Confessions 5.15–6.8

But why I was leaving here and going there, you knew, God, and you did not tell me or my mother, who grieved terribly at my departure and followed me as far as the sea. But I deceived her as she clung to me with all her strength, to call me back or to go with me; and I pretended that I did not want to leave a friend until the wind rose and he could sail. And I lied to my mother, and such a mother, and I got away. For this too you mercifully forgave me, preserving me, full of accursed filth, from the waters of the sea until the water of your grace, by which I would be washed and the rivers of my mother's eyes would be dried, with which she daily watered the ground beneath her face for me before you. Yet when she refused to go back without me, I barely persuaded her to stay that night in a place close to our ship, a memorial chapel of blessed Cyprian. But that night I secretly set out, and she did not; she stayed praying and weeping. And what did she ask of you, my God, with so many tears, but that you would not let me sail? But you, taking deep counsel and hearing the hinge of her desire, did not grant what she then asked, so that you might make me what she always asked. The wind blew and filled our sails and took the shore from our sight; and on that shore in the morning she was frantic with grief, and filled your ears with complaints and groans, which you disregarded, while you were snatching me away by my desires to put an end to those very desires, and her carnal longing was beaten with the just scourge of sorrow. For she loved to have me with her, as mothers do, but much more than many; and she did not know what joys you were going to make for her out of my absence. She did not know, and so she wept and wailed, and by those torments the remnant of Eve in her was shown, seeking with groaning what she had brought forth with groaning. And yet, after accusing me of deceit and cruelty, she turned again to praying to you for me, and went back to her usual life, and I went to Rome.

And see, there I was received with the scourge of bodily sickness, and I was already going to the underworld, carrying all the evils I had committed against you and myself and others, many and grievous, besides the bond of original sin by which “we all die in Adam.” For you had not yet forgiven me any of them in Christ, nor had he by his cross dissolved the enmities I had contracted with you by my sins. For how could he dissolve them on the cross of a phantasm, which is what I had believed about him? So the more false the death of his flesh seemed to me, the more real was the death of my soul; and the more real the death of his flesh was, the more false was the life of my soul, which did not believe it. And as the fever grew worse, I was already going and perishing. For where would I have gone, if I had departed from here then, but into the fire and the torments my deeds deserved in the truth of your order? And she did not know this, and yet she prayed for me in her absence. But you, present everywhere, heard her where she was, and where I was you had mercy on me, so that I recovered the health of my body, though still sick in my sacrilegious heart. For in that great danger I did not desire your baptism; and I was better as a boy, when I begged for it from my mother's devotion, as I have already recalled and confessed. But I had grown up to my own disgrace, and in my madness I laughed at the counsels of your medicine, you who did not allow me, being such, to die twice. If my mother's heart had been struck by that wound, it would never have healed. For I cannot say enough what feeling she had for me, and with how much greater anxiety she was in labor with me in the spirit than she had borne me in the flesh.

So I do not see how she would have been healed if such a death of mine had pierced the heart of her love. And where would so many prayers have been, so frequent and without ceasing? Nowhere but with you. Or would you, God of mercies, despise the “contrite and humbled heart” of a chaste and sober widow, frequent in almsgiving, attentive and serving to your saints, letting no day pass without an offering at your altar, coming to your church twice a day, morning and evening, without fail, not for empty tales and old women's chatter, but so that she might hear you in your words and you might hear her in her prayers? Would you, by whose gift she was such, despise and reject from your help the tears of such a woman, by which she asked of you not gold or silver or any fleeting or changeable good, but the salvation of her son's soul? By no means, Lord; rather you were present and heard her, and you acted in the order in which you had predestined it to be done. Far be it that you should deceive her in those visions and answers of yours, those I have mentioned and those I have not, which she held in her faithful heart and, always praying, pressed upon you like your own signed promissory notes. For you deign, because “your mercy is forever,” to become a debtor by your promises to those whose debts you forgive entirely.

