Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 1 part 15/22

Because they are more strongly occupied in other things, which make them wretched rather than that thing, which they but faintly remember, makes them happy. For there is still a little light in men; let them walk, let them walk, lest the darkness overtake them. But why does truth beget hatred, and your man who preaches the truth become an enemy to them, when the happy life is loved, which is nothing but joy over truth—unless because truth is loved in such a way that whoever loves something else wishes that what they love be the truth, and because they would not wish to be deceived, they are unwilling to be convicted of being deceived? Therefore they hate the truth for the sake of that very thing which they love in place of truth. They love it when it shines upon them, they hate it when it reproves them.

For because they do not wish to be deceived but wish to deceive, they love it when it reveals itself, and hate it when it reveals them. Thus it will repay them, that those who do not wish to be made manifest by it, it will both make manifest against their will, and itself will not be manifest to them. Thus, thus, even thus the human mind, even thus blind and feeble, base and unseemly, wishes to lie hidden, yet does not wish that anything be hidden from itself. But the opposite is rendered to it, that it itself is not hidden from the truth, while the truth is hidden from it. Yet even so, while it is wretched, it prefers to rejoice over true things rather than over false. It will therefore be happy, if, with no annoyance interposing, it shall rejoice over the truth alone, through which all things are true.

Behold how widely I have ranged in my memory seeking you, Lord, and I have not found you outside it. Nor do I find anything about you which I did not remember from the time I learned of you. For from the time I learned of you, I have not forgotten you. For where I found truth, there I found my God, truth itself, which since I learned, I have not forgotten. And so, since I learned of you, you abide in my memory, and there I find you, when I recall you and delight in you. These are my holy delights, which you have given me, in your mercy regarding my poverty. But where in my memory do you abide, Lord, where there do you abide? What chamber have you fashioned for yourself? What sanctuary have you built for yourself?

You have given this dignity to my memory, that you should abide in it; but in which part of it you abide, this I consider. For I transcended those parts of it which the beasts also have, when I recalled you, because I did not find you there among the images of bodily things; and I came to those parts of it where I committed the affections of my mind, and there too I did not find you.

And I entered into the seat of my mind itself, which it has in my memory, since the mind also remembers itself, and you were not there either; for just as you are not a bodily image nor the affection of a living being, such as it is when we rejoice, are saddened, desire, fear, remember, forget, and whatever is of this kind, so neither are you the mind itself, because you are the Lord God of the mind; and all these things are changed, but you remain unchangeable above all things, and you have deigned to dwell in my memory from the time I learned of you. And why do I seek in what place of it you dwell, as though there were places there? You certainly dwell in it, since I remember you from the time I learned of you, and in it I find you, when I recall you. Where, then, did I find you, that I might learn of you?

For you were not yet in my memory before I learned of you. Where then did I find you, that I might learn of you, except in you above myself? And nowhere is there a place; we recede and we approach, and nowhere is there a place. O Truth, everywhere you preside over all who consult you, and at the same time you answer all who consult you on diverse matters. Clearly you answer, but not all clearly hear. All consult you about what they wish, but they do not always hear what they wish. Your best servant is he who looks not so much to hear from you what he himself wished, but rather to wish that which he has heard from you. Late have I loved you, O beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! And behold, you were within and I was outside, and there I sought you, and into those shapely things which you made I rushed, deformed.

You were with me, and I was not with you. Those things held me far from you, which, if they were not in you, would not exist at all. You called and cried out and broke through my deafness; you flashed, you shone, and you put my blindness to flight; you breathed fragrance, and I drew in breath and now pant for you; I tasted, and I hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I burned for your peace. When I shall cleave to you with my whole self, nowhere shall there be sorrow and toil for me, and my life shall be alive, wholly full of you. But now, since you lift up him whom you fill—because I am not yet full of you—I am a burden to myself. My joys, which should be wept over, contend with my sorrows, in which I should rejoice, and on which side the victory stands I do not know. Woe is me, Lord, have mercy on me!

My evil sorrows contend with my good joys, and on which side the victory stands I do not know. Woe is me! Lord, have mercy on me! Woe is me! Behold, I do not hide my wounds: you are the physician, I am sick; you are merciful, I am wretched. Is not human life upon the earth a temptation? Who would wish for troubles and difficulties? You command that they be endured, not loved. No one loves what he endures, even if he loves to endure. For although he rejoices to endure, yet he would rather there be nothing for him to endure. In adversity I desire prosperity, in prosperity I fear adversity. What middle place is there between these, where human life is not a temptation? Woe to the prosperities of the world, once and again, from fear of adversity and from corruption of joy!

