me was the comfort of other friends, with whom I loved what I loved instead of you; and this was a huge fable and a long lie, by whose adulterous rubbing our minds, itching in the ears, were corrupted. But that fable did not die for me if any of my friends died. There were other things in them that captured my mind more: talking and laughing together, doing kindnesses for one another in turn, reading pleasant books together, joking together and being serious together, disagreeing sometimes without ill will, as a man does with himself, and seasoning our very many agreements with those very rare disagreements; teaching one another something or learning from one another; missing the absent with pain and welcoming those who arrived with joy. By these and similar signs, coming from the hearts of those who love and are loved in return, through the face, the tongue, the eyes, and a thousand most pleasing gestures, our minds were set ablaze as if by kindling, and out of many were made one.

This is what is loved in friends, and loved in such a way that the human conscience feels itself guilty if it does not love one who loves in return, or does not return the love of one who loves, seeking nothing from the other's body but signs of goodwill. Hence that mourning if someone dies, and the darkness of griefs, and the heart drenched as sweetness turns to bitterness, and, from the lost life of the dying, the death of the living. Blessed is the one who loves you, and his friend in you, and his enemy because of you. For he alone loses no one dear to him to whom all are dear in the one who is not lost. And who is this but our God, the God who made heaven and earth and fills them, because by filling them he made them? No one loses you except one who leaves you; and when he leaves you, where does he go, or where does he flee, but from you well pleased to you angry? For where does he not find your law in his own punishment? And “your law is truth,” and the truth is you.

“God of hosts, turn us, and show us your face, and we shall be saved.” For wherever the soul of a human being turns, anywhere other than to you, it is fastened to griefs, even if it is fastened to beautiful things outside you and outside itself. Yet these would be nothing unless they were from you. They rise and set; by rising they begin, as it were, to be, and they grow so as to be perfected, and once perfected they grow old and perish; and not all grow old, but all perish. So when they rise and strive to be, the more quickly they grow so as to be, the more they hasten not to be. Such is their measure. This much you gave them, because they are parts of things that do not all exist at once, but by departing and succeeding one another they all make up the universe of which they are parts. See, so too our speech is completed by sounding signs. For there will not be a whole sentence unless one word departs when it has sounded its parts, so that another may follow. Let my soul praise you for these things, God, creator of all, but let it not be fastened to them with the glue of love through the senses of the body. For they go where they were going, so as not to be, and they tear the soul with pestilent desires, since it wants to be and loves to rest in what it loves. But in them there is nowhere to rest, because they do not stand still: they flee, and who can follow them with the sense of the flesh? Or who can grasp them, even when they are present? For the sense of the flesh is slow, because it is the sense of the flesh: that is its measure. It is sufficient for the other purpose for which it was made, but it is not sufficient to hold things that run past from their due beginning to their due end. For in your Word, through which they are created, there they hear: “From here, and as far as this.”

Do not be vain, my soul, and do not let the ear of your heart grow deaf with the tumult of your vanity. You too, listen: the Word itself cries out for you to return, and there is the place of undisturbed rest, where love is not forsaken if it does not itself forsake. See, those things depart so that others may succeed them, and the lowest universe may consist of all its parts. “But do I depart anywhere?” says the Word of God. There fix your dwelling; there entrust whatever you have from there, my soul, wearied at least by deceptions. Entrust to the Truth whatever you have from the Truth, and you will lose nothing; and your decay will flower again, and “all your diseases will be healed,” and your fleeting parts will be reformed and renewed and bound tightly to you, and they will not lay you down where they descend, but will stand with you and abide before God, who always stands and abides.

Why do you follow your flesh, perversely turned? Let it follow you, once you are turned back. Whatever you perceive through it is in part, and you do not know the whole of which these are parts; and yet they delight you. But if the sense of your flesh were capable of grasping the whole, and had not itself, as your punishment, received a just limitation to a part of the universe, you would want whatever exists in the present to pass away, so that everything might please you more. For what we say, too, you hear through that same sense of the flesh, and you certainly do not want the syllables to stand still, but to fly past so that others may come and you may hear the whole. So it always is with all the things of which some one thing consists, when the things of which it consists do not all exist at once: all of them together delight more than each singly, if all could be perceived. But far better than these is he who made all things, and he is our God, and he does not depart, because nothing succeeds him.

If bodies please you, praise God for them and turn your love back to their maker, lest in the things that please you, you displease him. If souls please you, let them be loved in God, because they too are changeable and are made stable by being fixed in him; otherwise they would pass away and perish. So let them be loved in him, and carry off with you to him as many as you can, and say to them: “Let us love him; he made these things and he is not far away.” For he did not make them and go away; they are from him and in him. See where he is, where truth is tasted: he is most inward to the heart, but the heart has wandered from him. “Return to the heart, you transgressors,” and cling to him who made you. Stand with him, and you will stand; rest in him, and you will be at rest. Where are you going, into rough places? Where are you going? The good that you love is from him; but only insofar as it is toward him is it good and sweet; and it will rightly become bitter, because whatever is from him is wrongly loved if he is abandoned. Why do you still go on and on walking difficult and toilsome ways? There is no rest where you seek it. Seek what you seek, but it is not where you seek it. You seek a happy life in the region of death: it is not there. For how can there be a happy life where there is not even life?