So you restored me from that sickness and saved “the son of your handmaid,” for the time being in body, so that there might be someone to whom you could give a better and more certain salvation. And even then at Rome I associated with those false and deceiving “saints”: not only with their hearers, among whom was the man in whose house I had fallen ill and recovered, but also with those they call the elect. For it still seemed to me that it is not we who sin, but some other nature in us that sins; and it pleased my pride to be free of blame, and when I had done something evil, not to confess that I had done it, so that you might “heal my soul, because it had sinned against you,” but I loved to excuse myself and accuse some other thing that was with me and was not I. But in truth it was all I, and my impiety had divided me against myself; and that sin was the more incurable because I did not think myself a sinner; and it was an execrable iniquity that I preferred you, almighty God, to be overcome in me to my destruction, rather than myself to be overcome by you to my salvation. So you had not yet “set a guard on my mouth and a door of restraint about my lips, that my heart might not turn aside to evil words, to make excuses in sins with men who work iniquity”; and so I still associated with their elect, though I despaired of being able to make progress in that false doctrine; and even the things with which I had decided to be content if I found nothing better, I now held more loosely and carelessly.

For the thought also arose in me that the philosophers called Academics had been wiser than the rest, because they had held that everything should be doubted and had concluded that nothing true can be grasped by a human being. For so they seemed to me to have plainly thought, as they are commonly taken to have done, since I did not yet understand their intention. Nor did I hesitate to restrain my host from the excessive confidence I perceived he had in the fabulous things of which the Manichaean books are full. Yet I enjoyed their friendship more intimately than that of other people who had not been in that heresy. I no longer defended it with my former zeal; but still my familiarity with them (for Rome concealed many of them) made me slower to look for anything else, especially since I despaired of finding the truth in your church, Lord of heaven and earth, creator of all things visible and invisible, from which they had turned me away. And it seemed to me very shameful to believe that you had the shape of human flesh and were bounded by the bodily outlines of our limbs. And because, when I wanted to think of my God, I did not know how to think of anything but bodily masses (for it did not seem to me that anything existed that was not such), this was the greatest and almost the only cause of my inevitable error.

For from this I also believed that evil was some such substance and had its own mass, foul and misshapen, either dense, which they called earth, or thin and subtle, like the body of air, which they imagine as a malignant mind creeping through that earth. And because such piety as I had compelled me to believe that the good God had created no evil nature, I set up two masses opposed to each other, both infinite, but the evil one more narrowly, the good one more largely; and from this pestilent beginning the other sacrileges followed. For when my mind tried to run back to the catholic faith, it was driven back, because what I thought was the catholic faith was not the catholic faith. And it seemed to me more pious to believe you, my God, to whom your mercies toward me confess, to be infinite at least on the other sides, though on the one side where the mass of evil was set against you I was forced to admit that you were finite, than to think you bounded on all sides in the form of a human body. And it seemed to me better to believe that you had created no evil (which in my ignorance seemed to me not only some substance but even a bodily one, since I did not know how to think even of the mind except as a subtle body, spread out through the spaces of place) than to believe that the kind of nature of evil I imagined came from you. Our Savior himself too, your only-begotten, I thought of as if extended for our salvation from the mass of your most luminous bulk, so that I believed nothing about him except what I could imagine in my vanity. So I thought that such a nature as his could not be born of the Virgin Mary without being mingled with flesh; and I did not see how it could be mingled and not defiled, picturing it as I did. So I was afraid to believe him incarnate, lest I be forced to believe him defiled by the flesh. Now your spiritual ones will laugh at me gently and lovingly if they read of these confusions of mine; but such I was.

