Confessions 9.3–9.24

You had pierced our heart with your love, and we carried your words fixed in our inmost parts; and the examples of your servants, whom you had made bright from dark and living from dead, gathered into the bosom of our thought, burned up and consumed our heavy torpor, so that we would not sink into the depths, and they set us so strongly on fire that every blast of contradiction from a deceitful tongue could only inflame us more fiercely, not extinguish us. Yet, because our vow and purpose would certainly also have its praisers on account of your name, which you have sanctified throughout the earth, it seemed like boasting not to wait for the holiday season, now so near, but to leave beforehand a public profession placed before the eyes of all; so that all who looked at what I had done, and at how I had not been willing to wait for the vintage day so close at hand, would say a great deal about my having wanted, as it were, to seem great. And what good would it do me for people to judge and dispute about my intentions, and for "our good to be spoken evil of"?

Moreover, that very summer my lungs had begun to give way under too much literary labor; I breathed with difficulty, and pains in my chest showed that they were injured, and they refused a clear or prolonged voice. At first this had troubled me, because it was forcing me almost of necessity to lay down the burden of that teaching, or at least to interrupt it, if I could be cured and recover. But when the full will to be free and "to see that you are the Lord" had arisen in me and been confirmed (you know it, my God), I even began to rejoice that I also had this excuse, and not a false one, to soften the offense of the people who, for the sake of their children, never wanted me to be free. Full of such joy, then, I endured that interval of time until it ran out (I do not know whether it was as much as twenty days); yet they were endured bravely, because the ambition that used to help me bear the heavy business had gone, and I would have been left crushed if patience had not taken its place. Someone among your servants, my brothers, may say that I sinned in this, that with my heart now fully in your service I allowed myself to sit even one hour in the chair of lies. I do not dispute it. But you, most merciful Lord, did you not pardon and forgive me this sin too, with the other dreadful and deadly ones, in the holy water?

Verecundus was wasting away with anxiety over this good of ours, because he saw that, on account of the bonds by which he was held most tightly, he would be left out of our company. Not yet a Christian himself, though his wife was one of the faithful, he was held back from the journey we had begun by her, a fetter tighter than all the rest; and he said he did not want to be a Christian in any other way than the one that was impossible for him. Yet he kindly offered that we might stay at his property as long as we were there. You will repay him, Lord, "at the resurrection of the just," since you have already repaid him with that very lot. For while we were away, when we were already in Rome, he was seized with a bodily illness, and in it he became a Christian and one of the faithful, and departed this life. So you had mercy not only on him but also on us, so that we would not be tormented with unbearable grief, thinking of our friend's outstanding kindness toward us and not counting him in your flock. Thanks be to you, our God; we are yours. Your exhortations and consolations show it: faithful in your promises, you repay Verecundus for that country estate of his at Cassiciacum, where we rested in you from the heat of the world, with the loveliness of your ever-green paradise, since you forgave him his sins on earth "on the curdled mountain, your mountain, the fertile mountain."

He, then, was distressed, but Nebridius rejoiced with us. For although he too, not yet a Christian, had fallen into that pit of most pernicious error of believing the flesh of your Son, the Truth, to be a phantom, yet he was emerging from it and was in this state: not yet initiated into any sacraments of your church, but a most ardent seeker of the truth. Not long after our conversion and our regeneration through your baptism, he too became one of the catholic faithful, serving you in perfect chastity and continence among his own people in Africa, and after his whole household had become Christian through him, you released him from the flesh. And now he lives in Abraham's bosom. Whatever is signified by that bosom, there my Nebridius lives, my sweet friend, and your son, adopted from a freedman: there he lives. For what other place is there for such a soul? He lives there, in the place about which he used to ask me, an inexperienced little man, so many questions. Now he no longer puts his ear to my mouth, but his spiritual mouth to your fountain, and he drinks as much wisdom as he can, as much as he thirsts, happy without end. And I do not think he is so intoxicated by it that he forgets me, since you, Lord, whom he drinks, are mindful of us. That, then, was how we were: consoling Verecundus in his sadness, our friendship unharmed by such a conversion of ours, and exhorting him to faith according to his own station, that is, married life; and waiting for Nebridius to follow, which he could do very soon and was on the point of doing, when at last those days rolled by. For they seemed long and many for the love of free leisure to sing from the depths of my being: "My heart has said to you, I have sought your face; your face, Lord, will I seek."

