But they, having related their resolve and purpose, and in what manner such a will had arisen and been established in them, asked that, if they refused to be joined, they should not be troublesome to them. The others, however, in no way changed from their former selves, yet wept for themselves, as he said, and piously congratulated them and commended themselves to their prayers, and dragging their heart along the ground went off to the palace; but those, fixing their heart on heaven, remained in the cottage. And both had betrothed brides: who, after they heard this, also dedicated their virginity to you. Ponticianus was narrating these things.
But you, O Lord, amid his words turned me back toward myself, taking me from behind my back, where I had placed myself while I was unwilling to attend to myself, and you set me before my own face, that I might see how foul I was, how distorted and sordid, spotted and ulcerous. And I saw and was horrified, and there was nowhere I could flee from myself. And if I tried to turn my gaze away from myself, he kept narrating what he narrated, and you again set me over against myself and thrust me into my own eyes, that I might find my iniquity and hate it. I had known it, but I dissembled and suppressed and forgot it. But then, the more ardently I loved those of whom I heard wholesome affections, that they had given themselves wholly to you to be healed, the more execrably did I hate myself compared with them.
For many of my years had flowed away with me — perhaps twelve years — since, from the nineteenth year of my age, having read Cicero's Hortensius, I had been roused to the pursuit of wisdom, and I kept deferring, with earthly felicity despised, to be at leisure to investigate it — wisdom, whose not the finding, but even the sole seeking, was already to be preferred even to treasures found and the kingdoms of nations and bodily pleasures flowing around at a nod. But I, a most wretched youth, more wretched at the very beginning of my youth, had even begged from you chastity, and had said: "Give me chastity and continence, but not yet." For I feared lest you should quickly hear me and quickly heal me from the disease of concupiscence, which I preferred to have satisfied rather than extinguished.
And I had walked along crooked ways in sacrilegious superstition, not indeed sure of it, but as it were preferring it to the others, which I did not seek with reverence but assailed with hostility. And I had supposed that I was putting off from day to day my following of you alone, having despised the hope of the world, only because no certain thing appeared to me by which to direct my course. But the day had come when I was stripped bare before myself and my conscience upbraided me: 'Where now is your tongue? Surely you used to say that you would not cast away the burden of vanity because the truth was uncertain. Behold, now it is certain, and that burden still presses upon you, while others, with shoulders set freer, take wings—those who have neither been so worn down in seeking nor pondered these things for ten years and more.'
Thus I was gnawed within and vehemently confounded by a horrible shame, while Ponticianus was speaking such things. And when his discourse was ended, and the business for which he had come, he departed, and I returned to myself. What things did I not say against myself? With what lashes of reflections did I not scourge my soul, that it might follow me as I strove to go after you? Yet it resisted, it refused, and would not excuse itself. All its arguments were spent and refuted; there remained a mute trembling, and it dreaded, as it were death, to be restrained from that flow of habit by which it was wasting away unto death. Then, in that great quarrel of my inner house, which I had stirred up so violently with my soul in our chamber, in my heart, troubled as much in countenance as in mind, I rushed upon Alypius and cried out: 'What are we suffering?
What is this you have heard? The unlearned rise up and seize heaven, and we with our learning—behold where we wallow in flesh and blood! Is it because they have gone before us that we are ashamed to follow, and not ashamed even not to follow at all?' I said something like this, I know not what, and my fervor tore me away from him, while he kept silent, gazing at me astonished. For I was not sounding as usual. My brow, my cheeks, my eyes, my color, the tone of my voice spoke more of my mind than the words I uttered. There was a little garden belonging to our lodging, which we used as we did the whole house; for the host, the master of the house, did not live there. Thither the tumult of my breast had carried me, where no one might hinder the burning lawsuit I had begun with myself, until it should come out as you knew, but I did not:
but only I was madly raving to my health and dying that I might live, knowing what evil thing I was, and not knowing what good thing I should shortly become. I withdrew, then, into the garden, and Alypius step by step behind me. For his presence was no breach of my privacy; and when would he have forsaken me, so affected as I was? We sat down as far as we could from the buildings. I was raging in spirit, indignant with a most turbulent indignation, that I was not entering into your covenant and pact, O my God, into which all my bones cried out that I should enter, and they lifted it to heaven with praises—and one went there not by ships or chariots or feet, no, not even so far as I had come from the house to the place where we were sitting.
