The Confessions of St. Augustine
I was already, displeasing even such as myself? with innumerable lies
deceiving my tutor, my masters, my parents, from love of play, eagerness
to see vain shows and restlessness to imitate them! Thefts also I
committed, from my parents' cellar and table, enslaved by greediness, or
that I might have to give to boys, who sold me their play, which all
the while they liked no less than I. In this play, too, I often
sought unfair conquests, conquered myself meanwhile by vain desire of
preeminence. And what could I so ill endure, or, when I detected it,
upbraided I so fiercely, as that I was doing to others? and for which
if, detected, I was upbraided, I chose rather to quarrel than to yield.
And is this the innocence of boyhood? Not so, Lord, not so; I cry Thy
mercy, my God. For these very sins, as riper years succeed, these very
sins are transferred from tutors and masters, from nuts and balls and
sparrows, to magistrates and kings, to gold and manors and slaves, just
as severer punishments displace the cane. It was the low stature then of
childhood which Thou our King didst commend as an emblem of lowliness,
when Thou saidst, Of such is the kingdom of heaven.
Yet, Lord, to Thee, the Creator and Governor of the universe, most
excellent and most good, thanks were due to Thee our God, even hadst
Thou destined for me boyhood only. For even then I was, I lived, and
felt; and had an implanted providence over my well-being--a trace of
that mysterious Unity whence I was derived; I guarded by the inward
sense the entireness of my senses, and in these minute pursuits, and in
my thoughts on things minute, I learnt to delight in truth, I hated to
be deceived, had a vigorous memory, was gifted with speech, was
soothed by friendship, avoided pain, baseness, ignorance. In so small a
creature, what was not wonderful, not admirable? But all are gifts of
my God: it was not I who gave them me; and good these are, and these
together are myself. Good, then, is He that made me, and He is my good;
and before Him will I exult for every good which of a boy I had. For it
was my sin, that not in Him, but in His creatures--myself and others--I
sought for pleasures, sublimities, truths, and so fell headlong into
sorrows, confusions, errors. Thanks be to Thee, my joy and my glory
and my confidence, my God, thanks be to Thee for Thy gifts; but do Thou
preserve them to me. For so wilt Thou preserve me, and those things
shall be enlarged and perfected which Thou hast given me, and I myself
shall be with Thee, since even to be Thou hast given me.
BOOK II
I will now call to mind my past foulness, and the carnal corruptions of
my soul; not because I love them, but that I may love Thee, O my God.
For love of Thy love I do it; reviewing my most wicked ways in the very
bitterness of my remembrance, that Thou mayest grow sweet unto me (Thou
sweetness never failing, Thou blissful and assured sweetness); and
gathering me again out of that my dissipation, wherein I was torn
piecemeal, while turned from Thee, the One Good, I lost myself among a
multiplicity of things. For I even burnt in my youth heretofore, to be
satiated in things below; and I dared to grow wild again, with these
various and shadowy loves: my beauty consumed away, and I stank in Thine
eyes; pleasing myself, and desirous to please in the eyes of men.
And what was it that I delighted in, but to love, and be loved? but
I kept not the measure of love, of mind to mind, friendship's bright
boundary: but out of the muddy concupiscence of the flesh, and the
bubblings of youth, mists fumed up which beclouded and overcast my
heart, that I could not discern the clear brightness of love from the
fog of lustfulness. Both did confusedly boil in me, and hurried my
unstayed youth over the precipice of unholy desires, and sunk me in a
gulf of flagitiousnesses. Thy wrath had gathered over me, and I knew it
not. I was grown deaf by the clanking of the chain of my mortality, the
punishment of the pride of my soul, and I strayed further from Thee,
and Thou lettest me alone, and I was tossed about, and wasted, and
dissipated, and I boiled over in my fornications, and Thou heldest Thy
peace, O Thou my tardy joy! Thou then heldest Thy peace, and I wandered
further and further from Thee, into more and more fruitless seed-plots
of sorrows, with a proud dejectedness, and a restless weariness.
Oh! that some one had then attempered my disorder, and turned to account
the fleeting beauties of these, the extreme points of Thy creation! had
put a bound to their pleasureableness, that so the tides of my youth
might have cast themselves upon the marriage shore, if they could not be
calmed, and kept within the object of a family, as Thy law prescribes,
O Lord: who this way formest the offspring of this our death, being
able with a gentle hand to blunt the thorns which were excluded from Thy
paradise? For Thy omnipotency is not far from us, even when we be far
from Thee. Else ought I more watchfully to have heeded the voice from
the clouds: Nevertheless such shall have trouble in the flesh, but I
spare you. And it is good for a man not to touch a woman. And, he that
is unmarried thinketh of the things of the Lord, how he may please the
Lord; but he that is married careth for the things of this world, how he
may please his wife.
