On Order

To see or to explain the order of things, Zenobius, both the order proper to each thing and especially that of the universe, by which this world is held together and ruled, is very difficult and very rare for men. Besides, even if someone could do this, he cannot also manage to find a hearer worthy of such divine and obscure matters, either by merit of life or by some settled habit of learning. And yet there is nothing that all the best minds seek more eagerly, nothing that those who look upon the reefs and storms of this life with head held as high as they can are more eager to hear and learn, than how it comes about both that God cares for human affairs and that so great a perversity is spread everywhere in human affairs that it seems attributable not to a divine governance but not even to a slave's, if such power were given him. Therefore those who care about such things are left, as if by necessity, to believe one of two things: either that divine providence does not reach down to these last and lowest things, or that all evils are committed by the will of God. Both are impious, but the latter more so. For although to believe that anything is abandoned by God is both most ignorant and most dangerous to the mind, yet among men themselves no one has ever accused another of being unable to do something; and blame for negligence is much more clear of guilt than blame for malice and cruelty. So reason is as it were compelled, not forgetful of piety, to hold either that these earthly things cannot be administered by divine things, or that they are neglected and despised rather than governed in such a way that every complaint against God should be mild and blameless.

But who is so blind in mind as to hesitate to attribute to divine power and governance whatever reason there is in the movement of bodies beyond human arrangement and will? Unless perhaps the limbs of even the tiniest animals are shaped by chance with such fixed and subtle measure; or someone could admit that what he denies was made by chance was made other than by reason; or indeed we shall dare, with some trifles of vain opinion, to remove from the most hidden judgment of the divine majesty what we marvel at throughout the whole of nature as ordered in each single thing without any effort of human art. 'But this itself is the more full of questions,' it may be said, 'that the limbs of a flea are arranged wonderfully and distinctly, while human life meanwhile is tossed and fluctuates with the inconstancy of countless disturbances.' But in this way, if someone saw so narrowly that his gaze could take in no more than the measure of one small tile in a mosaic pavement, he would blame the craftsman as ignorant of order and composition, because he thought the variety of little stones was confused, being unable to see and survey together those inlaid pieces fitting into the face of one beauty. For nothing else happens to less educated men, who, unable to embrace and consider with their weak minds the whole fitting together and design of things, think that if something offends them, because it is great to their thought, a great ugliness clings to things.

The greatest cause of this error is that man is unknown to himself. Yet to know himself he needs a great habit of withdrawing from the senses and of gathering the mind into itself and keeping it within itself. Only those attain this who either cauterize by solitude or heal by the liberal disciplines certain wounds of opinions which the course of daily life inflicts. For the mind, thus restored to itself, understands what the beauty of the universe is, which is surely named from 'one'; and so that beauty cannot be seen by the soul that goes out into many things and with greed pursues poverty, which it does not know can be avoided only by separation from multitude. By multitude I mean not of men but of all things the senses touch. And do not wonder that it suffers want the more, the more it seeks to embrace many things. For as in a circle, however large, there is one middle point to which all things converge, which geometers call the kentron, and although the parts of the whole circumference can be divided innumerably, there is nothing besides that one point by which the rest are measured equally and which rules over all as by a kind of law of equality; but if you wish to go out from there to any part, all is lost the more one proceeds into very many: so the mind, poured out from itself, is beaten about by a kind of immensity and worn down by true beggary, when its nature compels it to seek the one everywhere and multitude does not allow it to find it.

But what these things I have said are, what cause there is of the error of souls, and how all things fit together into one and are perfect and yet sins are to be avoided, you will surely grasp, my Zenobius. For I know your mind, and your soul that loves beauty of every kind without the excess and filth of lust; this, as a sign of future wisdom in you, by divine right forbids harmful desires, so that you may not desert your cause, lured by false pleasures; nothing more shameful or dangerous than such a betrayal can be found. You will grasp these things, then, believe me, when you have devoted yourself to learning, by which the mind is purified and cultivated, before which it is in no way fit to have divine seeds entrusted to it. What all this is like, what order it demands, what reason promises to the studious and good, what sort of life we, your dearest friends, live, and what fruit we gather from liberal leisure: these books will teach you sufficiently, I think, books dearer to us for your name than for our labor; especially if you, choosing the better things, will place and fit yourself into that very order about which I write to you.

For when a pain in the stomach had compelled me to leave the school, although, as you know, I was already trying to take refuge in philosophy even without any such necessity, I at once went to the country house of our very close friend Verecundus. Why should I say that he was glad of it? You know very well the man's singular goodwill toward everyone, and especially toward us. There we discussed among ourselves whatever seemed useful, employing a stenographer, indeed, to take everything down, which I saw was good for my health. For since I was held back by some care in speaking, no immoderate contention crept in during the discussion; and also, if we chose to commit anything of ours to writing, there was no need to say it differently and no labor of recollection. Those who took part in these things with me were Alypius and my brother Navigius, and Licentius, who had suddenly and wonderfully given himself to poetry; military service had also given Trygetius back to us, who, like a veteran, had fallen in love with history; and we also had some books.

But one night, when I had woken as usual and was silently turning over by myself what came into my mind from I know not where (for through love of finding the truth it had become my habit to lie awake, thinking about whatever it might be, either the first or certainly the last part of the night, about half of it, if such concerns were present; and I did not allow myself to be called away from myself by the young men's night studies, because they also worked so much through the whole day that it seemed to me too much if they took some of the night as well for the labor of study; and they also had this rule from me, that they should do something with themselves apart from books and accustom their minds to dwell with themselves): so, as I said, I was awake, when behold, the sound of water flowing past behind the baths drew me to listen and was noticed more attentively than usual. It seemed to me very strange that the same water, rushing over the stones, now murmured more clearly, now more softly. I began to ask myself what the cause might be. I confess nothing occurred to me, when Licentius, striking a piece of wood beside his bed, frightened off some troublesome mice and in this way showed that he was awake. I said to him: "Licentius, have you noticed (for I see your Muse has lit you a lamp for night work) how irregularly that channel sounds?" "This is not new to me," he said. "For once, when I had woken longing for fair weather and put my ear to it, to hear whether rain was coming on, that water was doing what it is doing now." Trygetius agreed. For he too, lying in his bed in the same room, was awake without our knowing it; for it was dark, which in Italy is almost necessary even for the wealthy.

So when I saw that our school, as much of it as was present (for Alypius and Navigius had gone to the city), was not asleep even at those hours, and that the course of the waters was prompting me to say something about it, I said: "What do we think is the cause of this sound alternating so? For we do not suppose that anyone at these hours is interrupting that flow so often by crossing it or by washing something." "What do you think," said Licentius, "except that somewhere leaves of some kind, which in autumn fall continually and in great numbers, are pushed into the narrows of the channel and are sometimes overcome and give way, but when the water that was pressing has passed through, gather again and pack together; or something else happens through the varied fall of floating leaves that likewise serves now to hold back, now to release that flow?" It seemed probable to me, having nothing else, and, praising his ingenuity, I confessed that I had found nothing, though I had long sought why it was so.

Then, after a short silence, I said: "Rightly you wondered at nothing and kept yourself indoors with Calliope." "Rightly," he said, "but now you have plainly given me something great to wonder at." "What is that?" I said. "That you," he said, "wondered at these things." "For where does wonder usually arise," I said, "or what is the mother of this fault, but a thing unusual and outside the evident order of causes?" And he said: "Outside the evident order, I accept; for nothing seems to me to happen outside order." Here I was roused with a livelier hope than I usually have when I ask something of them, because a young man's mind, turned to these things almost suddenly only yesterday, had conceived so great a thing, when no question about these matters had ever been discussed between us before. "Good," I said, "good; indeed very good; you have thought much, you have dared much. This, believe me, goes far beyond Helicon, to whose summit you are trying to reach as if to heaven. But I would very much like you to stand by this statement; for I will try to shake it." "Leave me to myself for now, please," he said; "for I have turned my mind hard to something else." Here, fearing somewhat that, carried away completely by his zeal for poetry, he might be swept far from philosophy, I said: "I am provoked to attack those verses of yours, which you are singing and howling in every kind of meter, and which are trying to raise between you and the truth a more monstrous wall than the one between your lovers; for they at least breathed through an ingrained little crack." For he had then begun to sing of Pyramus.

When I had said this in a sterner voice than he expected, he fell silent for a while. And I had already left the matter I had begun and returned to myself, not wanting vainly and foolishly to occupy one already occupied; then he said: "'I, like a mouse, by my own betrayal': nothing could be said more aptly in Terence than can now be said by me about myself. But perhaps that last part will be turned to the opposite; for what he says, 'Today I am done for,' perhaps today I shall be found. For if you do not despise what superstitious people usually do, taking omens even from mice, if by my noise I warned that mouse or rat which betrayed me to you as awake to return to its hole and keep quiet, if it has any sense, why should I not myself be warned by that noise of your voice to do philosophy rather than sing? For that is, as I have begun to believe while you prove it daily, our true and unshaken dwelling. So, if it is not troublesome to you and you think it ought to be done, ask what you will; I will defend the order of things as best I can, and assert that nothing can happen outside order. For I have so imbibed and drunk it in with my mind that even if someone overcomes me in this discussion, I will attribute even that not to any rashness but to the order of things. For not the thing itself, but Licentius, will be overcome."

Rejoicing, I gave myself back to them. Then I said to Trygetius: "What do you think?" "I favor order very much," he said, "but still I am uncertain and want so great a matter to be discussed most carefully." "Then let that side have your favor," I said; "for your uncertainty I think you share with Licentius and with me." "Not at all," said Licentius; "I am certain of this opinion. For why should I hesitate to pull down the wall you mentioned before it has fully risen? For truly poetry cannot turn me away from philosophy as much as distrust of finding the truth can." Then Trygetius said with joyful words: "We now have, what is more, a Licentius who is not an Academic. For he used to defend them most zealously." "Leave these things now, please," he said, "lest it twist me away and break me off from some divine thing, I know not what, which has begun to show itself to me, and on which I hang gaping." Here, seeing my joys overflowing far more richly than I had ever dared even to wish, I eagerly poured out this verse: "So may that Father God bring it about!" For he himself, if we follow, will lead us where he bids us go and where to set our dwelling, he who now gives an omen and glides into our minds. For it is not the 'lofty Apollo' who in caves, on mountains, in groves, stirred up by the smell of incense and the slaughter of cattle, fills madmen; it is surely another, that other lofty one, truthful, and (why should I go around with words?) truth itself, whose prophets are all who can be wise. So let us set to work, Licentius; relying on piety, as worshipers, let us stamp out with our feet the deadly fire of smoky desires.

"Now ask, I beg you," he said, "if I can explain this great thing, whatever it is, and in my own words too." "Answer me this first," I said: "from what does it seem to you that this water flows in not at random but by order? For that it glides over little wooden channels and is led all the way to our use can pertain to order. For it was done by men using reason, so that by one course of it they might both drink and bathe, and it followed from the advantages of the place that it should be so. But that those leaves, as you say, fell so that what we wondered at came about: by what order of things, then, and not rather by chance, shall we think this was done?" "As if," he said, "it could seem to anyone who looks most clearly that nothing can happen without a cause, that they ought to have fallen, or could have fallen, otherwise than they fell! What? Do you want me now to go through the positions of the trees and the branches, and the very weight that nature has put on the leaves? What? Why should I seek the mobility of the air, by which they fly about, or the softness by which they descend, and their various falls according to the state of the sky, their weight, their shapes, and countless other more obscure causes? These are hidden from our senses, deeply hidden; yet that which is enough for the question we have taken up is somehow not hidden from the mind: that nothing happens without a cause. For a tiresome questioner may go on to ask: 'What was the cause for trees to be planted there?' I will answer that men followed the richness of the soil. 'What if they are not fruit trees and sprang up at random?' Here too I will answer that we see too little; for the nature that produced them is by no means random. What more? Either let me be taught that something happens without a cause, or believe that nothing happens except by a fixed order of causes."

