Confessions 6.9–7.1

I gaped after honors, wealth, marriage, and you laughed at me. In those desires I suffered very bitter difficulties, and you were the more gracious to me the less you allowed anything that was not you to grow sweet to me. See my heart, Lord, you who willed that I should recall this and confess it to you. Now let my soul cling to you, which you have freed from so tenacious a birdlime of death. How wretched it was! And you pricked the feeling of its wound, so that, leaving all things, it might turn to you, who are above all things and without whom all things would be nothing, might turn and be healed. How wretched, then, I was, and how you acted to make me feel my wretchedness on that day when I was preparing to recite a panegyric to the emperor, in which I would tell many lies and be applauded for lying by those who knew it, and my heart was panting with these cares and seething with the fevers of consuming thoughts. Passing through a street in Milan, I noticed a poor beggar, already well fed, I believe, joking and merry. And I groaned and spoke with the friends who were with me of the many sorrows of our follies, because in all such efforts as those I was then laboring at, dragging the burden of my unhappiness under the goads of desire and making it heavier by dragging it, we wanted nothing but to reach a carefree joy, where that beggar had already gone before us, and where perhaps we would never arrive. For what he had already gained with a few coins begged from others, I was striving for by such painful windings and detours, namely, the joy of a temporal happiness. For he did not have true joy; but I too, with those ambitions, was seeking one much more false. And certainly he was glad, I was anxious; he was carefree, I was fearful. And if anyone had asked me whether I preferred to rejoice or to fear, I would have answered, “To rejoice”; again, if he had asked whether I preferred to be like the beggar or as I then was, I would have chosen myself, worn out with cares and fears, but perversely: surely not truly? For I ought not to have preferred myself to him because I was more learned, since I took no joy from it, but sought by it to please people, not to teach them, but only to please them. For this reason you broke my bones with the rod of your discipline.

Let them depart from my soul, then, who say to it, “It matters what one rejoices in.” That beggar rejoiced in drunkenness, you in glory. What glory, Lord? One that is not in you. For just as his was not true joy, so neither was that true glory; and it turned my mind still more. And he would sleep off his drunkenness that very night, while I had slept with mine and risen with it, and would sleep and rise with it again: see how many days! It does matter what one rejoices in, I know, and the joy of faithful hope is incomparably distant from that vanity. But even then there was a distance between us: he was certainly the happier, not only because he was drenched with cheerfulness while I was eviscerated by cares, but also because he had gained his wine by wishing people well, while I was seeking conceit by lying. I said much to this effect then to my dear friends, and I often noticed in these things how it was with me, and I found that it was bad with me, and I grieved and doubled that very badness; and if any prosperity smiled on me, I was loath to grasp it, because almost before it could be held it flew away.

We groaned together over these things, those of us who lived together as friends, and I discussed them especially with Alypius and Nebridius. Alypius was born in the same town as I, of parents who were leading citizens there, and was younger than I. For he had studied with me when I began to teach in our town, and afterwards at Carthage, and he loved me very much because I seemed to him good and learned, and I loved him for his great natural bent toward virtue, which was quite conspicuous at no great age. Yet the whirlpool of Carthaginian morals, in which frivolous shows are hotly pursued, had sucked him into the madness of the circus games. But while he was miserably rolling in it, and I was teaching rhetoric there in a public school, he did not yet attend my lectures, because of some quarrel that had arisen between his father and me. And I had found out that he loved the circus ruinously, and I was deeply distressed, because he seemed to me about to lose, or to have already lost, such great promise. But I had no opportunity to warn him and call him back by some restraint, either by the goodwill of friendship or by the right of a teacher. For I thought he shared his father's opinion of me; but he did not. So, disregarding his father's wishes in this matter, he had begun to greet me, coming into my lecture room, listening for a while, and leaving.

