Confessions 4.24–5.14

But I did not yet see the hinge of so great a matter in your art, Almighty, “who alone do wonders”; and my mind went through bodily forms, and I defined and distinguished the beautiful as what is so in itself, and the fitting as what is becoming because it is suited to something else, and I supported this with bodily examples. And I turned to the nature of the mind, and the false opinion I held about spiritual things did not allow me to see the truth. The very force of truth rushed into my eyes, and I turned my throbbing mind away from incorporeal reality to lines and colors and swelling magnitudes; and because I could not see these in the mind, I thought I could not see my mind. And since in virtue I loved peace and in vice I hated discord, I noted unity in the one and a kind of division in the other; and in that unity I thought the rational mind and the nature of truth and of the highest good consisted, while in that division, wretch that I was, I supposed there was some substance of irrational life and a nature of the highest evil, which was not only a substance but actually life, and yet was not from you, my God, “from whom are all things.” And I called the first a Monad, as a mind without any sex, and the second a Dyad, anger in crimes and lust in shameful acts, not knowing what I was saying. For I did not know, nor had I learned, that no substance is evil, and that our mind itself is not the highest and unchangeable good.

For just as there are crimes if that movement of the mind in which impulse lies is vicious and throws itself about insolently and turbulently, and shameful acts if that affection of the soul by which carnal pleasures are drunk in is immoderate, so errors and false opinions defile life if the rational mind itself is vicious. So it was in me then: I did not know that it must be illumined by another light in order to share in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth. “For you will light my lamp, Lord; my God, you will lighten my darkness”; and “from your fullness we have all received.” For you are “the true light that enlightens every human being coming into this world,” because “in you there is no change nor shadow of turning.”

But I strove toward you and was pushed back by you, so that I might taste death, because “you resist the proud.” And what is prouder than that I should assert, with amazing madness, that I was by nature what you are? For since I was changeable, and this was clear to me from the very fact that I desired to be wise so as to become better from worse, I nevertheless preferred to think that you too were changeable rather than that I was not what you are. So I was pushed back, and you resisted my windy neck, and I imagined bodily forms; and flesh as I was, I accused the flesh, and, “a spirit going away,” I did not return to you; and going on I went into things that do not exist, neither in you nor in me nor in the body, nor were they created for me by your truth, but they were invented by my vanity from bodies. And I would say to your little faithful ones, my fellow citizens, from whom I was exiled without knowing it, I would say to them, chattering and foolish: “Why then does the soul that God made err?” And I did not want it said to me, “Why then does God err?” And I would rather contend that your unchangeable substance was forced to err than confess that my changeable substance had strayed of its own accord and erred as a punishment.

And I was perhaps twenty-six or twenty-seven years old when I wrote those volumes, turning over within me bodily fictions that made a din in the ears of my heart, which I was straining, sweet Truth, toward your inner melody, as I thought about the beautiful and the fitting, longing to stand and hear you and to “rejoice with joy because of the bridegroom's voice”; and I could not, because I was snatched outside by the voices of my error and fell to the depths by the weight of my pride. For you did not “give joy and gladness to my hearing,” nor did my bones exult, since they had not been humbled.

And what did it profit me that when I was about twenty years old some writings of Aristotle came into my hands, which they call the Ten Categories (at whose name, when my teacher, the rhetorician of Carthage, and others who were considered learned, mentioned them with cheeks puffed out with conceit, I gaped in suspense as at something great and divine), and that I read them alone and understood them? When I discussed them with people who said they had understood them with difficulty, with the most learned teachers not only explaining them aloud but drawing many diagrams in the sand, they could tell me nothing about them that I had not already learned reading alone by myself. And they seemed to me to speak quite clearly about substances, such as a man, and what is in them, such as a man's shape, what kind it is, and his stature, how many feet tall, or relationship, whose brother he is, or where he is placed, or when he was born, or whether he stands or sits, or has shoes on or is armed, or does something or suffers something, and whatever innumerable things are found in these nine classes, of which I have given some examples, or in the class of substance itself.

