Confessions 9.25–10.12

So we said: "If for anyone the tumult of the flesh were silent; if the images of earth, water, and air were silent; if the heavens were silent, and the soul itself were silent to itself and passed beyond itself by not thinking of itself; if dreams and imaginary revelations were silent, and every tongue and every sign and whatever comes into being by passing away were wholly silent for anyone (since if anyone hears them, all these say, 'We did not make ourselves, but he made us who abides for ever'); if, having said this, they now fell silent, having turned their ear to him who made them, and he alone spoke, not through them but through himself, so that we might hear his Word, not through a tongue of flesh, nor through the voice of an angel, nor through the sound of thunder, nor through the riddle of a likeness, but might hear him himself, whom we love in these things, without these things, as we just now reached out and in a flash of thought touched the eternal Wisdom that abides above all things; if this were to continue, and other visions of a far lower kind were taken away, and this one alone were to seize and absorb and enfold its beholder in inward joys, so that eternal life might be like that moment of understanding for which we sighed: would not this be 'Enter into the joy of your Lord'? And when will that be? When we all rise again, but are not all changed?"

I said such things, if not in this way and in these words; yet, Lord, you know that on that day, when we were talking of such things and this world with all its delights grew worthless to us as we spoke, she said: "Son, for my part, I no longer take delight in anything in this life. What I am still doing here, and why I am here, I do not know, since my hope in this world is now spent. There was one thing for which I wanted to stay a little longer in this life: to see you a catholic Christian before I died. My God has granted this to me more abundantly, so that I see you even despising earthly happiness and his servant. What am I doing here?"

What I answered her I do not well remember, when meanwhile, within five days or not much more, she took to her bed with a fever. And while she was ill, one day she fainted and was for a little while withdrawn from those present. We ran to her, but she quickly came to her senses, and looked at us standing there, my brother and me, and said to us like one asking a question, "Where was I?" Then, looking at us stricken with grief, she said, "You will bury your mother here." I was silent and held back my tears. But my brother said something to the effect that he wished she might die not abroad but in her own country, as a happier lot. When she heard this, she looked at him with an anxious face, rebuking him with her eyes for thinking such things, and then, looking at me, said, "See what he says." And soon she said to us both: "Lay this body anywhere; let no care for it trouble you. This only I ask of you, that you remember me at the altar of the Lord, wherever you may be." And when she had expressed this wish in such words as she could, she fell silent, and her illness grew worse and afflicted her.

But I, thinking of your gifts, invisible God, which you put into the hearts of your faithful, and from which wonderful fruits spring up, rejoiced and gave you thanks, remembering what I knew: how anxiously she had always been concerned about the tomb which she had provided and prepared for herself beside the body of her husband. For because they had lived in great harmony, she also wanted (so little is the human mind able to grasp divine things) this to be added to that happiness and to be remembered among men: that it had been granted to her, after her journey across the sea, that the joined earth of both spouses should be covered by earth. But when this vanity had begun, by the fullness of your goodness, to be no longer in her heart, I did not know; and I rejoiced and marveled that she had shown herself so to me, although even in our conversation at the window, when she said, "What am I doing here now?" she did not seem to want to die in her own country. I heard also afterward that, when we were at Ostia, she spoke one day with a mother's confidence to some of my friends, when I was not present, about contempt for this life and the good of death; and when they were amazed at the courage of the woman (since you had given it to her) and asked whether she was not afraid to leave her body so far from her own city, she said: "Nothing is far from God, and there is no need to fear that at the end of the world he will not recognize where to raise me up from." So on the ninth day of her illness, in the fifty-sixth year of her age and the thirty-third of mine, that devout and holy soul was released from the body.

I closed her eyes, and a great sadness flowed into my heart and was passing over into tears; and at the same moment my eyes, under the violent command of my mind, drank back their fountain until they were dry, and in such a struggle it went very badly with me. Then, when she had breathed her last, the boy Adeodatus burst out in lamentation, and, checked by all of us, he fell silent. In the same way something childish in me too, which was slipping into tears, was checked by a young man's voice, the voice of the heart, and fell silent. For we did not think it fitting to celebrate that funeral with tearful laments and groans, because by these people usually lament some misery of the dying, or a kind of complete extinction. But she was neither dying miserably nor dying altogether. This we held for certain from the evidence of her character and from her "faith unfeigned" and from sure reasons.