And the day came when I was actually released from the profession of rhetoric, from which I had already been released in thought. And it was done: you delivered my tongue as you had already delivered my heart, and I blessed you and rejoiced as I set out for the country house with all my people. What I did there in literary work, now indeed in your service, but still breathing the school of pride as if in a pause for breath, is attested by the books of discussions with those present and with myself alone before you; and what I did with Nebridius, who was absent, is attested by my letters. And when will I have enough time to recall all your great benefits to us at that time, especially as I am hurrying on to other, greater things? For my memory calls me back, and it becomes sweet to me, Lord, to confess to you by what inward goads you tamed me, and how you leveled me, bringing low the mountains and hills of my thoughts, and made my crooked ways straight and my rough ways smooth; and how you subdued Alypius himself, the brother of my heart, to the name of your only-begotten, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, which at first he disdained to have put into our writings. For he wanted them to smell rather of the cedars of the schools, which the Lord has now broken, than of the wholesome herbs of the church that are good against serpents.

What cries I uttered to you, my God, when I read the Psalms of David, songs of faith, sounds of piety that shut out a swollen spirit, while I was still a novice in true love of you, a catechumen on holiday at the country house with Alypius, also a catechumen, and my mother staying with us, a woman in dress, a man in faith, with the calm of an old woman, a mother's love, and Christian piety! What cries I uttered to you in those psalms, and how I was set on fire toward you by them, and burned to recite them, if I could, to the whole world against the pride of the human race! And yet they are sung throughout the whole world, and "there is no one who hides himself from your heat." With what vehement and bitter grief I was indignant with the Manichees, and again I pitied them, because they did not know those sacraments, those medicines, and raged against the antidote by which they could have been made sane! I wished that they had been somewhere nearby then, without my knowing they were there, and could watch my face and hear my cries, when I read the fourth psalm in that time of leisure, and see what that psalm did to me: "When I called upon you, you heard me, O God of my righteousness; in tribulation you enlarged me. Have mercy on me, Lord, and hear my prayer." I wish they could have heard, without my knowing whether they heard, so that they would not think I was saying on their account what I said between these words; for in truth I would not have said those things, or said them in that way, if I had felt that I was being heard and seen by them; nor, if I had said them, would they have received them as I spoke them with myself and to myself before you, from the intimate feeling of my soul.

I trembled with fear, and at the same time I grew warm with hope and exultation in your mercy, Father. And all this came out through my eyes and my voice when your good Spirit turned to us and said, "Sons of men, how long will you be heavy of heart? Why do you love vanity and seek after a lie?" For I had loved vanity and sought after a lie. And you, Lord, had already glorified your Holy One, raising him from the dead and setting him at your right hand, whence he would send from on high his promise, the Paraclete, the Spirit of truth. And he had already sent him, but I did not know it. He had sent him, because he had already been glorified, rising from the dead and ascending into heaven. But before that, "the Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus had not yet been glorified." And the prophecy cries out: "How long will you be heavy of heart? Why do you love vanity and seek after a lie? Know that the Lord has glorified his Holy One." It cries "How long," it cries "Know"; and I, not knowing for so long, loved vanity and sought after a lie. And so I heard it and trembled, because it is said to such people as I remembered I had been. For in the phantoms which I had held for truth there was vanity and a lie. And I cried out many things, gravely and strongly, in the pain of my remembering. If only those who still love vanity and seek after a lie had heard them! Perhaps they would have been troubled and vomited it up, and you would have heard them when they cried to you, because he who intercedes with you for us died for us by a true death of the flesh.