What did this profit me, when it actually hindered me? For thinking that absolutely everything was comprehended in those ten categories, I tried to understand even you, my God, wonderfully simple and unchangeable, in that way, as if you too were the subject of your greatness or beauty, so that these would be in you as in a subject, as in a body; whereas your greatness and your beauty are you yourself, while a body is not great and beautiful by the fact that it is a body, since even if it were less great and less beautiful it would still be a body. For what I thought about you was falsehood, not truth, the fictions of my misery, not the firm foundations of your blessedness. For you had commanded, and so it came to pass in me, that the earth should bring forth thorns and thistles for me, and that with toil I should come to my bread.

And what did it profit me that I, then a most worthless slave of evil desires, read by myself and understood all the books of the so-called liberal arts that I could read? I rejoiced in them, and I did not know where whatever was true and certain in them came from. For I had my back to the light and my face toward the things that are lit; so my face, with which I saw the illuminated things, was not itself illuminated. Whatever I understood without great difficulty and with no one teaching me about the art of speaking and reasoning, about the dimensions of figures, about music and numbers, you know, Lord my God, because both quickness of understanding and sharpness of discernment are your gift. But I did not offer sacrifice to you from it. So it served me not for use but rather for ruin, because I took care to keep so good a portion of my substance in my own power, and I did not keep my strength for you, but went away from you into a far country to squander it on harlot desires. For what did a good thing profit me when I did not use it well? For I did not realize that those arts are understood with great difficulty even by studious and gifted people, except when I tried to explain them to such people, and the most excellent among them was the one who could follow my explanation without lagging.

But what did this profit me, when I thought that you, Lord God, the Truth, were a luminous and immense body and I a fragment of that body? Utter perversity! But so I was; and I do not blush, my God, to confess to you your mercies toward me and to call upon you, I who did not blush then to profess my blasphemies to people and to bark against you. What, then, did it profit me that my mind was nimble in those studies, and that so many knotty books were untied without the help of any human teacher, when I erred shamefully and with sacrilegious foulness in the teaching of piety? Or what great harm was it to your little ones that their minds were far slower, since they did not withdraw far from you, so that they could safely grow their feathers in the nest of your church and nourish the wings of love with the food of sound faith? O Lord our God, “let us hope in the shelter of your wings,” and protect us and carry us. You will carry us; you will carry us both as little ones and “even to old age you will carry us”; for when our strength is you, then it is strength, but when it is our own, it is weakness. Our good lives always with you, and because we turned away from it, we became perverse. Let us return now, Lord, so that we may not be overturned, because our good lives with you without any failing, and it is you yourself; and we do not fear that there will be nowhere to return to because we fell from there. For while we were absent, our house did not fall: your eternity.

Accept the sacrifice of my confessions from the hand of my tongue, which you formed and stirred up to confess to your name; and “heal all my bones, and let them say, Lord, who is like you?” For one who confesses to you does not teach you what is happening within him, because a closed heart does not shut out your eye, nor does human hardness repel your hand; but you loosen it when you will, either in mercy or in punishment, “and there is no one who can hide from your heat.” But let my soul praise you so that it may love you, and let it confess to you your mercies so that it may praise you. Your whole creation does not cease or fall silent in your praises: neither every human spirit, through a mouth turned toward you, nor animals and bodily things, through the mouths of those who contemplate them; so that our soul may rise to you from its weariness, leaning on the things you have made and passing over to you who made them wonderfully; and there is refreshment and true strength.

Let the restless and the wicked go and flee from you. You see them and distinguish their shadows; and see, all things with them are beautiful, while they themselves are foul. And how have they harmed you? Or in what have they dishonored your rule, which is just and whole from the heavens to the lowest things? For where did they flee when they fled from your face? Or where do you not find them? But they fled so as not to see you who see them, and, blinded, to stumble against you (for you forsake nothing that you have made); so that the unjust might stumble against you and be justly troubled, withdrawing themselves from your gentleness and stumbling against your uprightness and falling upon your severity. Evidently they do not know that you are everywhere, you whom no place encloses, and that you alone are present even to those who put themselves far from you. Let them then turn and seek you, because you have not forsaken your creation as they forsook their creator. Let them turn, and see, there you are in their heart, in the heart of those who confess to you and throw themselves upon you and weep in your bosom after their difficult ways; and you gently wipe away their tears, and they weep the more and rejoice in their weeping, because it is you, Lord, not some human being, flesh and blood, but you, Lord, who made them, who remake and console them. And where was I when I was seeking you? You were before me, but I had departed even from myself and could not find myself: how much less you!