What, then, was it that grieved me so heavily within, if not the fresh wound from the sudden breaking of that most sweet and dear habit of living together? I was indeed glad of her testimony, that in that very last illness, caressing me in return for my attentions, she called me dutiful and recalled with great love that she had never heard from my mouth any harsh or insulting word hurled at her. But yet, my God, who made us, what was there alike, what was there comparable, between the honor I paid her and the service she gave me? And so, because I was deprived of so great a comfort in her, my soul was wounded, and my life was, as it were, torn apart, since it had been made one from hers and mine.

When the boy had been restrained from weeping, Evodius took up the psalter and began to sing a psalm, to which the whole household responded: "Of mercy and judgment I will sing to you, O Lord." When they heard what was happening, many brothers and devout women gathered; and while those whose duty it was were attending to the burial according to custom, I, in a part of the house where I could fittingly do so, with those who thought I should not be left alone, discussed what was suitable to the occasion; and with this balm of truth I soothed a torment known to you, while they did not know it, listened attentively, and thought me to be without any feeling of grief. But in your ears, where none of them heard, I rebuked the softness of my feeling and held back the flood of sorrow, and it gave way to me a little; and again it was carried along by its own force, not as far as bursting into tears or changing my expression, but I knew what I was holding down in my heart. And because it greatly displeased me that these human things, which must happen in the due order and lot of our condition, had so much power over me, I grieved over my grief with another grief and was worn down by a double sadness. And then the body was carried out; we went, and we came back without tears.

For not even in those prayers which we poured out to you when the sacrifice of our redemption was offered for her, with the body already placed beside the grave before it was laid in it, as is the custom there, not even in those prayers did I weep; but all day long I was heavily sad in secret, and with troubled mind I asked you, as well as I could, to heal my grief, and you did not; I believe you were impressing on my memory by this one proof how strong is the bond of all habit, even against a mind that no longer feeds on a deceitful word. It seemed good to me also to go and bathe, because I had heard that baths got their name from the fact that the Greeks called them balaneion, because it drives anxiety from the mind. See, this too I confess to your mercy, "father of the fatherless": I bathed, and I was the same as before I bathed. For the bitterness of grief did not sweat out of my heart. Then I slept, and woke, and found my grief not a little softened; and as I lay alone in my bed, I remembered the true verses of your Ambrose: for you are "God, Creator of all things, and ruler of the heavens, clothing the day with the beauty of light, the night with the grace of sleep, so that rest may restore loosened limbs to the use of labor, and lift up weary minds, and free the anxious from their grief."

And then, little by little, I brought back to mind my former thoughts of your handmaid, her devout life toward you and her holy tenderness and compliance toward us, of which I had suddenly been deprived; and I wanted to weep in your sight about her and for her, about myself and for myself. And I let go the tears I had been holding back, to flow as much as they would, making them a bed for my heart; and it rested on them, because your ears were there, not those of some man who would put a proud interpretation on my weeping. And now, Lord, I confess to you in writing. Let whoever wishes read it and interpret it as he wishes; and if he finds it a sin that I wept for my mother for a small part of an hour, the mother now dead to my eyes who had wept for me many years that I might live in your eyes, let him not laugh at me, but rather, if he is a man of great love, let him himself weep for my sins before you, the Father of all the brothers of your Christ.

But now, with my heart healed of that wound, in which I might be blamed for a carnal feeling, I pour out to you, our God, for that handmaid of yours a very different kind of tears, which flows from a spirit shaken by considering the dangers of every soul that dies in Adam. Although she, made alive in Christ even before she was released from the flesh, lived in such a way that your name is praised in her faith and conduct, yet I do not dare to say that from the time you regenerated her through baptism no word came out of her mouth against your commandment. And it has been said by the Truth, your Son: "Whoever says to his brother, 'You fool,' will be liable to the fire of hell." And woe even to the praiseworthy life of men, if you examine it with mercy set aside! But because you do not search out our faults severely, we hope with confidence for some place with you. But whoever enumerates his true merits to you, what does he enumerate to you but your own gifts? Oh, if only men would know themselves to be men, and "let him who boasts boast in the Lord"!