I read: "Be angry, and do not sin," and how I was moved, my God, I who had already learned to be angry with myself for past things, so as not to sin in future; and to be rightly angry, because it was not another nature, from the race of darkness, that sinned in me, as those say who are not angry with themselves and "store up for themselves wrath on the day of wrath and of the revelation of your just judgment." My good things were no longer outside, nor were they sought with eyes of flesh in this sun. For those who want to find joy outside themselves easily become empty and pour themselves out on "the things that are seen and are temporal," and lick their images with starving thought. Oh, if only they would grow weary with hunger and say, "Who will show us good things?" and we would say, and they would hear: "The light of your face, Lord, is sealed upon us." For we are not the light that enlightens every man, but we are enlightened by you, so that we who "were once darkness may be light" in you. Oh, if only they could see the inward eternal thing, which, because I had tasted it, I gnashed my teeth that I could not show them, if they were to bring me their heart in their eyes, turned outward away from you, and say, "Who will show us good things?" For there, where I was angry with myself, within, in the chamber where I was pierced with sorrow, where I had sacrificed, slaying my old self and, beginning to meditate on my renewal, hoping in you, there you had begun to grow sweet to me, and "had put gladness in my heart." And I cried out as I read these things outwardly and recognized them inwardly, and I did not want to be multiplied with earthly goods, devouring time and devoured by time, when I had in eternal simplicity another "grain and wine and oil."

And I cried out at the next verse with a loud cry of my heart: "O in peace! O in the Selfsame!" O what did it say: "I will lie down and sleep"? For who will withstand us when the saying that is written comes to pass: "Death is swallowed up in victory"? And you are exceedingly the Selfsame, you who do not change, and in you is rest, forgetting all toil, because there is no other with you, nor are we to gain other things that are not what you are; but you, Lord, "have made me dwell alone in hope." I read and I burned, and I did not find what to do for those deaf and dead, among whom I had been, a plague, a bitter and blind barker against writings sweet with the honey of heaven and luminous with your light; and I wasted away with grief over the enemies of this Scripture.

When shall I recall everything from those days of rest? But I have not forgotten, nor will I pass over in silence, the sharpness of your scourge and the wonderful swiftness of your mercy. You tormented me then with toothache, and when it grew so bad that I could not speak, it came into my heart to urge all my friends who were present to pray to you for me, the God of every kind of health. And I wrote this on a wax tablet and gave it to them to be read. As soon as we knelt in simple devotion, that pain fled. But what pain? Or how did it flee? I was terrified, I confess, my Lord and my God; for I had never experienced anything like it from my earliest years. And your will was impressed on me in the depths, and rejoicing in faith I praised your name; and that faith did not let me be at ease about my past sins, which had not yet been forgiven me through your baptism.

When the vintage holidays were over, I gave notice that the people of Milan should provide their students with another seller of words, both because I had chosen to serve you and because I was not equal to that profession on account of my difficulty in breathing and the pain in my chest. And I made known by letter to your bishop, the holy man Ambrose, my former errors and my present intention, so that he might advise me which of your books I should read above all, to become better prepared and more fit to receive so great a grace. He told me to read the prophet Isaiah, I believe because he foretells the gospel and the calling of the Gentiles more plainly than the others. But I, not understanding the first part of it and thinking the whole was like that, put it aside to be taken up again when I was more practiced in the Lord's language.

