Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 1 part 4/22

And so by humble piety men return to you, and you purge us from our evil habit, and are propitious to the sins of those who confess, and hear the groans of those in fetters, and loose us from the bonds which we have made for ourselves, if only we no longer raise up against you the horns of a false liberty through the avarice of having more and the risk of losing all, by loving our own possession more than you, the Good of all. But amid shameful deeds and crimes and so many iniquities, there are the sins of those making progress, which by those who judge well and rebuke according to the rule of perfection are even praised, in hope of fruit, as the blade of the standing corn.

And there are certain things like to either a shameful deed or a crime, and yet they are not sins, because they neither offend you, the Lord our God, nor the social fellowship, when things suited to the use of life and to the occasion are procured, and it is uncertain whether out of a lust of having; or when men are punished by an ordained authority out of zeal for correction, and it is uncertain whether out of a lust of harming. Many deeds, therefore, which would seem to men to be reproved, are approved by your testimony; and many praised by men are condemned with you as witness; since often the appearance of the deed is one thing, and the mind of the doer another, and the article of the hidden time another.

But when you suddenly command something unaccustomed and unforeseen, even if you at some time forbade it, although you hide the cause of your command for the time being, and although it be against the covenant of some men's society, who would doubt that it must be done, since that society of men is just which serves you? But blessed are they who know that you have commanded. For all things are done by those who serve you, either to set forth what is needful for the present, or to foretell things to come. These things, not knowing, I mocked those holy servants and prophets of yours. And what was I doing when I mocked them, but being mocked by you, led on little by little and gradually to such trifles, that I believed a fig wept when it was plucked, and its mother, the tree, with milky tears?

Yet if some holy man should eat that fig, plucked surely by another's sin and not his own, he would mingle it with his bowels and breathe out from it angels, nay rather particles of God, by groaning in prayer and belching: which particles of the supreme and true God would have been bound up in that fruit, unless they were loosed by the tooth and belly of an elect saint. And I, wretched, believed that more mercy was to be shown to the fruits of the earth than to the men for whose sake they are born. For if anyone hungering, who was not a Manichaean, should ask for it, the morsel would seem, as it were, condemned to capital punishment, if it were given to him.

And You stretched forth Your hand from on high, and out of this deep darkness You drew my soul, when my mother, Your faithful one, wept for me before You more bitterly than mothers weep over the bodily deaths of their children. For she saw my death by the faith and the spirit which she had from You, and You heard her, O Lord. You heard her and did not despise her tears, when, streaming down, they watered the ground beneath her eyes in every place of her prayer; You heard her. For whence came that dream by which You consoled her, so that she consented to live with me and to share the same table in the house — for she had begun to refuse it, turning away from and detesting the blasphemies of my error?

For she saw herself standing upon a certain wooden rule, and a radiant youth coming toward her, cheerful and smiling upon her, while she herself was sorrowful and worn out with grief. When he had asked her the causes of her sadness and of her daily tears — asking, as is customary, to teach rather than to learn — and when she had answered that she was bewailing my perdition, he bade her be at ease, and admonished her to look and see that where she was, there I also was. And when she looked, she saw me standing beside her upon the same rule. Whence came this, except that Your ears were inclined to her heart, O You good and almighty One, who so care for each one of us as though You cared for him alone, and so care for all as though they were but single individuals?

Whence came this too: that when she had told me of that vision, and I tried to twist it round, so that she rather should not despair of becoming what I was, she at once and without any hesitation said: 'No; for it was not said to me, where he is, there shall you also be, but, where you are, there shall he also be.' I confess to You, O Lord, my remembrance, so far as I recall it — and I have often spoken of it — that I was more deeply moved by this answer of Yours through my mother, in that she was not disturbed by the falsehood of an interpretation so plausible, and so quickly saw what was to be seen — which I assuredly had not seen before she spoke — than by the very dream itself, whereby the joy of that devout woman, to be fulfilled so long afterward, was foretold so long beforehand for the consolation of her present anxiety.

For nearly nine years followed, during which I wallowed in that deep mire and the darkness of falsehood, often striving to rise, only to be dashed down the more grievously; while that chaste, devout, and sober widow, such as You love, though now more buoyant in hope, yet no less unremitting in weeping and groaning, did not cease in all the hours of her prayers to bewail me before You; and her prayers entered into Your sight, and yet You still let me be tossed and wrapped about in that darkness. And meanwhile You gave another answer, which I recall — for I pass over much, since I hasten to those things which more urgently press me to confess to You, and much I do not remember.