I said to him: "Though you may call me a tiresome questioner (for I can hardly not be one, having fought to keep you from conversing with Pyramus and Thisbe), I will still go on to ask you. For what good (to say nothing of countless other things) did that nature, which you want to seem ordered, produce these very trees that bear no fruit?" While Licentius was thinking what to say, Trygetius said: "Is the use of trees given to men only in fruits? How many other uses there are, from shade, from wood, and finally from the very branches or leaves!" "Please do not give these answers to his questions," said Licentius. "For countless things can be brought forward from which men have no use, or it is so hidden or so slight that it cannot be dug out or defended by men, especially by us. Let him rather teach us how something happens which no cause has preceded." "We will see about that later," I said. "For it is not now necessary for me to be the teacher, since you, who have professed yourself certain of so great a thing, have still taught me nothing, though I am very eager to learn and lie awake days and nights for this alone."

"Where are you sending me?" he said. "Is it because I follow you more lightly than those leaves follow the winds by which they are thrown into the stream, so that it is not enough for them to fall unless they are also carried along? For what else will it be when Licentius teaches Augustine, and things that are in the middle of philosophy?" "Please," I said, "do not either cast yourself down so much or raise me up. For I too am a boy in philosophy, and when I ask questions I do not care much through whom he answers me, who daily receives me complaining, of whom I believe you will one day be a prophet; and this 'one day' is perhaps not far off. But others too, far removed from studies of this kind, can teach something when they are bound to the company of the disputants as by the chains of questions. And that something is not nothing. Or do you not see (I will gladly use your own comparison) that those very leaves which are carried by the winds and float on the waves resist somewhat the rushing river and remind men of the order of things, if indeed what you defend is true?"

Here Licentius, even leaping from his bed for joy, said: "Who would deny, great God, that you administer all things by order? How all things hold together! How they are pressed into their knots by fixed successions! How great and how many things have happened so that we should be saying this! How great things happen so that we may find you! For from where does this itself flow and derive, if not from the order of things: that we woke up, that you noticed that sound, that you sought its cause with yourself, that you did not find the cause of so small a thing? A mouse even appears so that I, awake, may be revealed. Finally, even your own speech, perhaps without your intending it (for no one has it in his power what comes into his mind), is somehow turned around so as to teach me what I should answer you. For I ask you: if these things that we have said are committed to writing, as you have arranged, and spread a little more widely to men's notice, does it not seem so great a matter that some great prophet or Chaldean, consulted about it, ought to have answered long before it happened? And if he had answered, he would be called so divine, so exalted by everyone's praise, that still no one would ask him why a leaf fell from a tree, or whether a wandering mouse troubled a man lying down. For did any of them ever either say such future things of himself or was he compelled by a client to say them? Yet if he foretold that a certain not ignoble book would come to be, and saw that it would necessarily happen (for he could not divine otherwise), surely whatever the tumbling of leaves in the field and whatever the meanest little animal in the house does are as necessary in the order of things as that writing. For it is made of these words, which, without those meanest things preceding, could neither come into the mind nor come forth from the mouth nor be handed down to posterity. So now, I ask, let no one ask me why each thing happens. It is enough that nothing happens, nothing is born, which some cause has not begotten and moved."

"It appears, young man," I said, "that you do not know how many things have been said against divination, and by what sort of men. But answer now, not whether anything happens without a cause (for I see you do not want to answer that now), but whether that order you have undertaken to defend seems to you something good or something evil." And he, hesitating a little, said: "You have not asked in such a way that I can answer one of the two. For I see a kind of middle here. Order seems to me neither good nor evil." "What at least do you think," I said, "is contrary to order?" "Nothing," he said; "for how can anything be contrary to that which has occupied the whole, held the whole? For what is contrary to order must necessarily be outside order; but I see nothing outside order; so one must think nothing is contrary to order." "Then is error not contrary to order?" said Trygetius. "Not at all," he said; "for I see no one err without a cause; but the series of causes is included in order, and error itself is not only begotten by a cause but also begets something of which it is the cause. Therefore, inasmuch as it is not outside order, it cannot be contrary to order."

And when Trygetius had fallen silent and I could not contain myself for joy, because I saw that the young man, son of a very dear friend, was becoming mine too, and not only that but was already rising and growing into a friend for me, and that he, of whose zeal even for ordinary letters I had despaired, was coming with full force into the middle of philosophy as if he had recognized his own possession: while I was silently marveling at this and glowing with thanksgiving, suddenly he, as if seized by some inspiration, cried out: "O, if only I could say what I want! Words, wherever you are, I beg you, come to my aid. Both good and evil things are within order. Believe it, if you will; for how to explain it I do not know."

I marveled and kept silent. But Trygetius, when he saw that the man, his intoxication as it were somewhat slept off, had become approachable and been restored to conversation, said: "What you say seems to me absurd, Licentius, and plainly foreign to the truth; but please bear with me a little and do not drive me off by shouting." "Say what you like," he said; "for I do not fear that you will take me away from what I see and almost hold." "I wish," said Trygetius, "that you were not straying from that order which you defend, and were not carried away into so great a carelessness, to put it mildly, toward God. For what could be said more impious than that even evils are contained in order? For certainly God loves order." "Indeed he loves it," said Licentius; "it flows from him, it is with him; and if anything can be said more fittingly about so lofty a matter, think it over with yourself, please. For I am not fit to teach you these things now." "What should I think over?" said Trygetius. "I accept exactly what you say, and what I understand is enough for me. For you certainly said both that evils are contained in order and that order itself flows from the highest God and is loved by him. From this it follows both that evils are from the highest God and that God loves evils."

At this conclusion I feared for Licentius. But he, groaning at the difficulty of finding words, and not at all seeking what to answer but how to bring out what was to be answered, said: "God does not love evils, and for no other reason than that it is not of order for God to love evils; and he loves order greatly for this reason, that through it he does not love evils. But how can evils themselves not be in order, since God does not love them? For this itself is the order of evils, that they are not loved by God. Or does it seem to you a small order of things that God both loves good things and does not love evil ones? So evils, which God does not love, are not outside order, and yet he loves order itself; for he loves this very thing, to love good things and not to love evil ones, which belongs to a great order and a divine arrangement. And because this order and arrangement preserves the harmony of the universe by distinction itself, it comes about that evils too must exist. So, as from antitheses in a certain way, which also delights us in a speech, from contraries the beauty of all things together is fashioned."

After this he was silent a little, and suddenly, raising himself toward where Trygetius had his bed, he said: "For I ask you, please: is God just?" Trygetius was silent, greatly wondering, as he told us afterward, and shuddering at the speech of his fellow student and friend, suddenly breathed upon with new inspiration. While he was silent, Licentius went on thus: "If you answer that God is not just, you must see what you are doing, you who were accusing me of impiety a while ago. But if, as we are taught and as we perceive by the very necessity of order, God is just, he is just precisely by giving each his own. But what distribution can be spoken of where there is no distinction? Or what distinction, if all things are good? Or what can be found outside order, if by God's justice each is given his own according to the deserts of good and evil? But we all confess that God is just; therefore everything is included in order." Having said this, he threw himself back on his bed, and, now in a gentler voice, since no one said a word to him, he said: "Do you, who drove me to this, have nothing to answer me either?"

I said to him: "Some new religion has come upon you, I see. But I will answer what seems good by daylight, which seems to me already returning, unless that brightness that is falling on the windows belongs to the moon. At the same time we must be silent, so that oblivion may not swallow up such great goods of yours, Licentius. For when would our writings not demand that these things be committed to them? I will tell you plainly what I think. I will argue against you as much as I can; for no greater triumph can be given me than if you defeat me. But if your weakness, which, less fed by learning in the disciplines, perhaps could not sustain so great a God, gives way either to cunning or to some sharp error of the men whose side I will try to take, the thing itself will remind you how much strength you must prepare in order to return to him more firmly; and at the same time because I want this discussion of ours to turn out more polished, for I do not owe it to coarse ears. For our Zenobius often discussed much with me about the order of things, and I could never satisfy him when he inquired into deep matters, whether because of the obscurity of the things or because of the shortness of time. And he was so impatient of frequent postponements that, to force me to answer more carefully and fully, he even challenged me with a poem, and a good poem, so that you may love him the more. But it could not be read to you then, since you were very far from the study of these things, nor can it now. For his departure was so sudden and disturbed by that commotion that none of these things could come to our minds; for he had decided to leave it with me to answer, and many things come together for this conversation to be sent to him. First, because it is owed; next, because it is fitting that his goodwill toward us be shown in this way what sort of life we are now leading; and finally, because in joy at your hope he yields to no one. For when he was present, out of friendship for your father, or rather for all of us, he was very anxious lest certain sparks of your talent, which he carefully noticed, should be not so much fanned into flame by my care as extinguished by your carelessness; and when he learns that you are also devoted to poetry, he will be so glad that I seem already to see him exulting."

"You will do nothing more pleasing to me," he said; "but whether you laugh at my changeableness and boyish levity, or it truly happens in us by some divine nod and order, I would not hesitate to tell you: I have suddenly become lazier about those meters; something else, something far different, has now shone on me with light. Philosophy is more beautiful, I confess, than Thisbe, than Pyramus, than that Venus and Cupid, and all such loves of every kind." And with a sigh he gave thanks to Christ. How shall I say I received this: gladly, or what shall I not say? Let each take it as he will; I do not care, except that perhaps I rejoiced beyond measure.

Meanwhile, after a little while, the day broke. They got up, and I, in tears, prayed much, when I heard Licentius singing that prophetic verse joyfully and chattily: "God of hosts, turn us and show your face, and we shall be saved." The evening before, after supper, when he had gone outside for the needs of nature, he had sung it rather too loudly for our mother to bear that such things should be sung repeatedly in that place. For he said nothing else, since he had lately drunk in the very melody of the chant and loved it, as happens, as an unusual tune. That most religious woman, as you know, rebuked him precisely because the place was unsuitable for the canticle. Then he had said jokingly: "As though, if some enemy shut me in here, God would not hear my voice!"

So in the morning, when he had come back alone (for both had gone out for the same reason), he came to my bed and said: "Tell me truly, so may what you wish happen to us, what you think of me." And I, taking the young man's right hand, said: "What I think, you sense, believe, and understand. For I do not think you sang so long yesterday in vain, that the God of hosts would show himself to you when you are turned." And he, recalling it with wonder, said: "You speak of something great and true. For it moves me not a little that just now I was called away from those trifles of my poem only with difficulty, and now it irks and shames me to return to them; so wholly am I carried up into certain great and wonderful things. Is this not truly to be turned to God? At the same time I rejoice that the scruple of superstition cast on me was groundless, about my singing such things in such a place." "Nor does this displease me," I said, "and I think it pertains to that order that we should say something on this too. For I see that the very place which offended her, and the night, fit that canticle. For from what do you think we pray to be turned to God and see his face, if not from a kind of mire of the body and its filth, and likewise from the darkness in which error wraps us? Or what else is it to be turned than to be raised up into oneself from the excess of vices by virtue and temperance? Or what else is the face of God than truth itself, for which we sigh and for which, as our beloved, we make ourselves clean and beautiful?" "Nothing could be said better," he exclaimed; and then more quietly, as if into my ear: "See, please, how many things have come together to make me believe that something is now happening to us in a more favorable order."

"If you care for order," I said, "you must go back to those verses. For learning in the liberal disciplines, if modest and concise, produces lovers more eager, more persevering, and more refined to embrace the truth, so that they seek more ardently, pursue more constantly, and finally cling more sweetly to what is called, Licentius, the happy life. When it is named, everyone sits up and, as it were, looks at your hands to see whether you have anything to give to the needy and to those hindered by various diseases. But when wisdom begins to instruct them to endure the doctor and let themselves be cured with some patience, they fall back into their rags, and, wasting away from their warmth, they prefer to scratch the itch of wretched pleasures rather than be restored to the health and light of the healthy by enduring and submitting to the doctor's advice, which is a little harsh and burdensome to the diseases. So, content with the name and sense of the highest God as with an alms, they live wretchedly, but still they live. But other men, or, to speak more truly, other souls, already worthy of his bridal chamber while they live in this body, are sought by that best and most beautiful Bridegroom; for them it is not enough to live, but to live happily. So go meanwhile to those Muses. But do you know what I want you to do?" "Command what you please," he said. "When Pyramus and she," I said, "have killed themselves one over the other, as you are going to sing, in that very grief, by which your poem should be most strongly inflamed, you have a most suitable opportunity. Seize on a curse against that foul lust and the poisoned fires by which those pitiable things happen; then rise wholly into praise of pure and sincere love, by which souls taught by the disciplines and beautiful with virtue are joined to the intellect through philosophy, and not only escape death but also enjoy the most blessed life." Here he went away in silence, long wavering in thought, nodding his head.