Woe to the adversities of the world, once and again and a third time, from the desire of prosperity, and because adversity itself is hard, and lest it shatter endurance. Is not human life upon the earth a temptation without any intermission? And my whole hope is in nothing but your great mercy. Grant what you command, and command what you will. You enjoin continence upon us. And when I knew, says a certain one, that no one could be continent unless God granted it, this very thing was of wisdom, to know whose gift it was. For through continence we are gathered together and brought back into one, from which we had flowed away into many. For he loves you less who loves anything together with you, which he does not love for your sake. O love, who ever burns and is never extinguished, charity, my God, set me on fire!

You command continence: grant what You command, and command what You will. You command, surely, that I restrain myself from the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the ambition of the world. You commanded me to abstain from concubinage, and concerning marriage itself You counselled something better than what You allowed. And because You granted it, it was done even before I became a steward of Your sacrament. But there still live in my memory, of which I have spoken much, the images of such things, which my habit fixed there; and they rush upon me, when I am awake indeed without force, but in sleep not only unto delight but even unto consent and an act most like the deed. And so great is the power of that image's illusion upon my soul and in my flesh, that to me sleeping these false visions

persuade me of what true things, when I am awake, cannot. Am I not myself then, O Lord my God? And yet how great is the difference between myself and myself, within that moment in which I pass from here into sleep, or pass back again from there to here! Where then is the reason by which, when awake, a man resists such suggestions and, if the very things be thrust upon him, remains unshaken? Is it shut up together with the eyes? Is it lulled to sleep together with the bodily senses? And whence is it that often even in sleep we resist, and, mindful of our resolve and most chastely abiding in it, give no assent to such enticements?

And yet so great is the difference, that when it happens otherwise, we return upon waking to the repose of a clear conscience, and by the very distance find that we have not done that which nevertheless, in whatever way it was wrought in us, we grieve over. Is not Your hand mighty, O almighty God, to heal all the languors of my soul, and by Your more abundant grace to quench even the lascivious motions of my sleep? You will increase, O Lord, more and more Your gifts in me, that my soul may follow me to You, freed from the birdlime of concupiscence, that it may not be in rebellion against itself, and that even in sleep it may not only not perpetrate those shameful corruptions through animal images unto the flux of the flesh, but may not even consent to them.

For that nothing of the kind, or so little as could be checked by a nod, should delight me even in the chaste affection of one who sleeps—not only in this life but even at this age—is no great thing for the Almighty, who are able to do above what we ask and understand. Yet now I have told my good Lord what I still am in this kind of my evil, rejoicing with trembling in that which You have granted me, and mourning in that which I am still unfinished, hoping that You will perfect Your mercies in me unto that fullness of peace which my inward and outward parts shall have with You, when death is swallowed up in victory. There is another evil of the day, which would that it might suffice for it.

For we repair the daily ruins of the body by eating and drinking, until You destroy both food and belly, when You shall slay neediness with a wondrous fullness, and clothe this corruptible with everlasting incorruption. But now this necessity is sweet to me, and against that sweetness I fight, lest I be taken captive; and I wage a daily war by fasting, oftentimes bringing my body into subjection, and my pains are driven away by pleasure. For hunger and thirst are a kind of pain; they burn and slay like a fever, unless the medicine of nourishment comes to the rescue. And because this is at hand from the consolation of Your gifts, in which earth and water and sky serve our infirmity, calamity is called delight.

This You have taught me, that I should come to take food as I take medicine. But while I pass from the distress of want to the repose of satiety, in that very passage the snare of concupiscence lies in wait for me. For the passage itself is a pleasure, and there is no other by which to pass to that whither necessity compels us to pass. And whereas health is the cause of eating and drinking, there joins itself as a dangerous handmaid a pleasure, which for the most part tries to go before, so that for its sake may be done what I say or wish I do for health's sake. Nor is the measure of both the same: for what is enough for health is too little for delight, and often it becomes uncertain whether it is still the necessary care of the body that seeks support, or whether a voluptuous deceit of cupidity that demands service.