For not only to go, but even to arrive there, was nothing else than to will to go—but to will strongly and wholly, not to turn this way and that a half-wounded will, struggling with one part rising while the other fell. Indeed, in the very throes of my hesitation I was doing with my body many things which men sometimes will and cannot do, if either they have not the limbs themselves, or these are bound with fetters, or loosed by weakness, or in some way hindered. If I tore my hair, if I struck my forehead, if with interlocked fingers I clasped my knee—because I willed it, I did it. But I might have willed and not done it, if the mobility of my limbs had not obeyed. So many things, then, I did, where to will was not the same as to be able:
and yet I was not doing that which with incomparable affection pleased me far more, and which, as soon as I should will it, I should be able to do—since as soon as I willed it, I should indeed will it. For there the faculty was the very will, and to will was already to do; and yet it was not done. More easily did the body obey the slightest will of the soul, so that at a nod the limbs moved, than the soul obeyed itself to accomplish in the will alone its own great will. Whence this monstrous thing? And why is it so? Let your mercy shine forth, that I may inquire, whether perhaps the hidden recesses of the punishments of men and the most darksome contritions of the sons of Adam may be able to answer me. Whence this monstrous thing? And why is it so? The mind commands the body, and is obeyed at once; the mind commands itself, and is resisted.
The mind commands that the hand be moved, and so great is the readiness that the command is scarcely distinguished from the obeying: yet the mind is mind, and the hand is body. The mind commands that the mind itself will, and it is no other, yet it does not do so. Whence this monstrous thing? And why is it so? It commands, I say, that it will—which it would not command, unless it willed—and it does not do what it commands. But it does not will wholly: therefore it does not command wholly. For it commands insofar as it wills, and that which it commands is not done insofar as it does not will, since the will commands that there be a will—not another, but itself. It does not, then, command fully; therefore what it commands does not come to be. For if it were full, it would not command that it be, since it would already be.
It is no monstrous thing, then, partly to will and partly not to will, but a sickness of the soul, because it does not wholly rise up, being lifted by truth but weighed down by habit. And therefore there are two wills, because one of them is not whole, and that is present to the one which is lacking to the other. Let them perish from your face, O God, as they do perish, the vain talkers and seducers of the mind, who, when they have observed two wills in deliberation, assert that there are two natures of two minds, one good, the other evil. They themselves are truly evil, when they hold these evil opinions; and the same shall be good, if they hold true opinions and consent to the truth, so that your apostle may say to them: you were once darkness, but now light in the Lord.
For they, while they wish to be light not in the Lord but in themselves, supposing the nature of the soul to be that which God is, have thus become denser darkness, because by their horrible arrogance they have withdrawn farther from you—from you, the true light that enlightens every man coming into this world. Take heed what you say, and be ashamed, and come to him and be enlightened, and your faces shall not blush. As for me, when I was deliberating to serve the Lord my God, as I had long purposed, it was I who willed, I who was unwilling; it was I. I neither willed fully nor was unwilling fully. Therefore I strove with myself and was rent asunder by my own self; and this very rending came to pass against my will, yet it did not show the nature of an alien mind, but the punishment of my own.
And therefore it was no longer I who wrought it, but the sin that dwells in me, from the punishment of a freer sin, because I was a son of Adam. For if there are as many contrary natures as there are wills resisting one another, there will be not two, but more. If anyone deliberate whether to go to their conventicle or to the theater, these men cry out: 'Behold two natures, one good draws this way, the other evil leads back that way. For whence else this hesitation of wills opposing one another?' But I say that both are evil, both that which leads to them and that which leads back to the theater. Yet they do not believe that to be aught but good, by which one goes to them. What then?
If, then, one of us should deliberate, and waver with two wills contending within him, whether to go to the theater or to our church, will not these men too waver as to what they should answer? For either they will confess—what they do not wish—that one goes to our church with a good will, just as those go to it who have been imbued with its sacraments and are held by them; or they will suppose that two evil natures and two evil minds clash within one man, and then it will not be true, as they are wont to say, that one is good and the other evil; or they will be converted to the truth and will not deny that, when anyone deliberates, one soul is tossed by diverse wills.