Then I too got up, and, having offered our daily prayers to God, we had begun to go to the baths (for that place was suitable and familiar to us for discussion when we could not be in the field because of a gloomy sky), when behold, in front of the doors we noticed some cocks beginning a very fierce fight. We chose to watch. For what do the eyes of lovers not go around, where do they not roam, lest from anywhere the beauty of reason should nod to them, the reason that measures and governs all things, those that know and those that do not, which draws its eager followers to itself wherever and everywhere it bids itself be sought? For from what or where can it not give a sign? As in those very cocks one could see the heads stretched intently forward, the swollen crests, the vigorous blows, the most careful evasions, and in every movement of the animals lacking reason nothing that was not fitting, another reason, of course, governing all things from above; finally the very law of the victor, the proud crowing and the limbs gathered as it were into one circle, as if in the pride of mastery; and the sign of the vanquished, the feathers raised from the neck, and everything ugly in voice and movement, and by that very fact somehow harmonious and beautiful by the laws of nature.

We asked many things: why all do so, why for mastery over the hens subject to them, why then the very sight of the fight drew us somewhat, even apart from that higher consideration, into the pleasure of the spectacle; what there was in us that sought many things removed from the senses, and what again that was captured by the invitation of the senses themselves. We said to ourselves: Where is there not law? Where is there not rule owed to the better? Where is there not a shadow of constancy? Where is there not imitation of that most true beauty? Where is there not measure? And, warned by this that there should be measure in watching, we went on to where we had intended, and there, as well as we could, and quite carefully (for the things were fresh, and when could such striking things escape the memory of three students?), we put all the little works of our night study into this part of the book. And I did nothing else that day, to spare my health, except that before supper I listened with them to half a book of Vergil, as I was accustomed daily; we considered nothing anywhere but the measure of things, which no one can fail to approve, but which it is very difficult and very rare to perceive when one is doing something eagerly.

Then, very early the next morning, we eagerly met at the usual place and sat down there. And, with both attending to me, I said: "Be here, Licentius, as much as you can, and you too, Trygetius; for no small matter is in hand: we are inquiring about order. Why should I now, as if set in that school from which I rejoice to have escaped in whatever way, praise order to you copiously and in order? Take, if you will (rather, make yourselves willing), something than which nothing shorter, and, as it seems to me, nothing truer can be said in its praise. Order is that which, if we hold to it in life, will lead us to God, and which, unless we hold to it in life, we shall not reach God. And we presume and hope, unless my mind deceives me about us, that we shall reach him. So this question must be turned over and resolved most carefully between us. I would like the others to be present who usually take part with us in these pursuits; I would like, if it were possible, to have with me now as attentive as you are not only these but at least all our friends, whose talent I always admire, or at least Zenobius alone, whom, though he was working hard on this matter, I never received with leisure worthy of its greatness. But since that has not happened, they will read our writings, since we have already resolved not to waste words on these things, and to bind the things themselves, which flee from memory, with the chain of writing, as it were, by which they may be brought back. And perhaps order itself required this, which arranged their absence. For you too surely rise to so great a matter with a more uplifted mind because it is placed on us alone to bear; and when those who are our greatest concern read it, if anything moves them to contradict, this discussion will produce other discussions for us, and the very succession of conversations will insert itself into the order of learning. But now, as I promised, I will oppose Licentius, as far as the matter allows, who has almost completed the whole case, if he can surround it firmly and steadily with a wall of defense."

Here, when I saw by their silence, faces, eyes, suspense, and stillness of limbs that they were sufficiently moved by the greatness of the matter and inflamed with desire to hear, I said: "So, Licentius, if you agree, gather in yourself whatever strength you can, sharpen whatever keenness you have, and embrace in a definition what this order is." Then, when he heard that he was being forced to define, he shuddered as if sprinkled with cold water, and, looking at me with a rather troubled face and, as happens, smiling from very nervousness, he said: "What is this? What, do I seem to you as if nodding assent? I do not know with what foreign spirit you believe me inspired." And at once, encouraging himself: "Or perhaps," he said, "something is with me?" And he was silent a little, so that whatever notion he had of order might be brought together into a definition; then, more confidently: "Order," he said, "is that through which all things are done that God has established."

"What?" I said. "Does God himself not seem to you to be moved by order?" "Certainly he seems so," he said. "So God is moved?" said Trygetius. And Licentius said: "Why not? Do you deny that Christ is God, who both came to us by order and says that he was sent by God the Father? If, then, God sent Christ to us by order, and we do not deny that Christ is God, God not only does all things but is also moved by order." Here Trygetius, hesitating, said: "I do not know how to take that. For when we name God, it is not, as it were, Christ himself who comes to our minds, but the Father. Christ comes to mind when we name the Son of God." "A fine thing you are doing," said Licentius. "Shall we then deny that the Son of God is God?" Here Trygetius, though it seemed dangerous to him to answer, still forced himself and said: "He too is God, but still we call the Father God in the proper sense." I said to him: "Restrain yourself rather; for the Son is not called God improperly." And he, moved by religious scruple, did not want even his words to be written down; Licentius urged that they should remain, in the manner of boys, of course, or rather (alas!) of almost all men, as though this were being done among us for the sake of glory. When I rebuked this impulse of his mind with rather severe words, he blushed. Noticing that Trygetius was laughing and rejoicing at his embarrassment, I said to both: "Is this how you act? Are you not moved by the masses of vices and the darkness of ignorance by which we are pressed down and covered? Is this that attention of yours a little while ago, at which I foolishly rejoiced, and that rising up toward God and truth? O, if you could see, even with eyes as bleary as mine, in what dangers we lie, of what disease that laughter shows the madness! O, if you could see it! How quickly, how immediately, and for how much longer you would turn it into weeping! Wretched ones, do you not know where we are? It is common to all fools and the unlearned that their minds are sunk; but wisdom does not stretch out her help and hand to all the sunk in one and the same way. There are some, believe me, there are some who are called upward, and others who are let down into the depths. Do not, I beg you, double my miseries for me. Let my own wounds be enough for me; praying to God with almost daily tears that they may be healed, I still often convince myself that I am less worthy to be healed as quickly as I wish. Do not, I beg you, if you owe me any love, any bond of friendship, if you understand how much I love you, how highly I value you, how much care for your morals troubles me, if I am worthy not to be neglected by you, if finally, with God as witness, I do not lie that I wish nothing more for myself than for you: repay me this kindness, and if you willingly call me teacher, give me my fee: be good!"

Here, when tears had put an end to my saying more, Licentius, very much annoyed that everything was being written down, said: "What have we done, I ask you?" "Do you not even confess your sin yet?" I said. "Do you not know that in that school I used to be gravely angered that boys were led not by the usefulness and beauty of the disciplines but by love of the emptiest praise, so much that some were not even ashamed to recite others' words and received applause (O evil to be groaned over!) from the very people whose words they were reciting? So you, although you have never, I think, done anything like that, are still trying to bring in and sow, both into philosophy and into that life which I rejoice at last to have taken up, the last but more harmful plague of all, wasting rivalry and empty boasting; and perhaps, because I frighten you away from this vanity and disease, you will be lazier in the study of learning, and, driven back from the ardor of windy fame, will freeze into the torpor of idleness. Woe is me, if I must still endure such as these, from whom vices cannot depart without other vices succeeding!" "You will see," said Licentius, "how much more purified we shall be. Only we beg you by all you love to pardon us and order all that to be deleted; and at the same time to spare the tablets, which we no longer have. For none of the many things we discussed has been transferred into the books." "No," said Trygetius, "let our punishment stand, so that the very fame that lures us may frighten us from love of it by its own lash. For we will sweat not a little to make these writings known only to our friends and intimates." Licentius agreed.

Meanwhile our mother came in and asked us what progress we had made; for she too knew the question. When I had ordered her entrance and question to be written down, as was our custom, she said: "What are you doing? Have I ever heard, in those books you read, of women being brought into discussions of this kind?" I said to her: "I do not care much for the judgments of the proud and ignorant, who rush into reading books just as into greeting people. For they think not of what sort they themselves are, but of what clothes they wear and with how much pomp of possessions and fortune they shine. In literature they do not pay much attention to where the question comes from, or where the disputants are trying to arrive, or what has been explained and settled by them. Yet since among them are found some whose minds are not to be despised (for they are sprinkled with certain seasonings of humanity and are easily led through golden and painted doors into the sacred inner chambers of philosophy), both our ancestors, whose books I see are known to you through our reading, have satisfied them, and in our times (to pass over others) a man most outstanding in talent, eloquence, the very marks and gifts of fortune, and, what is above all, in mind, Theodorus, whom you yourself know well, is working so that no class of men, now or among posterity, may rightly complain about the literature of our times. But if my books should happen to come into anyone's hands, and, having read my name, they do not say, 'Who is this?' and throw the book away, but, either curious or very studious, despise the meanness of the threshold and go on to enter, they will not be annoyed that I do philosophy with you, nor perhaps will they despise any of those whose conversation is mingled in my writings. For they are not only free men, which is enough for any liberal discipline, let alone philosophy, but born to the highest rank among their own people. And the writings of the most learned men contain even shoemakers who did philosophy, and far meaner kinds of fortune, who nevertheless shone with such light of talent and virtue that they would by no means have wished, even if they could, to exchange their goods on any terms for any nobility of this kind. Nor, believe me, will there be lacking such a kind of men as will be more pleased by this very thing, that you do philosophy with me, than by anything else of either charm or seriousness they find here. For women too did philosophy among the ancients, and your philosophy pleases me very much."

"For, mother, so that you are not unaware of anything, this Greek word by which philosophy is named is called in Latin the love of wisdom. Hence the divine Scriptures too, which you embrace so ardently, command that not philosophers altogether, but the philosophers of this world, are to be avoided and laughed at. And that there is another world, very far removed from these eyes, which the intellect of a few sound men beholds, Christ himself signifies clearly enough, who does not say, 'My kingdom is not of the world,' but 'My kingdom is not of this world.' For whoever thinks all philosophy is to be avoided wants nothing else than that we should not love wisdom. So I would despise you in these writings of mine if you did not love wisdom; but I would not despise you if you loved it moderately, much less if you loved wisdom as much as I do. But now, since you love it much more than you love me, and I know how much you love me, and since you have made such progress in it that you are no longer terrified by fear of any chance misfortune or even of death itself, which is very difficult for the most learned men, and which all confess is the highest citadel of philosophy, shall I not gladly give myself to you even as a pupil?"

Here, when she had said charmingly and piously that I had never told so great a lie, and I saw that we had poured out so many words that they had to be written down, and the book was already of due length, and no tablets were left, we decided to put off the question, and at the same time to spare my stomach. For the things that seemed necessary for me to pour out against those young men had upset it more than I wished. But as we began to leave, Licentius said: "Remember how many and how necessary things are supplied to us, to be received from you, through that most hidden and divine order, even without your knowing it." "I see it," I said, "and I am not ungrateful to God, and I presume that you yourselves, who notice these things, will be better for that very reason." This was all my business that day.

Then, after a few days had passed, Alypius came, and when the sun rose very bright, the clearness of the sky and a mildness as pleasant as was possible in winter in those parts invited us to go down to the meadow, which we used very often and familiarly. Our mother was also with us. I had perceived her talent and her mind inflamed toward divine things before, through long living together and careful consideration; but especially in a certain discussion of no small matter, which I held with my guests on my birthday and put into a little book, her mind had appeared so great to me that nothing seemed more suited to true philosophy. So I had decided, since she had abundant leisure, to arrange that she should not be absent from our conversation. This you have also learned in the first book of this work.