And our very Life came down here and took away our death and killed it out of the abundance of his own life; and he thundered, crying out for us to return from here to him, into that secret place from which he came forth to us, first into the virgin womb itself, where the human creature, mortal flesh, was wedded to him, so as not to be forever mortal; and from there, “like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, he rejoiced like a giant to run his course.” For he did not delay, but ran, crying out by words, deeds, death, life, descent, ascent, crying out for us to return to him. And he departed from our eyes so that we might return to the heart and find him. For he went away, and see, he is here. He did not want to be with us long, and yet he did not leave us. For he went away to the place from which he never withdrew, because “the world was made through him,” and “he was in this world,” and “he came into this world to save sinners.” To him my soul confesses, and he heals it, “because it has sinned against him.” “Sons of men, how long will you be heavy of heart?” Even after Life has come down, do you not want to go up and live? But where do you go up, when you are on high and “have set your mouth in heaven”? Come down, so that you may go up, and go up to God. For you fell by going up against God. Tell them these things, so that they may weep in the valley of weeping, and so carry them off with you to God; for you say these things to them by his Spirit, if you say them burning with the fire of love.

These things I did not know then, and I loved lower beauties and went down into the depths, and I said to my friends: “Do we love anything but the beautiful? What then is the beautiful? And what is beauty? What is it that attracts us and wins us to the things we love? For unless there were grace and beauty in them, they could in no way move us toward them.” And I noticed and saw that in bodies themselves there is one thing that is a kind of whole and is therefore beautiful, and another that is fitting because it is suitably adapted to something else, as a part of the body to its whole, or a shoe to a foot, and the like. And this reflection welled up in my mind from my inmost heart, and I wrote books On the Beautiful and the Fitting, two or three, I think; you know, God, for it has slipped my memory. For we do not have them; they have strayed from us, I do not know how.

But what moved me, Lord my God, to dedicate those books to Hierius, an orator of the city of Rome? I did not know him by sight, but I had come to love the man from the reputation for learning that he enjoyed; and I had heard some words of his, and they had pleased me. But he pleased me more because he pleased others, and they praised him to the skies, amazed that a Syrian, first trained in Greek eloquence, had afterwards become a marvelous speaker in Latin too, and was most learned in the things that belong to the study of wisdom. The man was praised, and he was loved in his absence. Does that love enter the heart of the hearer from the mouth of the one who praises? Not at all; but one lover is set on fire by another. For this is why one who is praised is loved: because he is believed to be commended by a praiser whose heart is not deceitful, that is, when one who loves him praises him.

For I loved people then by the judgment of people, not by yours, my God, in whom no one is deceived. But still, why was it not as one loves a famous charioteer or a hunter made notorious by popular enthusiasm, but quite differently and seriously, and in the way I would have liked to be praised myself? For I would not have wanted to be praised and loved as actors are, although I myself praised and loved them; I would rather have chosen to remain unknown than to be known in that way, and even to be hated rather than to be loved like that. Where are these weights of various and different loves distributed in a single soul? What is it that I love in another, which, unless I hated it, I would not detest and reject in myself, since each of us is a human being? For it is not as a good horse is loved by someone who would not want to be a horse even if he could; this must be said also of the actor, who shares our nature. Do I then love in a human being what I hate to be, though I am a human being? The human being himself is a great deep, whose very hairs you, Lord, have numbered, and they are not lost in you; and yet his hairs are easier to count than his feelings and the movements of his heart.

But that rhetorician was of the kind I loved in such a way that I wanted to be like him; and I wandered in conceit and “was carried about by every wind,” and yet was steered by you, very secretly. And how do I know, and how can I confess to you with certainty, that I had loved him more for the love of those who praised him than for the things for which he was praised? Because if those same people had not praised him but criticized him, and had related those very same things with criticism and scorn, I would not have been kindled and stirred toward him; and certainly the things would not have been different, nor the man himself, but only the feelings of those who spoke of him. See where the weak soul lies that does not yet cling to the solidity of truth. As the breezes of tongues blow from the breasts of those who give opinions, so it is carried and turned, twisted and twisted back, and the light is clouded over for it and the truth is not seen. And see, it is before us. And it was a great thing to me if my speech and my studies should become known to that man; if he approved them, I would burn more; but if he disapproved, my heart, vain and empty of your solidity, would be wounded. And yet I gladly turned over in my mind that treatise on the beautiful and the fitting which I had dedicated to him, holding it before the eye of my contemplation, and I admired it with no one to praise it with me.