Let them no longer say, then, when they perceive two wills in one man opposing each other, that two contrary minds, from two contrary substances and from two contrary principles, are contending—one good, the other evil. For you, O God of truth, disprove them and refute them and convict them; as in the case of two evil wills, when anyone deliberates whether to kill a man by poison or by the sword; whether to seize this estate of another or that one, when he cannot seize both; whether to buy pleasure by luxury or to save money by avarice; whether to go to the circus or to the theater, if both are exhibited on one day; I add even a third, whether to go to commit a theft from another's house, if the occasion offers;
and I add a fourth, whether to go to commit adultery, if at the same time the opportunity for that also opens—if all these concur in one point of time and are all alike desired, things which cannot be done together: for they tear the mind apart with four wills opposing one another, or even more, in so great an abundance of things that are coveted; and yet they are not wont to say that there is so great a multitude of diverse substances. So also in good wills. For I ask them whether it be good to take delight in reading the apostle, and whether it be good to delight in a sober psalm, and whether it be good to expound the gospel. They will answer to each: 'Good.' What then?
If, then, all these alike delight, and at one and the same time, do not diverse wills stretch the heart of man apart, while it is deliberated which we should chiefly snatch at? And all are good and contend with one another, until one be chosen toward which the whole will, which was divided among many, may be borne as one. So also, when eternity delights us above and the pleasure of a temporal good holds us back below, it is the same soul willing this or that not with its whole will, and therefore it is torn apart with grievous distress, while by truth it prefers the one, but by familiarity does not put away the other. Thus I was sick and tormented, accusing myself far more bitterly than was my wont, and rolling and turning myself in my chain, until the whole of it should be broken, by which I was now but slightly held. But held I was, nonetheless.
And yet you pressed upon me in my hidden places, O Lord, with severe mercy redoubling the lashes of fear and shame, lest I should slacken again and that very small and slender thing which remained should not be broken off, but should grow strong again and bind me more robustly. For I was saying within myself: 'Behold, let it be done now, let it be done now,' and with the word I was already going into the resolve. I had almost done it, and yet I did not do it; nor did I slip back into my old ways, but I stood close by and drew breath. And again I made the attempt, and I was a little less far off, and a little less; now, even now, I was touching and holding it:
and yet I was not there, nor did I touch it, nor hold it, hesitating to die to death and to live to life; and the ingrained worse prevailed in me more than the better that was unaccustomed; and the very point of time at which I should be otherwise, the nearer it was brought, the greater the horror it struck into me; yet it did not strike me back, nor turn me away, but held me in suspense. The trifles of trifles and the vanities of the vain, my ancient mistresses, held me back; and they plucked at my fleshly garment and murmured softly: 'Do you cast us off?' and 'From this moment we shall be with you no more forever,' and 'From this moment this and that shall not be permitted to you anymore forever.' And what were they suggesting in that which I called 'this and that,' what were they suggesting, O my God?
Let your mercy turn it away from the soul of your servant! What filth they suggested, what disgraces! And I heard them now far less than half, not as if openly contradicting me by coming to meet me face to face, but as it were muttering behind my back and stealthily plucking at me as I departed, that I might look back. Yet they delayed me, hesitating as I was, from tearing myself away and shaking myself free from them and leaping across to where I was being called, while violent habit said to me: 'Do you think you can do without these?' But now it said this most lukewarmly.
For on that side toward which I had set my face, and to which I trembled to cross over, there was disclosed the chaste dignity of continence, serene and not dissolutely cheerful, honorably alluring me to come and not to doubt, and stretching out to receive and embrace me her holy hands, full of multitudes of good examples. There were so many boys and girls, there a great throng of youths and every age, and grave widows and aged virgins; and in all of them was continence herself by no means barren, but the fruitful mother of children, of joys, from you, O Lord, her husband. And she smiled upon me with an encouraging mockery, as if to say: 'Can you not do what these men, what these women, can do? Or is it indeed in themselves that these men and women have the power, and not in the Lord their God? The Lord their God gave me to them.
Why do you stand upon yourself, and so not stand at all? Cast yourself upon him, do not be afraid; he will not withdraw himself so that you fall: cast yourself securely upon him, he will receive you and will heal you.' And I blushed exceedingly, because I still heard the murmurs of those trifles, and hesitating I hung in the balance. And again she, as if to say: 'Become deaf toward those unclean members of yours upon the earth, that they may be mortified. They tell you of delights, but not according to the law of the Lord your God.' This controversy in my heart was nothing but myself against myself. But Alypius, fastened to my side, silently awaited the outcome of my unwonted agitation.
