Confessions 1.25–2.18

But woe to you, torrent of human custom! Who withstands you? How long before you dry up? How long will you roll the children of Eve into the great and fearful sea, which even those who have climbed aboard the wood can scarcely cross? Did I not read in you of Jupiter both thundering and committing adultery? Of course he could not do both; but it was written so that real adultery might have authority for imitation, with false thunder acting as its pander. And which of the cloaked schoolmasters listens with a sober ear to a man of their own dust crying out and saying: “Homer invented these things and transferred human things to the gods; I would rather he had transferred divine things to us”? But it is truer to say that he did indeed invent them, but by attributing divine qualities to disgraceful men, so that disgraceful deeds would not be thought disgraceful, and whoever did them would seem to imitate not abandoned men but the gods of heaven.

And yet, hellish torrent, the sons of men are thrown into you, with fees paid, so that they may learn these things; and a great to-do is made when this is done publicly in the forum, in full view of laws that decree salaries over and above the fees; and you strike your rocks and roar, saying, “From this words are learned; from this is gained eloquence, most necessary for persuading people and setting out one's views.” So we would not have known these words, “shower,” “golden,” “lap,” “deceit,” “temples of heaven,” and the other words written in that passage, unless Terence had brought on stage a worthless youth who set Jupiter before himself as an example of debauchery, while he looks at a painting on a wall that showed “how Jupiter, they say, once sent a golden shower into Danae's lap and played a trick on a woman.” And see how he excites himself to lust as if by heavenly instruction: “And what a god!” he says, “who shakes the temples of heaven with a mighty crash. And I, poor little man, should I not do it? Indeed I did it, and gladly.” Not at all, not at all are these words learned more easily through this filth; rather, through these words the filth is committed more confidently. I do not blame the words, which are like choice and precious vessels, but the wine of error that was poured for us in them by drunken teachers; and if we did not drink, we were beaten, and we were not allowed to appeal to any sober judge. And yet, my God, in whose sight my remembering is now free of fear, I learned these things gladly and delighted in them, wretch that I was, and for this I was called a boy of great promise.

Allow me, my God, to say something about my talent, your gift, and the follies on which I wore it away. For a task was set before me that was quite troubling to my soul, with the reward of praise and the fear of disgrace or beatings: to speak the words of Juno, angry and grieving that she “could not turn the king of the Trojans away from Italy,” words I had heard Juno never spoke. But we were forced to follow, astray, in the footsteps of poetic fictions, and to say in prose something like what the poet had said in verse. And the one who spoke most praiseworthily was the one in whom the passion of anger and grief stood out most lifelike, fitting the dignity of the character portrayed, with words that clothed the thoughts appropriately. What was that to me, my true life, my God? Why was I applauded when I declaimed, above many of my contemporaries and fellow students? See, was not all that smoke and wind? Was there nothing else on which my talent and my tongue could be exercised? Your praises, Lord, your praises through your Scriptures would have held up the young shoot of my heart, and it would not have been snatched away through empty trifles, a shameful prey for the birds. For there is more than one way of sacrificing to the rebel angels.

What wonder, then, that I was carried away into vanities and went out away from you, my God, when men were held up to me for imitation who, if they related some deeds of theirs that were not evil with a barbarism or a solecism, were covered with confusion when rebuked, but if they narrated their lusts in correct and well-ordered words, fully and elegantly, were praised and boasted of it? You see these things, Lord, and are silent, “long-suffering and abounding in mercy and truth.” Will you be silent forever? Even now you draw out of this most monstrous abyss the soul that seeks you and thirsts for your delights, whose heart says to you, “I have sought your face; your face, Lord, will I seek.” For I was far from your face in darkened affection. For it is not by feet or by distances of place that one goes away from you or returns to you. Did that younger son of yours look for horses or chariots or ships, or fly away on visible wings, or make his journey by moving his knees, so that, living in a far country, he might squander prodigally what you, a sweet father, had given him when he set out? Sweet because you had given, and sweeter still to him when he returned in need. So it is in lustful affection, that is, darkened affection, that one is far from your face.