I will set out in the sight of my God that twenty-ninth year of my age. A certain bishop of the Manichees had already come to Carthage, Faustus by name, a great snare of the devil; and many were entangled in him by the allure of his smooth speech. Although I praised it, I nevertheless distinguished it from the truth of the things I was eager to learn; and I looked not at the dish of speech but at what food of knowledge that Faustus, so renowned among them, set before me to eat. For his reputation had preceded him, that he was most skilled in all honorable learning and especially well educated in the liberal disciplines. And since I had read many works of the philosophers and retained them in memory, I compared some of their teachings with those long fables of the Manichees, and what the philosophers said seemed to me more probable, those who “were able to know so much that they could assess the world,” though they did not find its Lord at all. For you are great, Lord, and you “regard the lowly, but know the lofty from afar”; you draw near only to the broken of heart, and you are not found by the proud, not even if with curious skill they number the stars and the sand, and measure the regions of the sky, and trace the paths of the heavenly bodies.

For they search these things out with their mind and the intelligence you gave them, and they have discovered much, and foretold many years in advance eclipses of the sun and moon, on what day, at what hour, and how great a part would be eclipsed; and their calculation did not deceive them. It happened as they foretold. And they wrote down the rules they had discovered, and these are read today, and from them it is foretold in what year and what month of the year and what day of the month and what hour of the day, and how much of its light, the moon or the sun will be eclipsed; and it will happen as foretold. People who do not know these things marvel and are amazed, and those who know them exult and are lifted up; and, withdrawing through impious pride and falling away from your light, they foresee an eclipse of the sun so long before, and do not see their own in the present. For they do not ask with reverence where the intelligence comes from by which they investigate these things. And finding that you made them, they do not give themselves to you, so that you may preserve what you made; nor do they slay to you what they had made of themselves, and slaughter their high-flying pride like the birds, and their curiosity, by which they walk the hidden paths of the deep, like the fish of the sea, and their self-indulgence like the beasts of the field, so that you, God, a consuming fire, may burn up their dead cares and re-create them immortally.

But they did not know the way, your Word, through whom you made the things they number, and the very people who number, and the sense by which they perceive what they number, and the mind from which they number; and “of your wisdom there is no number.” But the Only-begotten himself “became for us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification,” and was numbered among us, and paid tribute to Caesar. They did not know this way, by which to come down from themselves to him and through him to go up to him. They did not know this way, and they think themselves lofty with the stars and shining; and see, they have fallen to the earth, “and their foolish heart was darkened.” They say many true things about the creation, and they do not seek with reverence the Truth, the maker of creation, and so they do not find him; or if they find him, “knowing God, they do not honor him as God or give thanks, but become vain in their thoughts, and say that they are wise,” attributing to themselves what is yours; and by this, with most perverse blindness, they strive also to attribute to you what is theirs, namely, bringing lies against you, who are the Truth, and “changing the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of an image of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed beasts and serpents,” and they “change your truth into a lie, and worship and serve the creature rather than the creator.”

Still, I retained many true things said by them about the creation itself, and their account made sense to me through calculations, the order of the seasons, and the visible evidence of the stars; and I compared it with the sayings of Mani, who wrote a great deal on these subjects, raving most copiously; and I found in him no account of the solstices and equinoxes, nor of eclipses, nor of anything of the kind I had learned in the books of worldly wisdom. There I was ordered to believe, and it did not agree with those accounts verified by calculation and by my own eyes, but was far different.

Does anyone who knows these things, Lord God of truth, please you for that reason? For unhappy is the one who knows all those things but does not know you; and happy is the one who knows you, even if he does not know them. And one who knows both you and them is not happier because of them, but is happy because of you alone, if, knowing you, he glorifies you as you are and gives thanks and does not become vain in his thoughts. For just as one who knows how to possess a tree and gives you thanks for its use, though he does not know how many cubits high it is or how wide it spreads, is better than one who measures it and counts all its branches but neither possesses it nor knows or loves its creator; so it is foolish to doubt that the faithful man, “to whom the whole world of riches belongs,” and who, “as having nothing, possesses all things” by clinging to you, whom all things serve, even if he does not know the circuits of the Great Bear, is certainly better than one who measures the sky and numbers the stars and weighs the elements and neglects you, who have “ordered all things in measure and number and weight.”