Then, when the time came for me to give in my name, we left the country and returned to Milan. Alypius too decided to be reborn in you with me; he had already put on the humility that befits your sacraments, and was a most strong master of his body, so that with unusual daring he wore down the frozen soil of Italy with bare feet. We also took with us the boy Adeodatus, born of me in the flesh from my sin. You had made him well. He was about fifteen years old, and in intelligence he surpassed many grave and learned men. I confess your gifts to you, Lord my God, Creator of all, and very powerful to form our deformities; for I had nothing in that boy but the sin. That he was brought up by us in your discipline, you had inspired us to do, and no one else: I confess your gifts to you. There is a book of ours entitled On the Teacher: he speaks with me there. You know that all the thoughts placed there in the mouth of the one who speaks with me were his, when he was sixteen years old. I experienced many other things in him more wonderful still. His intelligence filled me with awe; and who but you is the maker of such wonders? Soon you took his life from the earth, and I remember him with less anxiety, fearing nothing for his boyhood or youth, or for him at all. We took him with us, the same age as ourselves in your grace, to be brought up in your discipline; and we were baptized, and anxiety about our past life fled from us. Nor could I have enough in those days of the wonderful sweetness of considering the depth of your counsel for the salvation of the human race. How much I wept at your hymns and songs, deeply moved by the voices of your sweetly singing church! Those voices flowed into my ears, and truth was distilled into my heart, and from it the feeling of devotion welled up, and the tears ran, and it was good for me to be with them.

It was not long before this that the church of Milan had begun to practice this kind of consolation and exhortation, the brothers singing together with great zeal of voice and heart. It was, in fact, a year or not much more since Justina, the mother of the boy emperor Valentinian, had been persecuting your servant Ambrose on account of her heresy, into which she had been led by the Arians. The devout people kept watch in the church, ready to die with their bishop, your servant. There my mother, your handmaid, taking a leading part in the anxiety and the vigils, lived on prayers. We, still cold, untouched by the heat of your Spirit, were nevertheless stirred by the astonished and troubled city. It was then that the custom was established of singing hymns and psalms after the manner of the eastern regions, so that the people would not waste away with the weariness of grief; and from then until today it has been kept, and many, indeed almost all, of your flocks throughout the rest of the world have imitated it.

At that time you revealed in a vision to your bishop whom I have named where the bodies of the martyrs Protasius and Gervasius lay hidden, which you had kept uncorrupted for so many years in the treasury of your secret, so that you might bring them out at the right time to check the fury of a woman, but a royal one. For when they had been brought out and dug up and were being carried with due honor to the Ambrosian basilica, not only were those who were troubled by unclean spirits healed, the demons themselves confessing it, but also a certain citizen who had been blind for many years and was very well known to the city, having asked and learned the reason for the people's tumultuous joy, leapt up and asked his guide to lead him there. When he was brought there, he obtained permission to touch with a cloth the bier of your saints, "whose death is precious in your sight." When he had done this and put it to his eyes, they were immediately opened. From this the news spread, from this came your praises, fervent and shining; from this the mind of that enemy, though not brought to the health of believing, was nevertheless restrained from the fury of persecuting. Thanks be to you, my God! From where and to where have you led my memory, that I should confess to you even these things, great as they are, which I had forgotten and passed over? And yet at that time, when "the fragrance of your ointments" was so sweet, "we did not run after you"; and so I wept all the more at the singing of your hymns, once sighing for you, and at last breathing you, as far as the air is free in a house of grass.

You who make those of one mind to dwell in a house also joined to us Evodius, a young man from our own town. While he was serving as an agent in affairs, he was converted to you before us and baptized, and, leaving worldly service, he girded himself for yours. We were together, intending to live together in our holy resolve. We were looking for the place where we could be most useful in serving you, and we were going back to Africa together. And when we were at Ostia on the Tiber, my mother died. I pass over many things, because I am in great haste. Accept my confessions and thanksgivings, my God, for innumerable things, even in silence. But I will not pass over whatever my soul brings forth concerning that servant of yours who brought me forth both in the flesh, that I might be born into this temporal light, and in her heart, that I might be born into the eternal light. I will speak not of her gifts but of your gifts in her. For she had not made herself or brought herself up: you created her, and neither her father nor her mother knew what kind of person would come from them. And the rod of your Christ, the rule of your only Son, trained her in your fear in a faithful household, a good member of your church. Yet she used to praise not so much her mother's care for her upbringing as that of a certain aged servant, who had carried her father as a baby, as little children are carried on the backs of bigger girls. For this reason, and because of her age and excellent character, she was greatly respected by her masters in that Christian house. So she was also entrusted with the care of her masters' daughters, and she carried it out diligently, and was vehement with a holy severity in restraining them when necessary, and sober and prudent in teaching them. For apart from the hours when they ate very moderately at their parents' table, she would not let them drink even water, however much they burned with thirst, guarding against a bad habit and adding this sound word: "Now you drink water, because you do not have wine in your power; but when you come to husbands and have become mistresses of storerooms and cellars, water will seem poor to you, but the habit of drinking will prevail." By this manner of teaching and the authority of her command she curbed the greed of their tender age and shaped the girls' very thirst to an honorable measure, so that they no longer wanted what was not fitting.