So when we had sat down in that place, as comfortably as we could, I said to those two young men: "Although I was angry with you for behaving like boys about great things, still it seems to me to have happened not without order, by God's favor, that in the conversation in which I was drawing you away from that levity the time was so used up that so great a matter seems to have been put off until Alypius's arrival. Therefore, since I have now made the question well known to him and shown how far we have advanced in it, are you ready, Licentius, to defend the case you undertook from that definition of yours? For I think I remember that you said order is that through which God does all things." "I am ready," he said, "as far as I can." "How then," I said, "does God do all things by order? So as to move even himself by order? Or are other things besides him governed by him by order?" "Where all things are good," he said, "there is no order. For there is supreme equality, which needs no order." "Do you deny," I said, "that with God all things are good?" "I do not deny it," he said. "It follows," I said, "that neither God nor the things that are with God are administered by order." He granted it. "Do all good things seem to you to be nothing?" I said. "On the contrary," he said, "they truly are." "Where then," I said, "is that statement of yours, that all things that exist are administered by order and that there is nothing at all separated from order?" "But there are also evils," he said, "through which it has come about that order includes good things too; for good things alone are not ruled by order, but good and evil together. And when we say 'all things that exist,' we certainly do not mean only good things. Hence it follows that all things together that God administers are administered by order."

I said to him: "Do the things that are administered and done seem to you to be moved, or do you think they are immovable?" "These things that happen in this world," he said, "I admit are moved." "Do you deny it of the rest?" I said. "The things that are with God," he said, "are not moved; I think all the rest are moved." "Since, then," I said, "you think that the things that are with God are not moved, but grant that the others are moved, you show that all things that are moved are not with God." "Repeat that a little more plainly," he said. This he seemed to me to want not from difficulty in understanding but to gain room to find what to answer. "You said," I said, "that the things that are with God are not moved, but the others are. So if these things that are moved would not be moved if they were with God, since you deny that anything with God is moved, it remains that the things that are moved are apart from God." When this had been said he was still silent, until at last he said: "It seems to me that if there are any things in this world that are not moved, they are with God." "That is nothing to me," I said; "for you admit, I think, that not all things in this world are unmoved. From this it follows that not all things of this world are with God." "I admit," he said, "not all." "So there is something without God?" "No," he said. "Then all things are with God." Here, hesitating, he said: "Please, I would not have said that nothing is without God; for all things that are moved certainly do not seem to me to be with God." "Then this heaven," I said, "which no one doubts is moved, is without God." "Heaven is not without God," he said. "So there is something with God that is moved?" "I cannot explain what I think as I wish," he said; "but I ask you, without waiting for my words, to understand as shrewdly as you can what I am trying to say. For it seems to me both that nothing is without God and that what is with God remains unshaken; but I cannot say that heaven is without God, not only because I think nothing is without God, but because I think heaven has something that is not moved, which either is God or is with God, although I do not doubt that heaven itself turns and is moved."

"Then define, if you please," I said, "what it is to be with God and what it is not to be without God. For if the controversy between us is about words, it will easily be dismissed, provided we see the thing itself you have conceived in your mind." "I hate defining," he said. "What then shall we do?" I said. "You define, please," he said. "For it is easier for me to see in another's definition what I do not approve than to explain anything by defining well." "I will humor you," I said. "Does that seem to you to be with God which is ruled and administered by him?" "No," he said, "that is not what I had in mind when I said that the things that are not moved are with God." "Then see," I said, "whether at least this definition pleases you: whatever understands God is with God." "I grant it," he said. "What then?" I said. "Does the wise man not seem to you to understand God?" "He does," he said. "Since, then, wise men are moved not only in one house or city but also by traveling and sailing through immense regions, how will it be true that whatever is with God is not moved?" "You have made me laugh," he said, "as if I had said that what the wise man does is with God. It is with God, but that which he knows." "Does the wise man not know," I said, "his book, his cloak, his tunic, his furniture, if he has any, and other things of that kind, which even fools know well?" "I admit," he said, "that knowing a tunic and knowing a cloak is not being with God."

"So you say this," I said: "not everything the wise man knows is with God, but whatever of the wise man is with God, that the wise man knows." "Excellent," he said; "for whatever he knows by this bodily sense is not with God, but what he perceives by the mind. I dare to say even more, perhaps, but I will say it; for with you as judges I may either confirm it or learn. Whoever knows only what the sense of the body touches seems to me not only not to be with God but not even with himself." Here, when I noticed Trygetius with a face as if he wanted to say something in reply, but was held back by modesty from rushing, as it were, into another's place, I gave him leave to bring out what he wanted, Licentius now being silent. And he said: "No one seems to me to know at all the things that pertain to the senses of the body. For to sense is one thing, to know another. So if we know anything, I think it is contained in the intellect alone and can be grasped by it alone. From this it follows that, if what the wise man knows by understanding is with God, all that the wise man knows can be with God." When Licentius had approved this, he added something else which I could by no means despise. For he said: "The wise man himself is certainly with God; for the wise man also understands himself. This follows both from what I received from you, that whatever understands God is with God, and from what was said by us, that whatever is understood by the wise man is with God. But that part of him by which he uses these senses (for I do not think it should be counted when we call him wise) I admit I do not know, nor can I at all guess what sort it is."

"So you deny," I said, "that the wise man consists not only of body and soul but even of the whole soul, since it would be madness to deny that the part by which he uses the senses belongs to the soul. For it is not the eyes or ears themselves but something else that senses through the eyes. And if we do not give sensing itself to the intellect, we do not give it to any part of the soul. It remains that it be attributed to the body, than which nothing more absurd seems to me for the present to be said." "The soul of the wise man," said Licentius, "thoroughly purified by the virtues and already clinging to God, is worthy even of the name of wise, and nothing else of him is it right to call wise; but still certain things, like filth, so to speak, and cast-off skins, from which he has cleansed himself and as it were withdrawn into himself, serve that soul; or, if all this is to be called soul, they certainly serve and are subject to that part of the soul which alone should be called wise. In this subject part I think memory itself also dwells. So the wise man uses this part as a slave, so that he may command it and, now that it is tamed and subdued, set it the bounds of law; so that, while he uses these senses for the sake of those things which are necessary not to the wise man but to itself, it may not dare to exalt itself or be proud toward its master or use the very things that belong to it indiscriminately and immoderately. For the things that pass away can belong to that most worthless part. And to what is memory necessary except to passing and as it were fleeing things? So that wise man embraces God and enjoys him, who always remains and is not waited for in order to be, nor feared lest he fail, but by the very fact that he truly is, is always present. But he cares, unmoved and remaining in himself, in a certain way for the private property of his slave, so that the slave may use it well and keep it sparingly, as a thrifty and diligent servant."

Considering this view of his with admiration, I remembered that I had once said this very thing briefly in his hearing. Then, smiling, I said: "Give thanks, Licentius, to this slave of yours; if he had not supplied you with something from his own property, you would perhaps now have nothing to bring out. For if memory pertains to that part which yields itself like a maidservant to be ruled by the good mind, it is by her help, believe me, that you have just said this. So, before I return to that order, does it not seem to you that the wise man needs memory at least for such things, that is, for honorable and necessary disciplines?" "Why does he need memory," he said, "when he has and holds all his possessions present? For not even in sense itself do we call memory to help with what is before our eyes. So for the wise man, who has all things before those inner eyes of the intellect, that is, who gazes fixedly and immovably on God himself, with whom are all things that the intellect sees and possesses, what need, I ask, is there of memory? But I, needing it to retain these things I had heard from you, am not yet master of that servant; now I serve him, now I fight so as not to serve him, and I dare, as it were, to claim my freedom; and if perhaps I sometimes command and he obeys me and often makes me think I have won, in other matters he rises up again so that I lie wretched under his feet. So when we inquire about the wise man, I do not want you to name me." "Nor me," I said. "But can that wise man desert his own, or in any way, while he lives in this body in which he holds that servant bound by his law, abandon the duty of conferring benefits on those he can, and especially, what is most urgently demanded of him, of teaching wisdom itself? When he does this, in order to teach fittingly and be less awkward, he often prepares something to say and argue in an orderly way, which must perish unless he commits it to memory. So either you will deny that duties of benevolence belong to the wise man, or you will admit that some things of the wise man are kept by memory. Or perhaps he entrusts something of his own, not for his own sake but for the sake of his own people, yet necessary to himself, to be kept by that servant, so that he, as sober and trained by his master's excellent discipline, keeps only what his master has ordered him to keep for the sake of leading fools to wisdom?" "I do not think," he said, "that anything at all is entrusted to him by the wise man, since the wise man is always fixed on God, whether silent or speaking with men; but that servant, now well trained, diligently keeps what he may sometimes suggest to his master when he is disputing, and so does his duty gratefully to him as to a most just master, under whose power he sees himself living; and he does this not as if by reasoning but at the bidding of that highest law and highest order." "I do not resist your reasons now," I said, "so that what we undertook may rather be carried through. But how this matter stands (for it is no small thing or content with so short a conversation) we will see another time, when God himself, by order, gives the opportunity."

"It has been defined, then, what it is to be with God; and when I said that whatever understands God is with God, you added more, that the things understood by the wise man are also there. In this I am much troubled how you have suddenly placed folly with God. For if whatever the wise man understands is with God, and he cannot escape folly unless he understands it, that plague too will be with God, which it is impious to say." When they, troubled by this conclusion, had kept silent for a while, Trygetius said: "Let him answer too, whose most timely arrival for this discussion we did not, I think, welcome rashly." Then Alypius said: "God forbid! Was so great a silence of mine being prepared for this at last? But my quiet has now been broken. Still, I will now try to satisfy this question somehow, provided I first foresee what is coming and obtain from you that you demand nothing more of me beyond this answer." "It is in no way in keeping with your goodwill and humanity, Alypius," I said, "to deny your voice to our conversation, which even desires it. But go on now and do what you have begun; the rest will come as that order holds." "I too must hope for better things from order," he said, "in whose defense you have meanwhile chosen to substitute me. But, unless I am mistaken, you thought folly was joined to God by them, through that conclusion of yours, because they said that everything the wise man understands is with God. How far that is to be accepted I leave aside now; but note your reasoning a little. For you said: 'If whatever the wise man understands is with God, and he cannot escape folly unless he understands it': as though it were obscure that before anyone avoids folly he is not to be counted under the name of wise man! And it was said that what is understood by the wise man is with God. So when anyone understands folly in order to avoid it, he is not yet wise; and when he is, folly is not to be counted among the things he understands. Therefore, since the things the wise man already understands are joined to God, folly will rightly be separated from God."

"You have answered sharply, Alypius, as usual," I said, "but as one pushed into another's narrows. Still, since, as I think, you deign to be a fool with me still, what shall we do if we come upon some wise man who will gladly free us from so great an evil by teaching and arguing? For I shall ask nothing of him before this, I think: that he show me what folly is, what it is like, and of what sort it altogether is. About you I would not readily affirm; but it holds me as much and as long as it is not understood by me. So he will say, on your authority: 'You should have come to me to teach you this when I was a fool; now you can be your own teachers, for I no longer understand folly.' If I heard this from him, I would not hesitate to advise the man to become our companion, and we would look for another teacher together. For although I do not fully understand folly, I see that nothing is more foolish than this answer. But perhaps he will be ashamed either to leave us or to follow us so. So he will dispute and exaggerate most copiously the evils of folly. And we, providing well for ourselves, will either listen attentively to a man who does not know what he is saying, or believe that he knows what he does not understand; or else, by the reasoning of your clients, folly is still joined to God. But none of the former can, I see, be defended; so the last, which you do not want, remains." "I had never found you envious," he said. "For if I had received any fee from these clients of yours, as is customary, I would now be compelled to return it to them, since you hold so tightly to this reasoning. So let them either be content with this, that by my laboring with you I have given them not a little time to think, or, if defeated advocates, through no fault of their own, gladly listen to counsel, let them yield to you in this and be more cautious in the rest."