Next, I did not think that what they had criticized in your Scriptures could be defended; yet sometimes I did want to discuss the points one by one with someone very learned in those books and find out what he thought of them. For already at Carthage the speeches of a certain Elpidius, speaking and debating face to face against those same Manichees, had begun to move me, since he brought forward such things from the Scriptures as could not easily be resisted. And their reply seemed weak to me; indeed they did not readily bring it out in public, but only to us in private: they said that the Scriptures of the New Testament had been falsified by some people or other who wanted to insert the Jewish law into the Christian faith; yet they themselves produced no uncorrupted copies. But what most held me captive and, as it were, stifled and weighed me down, as I thought in bodily terms, were those masses, under which I panted and could not breathe the clear and simple air of your truth.

So I had begun diligently to do what I had come for, to teach the art of rhetoric at Rome, first gathering some students at my house, to whom and through whom I had begun to become known. And see, I learned that other things were done at Rome which I had not had to endure in Africa. For it was made clear to me that those “overturnings” by abandoned youths did not happen there; “but suddenly,” they said, “to avoid paying their teacher his fee, a number of young men conspire and transfer themselves to another, breakers of faith, to whom justice is cheap compared with love of money.” My heart hated these too, though not with a perfect hatred. For perhaps I hated what I was going to suffer from them more than the fact that they did what was unlawful to anyone. Certainly such people are base, and they commit fornication away from you by loving the fleeting mockeries of time and filthy gain, which soils the hand that grasps it, and by embracing a world that flees, while despising you who abide and call back and pardon the harlot human soul when it returns to you. And now I hate such crooked and twisted people, though I love them so that they may be corrected, that they may prefer to money the learning they study, and to that learning you, God, the Truth and abundance of certain good and most chaste peace. But then I was more unwilling to suffer them as bad people for my own sake than willing that they should become good for yours.

So when a request came from Milan to the prefect of the city of Rome to provide that city with a teacher of rhetoric, with travel at public expense granted as well, I myself canvassed, through those very people drunk with Manichaean vanities (to be rid of whom I was going, though neither they nor I knew it), that Symmachus, then prefect, should test me by setting a speech and send me. And I came to Milan, to Ambrose the bishop, known throughout the world as among the best, your devout worshiper, whose eloquence at that time was vigorously ministering to your people “the fat of your wheat,” “the gladness of oil,” and the sober intoxication of your wine. To him I was led by you without knowing it, so that through him I might be led to you knowing it. That man of God received me like a father and welcomed my coming as a bishop should. And I began to love him, at first not as a teacher of the truth, which I utterly despaired of finding in your church, but as a man who was kind to me. I listened eagerly when he preached to the people, not with the intention I should have had, but as if testing his eloquence, whether it matched his reputation or flowed more or less fully than was reported; and I hung intently on his words, but stood by uninterested in and scornful of the content; and I delighted in the sweetness of his speech, which was more learned, but less cheerful and soothing, than Faustus's in manner of speaking. But as to the content itself there was no comparison: for the one wandered astray in Manichaean deceptions, while the other taught salvation most soundly. But “salvation is far from sinners,” such as I then was present; and yet I was drawing nearer, gradually and without knowing it.

For while I did not trouble to learn what he said, but only to hear how he said it (for that empty concern was all that remained to me, now that I despaired that a way to you lay open for a human being), the content too, which I disregarded, came into my mind together with the words, which I loved. For I could not separate them. And while I opened my heart to take in how eloquently he spoke, there entered at the same time how truly he spoke, though by degrees. For first these things too began to seem to me defensible, and I began to think that the catholic faith, for which I had supposed nothing could be said against the attacks of the Manichees, could be asserted without shame, especially after I had heard one and another, and often, of the riddles of the Old Testament writings resolved, which had killed me when I took them literally. So when many passages of those books had been expounded spiritually, I began to blame that despair of mine, at least in so far as I had believed that no resistance at all could be made to those who hated and mocked the Law and the Prophets. Yet I did not therefore feel that I must hold to the catholic way, because it too could have its learned defenders who refuted objections fully and not absurdly; nor did I think that what I held must therefore be condemned, because the two sides were equal in their defense. For the catholic faith did not seem to me defeated, yet it did not yet appear victorious.