See, Lord my God, and see patiently, as you do see, how carefully the sons of men observe the conventions of letters and syllables received from earlier speakers, and neglect the eternal conventions of everlasting salvation received from you; so that one who holds or teaches those old agreements about sounds, if against the rules of grammar he says “’uman being” without aspirating the first syllable, displeases people more than if, against your commandments, he hates a human being, though he is one himself. As if anyone could feel that any enemy is more harmful to him than the very hatred with which he is roused against him, or as if anyone could do more damage by persecuting another than he does to his own heart by his enmity. And certainly the knowledge of letters is not more inward than the conscience inscribed within us, that one should not do to another what one would not wish to suffer. How hidden you are, dwelling on high in silence, God, who alone are great, scattering by an unwearied law the penalty of blindness upon unlawful desires! When a man in search of a reputation for eloquence, before a human judge with a crowd of people standing around, attacks his enemy with the most monstrous hatred, he takes the greatest care not to say “among the men” with a slip of the tongue; but that he may not, by the fury of his mind, take a man away from among men, he takes no care.

On the threshold of such morals I lay as a wretched boy, and that was the training ground for this arena, where I was more afraid of committing a barbarism than careful, if I committed one, not to envy those who did not. I say these things and confess them to you, my God, things for which I was praised by those whom I then thought it the honorable life to please. For I did not see the whirlpool of filth into which I had been cast away from your eyes. For in their eyes, what was fouler than I, when I even displeased such people by deceiving my tutor and teachers and parents with countless lies, out of love of play, eagerness to watch trifling shows, and restless desire to imitate the stage? I also committed thefts from my parents' cellar and table, either at the command of my gluttony or so as to have something to give to boys who sold me their play, though they certainly enjoyed it just as much. In that play too I often hunted for fraudulent victories, myself conquered by a vain desire to excel. For what was I so unwilling to suffer, and what did I so fiercely denounce if I caught it, as the very thing I was doing to others? And if I was caught and denounced, I preferred to rage rather than give in. Is this the innocence of boyhood? It is not, Lord, it is not, I beg you, my God. For these are the very things that pass, from tutors and teachers, nuts and balls and sparrows, to prefects and kings, gold, estates, and slaves; these same things altogether, as the later ages succeed, just as greater punishments succeed the cane. So it was the sign of humility in the small stature of childhood that you, our King, commended when you said, “Of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

Yet thanks be to you, Lord, our God, most excellent and best founder and ruler of the universe, even if you had willed me to be no more than a boy. For even then I existed, I lived and I felt, and I cared for my own well-being, a trace of that most hidden unity from which I came. With an inner sense I guarded the soundness of my senses, and even in my small thoughts about small things I delighted in truth. I did not want to be deceived, I had a strong memory, I was being equipped with speech, I was soothed by friendship, I shunned pain, disgrace, and ignorance. What in such a living being is not wonderful and praiseworthy? But all these are gifts of my God; I did not give them to myself. And they are good, and all these things are me. So he who made me is good, and he himself is my good, and I exult to him for all the good things of which even as a boy I consisted. For my sin was this: that I sought pleasures, heights, and truths not in him but in his creatures, myself and the rest, and so I rushed headlong into pains, confusions, and errors. Thanks be to you, my sweetness, my honor, my confidence, my God; thanks be to you for your gifts; but keep them for me. For so you will keep me, and what you have given me will be increased and perfected, and I myself shall be with you, because you have given me even my existence.

I want to call to mind my past foulness and the carnal corruptions of my soul, not because I love them, but so that I may love you, my God. I do this out of love for your love, going back over my most wicked ways in the bitterness of my remembering, so that you may grow sweet to me, sweetness that does not deceive, sweetness happy and secure, gathering me up from the scattering in which I was torn to pieces, when, turned away from you, the One, I vanished into the many. For in my adolescence I once burned to be glutted with the things below, and I dared to run wild in various shadowy loves; and my beauty wasted away, and I rotted before your eyes, pleasing myself and eager to please the eyes of men. And what was it that delighted me, but to love and be loved?