But it had slipped my mind to deal with him, so that so good a mind might not be destroyed by a blind and headlong passion for empty games. But you, Lord, who preside at the helm of all that you have created, had not forgotten that he would be among your sons, a bishop of your sacrament; and so that his correction might be openly attributed to you, you worked it through me, indeed, but without my knowing it. For one day, when I was sitting in my usual place with my students before me, he came, greeted me, sat down, and gave his attention to what was being discussed. By chance I had a text in hand; and while I was explaining it, it seemed opportune to use a comparison with the circus games, to make what I was conveying more pleasant and clearer, with biting mockery of those captivated by that madness. You know, our God, that I was not then thinking of curing Alypius of that plague. But he took it to himself and believed I had said it only because of him; and what another would have taken as a reason to be angry with me, the honorable young man took as a reason to be angry with himself and to love me more ardently. For you had said long ago and woven into your writings, “Rebuke a wise man, and he will love you.” But I had not rebuked him; you, however, who use all, knowing and unknowing, in the order you know (and that order is just), made of my heart and tongue burning coals, by which to sear and heal a mind of good promise that was wasting away. Let him be silent in your praises who does not consider your mercies, which confess to you from my inmost being. For indeed after those words he tore himself out of the deep pit in which he was willingly plunged and blinded with amazing pleasure, and he shook his mind with strong self-control, and all the filth of the circus fell away from him, and he never went there again. Then he overcame his father's reluctance so that he might have me as his teacher; the father gave way and allowed it. And beginning to hear me again, he became entangled with me in that superstition, loving in the Manichees their display of continence, which he thought true and genuine. But it was senseless and seductive, capturing precious souls not yet able to reach the height of virtue and easily deceived by the surface, though of a virtue only shadowed and feigned.

Not abandoning the worldly path that his parents had sung to him as a charm, he had gone ahead of me to Rome to study law; and there he was carried away, incredibly, by an incredible craving for gladiatorial shows. For although he turned away from such things and detested them, some friends and fellow students of his, whom he happened to meet on their way back from lunch, took him with friendly violence, though he vehemently refused and resisted, into the amphitheater during the days of the cruel and deadly games, while he said: “If you drag my body into that place, can you also fix my mind and my eyes on those shows? I will be there as one absent, and so I will overcome both you and them.” Hearing this, they nonetheless took him with them, perhaps wanting to find out whether he could do it. When they had arrived and taken what seats they could, the whole place was seething with the most savage pleasures. He closed the doors of his eyes and forbade his mind to go out to such great evils. If only he had also stopped his ears! For at some turn of the fight, when a huge shout from the whole crowd struck him violently, overcome by curiosity and as if prepared to despise and overcome whatever it was even if he saw it, he opened his eyes; and he was struck with a heavier wound in his soul than the man he wanted to see had received in his body, and he fell more wretchedly than the one whose fall had raised the shout. The shout entered through his ears and unlocked his eyes, so that there was a way to strike down and overthrow a mind that was bold rather than strong, and the weaker because it had presumed on itself when it should have relied on you. For as soon as he saw that blood, he drank in the savagery at the same time, and did not turn away but fixed his gaze, and drank in the frenzy without knowing it, and delighted in the wickedness of the contest and was intoxicated with bloody pleasure. And he was no longer the man who had come, but one of the crowd he had come to, and a true companion of those who had brought him. What more? He watched, he shouted, he burned, he carried away from there a madness that would goad him to return, not only with those who had dragged him there, but even ahead of them, dragging others. And yet from this you rescued him with your most powerful and merciful hand, and taught him to place his confidence not in himself but in you; but that was long afterward.

Nevertheless, this was already being stored up in his memory as medicine for the future. There was also that incident when he was still a student, already attending my lectures at Carthage, and was thinking over in the forum at midday what he was going to recite, as students usually practice; you allowed him to be arrested by the forum guards as a thief. I think you permitted this, our God, for no other reason than that he who was to be so great a man might already begin to learn how, in examining cases, one person should not easily be condemned by another through rash credulity. For he was walking alone in front of the tribunal with his tablets and stylus, when see, a young man, one of the students, the real thief, secretly bringing an axe, without his noticing, went in to the leaden railings that overhang the silversmiths' street and began to cut off the lead. But when the sound of the axe was heard, the silversmiths below murmured and sent men to seize whomever they might find. Hearing their voices, he left his tool and went off, afraid of being caught with it. Alypius, who had not seen him go in, noticed him going out and saw him leaving quickly; and wanting to know the reason, he went into the place, found the axe, and was standing looking at it in surprise, when see, those who had been sent found him alone holding the iron tool whose sound had roused them. They seized him, dragged him off, and, gathering the tenants of the forum, boasted that they had caught a thief red-handed; and from there he was being led away to be handed over for trial.