"I will not ignore," I said, "what Trygetius, somewhat noisily, wanted to say in your defense, and I will do it with your kind permission; for perhaps you are not well prepared, having come only recently upon this business, so that, setting aside the advocacy, I may listen patiently to them pleading their own case, as I had begun." Then Trygetius, Licentius being quite absent in mind, said: "Take it as you like, and laugh at my folly. It seems to me that that should not be called understanding by which folly itself is understood, since folly is either the only or the greatest cause of not understanding." "I do not readily refuse to accept that," I said. "For although I am much moved by what Alypius thinks, how anyone can rightly teach what sort of thing that is which he does not understand, and how great a harm it brings to the mind, which he does not see with the mind (for attending to exactly what you said, he was afraid to say it, though that view is known to him even from the books of the learned), yet, considering the very sense of the body (for the soul also uses that, and it is the only comparison of any kind it has with the intellect), I am led to say that no one can see darkness. So, if understanding is to the mind what seeing is to the sense, and although someone may have eyes open, sound, and clear, he still cannot see darkness, it is not absurdly said that folly cannot be understood; for we call nothing else the darkness of the mind. Nor will this now trouble us, how folly can be avoided without being understood. For as we avoid darkness with our eyes by the very fact that we do not want not to see, so whoever wants to avoid folly should not try to understand it, but should grieve that through it he does not understand the things that can be understood, and should perceive that it is present to him not because he understands it more but because he understands other things less."

"But let us return to order, so that Licentius may be given back to us at some point. For I now ask of you whether whatever a fool does seems to you to be done by order. For see what snares the question has. If you say 'by order,' where will that definition be, 'order is that by which God does all things that exist,' if even the fool does what he does by order? But if there is no order in the things done by a fool, there will be something that order does not hold; and you want neither. See, please, that you do not throw everything into confusion by your very defense of order." Here again Trygetius (for the other was still wholly absent) said: "It is easy to answer this dilemma of yours, but at present a comparison fails me by which I see my opinion ought to be supported and illustrated. Still, I will say what I think; for you will do what you did a little while ago. For that mention of darkness brought us not a little light on what I had left wrapped up. For the whole life of fools, although by themselves it is most inconstant and most disordered, is still, by divine providence, necessarily included in the order of things, and, as if places had been arranged by that ineffable and eternal law, it is in no way allowed to be where it ought not to be. So it happens that one who considers it alone, with a narrow mind, turns away as if struck back by a great ugliness. But if, lifting and spreading the eyes of the mind, he surveys all things together, he will find nothing not ordered and always distinguished and arranged, as it were, in its own seats."

"How great, how wonderful," I said, "are the answers which that God, and, as I am more and more led to believe, some hidden order of things itself, gives me through you! For you say things which I do not understand how they could be said without being seen, nor how you see them; so I suspect they are both true and deep. You were perhaps looking for one comparison for this view. But countless ones now occur to me that draw me entirely to agree. For what is more horrible than an executioner? What more savage and dreadful than his mind? Yet he holds a necessary place among the very laws and is inserted into the order of a well-governed city; he is harmful in his own mind, but in another's order he is the punishment of the harmful. What can be called more sordid, more empty, more full of shame and baseness than prostitutes, pimps, and other plagues of this kind? Take away prostitutes from human affairs, and you will throw everything into confusion with lusts; put them in the place of matrons, and you will dishonor them with stain and disgrace. So this kind of person is most impure in life through their own morals, and most base in condition through the laws of order. Are there not certain members in the bodies of animals which, if you attend to them alone, you could not bear to look at? Yet the order of nature neither willed them to be lacking, because they are necessary, nor allowed them to be prominent, because they are unseemly. And these unsightly things, by keeping their places, have yielded the better place to the better. What was more pleasant to us, what spectacle more fitting to a farm and country house, than that fight and conflict of cocks which we mentioned in the previous book? Yet what did we see more abject than the ugliness of the defeated one? And yet through it the more perfect beauty of that same contest had come about."

"All things, I believe, are like this, but they require eyes. Poets have loved what are called solecisms and barbarisms; they prefer to call them figures and metaplasms, changing the names, rather than avoid manifest faults. Yet take these away from poems, and we will miss the sweetest seasonings. Heap many into one place, and I will be disgusted by the whole as sour, rotten, and rancid. Transfer them to free and forensic speech, and who will not bid it flee and hide itself in the theaters? So order, governing and controlling them, will allow them to be neither excessive in their own place nor foreign anywhere. A low style, very like an unpolished one, placing itself in between, sets off the very leaps and charming passages; if it is alone, you throw it away as worthless; but if it is lacking, those beautiful things do not stand out, do not rule in their own regions, as it were, and possessions, but obstruct themselves with their own light and confuse the whole. Here too great thanks are owed to order. Who does not fear, who does not hate, lying arguments that creep little by little, by subtracting or adding, into assent to falsehood? Yet often in disputations, placed in fixed positions and their own seats, they have such force that somehow even the deception becomes sweet through them. Will not order itself be praised here too?"

"Now in music, in geometry, in the movements of the stars, in the necessities of numbers, order so rules that if anyone wants to see as it were its source and its very sanctuary, he either finds it in these or is led there through them without any error. For such learning, if one uses it in moderation (for nothing in it is to be feared but excess), nourishes such a soldier of philosophy, or even a leader, that he flies up and arrives where he wills at that highest measure, beyond which he neither can nor should nor desires to seek anything, and leads many there; from which, while he is still held by human affairs themselves, he so looks down on them and discerns all things that he is in no way troubled why one wishes to have children and has none, another is tormented by his wife's excessive fertility; why one who is ready to give much generously lacks money, while a lean and scabby moneylender broods over his buried hoard; why luxury scatters and squanders ample patrimonies, while a beggar weeping all day barely obtains a coin; why honor exalts one who is unworthy, while shining morals are hidden in the crowd."

"These and other things in human life generally compel men to believe impiously that we are not governed by any order of divine providence; but others, pious and good and endowed with splendid talent, who cannot bring themselves to think that we are deserted by the highest God, and yet, troubled by such darkness, as it were, and confusion of things, see no order, and, wanting the most hidden causes to be laid bare to them, often lament their errors even in poems. If they ask only this, why the Italians always pray for clear winters and likewise our wretched Gaetulia is always thirsty, who will easily answer them? Or where among us will any trace of that order be tracked down? But if I can advise my own people at all, as far as it appears to me and as far as I perceive, I judge that they should be educated in all the disciplines. Otherwise these things can in no way be understood so as to be clearer than light. But if they are too slow, or occupied with other business, or already too hard to learn, let them prepare for themselves the defenses of faith, by which chain he may draw them to himself and free them from these horrible and most tangled evils who allows no one to perish who believes in him well through the mysteries."

"For the way we follow when the obscurity of things troubles us is twofold: reason or, at least, authority. Philosophy promises reason and frees hardly a very few. Yet it compels them not only not to despise those mysteries but to understand them alone as they are to be understood; and the true and, so to speak, genuine philosophy has no other business than to teach what is the beginning of all things without beginning, and how great an intellect remains in it, and what has flowed from it for our salvation without any degeneration: the one almighty God, and with him, threefold in power, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, whom the venerable mysteries, which free peoples by sincere and unshaken faith, proclaim neither confusedly, as some do, nor insultingly, as many do. And how great a thing it is that so great a God deigned to take on and bear even this body of our kind for our sake: the cheaper it seems, the fuller it is of mercy, and the further and more deeply removed from a certain pride of clever men."

"But where the soul takes its origin, what it does here, how far it is distant from God, what it has of its own, what makes it alternate between the two natures, how far it dies and how it is proved immortal: how great an order do you think is needed for these things to be learned? Great indeed, and fixed, about which we will speak briefly later, if there is time. Now I want you to accept this from me: if anyone dares to rush into the knowledge of these things rashly and without the order of the disciplines, he becomes, instead of studious, curious; instead of learned, credulous; instead of cautious, incredulous. So I both wonder where your answers to my questions just now, so good and apt, come from, and am compelled to acknowledge it. Yet let us see how far your hidden intent can advance. Now let words be given back to us from Licentius too, who has been so long occupied with I know not what care and absent from this conversation that I believe he will read these things just like our friends who are not present. But come back to us, please, Licentius, and make sure you are wholly here; for I am speaking to you. For you approved my definition, in which it was said what it is to be with God, with whom you wanted to teach that the mind of the wise man remains unmoved, as far as I can follow."

"But this troubles me: since it is not denied that this wise man, as long as he lives among men, is in a body, how does it happen that while his body wanders here and there his mind remains unmoved? For in that way you could say that when a ship is moved, the men who are in it are not moved, although we admit that it is possessed and steered by them. For even if they ruled it by thought alone and made it go where they wished, still, since it is moved, those placed in it cannot fail to be moved." "The mind," said Licentius, "is not in the body in such a way that the body commands the mind." "Nor do I say that," I said; "but neither is a rider on a horse in such a way that the horse commands him, and yet, although he drives the horse where he wills, when the horse is moved he must be moved." "He can sit unmoved himself," he said. "You force us," I said, "to define what it is to be moved; if you can, I want you to do it." "Please," he said, "let your favor stand; for my request stands, and so that you need not ask me at all whether I want to define, I will declare it myself when I can do it." When this had been said, a boy from the house, to whom we had given this task, ran to us and announced that it was time for lunch. Then I said: "This boy forces us not to define but to show with our very eyes what it is to be moved. So let us go and pass from this place to another; for that, unless I am mistaken, is nothing else than to be moved." When they had laughed at this, we left.

But when we had refreshed our bodies, since clouds had covered the sky, we sat down in the usual place in the baths. And I said: "Do you grant, then, Licentius, that motion is nothing but passing from place to place?" "I grant it," he said. "Do you grant, then," I said, "that no one is in a place where he had not been without having been moved?" "I do not understand," he said. "If something was in one place a while ago and is now in another," I said, "do you grant that it has been moved?" He agreed. "Then," I said, "could the living body of some wise man be here with us now while his mind was absent from here?" "It could," he said. "Even," I said, "if he were conversing with us and teaching us something?" "Even if he were teaching us wisdom itself," he said, "I would say that he was not with us but with himself." "Then not in the body?" I said. "No," he said. I said to him: "Do you not admit that a body lacking a mind is dead, whereas I proposed a living one?" "I do not know how to explain it," he said. "For I see both that a man's body cannot be alive if the mind is not in it, and I cannot say that, wherever the wise man's body is, his mind is not with God." "I will make you able to explain it," I said. "For perhaps, since God is everywhere, wherever the wise man goes he finds God, with whom he can be. So it comes about that we can both not deny that he passes from place to place, which is to be moved, and yet say that he is always with God." "I admit," he said, "that that body makes the passage from place to place, but I deny it of the mind itself, to which the name of wise man has been given."

"For now I yield to you," I said, "so that a very obscure matter, which must be treated longer and more carefully, may not hinder our present purpose. But let us see, since we have defined what it is to be with God, whether we can also know what it is to be without God, although I think it is already clear. For I believe it seems to you that those who are not with God are without God." "If words could come to me," he said, "I would say something that would perhaps not displease you. But I ask you to bear with my lack of speech and, as befits you, to seize the things themselves with your quick mind. For these people seem to me neither to be with God and yet to be held by God; so I cannot say that those whom God holds are without God. Nor do I say they are with God, because they themselves do not hold God; for we agreed among ourselves some time ago, in that most delightful conversation we had on your birthday, that to have God is nothing else than to enjoy God. But I confess I dread these contraries, how someone can be neither without God nor with God."

"Do not let these things trouble you," I said. "For when there is agreement on the thing, who does not despise words? So let us at last return to that definition of order. For you said that order is that by which God does all things. But there is nothing, as I see, that God does not do; for from this it seemed to you that nothing can be found outside order." "My opinion stands," he said; "but I already see what you are going to say: whether God does the things that we admit are not done well." "Excellent," I said; "you have certainly cast your eye into my mind. But as you saw what I was going to say, so I ask you to see what should be answered." And he, shaking his head and shoulders, said: "We are confused." And by chance our mother had come upon this question. And he, after some silence, asked that I put this very question to him again; he had not noticed at all that Trygetius had answered it earlier. Then I said: "What, or why, should I repeat for you? 'Do not do what is done,' they say. So I advise you rather to take care to read what was said above, if you could not hear it. I have not been annoyed at this absence of your mind from our conversation, and I have long put up with it, so that I neither hindered what you were doing intently by yourself, removed from us, nor failed to pursue what this pen would not let you lose."