But who asked some Manichee or other to write about these things too, without skill in which piety could be learned? For you said to man, “See, piety is wisdom.” He could have been ignorant of this even if he had known those things perfectly; but since he did not know those things and yet most shamelessly dared to teach them, he could not possibly know piety. For it is vanity to make a profession of these worldly things even when one knows them, but piety to confess to you. So this deviant spoke a great deal about these things, with the result that, when he was refuted by those who had truly learned them, it became obvious what his understanding was in other matters that are more hidden. For he did not want to be thought little of, but tried to persuade people that the Holy Spirit, the Comforter and enricher of your faithful, was personally in him with full authority. So when he was caught saying false things about the sky and the stars and the motions of the sun and moon, although these things do not belong to the teaching of religion, it was plain enough that his presumption was sacrilegious, since he stated things that were not only unknown to him but also false, with such mad vanity of pride that he tried to attribute them to himself as to a divine person.

For when I hear some Christian brother or other who does not know these things and thinks one thing is another, I look patiently on the man holding his opinion; and I do not see that it harms him, provided he does not believe things unworthy of you, Lord, creator of all, even if he happens not to know the position and state of bodily creation. It does harm him, however, if he thinks this belongs to the very form of the doctrine of piety and dares to affirm stubbornly what he does not know. But even such weakness in the cradle of faith is borne by mother Charity, until the new man grows up “to a perfect man” and cannot “be carried about by every wind of doctrine.” But in the case of one who dared to make himself a teacher, an authority, a guide and leader of those he persuaded of these things, so that those who followed him thought they were following not just any man but your Holy Spirit, who would not judge that such madness, wherever he was shown to have said false things, should be detested and cast far away? But I had not yet clearly established whether the alternations of longer and shorter days and nights, and of night and day itself, and the eclipses of the lights, and whatever else of this kind I had read in other books, could also be explained according to his words; so that, if perhaps they could, it would become uncertain to me whether things were this way or that, but I would set his authority before my belief because of his reputed holiness.

And for almost those nine years during which, with a wandering mind, I was their hearer, I awaited the coming of this Faustus with a desire strained to excess. For the others of them whom I happened to meet, who failed to answer the questions I raised about such matters, kept promising me him, at whose coming, once we had conferred, these questions, and any greater ones I might ask, would be explained most easily and clearly. So when he came, I found him a pleasant man, agreeable in speech, and chattering the very things they usually say, but much more sweetly. But what use to my thirst was the most elegant server of precious cups? My ears were already sated with such things; nor did they seem better to me because they were better said, nor true because eloquent, nor was the soul wise because the face was fitting and the speech graceful. Those who had promised him to me were not good judges of things, and so he seemed prudent and wise to them because his speaking delighted them. I have also known another kind of people who hold even truth suspect and refuse to accept it if it is offered in polished and rich language. But you, my God, had already taught me in wonderful and hidden ways; and I believe that it was you who taught me, because it is true, and there is no other teacher of truth but you, wherever and from wherever it shines forth. So I had already learned from you that nothing ought to seem true because it is said eloquently, nor false because the signs from the lips sound clumsy; nor, again, true because it is stated unpolished, nor false because the speech is splendid; but that wisdom and folly are like wholesome and unwholesome food, and that both kinds of food can be served in ornate and plain words, as in elegant and rustic dishes.

So my eagerness, with which I had awaited that man for so long, was indeed delighted by his lively manner and feeling in debate and by his apt words, which came readily to clothe his thoughts. I was delighted, and with many, or even more than many, I praised and extolled him. But it annoyed me that in the gathering of his hearers I was not allowed to put my questions to him and share the concerns that troubled me by conferring with him informally, giving and receiving arguments. When I was able to do this, and with my friends began to engage his attention at a time when it was not unfitting to discuss in turn, and I brought forward some things that were troubling me, I found first that he was a man without knowledge of the liberal disciplines except grammar, and that only in the ordinary way. And because he had read some of Cicero's speeches and a very few books of Seneca, and some of the poets, and such volumes of his own sect as were written in Latin and in good style, and because he had daily practice in speaking, he had a ready eloquence, which became more acceptable and more seductive through the control of his intelligence and a certain natural charm. Is it so, as I recall it, Lord my God, judge of my conscience? My heart and my memory are before you, who were then dealing with me in the hidden secret of your providence, and were already turning my shameful errors before my face, so that I might see them and hate them.