And yet, as your handmaid used to tell me, her son, a liking for wine had crept up on her. For when, as the custom was, she as a sober girl was told by her parents to draw wine from the cask, she would dip the cup in through the opening at the top, and before pouring the wine into the flask she would sip a little with the tip of her lips, since she could not take more because her taste refused it. For she did not do this from any craving for drink, but from a certain overflowing of youthful high spirits, which bubble up in playful impulses and are usually kept down in childhood by the authority of elders. And so, adding daily little bits to that daily little bit (for "he who despises small things falls little by little"), she had slipped into such a habit that she was greedily gulping down little cups almost full of wine. Where then was the shrewd old woman and her strict prohibition? Could anything prevail against a hidden disease unless your medicine, Lord, watched over us? Father, mother, and nurses were absent, but you were present, who created, who call, who work some good for the salvation of souls even through those set over us. What did you do then, my God? How did you cure her? How did you heal her? Did you not bring out from another soul a hard and sharp taunt, like a surgeon's knife from your hidden stores, and with one stroke cut away that rottenness? For the maidservant with whom she used to go to the cask, quarreling with her young mistress, as happens, when they were alone together, threw this fault in her face with a most bitter insult, calling her a wine-bibber. Stung by this goad, she looked at her own foulness, and at once condemned it and gave it up. As flattering friends corrupt, so quarreling enemies often correct. And you repay them not for what you do through them, but for what they themselves intended. For she in her anger wanted to provoke her young mistress, not to heal her, and she did it secretly, either because the time and place of the quarrel found them so, or perhaps so that she would not herself be in danger for having told it so late. But you, Lord, ruler of things in heaven and on earth, who turn to your own purposes the depths of the torrent and the turbulent but ordered flow of the ages, healed one soul even through the unsoundness of another, so that no one, when he notices this, should attribute it to his own power if another whom he wishes to be corrected is corrected by his word.

So she was brought up modestly and soberly, made subject by you to her parents rather than by her parents to you; and when she reached a full marriageable age, she was given to a husband and served him as her lord, and she took pains to win him for you, speaking of you to him by her conduct, by which you made her beautiful and reverently lovable and admirable to her husband. She bore the wrongs done to her marriage bed in such a way that she never had any quarrel with her husband about it. For she waited for your mercy upon him, that believing in you he might become chaste. He was, besides, as remarkable for kindness as he was hot in anger. But she knew not to resist an angry husband, not only in deed but not even in word. When she saw that he had calmed down and was quiet, and the moment was right, she would give an account of what she had done, if perhaps he had been roused without good reason. Indeed, when many wives, whose husbands were milder, bore the marks of blows even on their disfigured faces, they would blame their husbands' conduct in friendly conversation, and she would blame their tongues, advising them seriously as if in jest that from the time they had heard the documents called marriage contracts read to them, they ought to have regarded them as instruments by which they had been made servants; and so, remembering their condition, they ought not to be proud toward their lords. And when they marveled, knowing what a violent husband she had to put up with, that it had never been heard, nor had there been any sign, that Patricius had beaten his wife, or that they had disagreed with each other in a domestic quarrel even for a single day, and asked her the reason in confidence, she taught them her rule, which I have mentioned above. Those who followed it found it good and thanked her; those who did not follow it were kept down and ill-treated.