You gave, then, yet another answer through Your priest, a certain bishop nourished in the Church and well exercised in Your books. When that woman begged him to deign to converse with me, to refute my errors, to unteach me what was evil and teach me what was good — for he was wont to do this whenever he found suitable persons — he refused, wisely indeed, as I afterward perceived. For he answered that I was as yet unteachable, since I was puffed up with the novelty of that heresy and had already, with certain petty little questions, harassed many unlearned folk, as she herself had told him. 'But,' said he, 'let him alone there. Only pray for him to the Lord:'

by reading he himself will discover what an error it is, and how great its impiety.' He related at the same time that he himself, as a little boy, had been handed over by his deluded mother to the Manichaeans, and had not only read but even repeatedly copied out almost all their books, and that it had become evident to him, with none disputing against or refuting him, how that sect was to be shunned; and so he had shunned it. When he had said this and she still would not acquiesce, but pressed all the more with entreaties and abundant weeping, that he would see me and discourse with me, he, now somewhat vexed, said: 'Go from me; as you live, it cannot be that the son of these tears should perish.' This saying she often recalled in her conversations with me as having received it as though it had sounded from heaven. BOOK FOUR.

Through that same period of nine years, from the nineteenth year of my age to the twenty-eighth, we were seduced and we seduced others, deceived and deceiving, amid various lusts: openly through the teachings which they call liberal, but secretly under the false name of religion; here proud, there superstitious, everywhere vain. On this side pursuing the emptiness of popular glory, even to the applause of the theatres, contentious poetic competitions, the strife for crowns of hay, the trifles of public spectacles, and the intemperance of lusts; on that side seeking to be purged of these filthy things, since we brought food to those who were called the elect and the holy, that out of them, in the workshop of their belly, they might fashion for us angels and gods through whom we might be set free.

And I pursued these things and did them with my friends, who were deceived along with me and through me. Let the arrogant deride me, and those not yet wholesomely cast down and broken by You, my God; yet let me confess to You my disgraces in Your praise. Suffer me, I beseech You, and grant me to range round, in present remembrance, the past windings of my error, and to offer to You a sacrifice of jubilation. For what am I to myself without You but a guide to my own precipice? Or what am I, even when it is well with me, but one sucking Your milk or feeding upon You, the food that is not corrupted? And what is any man, whatever man he be, seeing he is but a man? But let the strong and mighty deride us; we, the weak and needy, will confess to You.

In those years I taught the art of rhetoric, and, conquered by greed, I sold a victorious loquacity. Yet I preferred, Lord, as You know, to have good pupils — such as are called good — and without guile I taught them guile, not that they might use it against the life of the innocent, but sometimes for the life of the guilty. And, O God, You saw from afar my faith stumbling on the slippery ground and sparking faintly amid much smoke, the faith which I exhibited in that teaching to those who loved vanity and sought after a lie, being their companion. In those years I had one woman, known to me not by what is called lawful wedlock, but whom my wandering ardour, devoid of prudence, had tracked out;

yet only one, keeping faith with her bed also, in whom indeed I learned by my own example what difference there is between the bond of a conjugal compact, covenanted for the sake of begetting children, and the pact of a lustful love, where offspring is born even against one's wish, though once born it compels itself to be loved. I recall also that, when I had resolved to enter a contest of theatrical poetry, some soothsayer or other sent to ask me what reward I would give him to make me win; but I, detesting and abhorring those foul rites, answered that, even were the crown immortal and of gold, I would not let a fly be killed for my victory.

For he was going to slay living creatures in his sacrifices, and by those honours, it seemed, to invite demons to favour me. But this evil too I rejected, not out of devotion to Your chastity, O God of my heart. For I knew not how to love You, who knew not how to conceive anything save bodily splendours. And does not a soul, sighing after such fictions, commit fornication against You, and trust in things false, and feed the winds? But I, forsooth, would not have sacrifice offered for me to demons, while I myself was sacrificing to them by that very superstition. For what else is it to feed the winds than to feed those demons themselves — that is, by going astray to become their pleasure and their mockery?