For after it had become quite clear to me that he was unskilled in those arts in which I had thought he excelled, I began to despair of his being able to open up and resolve the things that troubled me; one could indeed be ignorant of them and still hold the truth of piety, but only if one were not a Manichee. For their books are full of very long fables about the sky and the stars and the sun and moon; and I no longer thought he could explain to me with precision what I especially wanted, namely, by comparing the calculations I had read elsewhere, whether things were rather as they were contained in Mani's books, or at least whether an equally good account could be given from them. But when I brought these matters forward to be considered and discussed, he very modestly did not dare to take up the burden. For he knew that he did not know these things and was not ashamed to confess it. He was not one of those many talkers I had endured, who tried to teach me these things and said nothing. This man had a heart, if not right toward you, at least not too incautious toward himself. He was not altogether ignorant of his own ignorance, and he did not want to be trapped by rash argument in a position from which there would be no way out and no easy return. For this too he pleased me more. For the moderation of a mind that confesses is more beautiful than the things I wanted to know. And I found him like this in all the more difficult and subtle questions.

So when the zeal I had directed toward Mani's writings was broken, and I despaired still more of their other teachers, since in many of the questions that troubled me the famous man had shown himself to be as I have said, I began to spend time with him for the sake of his own zeal, with which he burned for the literature I was then teaching young men as rhetorician of Carthage, and to read with him either what he wanted to hear or what I thought suited to such a mind. But all my effort to advance in that sect, which I had resolved on, collapsed completely once I came to know that man; not that I separated from them altogether, but as if I could find nothing better, I had decided to be content for the time being with what I had somehow rushed into, unless by chance something more worth choosing should shine forth. So that Faustus, who was a snare of death to many, had already begun, without willing or knowing it, to loosen the snare in which I was caught. For your hands, my God, in the hidden depth of your providence, did not abandon my soul; and from the blood of my mother's heart, through her tears day and night, a sacrifice was offered to you for me; and you dealt with me in wonderful ways. You did it, my God. For “by the Lord a man's steps are directed, and he will choose his way.” Or what provision for salvation is there but your hand, remaking what it made?

So you dealt with me so that I was persuaded to go to Rome and to teach there, rather than at Carthage, what I was teaching. And how I was persuaded of this I will not pass over confessing to you, because in these things too your deepest counsels and your mercy, most present to us, are to be pondered and proclaimed. I did not want to go to Rome because greater earnings and greater standing were promised me by the friends who urged it, although these things too drew my mind at that time; but the greatest and almost the only reason was that I heard that young men studied more quietly there and were kept in check by a more orderly discipline, so that they did not rush wantonly and at random into the school of a teacher who was not their own, and were not admitted at all unless he permitted it. At Carthage, on the other hand, the license of students is foul and unrestrained: they burst in shamelessly and, with an almost frenzied look, disrupt the order that each teacher has set up for the progress of his pupils. They do many outrageous things with amazing stupidity, things that would be punishable by law if custom were not their patron; and this shows them to be all the more wretched, since they do as if it were permitted what will never be permitted by your eternal law, and they think they do it with impunity, when they are punished by the very blindness of doing it and suffer incomparably worse things than they do. So the manners I refused to make my own when I was a student I was forced to endure in others when I was a teacher; and so I was pleased to go where all who knew said such things did not happen. But it was you, “my hope and my portion in the land of the living,” who, to make me change my country for the salvation of my soul, applied goads at Carthage to pull me away, and set before me allurements at Rome to draw me there, through people who love a dead life, doing mad things here and promising vain things there; and to correct my steps you secretly used both their perversity and mine. For those who disturbed my peace were blind with a foul frenzy, and those who invited me elsewhere savored of the earth; while I, who detested real misery here, was seeking a false happiness there.