But the measure was not kept, from mind to mind, as far as the bright boundary of friendship; instead, mists rose from the muddy desire of the flesh and the bubbling spring of puberty, and they clouded and darkened my heart, so that the clear sky of love could not be distinguished from the fog of lust. Both seethed together in confusion, and swept my weak youth over the cliffs of desire and plunged it in a whirlpool of disgraceful acts. Your wrath had grown strong over me, and I did not know it. I had become deaf from the clanking of the chain of my mortality, the punishment of my soul's pride, and I went further from you, and you let me; and I was tossed about and poured out, I flowed away and boiled over in my fornications, and you were silent. O my late-coming joy! You were silent then, and I went further and further from you into more and more barren seeds of sorrows, with a proud dejection and a restless weariness.

Who would have set a measure to my misery, turned the fleeting beauties of the lowest things to good use, and fixed limits to their sweetness, so that the waves of my youth might have broken on the shore of marriage, if calm could not be found in them otherwise, being content with the end of begetting children, as your law prescribes, Lord? For you shape even the offspring of our mortality, able to lay a gentle hand to soften the thorns that were shut out of your paradise. For your omnipotence is not far from us, even when we are far from you. Or at least I should have paid closer attention to the sound from your clouds: “Such people will have trouble in the flesh, but I would spare you”; and “It is good for a man not to touch a woman”; and “He who is without a wife thinks of the things of God, how to please God; but he who is joined in marriage thinks of the things of the world, how to please his wife.” I should have listened more attentively to these words, and, having made myself a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven, I would have awaited your embrace more happily.

But I boiled over, wretch that I was, following the rush of my own current and abandoning you; I went beyond all your lawful bounds, and I did not escape your scourges. For what mortal does? For you were always there, mercifully severe, sprinkling all my unlawful pleasures with the bitterest vexations, so that I might seek a pleasure without vexation; and where I could find that, I would find nothing but you, Lord, nothing but you, who “fashion pain into a precept,” and strike in order to heal, and kill us so that we may not die away from you. Where was I, and how far was I exiled from the delights of your house, in that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when the madness of lust, licensed by human shamelessness but forbidden by your laws, took the scepter over me, and I surrendered to it completely? My family took no care to catch me as I fell by means of marriage; their only care was that I should learn to make the best possible speeches and to persuade by eloquence.

In that year my studies were interrupted. I had been brought back from Madauros, the neighboring town where I had already begun to live away from home to study literature and oratory, while the expenses of a longer stay away at Carthage were being gathered, more by my father's determination than his means, for he was a burgess of Thagaste of quite modest means. To whom am I telling this? Not to you, my God; but before you I tell it to my own kind, the human race, however small the portion of it that may come upon these writings of mine. And to what end? So that I and whoever reads this may consider from what depths we must cry to you. And what is nearer to your ears than a confessing heart and a life lived by faith? For who did not then praise my father to the skies because, beyond the resources of his estate, he spent on his son whatever was needed for him to live far away for his studies? For many citizens far richer did nothing of the kind for their children. Yet meanwhile this same father took no trouble about how I was growing up toward you or how chaste I was, provided only that I was eloquent, or rather deserted, uncultivated by you, God, the one true and good Lord of your field, my heart.

But when in that sixteenth year, through a period of leisure caused by the family's straitened means, I began to live with my parents on holiday from all schooling, the brambles of lust grew above my head, and there was no hand to root them out. On the contrary, when my father saw me at the baths growing into manhood and clothed with restless youth, he told my mother with joy, as though already delighted by the thought of grandchildren, rejoicing with that drunkenness in which this world forgets you its creator and loves your creature instead of you, from the invisible wine of its own perverse will, bent toward the lowest things. But in my mother's breast you had already begun your temple and the foundation of your holy dwelling; for he was still a catechumen, and a recent one. So she started up with a holy trembling and fear, and although I was not yet one of the faithful, she feared for me the crooked ways in which those walk who turn their back to you and not their face.