Then I bent my mind vigorously to see whether I could by some certain proofs convict the Manichees of falsehood. If I could have conceived of a spiritual substance, all those contrivances would at once have been dissolved and thrown out of my mind; but I could not. Nevertheless, regarding the very body of this world and all the nature that the sense of the flesh can reach, I judged, as I considered and compared more and more, that many of the philosophers had held views far more probable. So, in the manner of the Academics as they are commonly understood, doubting everything and wavering among all things, I decided that the Manichees at least must be abandoned, not thinking that during that very time of my doubt I should remain in a sect to which I already preferred some philosophers. Yet to those philosophers, because they were without the saving name of Christ, I altogether refused to entrust the healing of my soul's sickness. So I decided to remain a catechumen in the catholic church, commended to me by my parents, until something certain should shine forth by which to direct my course.

“My hope from my youth,” where were you to me, and where had you withdrawn? Had you not made me and distinguished me from the four-footed beasts and the birds of the sky? You had made me wiser, and yet I walked through darkness and on slippery ground, and I sought you outside myself and did not find the God of my heart; and I had come into the depth of the sea, and I lost confidence and despaired of finding the truth. My mother had already come to me, strong in her devotion, following me by land and sea and secure in you in all dangers. For even in the perils of the sea she comforted the sailors themselves, by whom inexperienced travelers on the deep are usually comforted when they are alarmed, promising them a safe arrival, because you had promised this to her in a vision. And she found me in grave danger through despair of finding the truth. Yet when I told her that I was no longer a Manichee, though not a catholic Christian either, she did not leap for joy as if she had heard something unexpected, since she had already become secure about that part of my misery in which she wept for me as one dead but to be raised by you, and carried me out on the bier of her thought, so that you might say to the widow's son, “Young man, I say to you, arise,” and he would revive and begin to speak, and you would give him back to his mother. So her heart was not shaken by any turbulent exultation when she heard that so great a part of what she daily wept to you for had already been done: that I had not yet attained the truth, but had already been rescued from falsehood. Rather, because she was certain that you would give what remained, since you had promised the whole, she answered me very calmly and with a heart full of confidence that she believed in Christ that before she departed this life she would see me a faithful catholic. This, indeed, she said to me. But to you, fountain of mercies, she poured out more frequent prayers and tears, that you would hasten your help and lighten my darkness; and she ran more eagerly to church and hung on the lips of Ambrose, on “the fountain of water springing up to eternal life.” She loved that man as an angel of God, because she had learned that it was through him that I had meanwhile been brought to that doubtful wavering, through which she presumed with certainty that I would pass from sickness to health, after an intervening sharper danger, like the paroxysm that physicians call the crisis.

So when she had brought porridge and bread and unmixed wine to the shrines of the saints, as she used to do in Africa, and was stopped by the doorkeeper, as soon as she learned that the bishop had forbidden it, she accepted it so devoutly and obediently that I myself was amazed how readily she became an accuser of her own custom rather than a critic of his prohibition. For no love of wine besieged her spirit and goaded her to hatred of the truth, as it does many men and women who are sickened by a song of sobriety as drunkards are by a watered drink. But when she had brought her basket with the customary food to be tasted first and then shared, she never set out more than one small cup, mixed to suit her very sober palate, from which to take a sip out of respect; and if there were many shrines of the dead to be honored in that way, she carried around the same single cup to set down everywhere, and shared it with those present in tiny sips, by then not only very watery but quite lukewarm, because she sought devotion there, not pleasure. So when she discovered that the famous preacher and master of piety had commanded that these things not be done even by those who did them soberly, so that no occasion for gorging might be given to drunkards, and because these quasi-funeral feasts were very like the superstition of the pagans, she abstained most willingly; and in place of a basket full of the fruits of the earth she had learned to bring to the shrines of the martyrs a heart full of purer prayers, so that she might give what she could to the needy, and so that the communion of the Lord's body might be celebrated there, in imitation of whose passion the martyrs were sacrificed and crowned. Yet it seems to me, Lord my God (and so my heart is on this matter in your sight), that my mother would perhaps not easily have given way on cutting off this custom if it had been forbidden by someone else whom she did not love as she loved Ambrose. She loved him most of all for the sake of my salvation, and he loved her for her most devout way of life, in which, “fervent in spirit” in good works, she frequented the church; so that often, when he saw me, he would break out in her praise, congratulating me on having such a mother, not knowing what kind of son she had in me, who doubted all those things and thought that the way of life could not be found at all.