So I, my praise and my life, God of my heart, setting aside for a little while her good deeds, for which I give you thanks with joy, now pray to you for the sins of my mother. Hear me through the healing of our wounds, who hung on the tree and, sitting at your right hand, intercedes with you for us. I know that she acted mercifully and from her heart forgave her debtors their debts: forgive her too her debts, if she contracted any in so many years after the water of salvation. Forgive, Lord, forgive, I beg you; "do not enter into judgment with her." Let "mercy triumph over judgment," because your words are true and you have promised mercy to the merciful. That they should be merciful, you gave them, you "who will have mercy on whom you have mercy, and will show compassion on whom you have compassion."

And I believe you have already done what I ask; but "accept the freewill offerings of my mouth," Lord. For when the day of her release was at hand, she did not think of having her body sumptuously wrapped or embalmed with spices, nor did she desire a choice monument or care about a tomb in her homeland. She did not charge us with these things; she only desired that she be remembered at your altar, which she had served without missing a single day, and from which she knew the holy victim was dispensed, by which "the bond that was against us was canceled," by which the enemy was triumphed over, who reckons up our sins and looks for something to charge us with, and found nothing in him, in whom we conquer. Who will pour back into him his innocent blood? Who will give back to him the price with which he bought us, so as to take us away from him? To the sacrament of this price of ours your handmaid bound her soul with the bond of faith. Let no one tear her away from your protection. Let not the lion and the dragon thrust himself in, either by force or by snares. For she will not answer that she owes nothing, lest she be convicted and seized by the cunning accuser; but she will answer that her debts have been forgiven by him to whom no one can repay what he, owing nothing, repaid for us.

So let her rest in peace with her husband, before whom and after whom she was married to no one; whom she served, bringing forth fruit for you with patience, so that she might win him too for you. And inspire, my Lord, my God, inspire your servants, my brothers, your sons, my masters, whom I serve with heart and voice and pen, that as many as read this may remember at your altar Monica, your handmaid, with Patricius, once her husband, through whose flesh you brought me into this life, how I do not know. May they remember with devout feeling my parents in this passing light, and my brothers under you, our Father, in our catholic mother, and my fellow citizens in the eternal Jerusalem, for which the pilgrimage of your people sighs from its going out until its return; so that what she asked of me at the last may be granted her more richly by the prayers of many, through these confessions, than by my prayers alone.

Let me know you, you who know me; let me know you as I also am known. Power of my soul, enter into it and fit it to yourself, so that you may have and hold it "without spot or wrinkle." This is my hope; therefore I speak, and in this hope I rejoice, when I rejoice soundly. As for the other things of this life, the more they are wept for, the less they deserve weeping; and the less they are wept for, the more they deserve it. For see, "you have loved truth," because "he who does it comes to the light." I want to do it in my heart, before you in confession, and in my writing before many witnesses.

And indeed from you, Lord, to whose eyes the abyss of human conscience lies bare, what could be hidden in me, even if I did not want to confess it to you? I would be hiding you from myself, not myself from you. But now, since my groaning is witness that I am displeasing to myself, you shine out and are pleasing and loved and longed for, so that I blush for myself and cast myself away and choose you, and please neither you nor myself except by you. To you, then, Lord, I am laid open, whatever I am. And I have said with what fruit I confess to you. I do not do it with the words and sounds of the flesh, but with the words of the soul and the cry of thought, which your ear knows. For when I am evil, to confess to you is nothing other than to be displeased with myself; but when I am devout, to confess to you is nothing other than not to attribute this to myself, since you, Lord, bless the righteous, but first you justify him when he is ungodly. So my confession, my God, is made to you in your sight silently and not silently: silent in sound, it cries out in feeling. For I say nothing right to men that you have not first heard from me, nor do you hear anything of that kind from me that you have not first said to me.

What have I to do with men, then, that they should hear my confessions, as if they were going to heal all my diseases? A race curious to know another's life, lazy to correct their own! Why do they seek to hear from me what I am, when they do not want to hear from you what they are? And how do they know, when they hear from me about myself, whether I am telling the truth, since "no one among men knows what goes on in a man except the spirit of the man that is in him"? But if they hear from you about themselves, they will not be able to say, "The Lord is lying." For what is it to hear from you about oneself but to know oneself? And who knows himself and says, "It is false," unless he himself is lying? But because "love believes all things," at least among those whom it makes one by binding them to itself, I too, Lord, confess to you in such a way that men may hear, though I cannot prove to them whether my confession is true; but those whose ears love opens to me believe me.