Alas for me! And do I dare to say that you were silent, my God, when I went further from you? Were you really silent to me then? And whose were those words, if not yours, which you sang in my ears through my mother, your faithful one? Yet none of it sank into my heart so that I would do it. For she wanted, and I remember how she warned me privately with great anxiety, that I should not commit fornication, and above all that I should not commit adultery with anyone's wife. These seemed to me a woman's warnings, which I would have blushed to obey. But they were yours, and I did not know it; I thought that you were silent and that she was speaking, when through her you were not silent to me, and in her you were despised by me, by me, her son, “the son of your handmaid, your servant.” But I did not know, and I rushed headlong with such blindness that among my companions I was ashamed of being less shameless, since I heard them boasting of their disgraceful acts and glorying the more, the more disgraceful they were; and I took pleasure in doing it not only for the lust of the deed but also for the praise. What deserves blame but vice? Yet I became more vicious so as not to be blamed; and when there was nothing I had done to put me on a level with the abandoned, I pretended I had done what I had not, so as not to seem more contemptible for being more innocent, or be held cheaper for being more chaste.

See with what companions I walked the streets of Babylon and rolled in its mud as if in cinnamon and precious ointments. And in its very navel, so that I would stick the more firmly, the invisible enemy trampled me and seduced me, because I was easily seduced. For even the mother of my flesh, who had already fled from the midst of Babylon but went more slowly in its other quarters, though she had warned me to be chaste, did not take care about what she had heard of me from her husband, namely, to restrain within the bounds of married affection what she already felt was pestilent and dangerous for the future, if it could not be cut back to the quick. She did not take care of this, because she feared that my prospects would be hindered by the fetter of a wife: not that hope of the world to come which my mother had in you, but the hope of learning, which both my parents wanted me very much to acquire; he, because he thought almost nothing of you and only vain things about me; she, because she thought that the usual course of studies would be not only no hindrance but even some help toward reaching you. So I conjecture, recalling as best I can the characters of my parents. The reins were also let loose for me to play, beyond any measure of strictness, into the dissipation of various passions; and in all of it was a fog, my God, shutting me off from the clear sky of your truth, and “my iniquity came forth as from fatness.”

Theft is certainly punished by your law, Lord, and by the law written in human hearts, which not even iniquity itself erases. For what thief calmly puts up with a thief? Not even a rich one with one driven by want. Yet I wanted to commit theft, and did it, compelled by no need, but by a poverty of justice and a distaste for it, and a glut of iniquity. For I stole what I had in plenty, and much better; nor did I want to enjoy the thing I sought by theft, but the theft itself and the sin. There was a pear tree near our vineyard, laden with fruit tempting neither in appearance nor in taste. We went to shake it and carry off the fruit, a gang of the worst young fellows, late at night, having kept up our games in the streets until then, as was our vicious custom; and we took huge loads from it, not for our own feasting but even to throw to the pigs, though we ate a little of it, provided only that we did what pleased us because it was not allowed. See my heart, God, see my heart, on which you had pity in the depth of the abyss. Let my heart now tell you what it was seeking there, that I should be evil for nothing, and that there should be no cause of my wickedness but wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved to perish, I loved my own falling away, not that for which I fell away, but my falling away itself I loved, a foul soul leaping down from your firm support into destruction, not seeking something through disgrace, but seeking disgrace itself.