"Now I ask about something we have not yet tried to examine with careful reasoning. For when some order or other first brought forth this question of order for us, I remember that you said that this is the justice of God, by which he separates good and evil and gives each his own. For there is, as far as I can see, no clearer definition of justice. So I would like you to answer whether it seems to you that God was ever not just." "Never," he said. "If, then, God is always just," I said, "good and evil have always existed." "Certainly," said our mother, "I see nothing else that follows. For there was no judgment of God when there was no evil; and if he did not at some time give good and evil their own, he cannot seem to have been just." Licentius said to her: "So you think we must say that evil always existed?" "I do not dare say that," she said. "What then shall we say?" I said. "If God is just because he judges between good and evil, when there was no evil he was not just." Here, as they were silent, I noticed that Trygetius wanted to answer, and I allowed him. And he said: "Certainly God was just. For he could distinguish good and evil if evil had existed, and from the very fact that he could, he was just. For when we say that Cicero prudently investigated the conspiracy of Catiline, acted with temperance, was corrupted by no reward to spare the wicked, justly put them to the supreme penalty by the authority of the senate, and bravely sustained all the weapons of his enemies and, as he himself said, the mass of ill will, those virtues would not have failed to be in him if Catiline had not prepared so great a ruin for the state. For virtue is to be considered by itself, not by some work of this kind, even in man, how much more in God, if indeed in the narrows of things and words we are allowed to compare these in any way. For let us understand that God was always just, and that when evil arose which he might separate from good, he did not delay at all in giving each his own; for then he did not have to learn justice, but to use the justice he always had."

When both Licentius and our mother had approved this, compelled by its force, I said: "What do you say, Licentius? Where is what you so strongly asserted, that nothing happens outside order? For what happened so that evil was born was certainly not done by God's order, but when it had been born, it was included in God's order." And he, wondering and annoyed that so good a case had so suddenly slipped from his hands, said: "I say, of course, that order began from the time evil began to exist." "Then," I said, "that evil itself should exist was not done by order, if order began to exist after evil arose." "Somehow," he said, "the opinion I now reject escaped me; for I should not have said that order began after evil was born, but that, like that justice which Trygetius discussed, order too was with God, but did not come into use until evils began to exist." "You slip back into the same place," I said; "for what you least want remains unshaken. For whether order was with God or began to exist from the same time as evil, still that evil was born outside order. If you grant this, you admit that something can happen outside order, which weakens and maims your case; but if you do not grant it, evil begins to seem born by God's order, and you will confess God to be the author of evils, a sacrilege than which nothing more detestable occurs to me." When I had turned this over and over again for him, whether he did not understand or pretended not to have understood, he had nothing else to say and fell silent. Then our mother said: "I do not think that anything could have happened outside God's order, because the evil itself that was born was in no way born by God's order; but that justice did not allow it to be disordered, and brought it back and compelled it into the order it deserved."

Here, when I saw that all were seeking God most zealously and each according to his strength, but were not keeping that very order which we were discussing, by which one arrives at the understanding of that ineffable majesty, I said: "I beg you, if, as I see, you love order very much, do not let us be preposterous and disordered. For although a most hidden reason promises to show that nothing happens outside the divine order, still, if we heard some schoolmaster trying to teach syllables to a boy whom no one had first taught letters, we would think him, I do not say to be laughed at as a fool, but to be bound as a madman, for no other reason, I think, than that he did not keep the order of teaching. But no one doubts that both ignorant men do many such things, which are criticized and laughed at by the learned, and madmen do things which do not escape even the judgment of fools; and yet a certain lofty discipline, very far removed even from the suspicion of the multitude, promises to show to minds that are studious and love only God and souls that even all these things, which we admit are perverse, are not outside the divine order, so clearly that sums of numbers could not be more certain to us."

"This discipline is the very law of God, which, always remaining fixed and unshaken with him, is as it were transcribed into wise souls, so that they know they live the better and the more sublimely, the more perfectly they contemplate it by understanding and the more diligently they keep it by living. This discipline, then, commands those who desire to know it to follow a twofold order at once, one part of which concerns life, the other learning. So young men devoted to it must live in such a way that they abstain from sexual pleasures, from the enticements of belly and throat, from immodest care and adornment of the body, from the empty business of games and the torpor of sleep and sloth, from rivalry, detraction, and envy, from ambition for honors and powers, and even from immoderate desire for praise itself; and let them believe that love of money is the surest poison of all their hope. Let them do nothing feebly, nothing rashly. In the sins of their own people let them either drive out anger entirely or so restrain it that it is like anger driven out. Let them hate no one, and want to cure every vice. Let them take great care, when they punish, that it is not too much, and when they pardon, that it is not too little. Let them punish nothing that does not serve for the better, indulge nothing that turns to the worse. Let them consider all over whom power has been given them as their own. Let them serve in such a way that it shames others to rule them, and rule in such a way that it delights others to serve them. In the sins of others let them not be troublesome to one who does not want it. Let them avoid enmities most carefully, bear them most calmly, end them most quickly. In every contract and dealing with men it is enough to keep this one common proverb: let them do to no one what they do not want to suffer. Let them not want to administer the state unless they are perfect; and let them hasten to be perfected within the senatorial age, or certainly within youth. But whoever turns to these things late should not think that nothing has been prescribed for him; for he will certainly keep these things more easily at a mellowed age. In every life, place, and time let them either have friends or strive to have them. Let them defer to the worthy even when they do not expect it, care less for the proud, and be least of all proud themselves. Let them live fittingly and harmoniously; let them worship God, think of him, and seek him, supported by faith, hope, and love. Let them wish for tranquility and a sure course of study for themselves and all their companions, and for themselves and whomever they can, a good mind and a peaceful life."

"It follows that I should say how the studious, who have resolved to live as has been said, ought to be educated. We are necessarily led to learning in a twofold way, by authority and by reason. In time authority is first, in reality reason. For what is put first in acting is one thing, what is valued more in desiring is another. So although the authority of good men seems more wholesome for the unskilled multitude, and reason more suited to the educated, still, because no man becomes skilled except from unskilled, and no unskilled man knows how he should present himself to his teachers and by what life he can become teachable, it comes about that for all who desire to learn great and hidden goods, only authority opens the door. Whoever has entered it follows without any hesitation the precepts of the best life, through which, when he has become teachable, he will then at last learn both how much reason those very things possess which he followed before reason, and what reason itself is, which, now firm and fit after the cradle of authority, he follows and grasps; and what intellect is, in which all things are, or rather which is itself all things; and what, beyond all things, is the principle of all things. To this knowledge few arrive in this life, and beyond it no one can advance even after this life. But those who, content with authority alone, apply themselves steadily only to good morals and right desires, either despising or unable to be educated in the liberal and best disciplines, I do not know how I could call them happy while they live among men; yet I believe without wavering that as soon as they have left this body, they will be freed the more easily or with the more difficulty according as they have lived more or less well."

"Authority is partly divine, partly human; but the true, firm, and highest is that which is called divine. In it one must fear the wonderful deceitfulness of the aerial animals, which by certain divinations about things pertaining to these senses of the body, and by some pronouncements, are accustomed most easily to deceive souls that are curious about perishing fortunes, or desirous of fragile powers, or fearful of empty wonders. That authority, then, is to be called divine which not only surpasses all human ability in sensible signs, but, acting as man himself, shows him how far it has lowered itself for his sake, and commands him not to be held by the senses, to which those things seem wonderful, but to fly up to the intellect, showing at the same time both how much it can do here, and why it does these things, and how little it values them. For it ought to teach its power by deeds, its mercy by humility, and its nature by precept; all of which are handed down more secretly and more firmly by the sacred rites into which we are initiated, in which the life of the good is most easily purified, not by the windings of disputations but by the authority of the mysteries. Human authority, however, generally deceives; yet it seems rightly to excel in those who, as far as the senses of the unskilled can grasp, give many proofs of their teaching and do not live otherwise than they teach one should live. If some gifts of fortune are added to them, by whose use they appear great and by whose contempt greater, it is altogether very difficult for anyone to be rightly blamed for believing them when they give precepts for living."

Here Alypius said: "A very great image of life has been set before our eyes by you, both fully and briefly; and although we long for it through your daily precepts, you have made us more eager and ardent today. I would wish, if it were possible, that not only we but all men should now reach it and cling to it, if these things were as easy to imitate as they are wonderful to hear. For somehow (may it be far from us at least!) the human mind, while on hearing these things it proclaims them heavenly, divine, and altogether true, behaves otherwise in desiring, so that it seems to me most true that either divine men live thus or men do so not without divine help." I said to him: "These precepts for living, which please you very much as always, Alypius, although expressed here in my words for the occasion, you know very well were not invented by me. For the books of great and almost divine men are full of them. I thought I should say this not for your sake but for these young men, so that they may not rightly despise them as if they had only my authority. For I do not want them to believe me at all except when I teach and give reasons; and I think it was in order to stir them up, for the greatness of the matter, that you put in that remark. For these things are not difficult for you to follow, since you seized them with such eagerness and entered on them with such an impulse of admirable nature that I have become your teacher in words, and you mine in things. For there is now no cause for lying, nor even an occasion; for I do not think you become more studious by false praise, and these are present who know both of us, and this discourse will be sent to one to whom none of us is unknown."

"But I think you believe there are fewer good men devoted to the best morals than is probable to me, if you do not think otherwise than you said. Many lie completely hidden; and in many who are not hidden, those very things that are wonderful are hidden; for they are in the mind, which cannot be perceived by sense, and which often, when it wants to fit in with the conversations of vicious men, says things it seems either to approve or to desire. It also does many things unwillingly, either to avoid men's hatred or to escape seeming awkward; and when we hear or see this, we can hardly judge otherwise than this sense reports, and so it comes about that we believe many are not such as they themselves and their intimates know them to be. I would like you to persuade yourself of this from certain great goods of mind in some of our friends, which only we know. For this error also rests on no small cause: that not a few suddenly turn to a good and wonderful life, and until they become known by some more conspicuous deeds, they are believed to be what they were. For, not to go further, who that had known these young men before would easily believe that they seek great things so zealously, that at this age they have suddenly declared such great enmity to pleasures? So let us drive this opinion from our mind; for that divine help too, which you fittingly and religiously placed at the end of your speech, carries out the office of its mercy more widely among all peoples than some think. But let us return, if you please, to the order of our discussion, and, since enough has been said about authority, let us see what reason means."

"Reason is that movement of the mind which is capable of distinguishing and connecting the things that are learned. To use it as a guide to understanding God, or even the soul, whether in us or everywhere, is possible for a very rare kind of men, for no other reason than that it is hard for anyone who has gone out into the business of these senses to return into himself. So, although in these deceptive things men try to do everything by reason, almost everyone is wholly ignorant of what reason itself is and of what sort it is. It seems strange, but so it is. It is enough to have said this for the present; for if I wanted now to show you so great a thing as it should be understood, I would be as foolish as arrogant, even if I professed that I had already perceived it. Still, as far as it has deigned to go forth into things that seem known to us, let us track it meanwhile, if we can, as the discussion we have undertaken requires."

"And first let us see where this word that is called reason is usually used; for this should move us most, that man himself was defined by the ancient wise men thus: man is a rational, mortal animal. Here, the genus being set down, which is called animal, we see two differentiae added, by which, I believe, man was to be reminded both where he must return and from what he must flee. For as the soul's going forth slipped down to mortal things, so its return ought to be into reason. By one word, 'rational,' he is separated from beasts; by the other, 'mortal,' from divine beings. So unless he holds to the former, he will be a beast; unless he turns away from the latter, he will not be divine. But since very learned men usually distinguish sharply and subtly between rationale and rationabile, this is by no means to be neglected for our purpose. For they called rational (rationale) what uses reason or can use it, and reasonable (rationabile) what has been made or said by reason. So we can call these baths and our conversation reasonable, but rational either the one who made them or us who are speaking. So reason proceeds from the rational soul into the things that are made or said reasonably."