At this uncertainty my unhappy soul takes cheer, and in it prepares the defence of an excuse, rejoicing that it does not appear what may be enough for the moderation of health, so that under the pretext of health it may screen the business of pleasure. With these temptations I daily strive to resist, and I call upon Your right hand, and I refer my anxieties to You, because as yet I have no settled counsel in this matter. I hear the voice of my God commanding: 'Let not your hearts be weighed down with surfeiting and drunkenness.' Drunkenness is far from me: have mercy, that it draw not near me. But surfeiting has sometimes crept upon Your servant: have mercy, that it be put far from me. For no one can be continent unless You grant it. Many things You grant us when we pray, and whatever good we received before we prayed, we received it from You;

and that we might afterwards know this, we received it from You. A drunkard I never was, but drunkards made sober by You I have known. Therefore by You it was brought to pass that those should not be such who never were, even as by You it was brought to pass that those should not always be such who once were; and by You also it was brought to pass that both should know by whom it was brought to pass. I heard another voice of Yours: 'Go not after your lusts, and refrain yourself from your pleasure.' I heard also that saying, by Your gift, which I have much loved: 'Neither if we eat shall we abound, nor if we eat not shall we lack'—that is to say: neither shall that thing make me plentiful, nor that thing make me wretched. I heard also another: 'For I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, to be content; I know both how to abound, and I know how to suffer want.'

'I can do all things in Him who strengthens me.' Behold a soldier of the heavenly camp, not the dust which we are. But remember, O Lord, that we are dust, and out of dust You made man; and he was lost and is found. Nor could that man do it in himself, for he too was the same dust—he whom, saying such things by the breath of Your inspiration, I have come to love: 'I can do all things,' he said, 'in Him who strengthens me.' Strengthen me, that I may be able; grant what You command, and command what You will. He confesses that he has received, and that he who glories, glories in the Lord. I heard another asking that he might receive: 'Take from me,' he said, 'the concupiscences of the belly.' Whence it appears, holy God, that You give, when that is done which You command to be done. You have taught me, good Father:

'To the pure all things are pure,' but that it is evil for the man who eats with offence; and that every creature of Yours is good, and nothing to be cast away which is received with thanksgiving; and that 'food commends us not to God'; and that no man should judge us in meat or in drink; and that he who eats should not despise him who eats not, and he who eats not should not judge him who eats. These things I have learned—thanks be to You, praise be to You, my God, my master, knocker at my ears, illuminator of my heart: deliver me from every temptation. It is not the uncleanness of meat that I fear, but the uncleanness of craving.

I know that to Noah every kind of flesh that might serve for food was permitted to be eaten; that Elijah was refreshed with the food of flesh; that John, endowed with a marvellous abstinence, was not polluted by the living creatures, that is, the locusts, which fell to him for food. And I know that Esau was deceived by his craving for lentils; that David rebuked himself for his desire of water; and that our King was tempted, not with flesh, but with bread. And therefore the people too in the wilderness deserved to be reproved, not because they desired flesh, but because, in their desire for food, they murmured against the Lord. Placed therefore amid these temptations, I strive daily against the lust of eating and drinking: for it is not a thing that I may resolve to cut off once for all and never touch again, as I could concerning concubinage.

And so the reins of the throat must be held with a tempered slackening and tightening. And who is there, O Lord, who is not carried somewhat beyond the bounds of necessity? Whoever he is, he is a great man; let him magnify Your name. But I am not such, for I am a sinful man. Yet I too magnify Your name, and He who has overcome the world makes intercession to You for my sins, numbering me among the weak members of His body; for Your eyes have seen even what is imperfect in him, and in Your book all shall be written. Concerning the allurement of odours I am not greatly anxious: when they are absent, I do not seek them; when present, I do not refuse them, ready always even to do without them. So I seem to myself; perhaps I am deceived.

For these too are darkness to be bewailed, in which my own capacity, which is in me, lies hidden from me, so that my mind, questioning itself about its own powers, does not think it should easily believe itself, because that which is in it is for the most part hidden, unless experience make it manifest. And no man ought to be secure in this life, which is wholly called a temptation, whether he who could become better from worse may not also become worse from better. One hope, one confidence, one firm promise—Your mercy. The pleasures of the ears had more tenaciously entangled and subdued me, but You loosed and set me free.