But he was to be taught only so far. For at once, Lord, you came to the aid of his innocence, of which you alone were witness. For as he was being led either to prison or to punishment, they were met by an architect who had chief charge of the public buildings. They were glad that he above all had met them, since they were usually suspected by him of stealing things that had disappeared from the forum, so that now at last, as they thought, he would know who was doing these things. But the man had often seen Alypius at the house of a certain senator whom he used to visit to pay his respects; and recognizing him at once, he took him by the hand and led him apart from the crowd, and asking the cause of so great a trouble, he heard what had happened; and he ordered all those who were present, raging and threatening, to come with him. And they came to the house of the young man who had committed the deed. There was a slave boy in front of the door, so small that, fearing nothing for his master from it, he could easily tell everything; for he had been with him in the forum as his attendant. When Alypius remembered him, he told the architect. The architect showed the axe to the boy, asking him whose it was. He said at once, “Ours,” and then, when questioned, disclosed the rest. So the case was transferred to that house, and the crowds that had already begun to triumph over him were confounded; and the future dispenser of your word and examiner of many cases in your church went away more experienced and better instructed.

I had found him, then, at Rome, and he clung to me with the strongest bond, and set out with me to Milan, so as not to leave me and to practice something of the law he had studied, more in accordance with his parents' wishes than his own. He had already sat three times as an assessor, with an integrity that amazed others, while he was more amazed at those who preferred gold to innocence. His character was also tested not only by the lure of greed but by the goad of fear. At Rome he was assessor to the count of the Italian treasury. There was at that time a very powerful senator, to whom many were bound by his favors and many subject through fear. He wanted to be allowed something or other, as was the custom of his power, which was forbidden by law; Alypius resisted. A bribe was promised; he laughed at it in his heart. Threats were held out; he trampled on them, while all marveled at so unusual a soul, which neither desired as a friend nor feared as an enemy a man so great and so widely renowned for countless ways of helping and harming. The judge himself, whose counselor he was, though he too did not want it done, did not openly refuse, but shifted the matter onto Alypius, saying that Alypius would not permit him; and in truth, if the judge had done it, Alypius would have left. He was almost tempted in one thing only, by his love of literature: to have books copied for himself at praetorian rates. But he consulted justice and turned his deliberation to the better course, judging the equity by which he was forbidden more useful than the power by which he was permitted. This is a small thing; but “he who is faithful in a little is faithful also in much,” nor will anything be empty that has come from the mouth of your truth: “If you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will give you the true? And if you have not been faithful in what is another's, who will give you what is your own?” Such was the man who then clung to me and wavered with me in deciding what way of life we should hold to.

Nebridius too had left his native place near Carthage, and Carthage itself, where he was very often to be found, had left his father's excellent country estate, had left his home and a mother who would not follow him, and had come to Milan for no other reason than to live with me in the most ardent pursuit of truth and wisdom. He sighed with us and wavered with us, a burning seeker of the happy life and a most acute investigator of the most difficult questions. So there were the mouths of three needy people, sighing out their want to one another and waiting upon you, that you might “give them their food in due season.” And in all the bitterness that, by your mercy, followed our worldly activities, when we looked for the end for which we were suffering these things, darkness met us; and we turned away groaning and said, “How long will this go on?” And we said this often, and saying it we did not leave those things, because nothing certain shone forth that we could grasp once they were abandoned.

And I was most amazed, as I anxiously recalled how long a time it had been since the nineteenth year of my age, when I had begun to burn with the pursuit of wisdom, planning, once I found it, to abandon all the empty hopes and lying madnesses of vain desires. And see, I was now in my thirtieth year, still stuck in the same mud, greedy to enjoy present things that fled and scattered me, while I said: “Tomorrow I will find it; see, it will appear plainly, and I will hold it; see, Faustus will come and explain everything. O great men, the Academics! Nothing certain for the conduct of life can be grasped. No, let us seek more diligently and not despair. See, the things in the church's books that seemed absurd are no longer absurd, and can be understood differently and in an honorable sense. I will plant my feet on the step where my parents placed me as a boy, until the clear truth is found. But where is it to be sought? When is it to be sought? Ambrose has no time; there is no time to read. Where do we look for the books themselves? From where, or when, do we buy them? From whom do we borrow them? Let times be set aside, let hours be allotted for the salvation of the soul. A great hope has arisen: the catholic faith does not teach what we thought and vainly accused it of. Its learned men hold it wicked to believe that God is bounded by the shape of a human body. And do we hesitate to knock, so that the rest may be opened? Our students take up the morning hours; what do we do with the rest? Why do we not do this? But when do we pay our respects to our more powerful friends, whose support we need? When do we prepare what the students pay for? When do we restore ourselves by relaxing our minds from the strain of our cares?”