"So I see two things in which the power and force of reason can be brought near even to the senses themselves: the works of men, which are seen, and words, which are heard. In both the mind uses a twofold messenger, as the body requires, one that of the eyes, the other that of the ears. So when we see something shaped with parts agreeing with each other, we say not absurdly that it appears reasonably; and likewise, when we hear something harmonize well, we do not hesitate to say that it sounds reasonably. But anyone would be laughed at if he said 'it smells reasonably' or 'it tastes reasonably,' except perhaps in things arranged by men for some purpose, that they should smell or taste or be hot or something else in that way: as if someone should say that a place from which snakes are driven by strong odors smells so reasonably, looking at the reason why it was done; or that a drink which a doctor has prepared is reasonably bitter or sweet; or that a bath which he has ordered to be warmed for a sick man is reasonably hot or tepid. But no one entering a garden and putting a rose to his nose dares to praise it thus: 'How reasonably it smells!' Not even if a doctor has ordered him to smell it (for then the prescription or the gift is called reasonable, but not the smell); nor is this because that scent is natural. For although a stew is seasoned by a cook, we can say it is reasonably seasoned, but that it tastes reasonably, when there is no outside reason but present pleasure is satisfied, is in no way said in ordinary speech. For if one asks about the person to whom the doctor gave a drink why it had to taste sweet to him, something else is brought in for which it is so, namely the kind of disease, which is no longer in that sense but is otherwise in the body. But if one licking something, spurred by the goad of the gullet, is asked why it is sweet, and answers, 'Because I like it' or 'Because I enjoy it,' no one will call it reasonably sweet, unless perhaps his enjoyment is necessary for something and what he chews was prepared that way for that reason."

"We have, as far as we could investigate, certain traces of reason in the senses, and, as regards sight and hearing, even in pleasure itself. The other senses usually claim this name not in their own pleasure but for the sake of something else, and that is the act of a rational animal done for some end. But as regards the eyes, in which the agreement of parts is called reasonable, it is usually called beautiful; as regards the ears, when we speak of a reasonable harmony and say that a rhythmical song is reasonably composed, it is now called by its own name, sweetness. But neither in beautiful things, as regards what attracts us, nor in the sweetness of the ears, when a struck string sounds clearly and purely, do we usually call it reasonable. It remains, then, that we admit that in the pleasure of these senses what pertains to reason is where there is a certain measure and modulation."

"So in this very building, considering each part well, we cannot fail to be offended that we see one door at the side and another almost in the middle, yet not placed in the middle. For in things that are built, an unequal measure of parts, when no necessity compels it, seems to do a kind of injury to the sight itself. But that inside three windows, one in the middle and two at the sides at equal intervals, pour light on the bath: how it delights us as we look more carefully, and how it carries the mind into itself! The thing is clear and need not be opened to you with many words. Hence the architects themselves now call this 'reason' in their own term, and say that parts placed discordantly 'have no reason.' This extends widely and spreads into almost all the arts and works of men. Now in poems, in which we likewise say there is a reason pertaining to the pleasure of the ears, who does not perceive that measure is the craftsman of all this sweetness? But when an actor dances, since to those who watch well all those gestures are signs of things, although a certain rhythmic movement of the limbs delights the eyes by that same measure, the dance is still called reasonable because it signifies and shows something well, apart from the pleasure of the senses. For if he makes a winged Venus and a cloaked Cupid, even though he depicts it with wonderful movement and placing of the limbs, he does not seem to offend the eyes, but through the eyes the mind, to which those signs of things are shown; for the eyes would be offended if he did not move beautifully. For that pertained to sense, in which the soul, by the very fact that it is mixed with the body, perceives pleasure. So sense is one thing, what comes through sense another; for beautiful movement soothes the sense, but beautiful signification in the movement soothes, through the sense, the mind alone. This is noticed even more easily in the ears; for whatever sounds pleasantly pleases and attracts the hearing itself; but what is well signified by the same sound is brought by the messenger of the ears but is referred to the mind alone. So when we hear those verses, 'why winter suns hasten so to dip themselves in the Ocean, or what delay stands in the way of the slow nights,' we praise the meter in one way and the thought in another, and we do not say with the same understanding 'it sounds reasonably' and 'it is said reasonably.'"

"So there are now three kinds of things in which the reasonable appears: one in deeds directed to some end, the second in teaching, the third in delighting. The first warns us to do nothing rashly, the second to teach rightly, the last to contemplate happily; the former belongs to morals, these two to the disciplines, which we are now discussing. For that in us which is rational, that is, which uses reason and either makes or follows reasonable things, because it was bound by a kind of natural bond in fellowship with those with whom reason itself was common to it (and man could not be most firmly united to man unless they talked together and so, as it were, poured their minds and thoughts into each other), saw that words must be imposed on things, that is, certain signifying sounds, so that, since they could not perceive each other's minds, they might use sense as an interpreter to unite them to themselves. But the words of the absent could not be heard; so that reason produced letters, marking and distinguishing all the sounds of the mouth and tongue. But it could do none of these things if the multitude of things seemed to extend infinitely without some fixed limit. So the usefulness of numbering was noticed under great necessity. When these two had been discovered, the profession of copyists and calculators was born, a kind of infancy of grammar, which Varro calls litteratio; what it is called in Greek I do not quite recall at present."

"Then reason, advancing further, noticed that of those same sounds of the mouth by which we spoke and which it had already marked with letters, some flowed from the throat without any collision, as it were unknotted and simple, by a variously controlled opening; others still held some sound by a different pressure of the mouth; and the last could not break forth unless the first were joined to them. So it named the letters, in the order in which they have been set out, vowels, semivowels, and mutes; then it marked syllables; then words were arranged into eight kinds and forms, and all their movement, completeness, and joining were distinguished skillfully and subtly. From there, not forgetful of numbers and measure, it turned its mind to the various durations of the sounds and syllables themselves, and found that some lengths of time were double, others single, by which long and short syllables were extended. It marked these too and arranged them into fixed rules."

"Grammar could now have been complete; but because by its very name it proclaims that it professes letters (hence in Latin it is called litteratura), it came about that whatever worthy of memory was committed to letters necessarily belonged to it. So one name indeed, but a thing infinite, manifold, more full of cares than of pleasure or truth, was added to this discipline: history, laborious not so much for the historians themselves as for the grammarians. For who would put up with it that a man should seem ignorant who has not heard that Daedalus flew, while he who invented it does not seem a liar, he who believed it a fool, and he who asks about it shameless? Or, in which matter I usually pity our friends greatly, that if they have not answered what the mother of Euryalus was called, they are accused of ignorance, while they do not dare to call those who ask them such things vain, silly, and idly curious?"

"So that reason, grammar having been perfected and arranged, was prompted to seek and attend to that very power by which it had produced the art; for by defining, dividing, and gathering it had not only arranged and ordered it but had also defended it from every creeping in of falsehood. When, then, would it pass on to building other things, unless it first distinguished, marked, and arranged its own machines and instruments, as it were, and brought forth the discipline of disciplines itself, which they call dialectic? This teaches how to teach, this teaches how to learn; in it reason itself shows and discloses what it is, what it wants, what it can do. It knows how to know; it alone not only wants but is also able to make men knowers. But since foolish men, in matters which they are urged to rightly, usefully, and honorably, generally follow not that most pure truth itself, which a rare mind sees, but their own feelings and habit, they needed not only to be taught as far as they could but often and most of all to be moved. This part of itself which did this, more full of necessity than of purity, with a lap very full of delights to scatter to the people so that they might deign to be led to their own advantage, it called rhetoric. Thus far that part which is called reasonable in signifying has been advanced by liberal studies and disciplines."

"From here that reason wished to snatch itself up to the most blessed contemplation of divine things themselves. But so as not to fall from a height, it sought steps and built itself a road through its own possessions and order. For it desired a beauty which it alone and simple could behold without these eyes; it was hindered by the senses. So it turned its gaze a little toward those very senses which, crying out that they possessed the truth, were calling it back with untimely noise as it hurried on to other things. And first it began with the ears, because they said that those very words were theirs with which it had already made grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. But reason, most powerful in distinguishing, quickly saw what difference there was between a sound and that of which it was a sign. It understood that nothing pertained to the judgment of the ears but sound, and that sound was threefold: either in the voice of a living being, or in what breath makes in instruments, or in what is produced by striking. To the first pertained tragic or comic actors or choruses of any kind and absolutely all who sing with their own voice; the second was assigned to flutes and similar instruments; to the third were given citharas, lyres, cymbals, and everything that is musical by being struck."

"But it saw that this material was most worthless unless the sounds were shaped by a fixed measure of time and a controlled variety of high and low pitch. It recognized that from here came those seeds which in grammar, when it was turning over syllables with careful consideration, it had called feet and accents; and because in words themselves it was easy to notice the shortness and length of syllables scattered in speech in nearly equal numbers, it tried to arrange those feet into fixed orders and join them; and in this, first following the sense itself, it imposed measured joints, which they call caesuras and members. And so that the course of the feet should not roll on further than its judgment could sustain, it set a limit from which it should turn back, and from that very turning it called it verse. But what was not measured by a fixed end, yet ran in reasonably ordered feet, it marked with the name of rhythm, which in Latin could be called nothing but number. So poets were born from it. Seeing in them great moments not only of sounds but also of words and things, it honored them very highly and gave them power over whatever reasonable lies they wished. And since they derived their stock from that first discipline, it allowed the grammarians to be their judges."

"In this fourth step, then, whether in rhythms or in modulation itself, it understood that numbers reign and perfect the whole. It examined most carefully of what kind they were; it found them divine and eternal, especially since with their help it had woven together all the preceding things. And now it bore it very hard that their splendor and clarity should be discolored by the bodily matter of sounds. And since what the mind sees is always present and is approved as immortal (and numbers appeared to be of this kind), while sound, because it is a sensible thing, passes into the past and is impressed on memory, by a reasonable lie, reason now favoring the poets, it was invented that the Muses are the daughters of Jupiter and Memory. Hence this discipline, sharing in sense and intellect, found the name of music."

"From here it set out into the riches of the eyes, and surveying earth and sky, it perceived that nothing pleased it but beauty, and in beauty shapes, in shapes measures, in measures numbers; and it asked itself whether such a line and such a roundness, or any other form and shape, were there such as the intelligence contained. It found them far inferior, and that what the eyes saw was in no respect to be compared with what the mind discerned. These too, distinguished and arranged, it reduced to a discipline and called geometry. The movement of the heavens moved it greatly and invited it to consider it carefully. There too, through the most constant changes of seasons, through the fixed and defined courses of the stars, through the measured spaces of their intervals, it understood that nothing ruled but that measure and those numbers; and, likewise defining and distinguishing and binding them into order, it produced astronomy, a great argument for the religious and a torment for the curious."

"In all these disciplines, then, everything presented itself to it as numerical; yet these stood out more manifestly in those measures which, thinking and turning them over within itself, it beheld as most true, while in the things that are sensed it recognized rather their shadows and traces. Here it lifted itself up greatly and presumed much; it dared to prove the soul immortal. It handled everything carefully; it perceived that it could do very much, and that whatever it could do, it could do by numbers. A certain wonder moved it, and it began to suspect that it might itself be that very number by which all things are numbered, or, if not, that that number was there where it was striving to arrive. And this it grasped with all its strength, which was to be the revealer of all truth, and that Proteus whom Alypius mentioned when we were inquiring about the Academics was as it were in its hands. For the false images of the things we number, flowing down from that most hidden one by which we number, snatch thought to themselves and often make it slip away when it is already held."