And so I did not cease openly to consult those impostors whom they call mathematicians [astrologers], because there was, as it were, no sacrifice among them, and no prayers were directed to any spirit for the sake of divination. Yet true Christian piety consistently rejects and condemns this also. For it is good to confess to You, O Lord, and to say: Have mercy on me; heal my soul, for I have sinned against You; and not to abuse Your indulgence as a license to sin, but to remember the Lord's word: Behold, you are made whole; sin no more, lest a worse thing happen to you. All this wholesomeness those men strive to slay, when they say:

'From heaven comes for you an inescapable cause of sinning,' and 'Venus did this, or Saturn, or Mars' — to wit, that man may be without fault, being flesh and blood and proud rottenness, while the Creator and Orderer of heaven and the stars is to be blamed. And who is this but our God, the sweetness and the source of justice, who render to every man according to his works, and who do not despise a contrite and humbled heart? There was at that time a man shrewd, most skilled in the art of medicine and most renowned in it, who as proconsul had with his own hand placed that contestant's crown upon my unsound head — but not as a physician. For of that sickness You are the healer, You who resist the proud, but give grace to the humble.

Yet did You, even through that old man, fail me or cease to heal my soul? For when I had become more familiar with him, and was constantly and fixedly attached to his discourses — for they were pleasing and weighty, without the showy liveliness of words but with vivacity of sentiments — when he had learned from my conversation that I was given to the books of the casters of nativities, he warned me kindly and as a father to throw them away, and not to squander vainly upon that vanity the care and labour necessary for useful things. He said that he himself had learned these arts in such a way that in the earliest years of his life he had wished to take up that profession as a livelihood; and that, if he had understood Hippocrates, he could assuredly have understood those writings too;

and yet that afterward he had forsaken them and pursued medicine for no other reason than that he had found them utterly false, and that he, being a serious man, was unwilling to earn his living by deceiving men. 'But you,' said he, 'who hold rhetoric to support yourself among men, pursue this fallacy of free choice, not from necessity of livelihood. The more, therefore, you ought to believe me concerning it, who laboured to learn it as perfectly as I was willing to live by it alone.' When I had asked him what then was the cause that many true things were pronounced from it, he answered, as best he could, that the power of chance, everywhere diffused throughout the nature of things, brought this about.

For if, when someone happens to consult the pages of some poet who was singing and intending something far different, a verse should often come forth wondrously suited to the matter in hand, it was no wonder, he said, if from the human soul, by some higher instinct not knowing what was being wrought within it, there should sound forth something — not by art but by chance — which chimed with the affairs and deeds of the inquirer. And this indeed You provided for me from him, or through him, and You sketched in my memory what I myself should afterward seek out for myself.

But at that time neither he, nor my dearest Nebridius — a youth exceedingly good and exceedingly chaste, who derided that whole kind of divination — could persuade me to throw these things away, since the authority of the authors themselves moved me more, and I had not yet found any certain proof, such as I was seeking, by which it might appear to me without ambiguity that what was truly said by those consulted was said by chance or by lot, and not by the art of those who scanned the stars. In those years, at the time when I had first begun to teach in the town where I was born, I had acquired a friend exceedingly dear to me through fellowship in our studies, of my own age and like me in the very flower of youth. As a boy he had grown up with me, and we had gone together to school and together had played.

But he was not yet a friend in the truest sense — although even then he was not so, in the way that true friendship is; for it is not true unless You bind it fast among those who cleave to one another by the charity poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who is given to us. Yet still he was sweet to me, our friendship matured in the fervour of like pursuits. For from the true faith — which as a youth he did not hold genuinely and deeply — I had turned him aside into superstitious and pernicious fables, on account of which my mother bewailed me. Already that man was wandering astray in mind together with me, and my soul could not be without him.

And behold, You — pressing close upon the heels of Your fugitives, O God of vengeances and Fountain of mercies at once, who turn us back to Yourself in wondrous ways — behold, You took that man away from this life when he had scarcely completed a year in friendship with me, a friendship sweet to me beyond all the sweetnesses of that life of mine. Who can recount Your praises, even one man within himself alone, for those things he has experienced? What did You then do, my God, and how unsearchable is the abyss of Your judgments? For when he was suffering from fevers, he lay long without consciousness in a deathly sweat, and, when he was despaired of, he was baptized while unaware, I caring nothing and presuming that his soul would rather retain what it had received from me, not what was done in his unknowing body. But far otherwise was it.