But you, my inmost physician, make clear to me with what fruit I do this. For the confessions of my past evils, which you have forgiven and covered, to make me happy in you, changing my soul by faith and your sacrament, when they are read and heard, stir up the heart so that it does not sleep in despair and say, "I cannot," but wakes up in the love of your mercy and the sweetness of your grace, by which every weak person is strong who through it becomes aware of his own weakness. And good people are delighted to hear of the past evils of those who are now free of them; they are delighted not because they are evils, but because they were and are no longer. With what fruit, then, my Lord, to whom my conscience confesses daily, more secure in the hope of your mercy than in its own innocence, with what fruit, I ask, do I also confess to men before you through this writing, not what I was, but what I am now? For that other fruit I have seen and mentioned. But what I still am, at this very time of my confessions, many who know me want to know, and many who do not know me but have heard something from me or about me; yet their ear is not at my heart, where I am whatever I am. So they want to hear me confess what I am within, where they cannot direct eye or ear or mind; they want to, as people who will believe; will they know? For the love by which they are good tells them that I am not lying in confessing about myself, and that love in them believes me.

But with what fruit do they want this? Do they want to rejoice with me when they hear how close I come to you by your gift, and to pray for me when they hear how much I am held back by my own weight? To such people I will reveal myself. For it is no small fruit, Lord my God, that many should give you thanks for us and many should pray to you for us. Let a brotherly mind love in me what you teach is to be loved, and grieve in me over what you teach is to be grieved over. Let a brotherly mind do this, not a stranger's, not that of "alien children, whose mouth speaks vanity, and their right hand is a right hand of iniquity"; but that brotherly mind which, when it approves me, rejoices over me, and when it disapproves me, is sad for me, because whether it approves or disapproves me, it loves me. To such people I will reveal myself: let them breathe freely at my good things and sigh at my evil things. My good things are your works and your gifts; my evil things are my faults and your judgments. Let them breathe freely at the one and sigh at the other, and let hymn and weeping rise into your sight from brotherly hearts, your censers. And you, Lord, delighted with the fragrance of your holy temple, "have mercy on me according to your great mercy," for your name's sake; and, never abandoning what you have begun, bring to completion what is incomplete in me.

This is the fruit of my confessions, not of what I was but of what I am: that I should confess this not only before you, with secret exultation and trembling and with secret sorrow and hope, but also in the ears of the believing sons of men, companions of my joy and sharers of my mortality, my fellow citizens and fellow pilgrims, those who go before, those who follow, and the companions of my way. These are your servants, my brothers, whom you willed to be your sons and my masters, whom you commanded me to serve if I wish to live with you from you. And this word of yours would have been too little for me if it had commanded only by speaking, and had not gone before by doing. I do this in deeds and in words; I do it under your wings, with very great danger, were it not that under your wings my soul is subject to you and my weakness is known to you. I am a little child, but my Father lives for ever, and my guardian is sufficient for me; for he who begot me and he who guards me is the same, and you yourself are all my good things, you, the Almighty, who are with me even before I am with you. To such, then, as you command me to serve, I will reveal not what I was, but what I now am and still am; "but I do not judge myself." So let me be heard in this way.

For it is you, Lord, who judge me; because although "no one among men knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man that is in him," yet there is something of a man which not even the spirit of the man that is in him knows; but you, Lord, know all of him, for you made him. And I, though in your sight I despise myself and count myself "dust and ashes," yet know something of you that I do not know of myself. And certainly "we see now through a mirror in a riddle, not yet face to face"; and so, as long as "I am a pilgrim away from you," I am more present to myself than to you; and yet I know that you cannot be violated in any way, while I do not know which temptations I am able to resist and which I am not. And there is hope, because "you are faithful, and do not let us be tempted beyond what we can bear, but with the temptation also make a way out, so that we may be able to endure it." Let me confess, then, what I know of myself; let me confess also what I do not know of myself, since what I know of myself I know by your light, and what I do not know of myself I do not know until "my darkness becomes like noonday" in your sight.