Now, in the sounds which Your words animate, when they are sung with a sweet and skilful voice, I confess that I find some little repose—not indeed so as to cling there, but so that I may rise when I will. Yet together with the very sentiments by which they live, that they may be admitted to me, they seek in my heart a place of some dignity, and I scarcely grant them a fitting one. For sometimes I seem to myself to give them more honour than is fitting, while I feel that by the holy words themselves our minds are moved more religiously and ardently to a flame of piety when they are thus sung than if they were not so sung, and that all the affections of our spirit, according to their diversity, have their proper modes in voice and song, by some hidden affinity of which they are stirred up.

But the delight of my flesh, to which the mind ought not to be given over to be enervated, often deceives me, while the sense does not so attend upon the reason as patiently to be behind it, but, only because for reason's sake it deserved to be admitted, strives even to run before and to lead. Thus in these things I sin without perceiving it, and afterwards I perceive. At other times, however, guarding too anxiously against this very deception, I err by excessive severity—but very seldom—so that I could wish all the melodies of those sweet chants, with which the Psalter of David is frequented,

be removed from my ears and from those of the Church itself; and that seems to me safer which I remember was often told me concerning Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, who made the reader of the psalm sound it with so slight an inflexion of voice that he was nearer to one speaking than to one singing. Yet nevertheless, when I recall the tears which I shed at the chants of the Church in the beginnings of my recovered faith, and now when I am moved not by the singing but by the things that are sung, when they are sung with a clear voice and most fitting modulation, I again acknowledge the great usefulness of this institution.

Thus I waver between the peril of pleasure and the proof of wholesomeness, and am more inclined—though not pronouncing an irrevocable opinion—to approve the custom of singing in the Church, that by the delights of the ear the weaker mind may rise up into the affection of piety. Yet when it happens to me that the singing moves me more than the thing which is sung, I confess that I sin penally, and then I would rather not hear the singer. Behold where I am! Weep with me, and weep for me, you who within yourselves do some good, whence deeds proceed. For you who do not, these things do not move you. But You, O Lord my God, hear and look down and see and have mercy and heal me, in whose eyes I have become a question to myself, and that very thing is my languor.

There remains the pleasure of these eyes of my flesh, concerning which I make the confessions which the ears of Your temple may hear, the brotherly and pious ears, that we may conclude the temptations of the lust of the flesh, which still assail me as I groan and long to be clothed upon with my habitation which is from heaven. The eyes love beautiful and varied forms, bright and pleasant colours. Let not these hold my soul; let God hold it, who made these things very good indeed, but He is my good, not these. They touch me as I wake throughout the whole day, nor is there given me any respite from them, such as is given from the sounds of singing—sometimes from all sounds—in silence.

For that very queen of colours, this light, flooding all things which we behold, wherever I be by day, gliding upon me in manifold ways, flatters me when I am busy about something else and not attending to it. Yet it insinuates itself so forcibly that, if it be suddenly withdrawn, it is sought again with longing; and if it be long absent, it saddens the mind. O Light, which Tobit saw, when, with these eyes closed, he taught his son the way of life, and went before him with the foot of charity, nowhere erring; or which Isaac saw, when his bodily eyes, heavy and overshadowed with age, were such that he merited to bless his sons by not recognizing them, but to recognize them by blessing them; or which Jacob saw, when he too, dimmed in his eyes by great age, with luminous heart shed light upon the races of the future people prefigured in his sons.

And to his grandsons by Joseph he laid his hands crosswise in mystic fashion—not as their father from without corrected him, but as he himself from within discerned. This is the light, it is one, and they all are one who see and love it. But that bodily light, of which I was speaking, with its enticing and dangerous sweetness seasons the life of the world for its blind lovers. Yet when they who know how to praise You for it too, O God, Creator of all things, take it up into Your hymn, they are not taken up by it in their own sleep: so do I desire to be. I resist the seductions of the eyes, lest my feet be entangled, with which I walk Your way; and I lift up invisible eyes to You, that You may pluck my feet out of the snare. You again and again pluck them out, for they are ensnared.

You cease not to pluck them out, while I, on the other hand, repeatedly stick fast in the snares scattered everywhere, because You neither slumber nor sleep, who keep Israel. How innumerable are the things which men have added, by various arts and crafts, to the allurements of the eyes—in clothing, footwear, vessels, and fabrications of every kind, in pictures too and diverse images, and these far transgressing necessary and moderate use and pious signification—following outwardly what they make, forsaking inwardly Him by whom they were made, and destroying that which they were made.