Her mother-in-law too, who at first was set against her by the whisperings of bad servants, she won over by her attentiveness, persevering patience, and gentleness, so that the old woman of her own accord reported to her son the meddling tongues of the maids by which domestic peace between herself and her daughter-in-law was being disturbed, and asked that they be punished. So when he, obeying his mother, caring for the discipline of the household, and looking to the harmony of his family, had punished with beatings those who had been reported, at the discretion of the one who reported them, she promised that anyone who spoke ill of her daughter-in-law to her in order to please her must expect a similar reward; and since no one dared any longer, they lived together in a sweetness of goodwill worth remembering.

To that good servant of yours, in whose womb you created me, my God, my mercy, you had also given this great gift, that between any souls at odds and in discord, wherever she could, she showed herself such a peacemaker that, although she heard from both sides many very bitter things about each other, such as swollen and undigested discord usually belches out when the crudity of hatred is breathed out in sour talk to a present friend about an absent enemy, she would report nothing of the one to the other except what would help to reconcile them. This would seem a small good to me, did I not know to my sorrow that countless crowds, through some horrible and far-spreading plague of sins, not only report the words of angry enemies to angry enemies, but even add things that were not said; whereas, on the contrary, for a humane man it ought to be too little not to stir up or increase men's enmities by speaking ill, unless he also tries to extinguish them by speaking well. Such was she, taught by you, her inmost teacher, in the school of her heart.

Finally, near the very end of his temporal life she won her husband too for you; and once he was one of the faithful, she no longer lamented in him what she had borne while he was not yet one of the faithful. She was also a servant of your servants. Whoever of them knew her praised and honored and loved you greatly in her, because he sensed your presence in her heart, witnessed by the fruits of her holy way of life. For she had been "the wife of one husband," had "repaid her parents," had governed her house devoutly, was "well reported for good works." She had brought up her children, being in labor with them as often as she saw them straying from you. Finally, Lord, for all of us (since by your gift you allow your servants to speak), who before she fell asleep were already living together in you, having received the grace of your baptism, she cared as if she had given birth to us all, and served us as if she had been born of us all.

When the day was approaching on which she was to depart this life (a day you knew, though we did not), it happened, I believe by your arrangement in your hidden ways, that she and I stood alone, leaning at a window from which the garden inside the house where we were staying could be seen, there at Ostia on the Tiber, where, far from the crowds, after the toil of a long journey, we were resting ourselves for the voyage. So we talked alone together very sweetly, and "forgetting what lies behind and reaching out to what lies ahead," we asked each other, in the presence of the Truth, which you are, what the eternal life of the saints would be like, which "eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man." But we opened wide the mouth of our heart to the heavenly streams of your fountain, "the fountain of life, which is with you," so that, sprinkled from it according to our capacity, we might in some way think about so great a thing.

And when our talk had reached this point, that the delight of the bodily senses, however great, in however great a bodily light, seemed in comparison with the joy of that life not only unworthy of comparison but not even worth mentioning, we rose up with more ardent love toward the Selfsame, and step by step we passed through all bodily things and the heaven itself, from which sun and moon and stars shine upon the earth. And we went higher still, inwardly thinking and speaking and marveling at your works, and we came to our own minds and passed beyond them, so as to reach the region of unfailing abundance where you feed Israel for ever with the food of truth; and there life is Wisdom, through whom all these things come to be, both those that have been and those that will be; and she herself does not come to be, but is as she was, and so will be always. Rather, to have been and to be going to be are not in her, but only to be, since she is eternal; for to have been and to be going to be are not eternal. And while we spoke and longed for her, we touched her slightly with the whole force of our heart; and we sighed, and left there, bound fast, "the first fruits of the Spirit," and returned to the noise of our mouths, where a word both begins and ends. And what is like your Word, our Lord, who remains in himself without growing old and "renews all things"?