There is indeed beauty in beautiful bodies, in gold and silver and all things; in bodily touch, what is fitting counts for most; and for each of the other senses there is a suitable adjustment of bodies. Worldly honor, and the power to command and to prevail, also have their own splendor, from which the appetite for revenge also arises. And yet, to gain all these things, one must not go away from you, Lord, nor stray from your law. And the life we live here has its own allure, because of a certain measure of beauty it has and its harmony with all these lowest beautiful things. Human friendship too is sweet with its dear bond, because of the unity it makes of many souls. For all these things and things like them sin is committed, when, through an immoderate inclination toward them, since they are the lowest goods, the better and highest goods are abandoned: you, Lord our God, and your truth and your law. For these lowest things have their delights too, but not like my God, who made all things, for “in him the just man delights,” and he himself is the delight of the upright in heart.

So when the cause of a crime is investigated, the usual view is that it cannot be believed unless it appears that there could have been a desire to gain one of those goods we called lowest, or a fear of losing them. For they are beautiful and fine, though, compared with the higher goods that make us blessed, they are lowly and base. A man has committed murder. Why did he do it? He loved the man's wife or his estate, or he wanted to rob him to have something to live on, or he feared to lose something of the kind to him, or, having been wronged, he burned to avenge himself. Would he commit murder without a cause, delighted by murder itself? Who would believe it? For even of a certain senseless and exceedingly cruel man it was said that he was evil and cruel for no reason; yet a cause was given: “so that,” he says, “his hand or his mind would not grow sluggish through idleness.” Why that too? Why so? Clearly so that, by that practice in crime, once the city was taken he might gain honors, power, and riches, and be free of fear of the laws and of the difficulties of his situation caused by his lack of means and his consciousness of his crimes. So not even Catiline himself loved his crimes, but certainly something else for whose sake he committed them.

What did I, wretch, love in you, my theft, my crime by night in the sixteenth year of my age? For you were not beautiful, since you were a theft. Or are you anything at all, that I should speak to you? The fruit we stole was beautiful, because it was your creation, most beautiful of all, creator of all, good God, God the highest good and my true good. The fruit was beautiful, but my wretched soul did not desire the fruit itself. For I had plenty of better fruit; I picked those only in order to steal. Once picked, I threw them away, having feasted only on the iniquity, which I enjoyed with delight. For if any of that fruit entered my mouth, the crime was its seasoning. And now, Lord my God, I ask what delighted me in the theft, and see, there is no beauty in it: I do not say the beauty there is in justice and prudence, nor even that in the human mind and memory and senses and vegetative life, nor the beauty of the stars, fair in their places, and of earth and sea full of offspring that succeed by birth those that die; not even the kind of defective and shadowy beauty found in deceiving vices.

For even pride imitates loftiness, whereas you are the one God, exalted above all things. And what does ambition seek but honors and glory, whereas you alone are to be honored above all and are glorious forever? The cruelty of the powerful wants to be feared; but who is to be feared but the one God, from whose power what can be seized or withdrawn, when, where, how, or by whom? The caresses of the lustful want to be loved; but nothing is more caressing than your charity, and nothing is loved more healthily than your truth, beautiful and radiant above all things. Curiosity seems to aspire to a zeal for knowledge, whereas you know all things supremely. Ignorance itself and folly are cloaked under the name of simplicity and innocence, because nothing is found simpler than you. And what is more innocent than you, since it is their own works that are hostile to the wicked? Sloth seeks rest, as it were; but what sure rest is there besides the Lord? Luxury wants to be called fullness and abundance; but you are the fullness and unfailing store of incorruptible sweetness. Prodigality casts a shadow of generosity; but you are the most bountiful giver of all good things. Avarice wants to possess much; and you possess all things. Envy contends for preeminence; what is more preeminent than you? Anger seeks revenge; who avenges more justly than you? Fear shudders at unusual and sudden things that threaten what it loves, while it takes precautions for its safety; but to you what is unusual? what is sudden? Or who separates from you what you love? Or where but with you is there firm security? Sadness pines at the loss of things in which desire delighted, because it would wish that nothing could be taken from it, as nothing can be taken from you.