For he was revived and made well; and immediately, as soon as I could speak with him — and I could soon, as soon as he could, since I did not leave him and we hung too much upon each other — I tried to jest with him, as though he too would jest with me about the baptism which he had received while utterly absent in mind and sense. But he had now learned that he had received it. And he shrank from me as from an enemy, and with a marvellous and sudden freedom admonished me that, if I wished to be his friend, I should cease to say such things to him. But I, stupefied and disturbed, deferred all my impulses until he should first recover and be fit in the strength of health, with whom I might then deal as I wished. But he was snatched away from my madness, that he might be kept with You for my consolation:

after a few days, in my absence, he was again seized by fevers and died. By this grief my heart was darkened, and whatever I looked upon was death. My homeland was a torment to me, and my father's house a strange unhappiness; and whatever I had shared with him had, without him, turned into a monstrous torture. My eyes sought him everywhere, and he was not given to me; and I hated all things, because they had him not, nor could they now say to me, 'Behold, he comes!' as they did when he was alive and away. I had become to myself a great riddle, and I questioned my soul why it was sad and why it troubled me so exceedingly; and it knew not what to answer me. And if I said:

'Hope in God,' it rightly did not comply, because the man whom it had lost — most dear to it — was truer and better than the phantasm in which it was bidden to hope. Weeping alone was sweet to me, and it had succeeded my friend in the delights of my soul. And now, O Lord, those things have passed away, and time has soothed my wound. Can I hear from You, who are Truth, and apply the ear of my heart to Your mouth, that You may tell me why weeping is sweet to the wretched? Or have You, though present everywhere, cast our misery far from Yourself, and do You abide in Yourself, while we are tossed about in our trials? And yet, unless we wept into Your ears, nothing of our hope would remain.

Whence, then, is a sweet fruit plucked from the bitterness of life — to groan and to weep, to sigh and to lament? Is it this that is there sweet, that we hope You hear us? This is rightly so in prayers, for they have a longing to attain to You. But was it so in the grief of a thing lost and in the mourning with which I was then covered? For neither did I hope that he would live again, nor was this what I sought with my tears; but I only grieved and wept. For I was wretched, and had lost my joy. Or is weeping itself a bitter thing, and does it please us out of loathing for the things we formerly enjoyed, only then, while we shrink from them? But why do I speak of these things? For now is not the time for questioning, but for confessing to You.

I was wretched, and wretched is every soul bound by friendship with mortal things, and torn asunder when it loses them, and then feels the misery by which it is wretched even before it loses them. So was I at that time, and I wept most bitterly and found my rest in bitterness. Thus was I wretched, and I held that wretched life itself dearer than my friend. For although I wished to change it, yet I was unwilling to lose it more than to lose him; and I know not whether I would even have been willing to lose it for him, as is told of Orestes and Pylades — if it is not a fiction — who would willingly have died for one another at once, because to them it was worse than death not to live together. But in me there had arisen some affection exceedingly contrary to this, and there was in me a most grievous weariness of living, together with a fear of dying.

I believe that the more I loved him, the more I hated and feared, as a most cruel enemy, the death that had snatched him from me; and I imagined that it would suddenly consume all men, since it had been able to consume him. So was I altogether, I remember. Behold my heart, my God, behold within; see, for I remember it, my hope, who cleanse me from the uncleanness of such affections, directing my eyes toward You and plucking my feet out of the snare. For I marveled that other mortals lived, since he whom I had loved as though he would never die was dead; and I marveled still more that I, who was a second self to him, should live when he was dead. Well did one say of his friend that he was the half of his soul.

For I felt that my soul and his soul had been one soul in two bodies, and therefore life was a horror to me, because I did not wish to live as a half; and therefore perhaps I feared to die, lest he whom I had greatly loved should wholly die. O madness, that knows not how to love men humanly! O foolish man, immoderately enduring human things! Such was I then. And so I seethed, I sighed, I wept, I was troubled; there was neither rest nor counsel. For I bore about my shattered and bleeding soul, impatient of being borne by me, and where I might lay it down I could not find.

Not in pleasant groves, not in games and songs, nor in sweet-smelling places, nor in sumptuous banquets, nor in the delight of bed and couch, nor finally in books and verses did it find rest. All things were ghastly, even the very light; and whatever was not what he was, was loathsome and wearisome, save for groaning and tears: for in these alone was there a little rest. But when my soul was withdrawn from these, a vast burden of misery weighed me down. To You, O Lord, it should have been lifted up to be healed, I knew; but I neither would nor could, the more so because, when I thought of You, You were to me nothing solid and firm. For it was not You, but an empty phantasm, and my own error was my god.