But I, my God and my glory, even from this offer You a hymn, and sacrifice praise to Him who sacrifices for me, because the beautiful things that pass through souls into skilful hands come from that Beauty which is above souls, for which my soul sighs day and night. But the makers and followers of outward beauties draw thence the measure of approving them, yet do not draw thence the measure of using them. And He is there, and they see Him not, that they might go no further, and might keep their strength for You, and not scatter it abroad in luxurious weariness. But I, while I speak and discern these things, entangle my step even in these beauties; yet You will pluck me out, O Lord, You will pluck me out, because Your mercy is before my eyes.

For I am caught miserably, and You pluck me out mercifully—sometimes when I do not feel it, because I had fallen in but lightly; sometimes with pain, because I had already stuck fast. To this is added another form of temptation, manifoldly more perilous. For besides the lust of the flesh, which is in the delight of all the senses and pleasures, whose slaves perish utterly who make themselves far from You, there is in the soul, through those same bodily senses, a certain vain and curious desire, not of taking delight in the flesh, but of making experiments through the flesh, cloaked under the name of knowledge and science. And since this is in the appetite of knowing, while the eyes are the chief of the senses for knowing, in the divine word it is called the lust of the eyes.

For to see belongs properly to the eyes. Yet we use this word also of the other senses, when we direct them toward knowing. For we do not say: hear how it glows, or: smell how it shines, or: taste how it gleams, or: touch how it sparkles—for all these are said to be seen. But we say not only: see what shines, which the eyes alone can perceive, but also: see what sounds, see what smells, see what tastes, see how hard it is.

And therefore the general experience of the senses is called, as has been said, the lust of the eyes, because the office of seeing, in which the eyes hold the primacy, the other senses too usurp to themselves by way of likeness, when they explore anything of knowledge. From this, moreover, it is more evidently discerned what is done by the senses for pleasure, and what for curiosity: that pleasure pursues things beautiful, melodious, sweet, savoury, smooth; but curiosity, for the sake of trial, pursues even the contraries of these—not to undergo annoyance, but from the lust of experiencing and knowing. For what pleasure has it to see in a mangled corpse that at which you shudder? And yet, if one lie anywhere, men run together, that they may be saddened, that they may grow pale.

They even fear lest they should see this in their dreams, as if anyone had compelled them to see it while waking, or any report of its beauty had persuaded them. So also in the other senses, which it were long to pursue. From this disease of curiosity are exhibited all the marvels in spectacles. Hence men proceed to search out the secrets of nature, which is beyond us, the knowing of which profits nothing, and men desire nothing else than to know. Hence too, if anything be sought by magical arts to the same end of perverse science. Hence even in religion itself God is tempted, when signs and prodigies are demanded, not for any salvation, but desired for the sole experience of them.

In this so immense a forest, full of snares and dangers, behold how many things I have cut away and driven from my heart, as You have granted me to do, O God of my salvation. Yet when do I dare to say—when on every side so many things of this kind clamour around our daily life—when do I dare to say that I am made intent upon no such thing to gaze upon it and to be captivated by a vain care? Truly the theatres no longer carry me away, nor do I care to know the courses of the stars, nor has my soul ever sought answers from the shades: all sacrilegious rites I detest. From You, O Lord my God, to whom I owe humble and simple service, with how many machinations of suggestions does the enemy deal with me, that I should ask some sign of You!

But I beseech You, by our King and by our country Jerusalem, simple and chaste, that as the consent to such things is far from me, so it may be ever far and farther. But when I pray to You for anyone's salvation, far different is the end of my intention, and You, doing what You will, grant and will grant me gladly to follow. Yet nevertheless, in how many most minute and contemptible things our curiosity is daily tempted, and how often we slip, who can recount? How often, when men relate vain things, we first as it were bear with them, lest we offend the weak, and then little by little give heed to them with pleasure. I no longer watch a dog running after a hare when it happens in the circus;

but in truth in the field, if I chance to pass by, that hunting perhaps diverts me even from some great thought and turns me to itself—not compelling me to swerve aside by the body of my beast, but by the inclination of my heart; and unless, my infirmity being already shown to me, You quickly admonish me either to rise up to You out of that very sight by some consideration, or to despise the whole and pass on, I grow vacant and dull. What of it, when, as I sit at home, a lizard catching flies, or a spider entangling them as they rush into its webs, often makes me intent? Is the same thing not enacted because the creatures are small? I pass on from this to praising You, the wondrous Creator and Orderer of all things; but I do not begin to be intent from this. It is one thing to rise up quickly, another not to fall.