So the soul commits fornication when it turns away from you and seeks outside you what it cannot find pure and clear except when it returns to you. All who put themselves far from you and exalt themselves against you imitate you perversely. But even by imitating you in this way they show that you are the creator of all nature, and that there is therefore nowhere to withdraw from you altogether. What, then, did I love in that theft, and in what did I imitate my Lord, even viciously and perversely? Did I take pleasure in acting against the law at least by deceit, since I could not by power, so that, a prisoner, I might imitate a crippled freedom by doing with impunity what was not allowed, in a darkened likeness of omnipotence? See, here is that slave fleeing his master and chasing a shadow. O rottenness, O monstrous life and depth of death! Could it please me to do what was not allowed, for no other reason than that it was not allowed?

“What shall I render to the Lord,” that my memory recalls these things and my soul is not afraid because of them? “I will love you, Lord,” and give thanks, and confess to your name, since you have forgiven me such evil and wicked deeds. I credit it to your grace and your mercy that you have melted away my sins like ice. I credit to your grace also whatever evils I did not do; for what could I not have done, I who loved even a crime done for nothing? And I confess that all has been forgiven me, both the evils I did of my own accord and those I did not do because you guided me. What human being, considering his own weakness, dares to credit his chastity and innocence to his own strength, so as to love you less, as if he had less need of your mercy, by which you forgive the sins of those who turn to you? For whoever, called by you, has followed your voice and avoided the things he reads of me as I recall and confess them about myself, let him not mock me, sick as I was, for being healed by that physician through whom it was granted to him not to fall sick, or rather to be less sick; and let him therefore love you as much, or rather even more, because he sees that the one through whom I am freed from the great sicknesses of my sins is the one through whom he is kept from being entangled in such great sicknesses of sin.

“What fruit did I ever have,” wretch that I was, in the things of which I now blush to remember, especially in that theft, in which I loved the theft itself and nothing else, since it was itself nothing and I was the more wretched for it? And yet I would not have done it alone. So I recall my state of mind then: alone I would not have done it at all. So I loved there also the companionship of those with whom I did it. So it is not true that I loved nothing but the theft; or rather, it is true that I loved nothing else, because that companionship too is nothing. What is it really? Who is there to teach me, except the one who enlightens my heart and discerns its shadows? What is it that has come into my mind to inquire into, discuss, and consider? That if I had loved the fruit I stole and wanted to enjoy it, I could have committed that iniquity alone, if that were enough to reach my pleasure, without inflaming the itch of my desire by rubbing against accomplices' minds. But since my pleasure was not in the fruit, it was in the crime itself, which the companionship of fellow sinners produced.

What was that state of mind? It was certainly exceedingly foul, and woe to me who had it. But still, what was it? “Who understands sins?” It was a laugh, as if our hearts were tickled, that we were deceiving those who did not think we would do such things and strongly disapproved. Why, then, did it delight me that I did not do it alone? Is it because no one laughs easily alone? No one does so easily; yet sometimes laughter does overcome people alone and by themselves, with no one else present, if something very ridiculous meets their senses or their mind. But I would not have done that alone; I would not have done it at all alone. See, before you, my God, is the living memory of my soul. Alone I would not have committed that theft, in which I took pleasure not in what I stole but in stealing; and I would not have enjoyed doing it alone at all, nor would I have done it. O friendship too unfriendly, unfathomable seduction of the mind, eagerness to harm arising from play and jest, appetite for another's loss with no desire for my own gain or for revenge; but when someone says, “Let's go, let's do it,” one is ashamed not to be shameless.

Who can untie this most twisted and tangled knot? It is foul; I do not want to look at it, I do not want to see it. I want you, justice and innocence, beautiful and fair with honorable light and a satisfaction that never cloys. With you is true rest and a life that cannot be disturbed. Whoever enters into you “enters into the joy of his Lord,” and will not fear, and will be supremely well in the supreme Good. I slipped away from you and wandered, my God, too far astray from your stability in my youth, and I became to myself a land of want.