If I tried to lay my soul there, that it might rest, it slipped through the void and again came rushing down upon me; and I remained to myself an unhappy place, where I could neither be nor depart from it. For whither could my heart flee from my heart? Whither could I flee from myself? Whither would I not follow myself? And yet I fled from my homeland. For my eyes sought him less where they were not wont to see him; and from the town of Thagaste I came to Carthage. Times are not idle, nor do they roll vainly through our senses: they work wondrous works in the mind. Behold, they came and passed from day to day, and by their coming and passing they sowed in me other hopes and other memories, and little by little patched me up with former kinds of delights, to which that grief of mine gave way;

but in their place succeeded, not indeed other griefs, yet the causes of other griefs. For whence had that grief penetrated me so easily and so deeply, except because I had poured out my soul upon the sand by loving one who must die as though he would not die? Most of all I was restored and refreshed by the solaces of other friends, with whom I loved what I loved instead of You; and this was a huge fable and a long lie, by whose adulterous friction our mind was corrupted, itching in its ears. But that fable did not die for me even if any of my friends died. There were other things which more took hold of my soul in their company:

to converse and to laugh together and to do kindly services for one another in turn; to read together pleasantly-worded books; together to trifle and together to be earnest; to dissent at times without rancour, as a man might with his own self, and by that very rare dissension to season our manifold agreements; to teach one another something or to learn from one another; to long for the absent with sorrow and to receive the coming with gladness. By these and like signs, proceeding from the hearts of those who love and are loved in return, through the mouth, through the tongue, through the eyes, and a thousand most pleasing gestures, our spirits were enkindled as if by tinder, and out of many were made one.

This is what is loved in friends, and so loved that the human conscience holds itself guilty if it does not love one who loves in return, or if it does not return love to one who loves, seeking nothing from his body beyond tokens of goodwill. Hence comes that mourning if anyone dies, and the darkness of sorrows, and the heart drenched as sweetness is turned into bitterness, and out of the lost life of the dying comes the death of the living. Blessed is he who loves You, and his friend in You, and his enemy for Your sake. For he alone loses no dear one to whom all are dear in Him who is not lost. And who is this but our God, the God who made heaven and earth and fills them, since by filling them He made them?

No one loses You except him who forsakes You; and because he forsakes You, whither does he go or whither does he flee but from You appeased to You angered? For where does he not find Your law in his own punishment? And Your law is truth, and truth is You. O God of hosts, turn us, and show us Your face, and we shall be saved. For whithersoever the soul of man turns itself, it is fixed upon sorrows anywhere but in You, even though it is fixed upon beautiful things outside You and outside itself. Yet these would be nothing unless they were from You. They rise and set, and by rising they begin, as it were, to be, and they grow that they may be perfected, and being perfected they grow old and perish — and not all grow old, yet all perish.

Therefore, when they rise and tend toward being, the more swiftly they grow that they may be, the more they hasten that they may cease to be. Such is their measure. So much have You given them, because they are parts of things which do not all exist at once, but by departing and succeeding accomplish all together the universe, of which they are parts. Behold, even so is our speech accomplished by sounding signs. For our speech would not be complete unless each word, when it has sounded, gives place to its parts, that another may follow. Let my soul praise You out of these things, O God, Creator of all; but let it not be fastened to them with the glue of love through the bodily senses. For they go whither they were going, that they may not be, and they rend the soul with pestilent desires, since the soul wills to be and loves to rest in the things which it loves.

But in those things there is no place where it may rest, because they do not stand still: they flee, and who can follow them with the sense of the flesh? Or who can grasp them, even when they are present? For the sense of the flesh is slow, since it is the sense of the flesh: that is its measure. It suffices for that other thing for which it was made, but it does not suffice to grasp things rushing past from their due beginning to their due end. For in Your Word, by which they are created, there they hear: 'Hence and thus far.' Be not vain, O my soul, and do not grow deaf in the ear of your heart with the tumult of your vanity. Hear, you also: the Word Himself cries out to you to return; and there is the place of imperturbable rest, where love is not forsaken, if it does not itself forsake.

Behold, those things depart, that others may succeed, and that the lowest universe may consist of all its parts. 'Do I depart anywhere?' says the Word of God. There fix your dwelling, there entrust whatever you have from thence, O my soul, at least wearied as you are with deceptions. Entrust to Truth whatever is in you from Truth, and you shall lose nothing; and your rotten things shall flourish again, and all your diseases shall be healed, and your fleeting things shall be reformed and renewed and bound fast to you, and they shall not set you down where they descend, but shall stand with you and abide unto God who stands and abides forever. Why do you, being perverse, follow your flesh? Let it follow you, now turned about.