To these words I should have listened more attentively, and being
severed for the kingdom of heaven's sake, had more happily awaited Thy
embraces; but I, poor wretch, foamed like a troubled sea, following the
rushing of my own tide, forsaking Thee, and exceeded all Thy limits; yet
I escaped not Thy scourges. For what mortal can? For Thou wert ever with
me mercifully rigorous, and besprinkling with most bitter alloy all my
unlawful pleasures: that I might seek pleasures without alloy. But where
to find such, I could not discover, save in Thee, O Lord, who teachest
by sorrow, and woundest us, to heal; and killest us, lest we die from
Thee. Where was I, and how far was I exiled from the delights of Thy
house, in that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when the madness
of lust (to which human shamelessness giveth free licence, though
unlicensed by Thy laws) took the rule over me, and I resigned myself
wholly to it? My friends meanwhile took no care by marriage to save my
fall; their only care was that I should learn to speak excellently, and
be a persuasive orator.
For that year were my studies intermitted: whilst after my return from
Madaura (a neighbour city, whither I had journeyed to learn grammar and
rhetoric), the expenses for a further journey to Carthage were being
provided for me; and that rather by the resolution than the means of my
father, who was but a poor freeman of Thagaste. To whom tell I this? not
to Thee, my God; but before Thee to mine own kind, even to that small
portion of mankind as may light upon these writings of mine. And to what
purpose? that whosoever reads this, may think out of what depths we are
to cry unto Thee. For what is nearer to Thine ears than a confessing
heart, and a life of faith? Who did not extol my father, for that beyond
the ability of his means, he would furnish his son with all necessaries
for a far journey for his studies' sake? For many far abler citizens
did no such thing for their children. But yet this same father had no
concern how I grew towards Thee, or how chaste I were; so that I were
but copious in speech, however barren I were to Thy culture, O God, who
art the only true and good Lord of Thy field, my heart.
But while in that my sixteenth year I lived with my parents, leaving all
school for a while (a season of idleness being interposed through the
narrowness of my parents' fortunes), the briers of unclean desires grew
rank over my head, and there was no hand to root them out. When that my
father saw me at the baths, now growing towards manhood, and endued
with a restless youthfulness, he, as already hence anticipating his
descendants, gladly told it to my mother; rejoicing in that tumult of
the senses wherein the world forgetteth Thee its Creator, and becometh
enamoured of Thy creature, instead of Thyself, through the fumes of that
invisible wine of its self-will, turning aside and bowing down to the
very basest things. But in my mother's breast Thou hadst already begun
Thy temple, and the foundation of Thy holy habitation, whereas my
father was as yet but a Catechumen, and that but recently. She then was
startled with a holy fear and trembling; and though I was not as yet
baptised, feared for me those crooked ways in which they walk who turn
their back to Thee, and not their face.
Woe is me! and dare I say that Thou heldest Thy peace, O my God, while I
wandered further from Thee? Didst Thou then indeed hold Thy peace to me?
And whose but Thine were these words which by my mother, Thy faithful
one, Thou sangest in my ears? Nothing whereof sunk into my heart, so as
to do it. For she wished, and I remember in private with great anxiety
warned me, "not to commit fornication; but especially never to defile
another man's wife." These seemed to me womanish advices, which I should
blush to obey. But they were Thine, and I knew it not: and I thought
Thou wert silent and that it was she who spake; by whom Thou wert not
silent unto me; and in her wast despised by me, her son, the son of Thy
handmaid, Thy servant. But I knew it not; and ran headlong with such
blindness, that amongst my equals I was ashamed of a less shamelessness,
when I heard them boast of their flagitiousness, yea, and the more
boasting, the more they were degraded: and I took pleasure, not only in
the pleasure of the deed, but in the praise. What is worthy of dispraise
but vice? But I made myself worse than I was, that I might not be
dispraised; and when in any thing I had not sinned as the abandoned
ones, I would say that I had done what I had not done, that I might not
seem contemptible in proportion as I was innocent; or of less account,
the more chaste.
Behold with what companions I walked the streets of Babylon, and
wallowed in the mire thereof, as if in a bed of spices and precious
ointments. And that I might cleave the faster to its very centre, the
invisible enemy trod me down, and seduced me, for that I was easy to be
seduced. Neither did the mother of my flesh (who had now fled out of
the centre of Babylon, yet went more slowly in the skirts thereof as
she advised me to chastity, so heed what she had heard of me from her
husband, as to restrain within the bounds of conjugal affection, if it
could not be pared away to the quick) what she felt to be pestilent
at present and for the future dangerous. She heeded not this, for she
feared lest a wife should prove a clog and hindrance to my hopes. Not
those hopes of the world to come, which my mother reposed in Thee; but
the hope of learning, which both my parents were too desirous I should
attain; my father, because he had next to no thought of Thee, and of
me but vain conceits; my mother, because she accounted that those
usual courses of learning would not only be no hindrance, but even some
furtherance towards attaining Thee. For thus I conjecture, recalling, as
well as I may, the disposition of my parents. The reins, meantime, were
slackened to me, beyond all temper of due severity, to spend my time in
sport, yea, even unto dissoluteness in whatsoever I affected. And in all
was a mist, intercepting from me, O my God, the brightness of Thy truth;
and mine iniquity burst out as from very fatness.
Theft is punished by Thy law, O Lord, and the law written in the hearts
of men, which iniquity itself effaces not. For what thief will abide a
thief? not even a rich thief, one stealing through want. Yet I lusted to
thieve, and did it, compelled by no hunger, nor poverty, but through a