But when deep reflection had drawn up from the secret bottom and heaped together all my misery in the sight of my heart, a mighty storm arose, bearing a mighty rain of tears. And that I might pour it all out with its own utterances, I rose up from Alypius—solitude was suggested to me as fitter for the business of weeping—and I withdrew farther off, so that not even his presence might be burdensome to me. So was I then, and he perceived it; for I had said something, I think, in which the sound of my voice already heavy with weeping appeared, and so I had risen up. He remained, then, where we had been sitting, utterly amazed.
I, beneath a certain fig tree, flung myself down I know not how, and let loose the reins to my tears; and the floods of my eyes burst forth, an acceptable sacrifice to you. And not indeed in these words, but to this effect I said much to you: And you, O Lord, how long? How long, O Lord, will you be angry to the end? Remember not our ancient iniquities. For I felt that I was held by them. I cast forth pitiful cries: 'How long, how long this tomorrow and tomorrow? Why not now? Why not this very hour an end to my vileness?' I said these things and wept in the most bitter contrition of my heart. And behold, I hear a voice from the divine house, of one chanting and repeating again and again, as of a boy or a girl, I know not which: 'Take up and read, take up and read.'
And immediately, with changed countenance, I began most intently to consider whether children were wont in any kind of game to chant such a thing; nor did it at all occur to me that I had ever heard it anywhere. And checking the rush of my tears, I rose up, interpreting it to be nothing other than a divine command to me, that I should open the book and read the first chapter I should find. For I had heard of Antony, that being admonished by a reading from the gospel upon which he had chanced to come, as though what was being read were spoken to him: Go, sell all that you have, give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me—and that by such an oracle he had been forthwith converted to you. So, in haste, I returned to the place where Alypius was sitting:
for there I had laid the book of the apostle when I rose up from there. I snatched it, opened it, and read in silence the chapter on which my eyes first fell: Not in revelings and drunkenness, not in chambers and impurities, not in strife and envy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts. No further did I wish to read, nor was there need. For instantly, with the end of this sentence, as if by a light of security poured into my heart, all the darkness of doubt fled away. Then, having put my finger or some other mark between the leaves, I closed the book and with now a tranquil countenance made it known to Alypius. And he in turn disclosed what was being wrought within him—which I did not know.
He asked to see what I had read: I showed him, and he attended even beyond what I had read. And I did not know what followed. But what followed was: Him that is weak in faith, receive. This he applied to himself and disclosed it to me. And by such an admonition he was strengthened, and by a good resolve and purpose most fitting to his character—in which he had long since far and greatly excelled me toward the better—without any turbulent hesitation he was joined to me. From there we go in to my mother and make it known: she rejoices. We tell how it was brought about: she exults and triumphs and blessed you, who are able to do above what we ask or understand, because she saw that so much more had been granted to her by you concerning me than she was wont to ask with her pitiable and tearful groanings.
For you converted me to yourself, so that I sought neither a wife nor any hope of this world, standing in that rule of faith in which you had revealed me to her so many years before; and you turned her mourning into joy far more abundant than she had wished, and far dearer and chaster than she sought from grandchildren of my flesh. O Lord, I am your servant; I am your servant and the son of your handmaid. You have broken my bonds asunder; to you will I sacrifice the sacrifice of praise. Let my heart and my tongue praise you, and let all my bones say: Lord, who is like unto you? Let them say it, and answer me, and say to my soul: I am your salvation. Who am I, and what am I? What evil has there not been, either in my deeds, or, if not in deeds, in my words, or, if not in words, in my will?
But you, O Lord, good and merciful, your right hand having regard to the depth of my death and draining out from the bottom of my heart the abyss of corruption. And this was the whole of it: to be unwilling for what I willed, and to will what you willed. But where, in so long a span of years, and out of what deep and lofty secret, was my free will summoned forth in a moment, by which I should bow my neck to your gentle yoke and my shoulders to your light burden, O Christ Jesus, my helper and my redeemer? How sweet it suddenly became to me to be without the sweetnesses of trifles; and what I had feared to lose, it was now joy to let go.
For you cast them out from me, you who are the true and supreme sweetness; you cast them out and entered in their place, sweeter than all pleasure, but not to flesh and blood; brighter than all light, but more inward than every secret; loftier than all honor, but not to those who are lofty in themselves. Now my mind was free from the gnawing cares of seeking and acquiring and wallowing and scratching the itch of lusts, and I prattled to you, my brightness and my riches and my salvation, the Lord my God. And it pleased me in your sight not to tear away tumultuously, but gently to withdraw the ministry of my tongue from the markets of loquacity, lest any longer the boys, meditating not your law, not your peace, but lying frenzies and lawsuits of the forum, should buy from my mouth weapons for their fury.