Not with a doubtful but with a certain conscience, Lord, I love you. You struck my heart with your word, and I loved you. But heaven and earth and all that is in them, see, on every side they tell me to love you, and they do not cease to tell it to everyone, "so that they are without excuse." But more deeply you "will have mercy on whom you have mercy, and show compassion on whom you have compassion"; otherwise heaven and earth speak your praises to the deaf. But what do I love when I love you? Not the beauty of a body, nor the grace of time, nor the brightness of light, so friendly to these eyes; not the sweet melodies of every kind of song, not the fragrance of flowers and ointments and spices, not manna and honey, not limbs welcome to the embraces of the flesh: I do not love these when I love my God. And yet I love a kind of light and a kind of voice and a kind of fragrance and a kind of food and a kind of embrace when I love my God: the light, voice, fragrance, food, and embrace of my inner man, where there shines for my soul what no place contains, where there sounds what time does not snatch away, where there is fragrance which no wind scatters, where there is taste which eating does not lessen, and where there is a clinging which satiety does not tear apart. This is what I love when I love my God.

And what is this? I asked the earth, and it said, "I am not he"; and all things in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps and the creeping things with living souls, and they answered, "We are not your God; look above us." I asked the breezes that blow, and the whole air with its inhabitants said, "Anaximenes is mistaken; I am not God." I asked the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars: "Nor are we the God whom you seek," they say. And I said to all the things that stand around the doors of my flesh: "Tell me about my God, since you are not he; tell me something about him." And they cried out with a loud voice: "He made us." My question was my attention, and their answer was their beauty. And I turned to myself and said to myself, "Who are you?" And I answered, "A man." And see, body and soul are present in me, the one outer and the other inner. Which of these should I have asked about my God, whom I had already sought through the body from earth to heaven, as far as I could send messengers, the rays of my eyes? But the inner is better. For to it, as ruler and judge, all the bodily messengers reported the answers of heaven and earth and all that is in them, saying, "We are not God," and "He made us." The inner man knew these things through the service of the outer; I, the inner, knew these things, I, I the mind, through the senses of my body. I asked the mass of the world about my God, and it answered me, "I am not he, but he made me."

Is not this beauty apparent to all whose senses are sound? Why does it not speak the same to all? Animals small and great see it, but they cannot ask about it, for reason is not set over them as a judge of what the senses report. But men can ask, so that "the invisible things of God are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made"; but by love they become subject to them, and being subject they cannot judge. Nor do these things answer those who ask unless they judge; nor do they change their voice, that is, their beauty, if one man only sees and another sees and asks, so as to appear one way to the one and another way to the other; but appearing in the same way to both, it is mute to the one and speaks to the other. Or rather, it speaks to all, but they understand who compare its voice, received from outside, with the truth within. For the truth says to me: "Your God is not heaven and earth, nor any body." Their nature says this. They see: it is a mass, less in the part than in the whole. Now you are better, I tell you, my soul, since you quicken the mass of your body, giving it life, which no body gives to a body. But your God is for you also the life of your life.

What, then, do I love when I love my God? Who is he who is above the head of my soul? Through my soul itself I will ascend to him. I will pass beyond the power by which I cling to the body and fill its frame with life. It is not by this power that I find my God; for then "the horse and mule, which have no understanding," would find him, since theirs is the same power by which their bodies also live. There is another power, not only by which I give life but also by which I give sensation to my flesh, which the Lord made for me, commanding the eye not to hear and the ear not to see, but the one to be that through which I see, the other that through which I hear, and assigning to each of the other senses its own seat and office: the various things I do through them, I, one mind. I will pass beyond this power of mine too, for the horse and mule have this also; they too sense through the body.

So I will pass beyond this power of my nature too, ascending by steps to him who made me, and I come to the fields and spacious palaces of memory, where the treasures of countless images are, brought in from things of every kind perceived by the senses. There is stored away whatever we think as well, when we enlarge or diminish or in any way vary what the senses have touched, and anything else that has been entrusted and laid up there, which forgetfulness has not yet swallowed and buried. When I am there, I ask for whatever I want to be brought out, and some things come forth at once; some are sought for longer and are dug out, as it were, from more hidden storerooms; some rush out in crowds, and while something else is being asked for and sought, they leap out into the middle as if saying, "Is it perhaps us?" And I drive them away with the hand of my heart from the face of my remembering, until what I want is cleared of clouds and comes into sight from its hiding places. Other things are supplied easily and in unbroken order as they are called for, and those in front give way to those that follow, and in giving way are stored away, to come forth again when I wish. All this happens when I tell something from memory.