Nor did I yet groan in prayer for you to help me; but my mind was intent on seeking and restless for debate, and I thought Ambrose himself a happy man by the world's standards, since such great powers honored him; only his celibacy seemed to me burdensome. But what hope he carried, what struggle he had against the temptations of his very eminence, what comfort in adversity, and what savory joys the hidden mouth of his heart tasted as it chewed on your bread, I could not guess and had not experienced. Nor did he know my turmoil or the pit of my danger. For I could not ask him what I wanted as I wanted, since crowds of busy people, whose weaknesses he served, shut me out from his ear and his mouth; and when he was not with them, which was a very short time, he was refreshing either his body with necessary food or his mind with reading. But when he read, his eyes moved over the pages and his heart searched out the sense, while his voice and tongue were silent. Often when we were present (for no one was forbidden to enter, nor was it the custom for visitors to be announced to him), we saw him reading silently like this, and never otherwise; and after sitting in long silence (for who would dare to burden one so intent?), we would go away. We guessed that in the little time he found for refreshing his mind, free from the din of other people's cases, he did not want to be distracted by anything else; and perhaps he was careful lest, if a listener were intent and in suspense, he might have to explain something the author he was reading had put rather obscurely, or discuss some more difficult questions, and, spending his time on this work, get through fewer volumes than he wished; though preserving his voice, which easily grew hoarse, may have been a more valid reason for reading silently. But whatever his purpose in doing it, that man certainly did it for a good one.

But certainly I was given no opportunity to inquire what I wanted of that holy oracle of yours, his heart, except when something could be heard briefly. But my turmoil required him to have plenty of leisure for me to pour it out to him, and never found it. I did hear him every Sunday “rightly handling the word of truth” among the people, and I became more and more convinced that all the knots of cunning slander that those deceivers of ours had tied against the divine books could be untied. And when I also discovered that your spiritual children, whom you have regenerated by grace from the catholic mother, do not understand the words that man was made by you “in your image” in such a way as to believe and think that you are bounded by the form of a human body (although I did not have even the faintest or most riddling notion of what a spiritual substance might be like), I blushed with joy that for so many years I had barked not against the catholic faith but against the fictions of carnal thoughts. I had been so rash and impious in that I had spoken in accusation of what I ought to have learned by inquiry. But you, most high and most near, most hidden and most present, who have no limbs larger and smaller, but are everywhere whole and nowhere in place, are certainly not of that bodily form; yet you made man in your image, and see, he is in place from head to foot.

So, since I did not know how this image of yours subsisted, I should have knocked and asked how it was to be believed, not insultingly objected as if it were believed as I supposed. So the sharper was the anxiety that gnawed at my inmost self about what I should hold as certain, the more ashamed I was to have been so long mocked and deceived by the promise of certainties, and with childish error and animosity to have chattered about so many uncertain things as if they were certain. For that they were false became clear to me later. But it was already certain that they were uncertain and that I had once held them as certain, when I accused your catholic church with blind contentiousness; though I had not yet discovered that it taught truth, it at least did not teach the things I so vehemently accused it of. So I was confounded and converted, and I rejoiced, my God, that the one church, the body of your only Son, in which the name of Christ was put upon me as an infant, did not relish childish trifles, nor held in its sound doctrine that you, the creator of all, were crammed into a space of place, however high and wide, bounded on all sides by the shape of human limbs.