“Let everything perish, and let us dismiss these vain and empty things; let us devote ourselves to the search for truth alone. Life is wretched, death uncertain; it may creep up suddenly: in what state shall we depart from here? And where must we learn what we have neglected here? Or rather, shall we not have to pay the penalty for this negligence? What if death itself cuts off and ends all care along with sensation? Then this too must be investigated. But far be it that it should be so. It is not for nothing, it is not empty, that the lofty summit of the authority of the Christian faith is spread through the whole world. Never would such great things be done for us by God if the life of the soul were also consumed by the death of the body. Why then do we delay to abandon worldly hope and devote ourselves wholly to seeking God and the happy life? But wait: these things too are pleasant, they have no small sweetness of their own; one's attention should not lightly be cut off from them, because it is shameful to return to them again. See, it is already a great thing to obtain some position of honor. And what more is to be desired in these things? We have plenty of powerful friends: if we hurry for nothing else, at least a governorship can be given. And a wife must be married with some money, so that she does not increase our expenses; and that will be the limit of desire. Many great men, most worthy of imitation, have devoted themselves to the pursuit of wisdom with their wives.”

While I said these things, and these winds shifted and drove my heart this way and that, time passed, and I was slow to turn to the Lord, and I put off from day to day living in you, but did not put off dying daily in myself. Loving the happy life, I feared it in its own dwelling, and fleeing from it I sought it. For I thought I would be too miserable if I were deprived of the embraces of a woman; and I did not think of the medicine of your mercy for healing that same weakness, because I had not tried it; and I believed continence to be a matter of one's own strength, which I was not aware of having, being so foolish as not to know that, as it is written, no one can be continent unless you give it. Certainly you would have given it, if I had knocked at your ears with inner groaning and with firm faith had cast my care upon you.

Alypius indeed kept me from marrying a wife, insisting that if I did, we could in no way live together in carefree leisure in the love of wisdom, as we had long desired. For he was himself extremely chaste in this matter even then, so much so that it was remarkable; for although he had had experience of intercourse at the beginning of his youth, he had not become attached to it, but rather regretted and scorned it, and from then on lived most continently. But I resisted him with the examples of those who, as married men, had cultivated wisdom, pleased God, and been faithful to their friends and loved them. From their greatness of soul I was indeed far removed; bound by the disease of the flesh with its deadly sweetness, I dragged my chain, afraid to be set free, and, as if my wound were jarred, I pushed away the words of one who advised me well, like the hand of one who would untie me. Moreover, through me the serpent spoke to Alypius himself, and wove and scattered through my tongue sweet snares in his path, in which his honorable and free feet might be entangled.

For when he marveled that I, whom he esteemed not a little, was so stuck in the birdlime of that pleasure as to affirm, whenever we discussed it between us, that I could in no way lead a celibate life; and when I defended myself, seeing him amazed, by saying that there was a great difference between what he had experienced hastily and furtively, which he now scarcely remembered and so could easily despise without any trouble, and the delights of my habit, to which, if the honorable name of marriage were added, he ought not to wonder why I could not spurn that life; he too began to desire marriage, not at all overcome by lust for such pleasure, but by curiosity. For he said he wanted to know what that was without which my life, which pleased him so much, seemed to me not a life but a punishment. For his mind, free from that chain, was amazed at my slavery, and by being amazed was going on to a desire to try it, about to come to the experience itself and from there perhaps to fall into the slavery that amazed him, since he wanted “to make a covenant with death”; and “he who loves danger will fall into it.” For neither of us gave more than slight thought to whatever dignity there is in marriage, in the duty of ordering a married life and raising children. For the most part it was the habit of satisfying an insatiable lust that held me captive and tormented me violently, while he was being drawn to captivity by wonder. So we were, until you, Most High, not abandoning our clay, had mercy on us wretches and came to our aid in wonderful and hidden ways.

And I was pressed without letup to marry a wife. I was already making my suit, and a promise was already being made, chiefly through my mother's efforts, so that once married I might be washed by saving baptism; she rejoiced that I was daily being made ready for it, and she noticed that her prayers and your promises were being fulfilled in my faith. Indeed, both at my request and from her own desire, she begged you daily with a strong cry of her heart to show her something in a vision about my future marriage, and you never would. She saw some vain and fanciful things, such as the force of a human spirit preoccupied with this matter produced, and she told them to me, not with the confidence she usually had when you showed her something, but making light of them. For she said she could tell, by some kind of taste which she could not explain in words, the difference between your revealing and her own soul's dreaming. Still I was pressed, and a girl was sought in marriage who was almost two years under the age for marrying; and because she was pleasing, we were waiting.