And opportunely there now remained but very few days until the vintage vacation, and I resolved to endure them, that I might depart in due form and, being redeemed by you, no longer return for sale. Our plan, therefore, was before you, but before men it was not, save before our own. And it had been agreed among us that it should not be poured out indiscriminately to anyone; although you had given to us, as we ascended in the valley of weeping and sang the song of degrees, sharp arrows and devastating coals against the deceitful tongue, which contradicts as though counseling and consumes by loving, as it is wont with food.
You had pierced our heart with your charity, and we carried your words transfixed in our inmost parts; and the examples of your servants, whom from black you had made shining and from dead you had made living, heaped up in the bosom of our thought, burned and consumed our heavy torpor, lest we should sink into the depths, and kindled us mightily, so that every blast of contradiction from a deceitful tongue might inflame us the more keenly, not extinguish us.
Yet nevertheless, because for the sake of your name, which you have hallowed throughout the lands, our vow and purpose would surely have its praisers too, it seemed something like ostentation not to await so near a time of the vacation, but to depart before it, from a public profession set before the eyes of all; so that the mouths of all who beheld how I had been unwilling to wait for the near approaching day of the vintage, turning their gaze upon my deed, might say many things, as though I had sought to appear great. And what was that to me, that there should be supposition and dispute about my mind, and that our good should be blasphemed?
Moreover, the fact that in that very summer my lung had begun to give way under the excessive labor of literature, and to draw breath with difficulty, and by pains of the chest to testify that it was wounded, and to refuse a clearer or more sustained voice—this at first had troubled me, because it almost compelled me, now by very necessity, to lay down the burden of that teaching, or, if I could be cured and recover, at least to interrupt it. But when a full will to be at leisure and to see that you are the Lord arose in me and was confirmed—you know it, my God—I even began to rejoice that this too lay at hand as a not untruthful excuse, which might temper the offense of men who, for the sake of their children, never wished me to be free.
Full, therefore, of such joy I endured that interval of time until it should run out—I know not whether it was even twenty days—but nevertheless they were bravely endured, because the desire had departed that used to bear with me the heavy burden, and I had remained to be pressed down, had not patience succeeded. Let any of your servants, my brethren, say that I sinned in this, that with a heart now full of your warfare I suffered myself even for one hour to sit in the chair of falsehood. But I do not contend. But you, O most merciful Lord, did you not also forgive and remit me this sin, with the rest of my horrible and deadly ones, in the holy water?
Verecundus was wasted with anxiety over this good of ours, because, on account of his bonds, by which he was most tenaciously held, he saw himself being forsaken from our fellowship. Not yet a Christian, though with a believing wife, he was nevertheless retarded by that very wife as a fetter tighter than the rest from the journey upon which we had set out; and he said that he did not wish to be a Christian in any other way than that in which he could not be. Yet kindly he offered that, as long as we should be there, we should be at his estate. You will repay him, O Lord, in the recompense of the just, because you have already repaid him with that very lot. For although, while we were absent, when we were now at Rome, he was seized with bodily sickness, and in it, being made a Christian and a believer, he departed from this life.
Thus you had mercy not only on him but also on us, lest, thinking of the surpassing kindness of our friend toward us and not numbering him in your flock, we should be tormented with intolerable grief. Thanks to you, our God—we are yours. Your exhortations and consolations declare it: a faithful promiser, you repay Verecundus, in place of that rural estate of his at Cassiciacum, where we found rest in you from the heat of the world, the loveliness of the everlasting greenness of your paradise, because you forgave him his sins upon the earth, in the rich and fruitful mountain, your mountain, the mountain of plenty. He, then, was anguished at that time; but Nebridius rejoiced together with us.
For although he too, not yet a Christian, had fallen into that pit of most pernicious error, so that he believed the flesh of your Son, the Truth, to be a phantasm, yet emerging from there he was so disposed, not yet imbued with any sacraments of your Church, but a most ardent inquirer after truth. Him, not long after our conversion and regeneration through your baptism, being himself also a faithful Catholic, serving you in Africa among his own people with perfect chastity and continence, when his whole household had through him been made Christian, you released from the flesh. And now he lives in the bosom of Abraham. Whatever that be which is signified by that bosom, there my Nebridius lives, my sweet friend, but your adopted son, made from a freedman: there he lives.