I also rejoiced that the ancient writings of the Law and the Prophets were now set before me to be read not with that eye with which they had previously seemed absurd, when I criticized your saints as if they thought such things; in truth they did not think so. And gladly I heard Ambrose often say in his sermons to the people, as if he were most carefully commending it as a rule, “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life,” when he drew aside the mystical veil and opened up spiritually those things which, taken according to the letter, seemed to teach perversity. He said nothing that offended me, although he said things whose truth I still did not know. I kept my heart from all assent, fearing a fall, and I was being killed all the more by that suspension. For I wanted to be made as certain of things I did not see as I was certain that seven and three make ten. For I was not so mad as to think that not even this could be grasped; but as I was of this, so I wanted to be of other things, whether bodily things not present to my senses, or spiritual things, of which I did not know how to think except bodily. And I could have been healed by believing, so that the sight of my mind, being purified, might be directed somehow toward your truth, which always abides and fails in nothing. But, as usually happens, one who has had a bad doctor is afraid to entrust himself even to a good one; so it was with the health of my soul, which certainly could not be healed except by believing, and, for fear of believing falsehoods, refused to be cured, resisting your hands, you who have prepared the medicines of faith and sprinkled them upon the diseases of the whole world and given them such great authority.

From this time, however, I began to prefer catholic doctrine. I felt that it acted more modestly and without any deceit in commanding that what was not demonstrated be believed (whether it could be demonstrated but perhaps not to everyone, or could not be demonstrated at all), than the Manichees did, who mocked credulity with a rash promise of knowledge and then commanded that so many utterly fabulous and absurd things be believed because they could not be demonstrated. Then little by little, Lord, handling and composing my heart with a most gentle and merciful hand, you persuaded me, as I considered how countless were the things I believed that I had not seen, nor had been present when they happened, such as so many things in the history of the nations, so many about places and cities I had never seen, so many on the word of friends, so many of doctors, so many of other people, which unless we believed them we would do nothing at all in this life; and, finally, with how unshakably firm a faith I held from what parents I was born, which I could not know unless I had believed what I heard: you persuaded me that it is not those who believe your books, which you have established with such great authority among almost all nations, who are to be blamed, but those who do not believe them; and that no one should be listened to who might say to me, “How do you know that those books were given to the human race by the Spirit of the one true and most truthful God?” For that was the very thing most to be believed, since no contentiousness of slanderous questions, of the many I had read among the philosophers contradicting one another, could ever wring from me the refusal to believe that you exist, whatever you are (which I did not know), and that the government of human affairs belongs to you.

But I believed sometimes more strongly, sometimes more weakly; yet I always believed both that you exist and that you care for us, even though I did not know either what should be thought about your substance or what way led, or led back, to you. And so, since we were too weak to find the truth by clear reason, and for this reason needed the authority of the holy writings, I had now begun to believe that you would in no way have given such surpassing authority to that Scripture throughout all lands unless you had willed that through it you should be believed and through it sought. For the absurdity that used to offend me in those writings, now that I had heard many of them plausibly explained, I referred to the depth of their mysteries; and their authority seemed to me all the more worthy of reverence and of holy faith because it was ready to hand for all to read and yet kept the dignity of its secret in a deeper understanding; offering itself to all in the plainest words and the humblest style of speech, and exercising the attention of those who are not “light of heart”; so that it might receive all in its popular embrace and bring a few through narrow openings to you, yet many more than if it did not stand out with so lofty an authority and draw the crowds into the bosom of its holy humility. I thought about these things and you were present to me; I sighed and you heard me; I wavered and you steered me; I went along the broad way of the world and you did not abandon me.