And many of us friends, turning over in our minds and talking about and detesting the turbulent troubles of human life, had almost decided to live in leisure away from the crowds. We planned that leisure so that whatever we could possess we would put into a common fund and make one household out of all, so that through the sincerity of friendship nothing would belong to this one or that, but what was made one out of all would belong wholly to each, and everything to everyone. It seemed to us that there could be about ten people in that community, and there were some very rich men among us, especially Romanianus, our fellow townsman, a close friend of mine from my early youth, whom serious turmoil in his affairs had then brought to the court. He pressed this plan most of all and had great authority in urging it, because his ample wealth far exceeded the others'. And we had agreed that two officers each year, like magistrates, should see to all necessary things, while the others were left in peace. But after we began to consider whether the women would allow this, those whom some of us already had and whom we wished to have, that whole plan, which we were shaping so well, fell apart in our hands and was broken and thrown aside. Then back to sighs and groans, and to steps following the broad and beaten ways of the world; for “many thoughts were in our heart, but your counsel abides forever.” By that counsel you laughed at our plans and prepared your own for us, intending to “give us food in due season,” and to “open your hand and fill our souls with blessing.”

Meanwhile my sins were multiplied, and the woman with whom I had been accustomed to sleep was torn from my side as an obstacle to marriage; my heart, where it clung to her, was cut and wounded and bleeding. She had returned to Africa, vowing to you that she would never know another man, leaving with me my natural son by her. But I, unhappy, not even imitating a woman, impatient of delay, since I was to receive the girl I was seeking only after two years, because I was not a lover of marriage but a slave of lust, procured another woman, certainly not a wife, so that the disease of my soul might be sustained and carried on, either intact or even increased, under the escort of lasting habit, into the realm of marriage. Nor was that wound of mine healed which had been made by cutting off the first; but after the fever and the sharpest pain it festered, and ached more coldly, as it were, but more desperately.

Praise to you, glory to you, fountain of mercies! I was becoming more wretched, and you nearer. Your right hand was already there, ready at any moment to snatch me from the mire and wash me, and I did not know it. Nothing called me back from a deeper whirlpool of carnal pleasures but the fear of death and of your future judgment, which, through all my various opinions, never left my breast. And I argued with my friends Alypius and Nebridius about the ends of good and evil, that in my mind Epicurus would have won the palm, had I not believed that after death there remains life for the soul and the consequences of our deserts, which Epicurus refused to believe. And I asked, if we were immortal and lived in perpetual bodily pleasure without any fear of losing it, why we would not be happy, or what else we would seek; not knowing that this very thing belonged to great misery, that, so sunk and blind, I could not conceive the light of goodness and of a beauty to be embraced for its own sake, which the eye of the flesh does not see and which is seen from within. Nor did I, wretch, consider from what spring it flowed to me that I discussed even these foul things with friends with pleasure, and that I could not be happy without friends, even according to the sense I then had, however great the abundance of carnal pleasures. These friends I certainly loved for their own sake, and I felt that I was loved by them for my own sake in return. O crooked ways! Woe to my rash soul, which hoped that if it withdrew from you it would have something better! Turned and turned again, on its back, on its sides, on its belly, all is hard, and you alone are rest. And see, you are here, and you free us from our wretched errors and set us on your way, and console us and say: “Run; I will carry you, and I will bring you through, and there too I will carry you.”

My evil and abominable adolescence was already dead, and I was passing into young manhood; the older I was in years, the more shameful in vanity, since I could not conceive of any substance except such as is usually seen with these eyes. I did not think of you, God, in the shape of a human body; ever since I began to hear something of wisdom I always shunned this, and I rejoiced to find it so in the faith of our spiritual mother, your catholic church. But what else to think of you did not occur to me. And I, a man, and such a man, tried to think of you, the supreme and only and true God; and with all my inmost being I believed you to be incorruptible and inviolable and unchangeable. For, though I did not know from where or how, I saw plainly and was certain that what can be corrupted is worse than what cannot, and I unhesitatingly preferred what cannot be violated to what can, and that what suffers no change is better than what can be changed. My heart cried out violently against all my phantasms, and with this one blow I tried to drive away from the sight of my mind the unclean swarm flying around it; and, scattered in the twinkling of an eye, see, it gathered again and was back, and rushed upon my sight and clouded it. So, although not in the form of a human body, I was still forced to think of something bodily, extended through spaces of place, either infused into the world or even diffused outside the world through infinite space; even that incorruptible, inviolable, and unchangeable being, which I preferred to the corruptible, violable, and changeable. For whatever I deprived of such spaces seemed to me to be nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a void, as if a body were taken out of a place and the place remained empty of every body, earthly, watery, airy, and heavenly, but still a place, empty, like a spacious nothing.