"If anyone does not yield to them, and reduces all those things which are spread widely and variously through so many disciplines to one simple, true, and certain thing, he is most worthy of the name of learned, and not rashly does he now seek those divine things, no longer only to be believed but also to be contemplated, understood, and retained. But whoever, whether still a slave of desires and gaping after perishing things, or already fleeing them and living chastely, does not know what nothing is, what formless matter is, what a lifeless formed thing is, what a body is, what the lifeless in a body is, what place is, what time is, what is in place, what is in time, what motion according to place is, what motion not according to place is, what stable motion is, what eternity is, what it is to be neither in place nor nowhere, what it is to be beyond time and always, what it is both to be nowhere and to be nowhere not, and never to be and never not to be: whoever, I say, not knowing these things, wishes to inquire and dispute, I do not say about that highest God, who is better known by not knowing, but about his own soul, will err as much as it is possible to err. But he will know these things more easily who has grasped simple and intelligible numbers; and he will grasp these who, strong in talent, at leisure by the privilege of age or of some good fortune, and vehemently on fire with zeal, has followed the order of disciplines we have described as far as is sufficient. For since all those liberal arts are learned partly for the use of life and partly for the knowledge and contemplation of things, it is very difficult to attain their use except for one who, very gifted from childhood itself, has applied himself most earnestly and constantly."

"But do not, mother, I beg you, let this as it were immense forest of things frighten you away from what we need of them for what we are seeking. For certain things will be chosen from all of them, very few in number but very powerful, and, though hard for many to know, they will be as easy for you, whose talent is new to me every day, and whose mind, whether by age or by wonderful temperance most removed from all trifles and emerging from the great stain of the body, I know has risen high within itself, as they will be hard for the slowest and those who live most wretchedly. For if I said that you will easily attain to a speech free from faults of pronunciation and language, I would surely lie. For even I, who had great need to learn these things thoroughly, am still criticized by the Italians for many sounds of words, and they in turn are criticized by me as regards the sound itself. For it is one thing to be secure by art, another by birth. As for what we call solecisms, perhaps any learned man who pays careful attention will find them in my speech; for there was someone who very skillfully persuaded me that even Cicero himself committed some faults of this kind. And as for barbarisms, in our times a kind has been discovered such that even that speech of his by which Rome was saved seems barbarous. But you, despising these things, either childish or not pertaining to you, will so know the almost divine power and nature of grammar that you will seem to have held its soul and left its body to the eloquent."

"I would say this also of the other arts of this kind; and if you perhaps despise them entirely, I advise you, as far as I dare as your son and as far as you allow, to guard firmly and carefully that faith of yours which you received through the venerable mysteries, and then to remain constantly and watchfully in this life and these morals. As for the most obscure and yet divine matters: how God both does no evil and is almighty, and so many evils happen; for what good he made the world, since he was in need of nothing; and whether evil always existed or began in time; and, if it always existed, whether it was under God's control; and if it was, whether this world also always existed, in which that evil was tamed by divine order. If this world began to exist at some time, how was evil held by God's power before it existed, and what need was there for the world to be built, in which evil, which God's power was already restraining, should be shut up for the punishment of souls? If there was a time when evil was not under God's dominion, what suddenly happened that had not happened through eternal ages past? For to say that a new plan arose in God, not to say impious, is most foolish. But if we say that evil was troublesome and as it were wicked toward God, as some think, no learned man will keep from laughing and no unlearned man will fail to be angry; for what harm could that nature of evil, whatever it is, do to God? If they say it could not, there will be no reason for building the world; if they say it could, it is an inexpiable crime to believe that God can be violated, and not even in such a way that he provided by his power that his substance should not be violated; for they admit that the soul pays penalties here, while they want there to be no difference at all between its substance and God's. But if we say that this world was not made, it is impious and ungrateful to believe it, lest it follow that God did not build it. So about these and such matters nothing is to be inquired except by that order of learning, or not at all."

"And so that no one may think we have embraced something very wide, I say this more plainly and briefly: no one ought to aspire to the knowledge of these things without that twofold knowledge, as it were, of good disputation and of the power of numbers. If anyone thinks even this too much, let him know numbers alone very well, or dialectic alone. If even this is endless, let him know perfectly only what one is in numbers and how much it can do, not yet in that highest law and highest order of all things, but in the things we perceive and do everywhere every day. For philosophy itself takes up this learning, and in it he will find nothing more than what one is, but far more deeply and far more divinely. Its question is twofold, one about the soul, the other about God. The first makes us know ourselves, the other our origin. The former is sweeter to us, the latter dearer; the former makes us worthy of the happy life, the latter makes us happy; the first is for learners, the latter for the already learned. This is the order of the studies of wisdom, by which each becomes fit to understand the order of things, that is, to discern the two worlds and the very Father of the universe, of whom there is no knowledge in the soul except to know how it does not know him."

"Keeping this order, then, the soul now given over to philosophy first looks into itself, and, having been persuaded by that learning that reason is either its own or itself, and that in reason either nothing is better and more powerful than numbers or reason is nothing but number, it will speak thus with itself: 'By a certain inner and hidden movement of mine I can distinguish or connect the things that are to be learned, and this power of mine is called reason. But what is to be distinguished, except what is thought to be one and is not, or certainly is not as much one as it is thought? Likewise, why is anything to be connected, except that it may become one as far as it can? So both in distinguishing and in connecting I want one and I love one; but when I distinguish, I want it purified, when I connect, whole. In the former, foreign things are avoided; in the latter, proper things are joined, so that something one and perfect may come to be. For a stone to be a stone, all its parts and its whole nature have been solidified into one. What of a tree? Would it not cease to be a tree if it were not one? What of the members and organs of any animal and whatever it consists of? Certainly if they suffer a divorce from unity, it will not be an animal. What do friends strive for but to be one? And the more one they are, the more friends they are. A people is one city, for which dissension is dangerous. And what is to dissent but not to think one thing? From many soldiers one army is made. Is not any multitude the less easily defeated the more it comes together into one? Hence the very coming together into one is called a wedge (cuneus), as if co-uneus. What of all love? Does it not want to become one with what it loves, and, if it succeeds, become one with it? Pleasure itself delights more vehemently for no other reason than that bodies loving each other are brought together into one. Why is pain harmful? Because it strives to tear apart what was one. So it is troublesome and dangerous to become one with what can be separated.'"

"'From many things lying about before, then gathered into one form, I make one house. I am better, since I make it and it is made; better precisely because I make it; there is no doubt that in this I am better than the house. But I am not in this better than a swallow or a little bee (for the one builds nests skillfully and the other honeycombs); I am better than these because I am a rational animal. But if reason lies in fixed measures, is what birds build less fittingly and harmoniously measured? On the contrary, it is most rhythmical. So I am better not by making rhythmical things but by knowing numbers. What then? Could they make rhythmical things without knowing? They certainly could. How is this taught? From the fact that we too fit our tongue to the teeth and palate by fixed measures so that letters and words break forth from the mouth, and yet when we speak we do not think by what movement of the mouth we must do it. Then, what good singer, even if unskilled in music, does not keep in memory while singing, by natural sense itself, the rhythm and melody he has perceived, than which what can be done more rhythmically? The unlearned man does not know it, yet he does it, nature working. When then is he better and to be ranked above cattle? When he knows what he does. Nothing ranks me above cattle except that I am a rational animal.'"

"'How then is reason immortal, and I am at the same time defined as something rational and mortal? Or is reason not immortal? But one is to two as two is to four is a most true ratio; and this ratio was no more true yesterday than today, nor will it be more true tomorrow or a year from now; nor, if this whole world collapsed, could this ratio cease to be. For it is always such; but this world neither had yesterday nor will have tomorrow what it has today, nor even on this very day, or in the space of one hour, has it had the sun in the same place; so, since nothing in it remains, it has nothing in the same way even for a short space of time. So if reason is immortal, and I, who distinguish or connect all these things, am reason, that by which I am called mortal is not mine; or if the soul is not the same as reason, and yet I use reason and am better through reason, I must flee from the worse to the better, from the mortal to the immortal.' These and many other things the well-educated soul speaks and turns over with itself, which I do not want to pursue, lest, while I wish to teach you order, I exceed measure, which is the father of order. For step by step it leads itself to morals and the best life, no longer by faith alone but by sure reason. To one who carefully considers the force and power of numbers it will seem most unworthy and most lamentable that by its own knowledge a verse should run well and a cithara harmonize, while its own life and itself, which is the soul, follows a crooked road and, with lust ruling over it, is out of tune with the most shameful din of vices."

"But when it has composed and ordered itself and made itself harmonious and beautiful, it will dare to see God, the very source from which all truth flows, and the very Father of truth. Great God, what will those eyes be, how sound, how fair, how strong, how constant, how serene, how blessed! And what is it that they see? What, I ask, should we think, judge, say? Everyday words come to mind, and all are soiled by the meanest things. I will say nothing more than that we are promised the sight of a beauty by imitation of which other things are beautiful, by comparison with which they are ugly. Whoever has seen it (and he will see it who lives well, prays well, studies well), how will it trouble him why one who wishes to have children has none, another has them abundantly, another exposes them, hates them before they are born, loves them once born? How will it not conflict with him that nothing will be that is not with God, from which it follows necessarily that all things happen by order, and yet that God is not prayed to in vain? Finally, when will any burdens or dangers or disdains or flatteries of fortune move this man? For in this sensible world one must consider earnestly what time and place are, so that what delights in a part, whether of place or of time, may be understood to be much less good than the whole of which it is a part; and again, so that it may be clear to a learned man that what offends in a part offends for no other reason than that the whole is not seen, with which that part wonderfully harmonizes; while in that intelligible world any part is beautiful and perfect like the whole. These things will be said more fully if your studies resolve to keep, as I urge and hope, either the order we have described or another, perhaps shorter and more convenient, but still right order, and keep it altogether diligently and constantly."

"That we may be allowed this, the greatest effort must be given to the best morals; for our God will not be able to hear us otherwise, but he will most easily hear those who live well. Let us pray, then, not that riches or honors or such fleeting and tottering things, which pass away at any resistance, may come to us, but those things that make us good and happy. That these prayers may be fulfilled most devoutly, we lay this task above all on you, mother, by whose prayers I believe and affirm without doubt that God gave me this mind, that I put nothing at all before finding the truth, want nothing else, think of nothing else, love nothing else; and I do not cease to believe that we shall obtain so great a good, which we have desired through your merit, by your asking too. Now, Alypius, what shall I urge or advise you? You are not excessive, because loving such things, however much, can perhaps always be rightly called too little, but never too much."

Here Alypius said: "You have truly brought it about that the memory of the most learned and great men, which sometimes seemed incredible because of the greatness of the things, we not only do not hold doubtful, through daily consideration and through this present admiration we have for you, but could even swear to it if necessary. For what? Has not that venerable and almost divine discipline of Pythagoras, which has rightly been both held and proved so, been opened today by you almost before our eyes, when you showed both the rules of life and not so much the paths of knowledge as its very fields and clear seas, and, what that man held in great veneration, the very sanctuaries of truth, where they are, what they are like, and what sort of men should seek them, so briefly and so plainly that, although we suspect and believe that you have still more secret things, we would think ourselves not without shamelessness if we thought anything more should be demanded?"

"I accept this gladly," I said, "for it is not so much your words, which are not true, as the true mind in the words that delights and stirs me; and it is good that we have decided to send this writing to one who is accustomed gladly to tell many lies about us. And if others perhaps read it, I do not fear that they will be angry with you. For who would not most kindly pardon the error of one who loves when he judges? But as for your mention of Pythagoras, I believe it came into your mind by some hidden divine order. For a very necessary thing had completely slipped my mind, which I usually admire in that man (if anything committed to writing is to be believed; though who would not believe Varro?) and, as you know, praise almost daily: that he handed on the discipline of governing the state to his hearers last, when they were already learned, already perfect, already wise, already happy. For he saw such great waves there that he would not entrust them to anyone but a man who would both avoid the rocks in governing almost divinely and, if everything else failed, would himself become like a rock to those waves. For of the wise man alone can it be said most truly: 'He, like a rock of the sea, stands unmoved,' and the rest that has been said in splendid verses to this effect." Here the discussion came to an end, and, all being glad and full of hope, we dismissed the gathering, since the night lamp had already been brought in.