For what other place is there for such a soul? There he lives, whence he asked me, an inexperienced little man, many things. No longer does he set his ear to my mouth, but his spiritual mouth to your fountain, and drinks, as much as he can, wisdom according to his eagerness, happy without end. Nor do I think him so inebriated by it as to forget me, since you, O Lord, whom he drinks, are mindful of us. So, then, we were: consoling Verecundus, sorrowful with our friendship preserved, concerning such a conversion of ours, and exhorting him to a faith proper to his condition, namely the conjugal life; but awaiting Nebridius, when he should follow. This he could do from so near at hand, and was now on the very point of doing, when behold, those days at last rolled away.
For they seemed long and many before the love of leisured liberty, that I might sing from all my marrow: My heart has said to you, I have sought your face; your face, O Lord, will I seek. And the day came when I was even in deed loosed from the profession of rhetoric, from which in thought I was already loosed. And it was done: you drew out my tongue, whence you had already drawn out my heart, and I blessed you, rejoicing, as I set out for the country house with all my own. There, what I did in letters—letters that were now in your service, but as yet panting from the school of pride, as in a pause for breath—the books attest, debated with those present and with myself alone before you; but what was done with the absent Nebridius, the letters attest.
And when would there be time enough for me to commemorate all your great benefits toward us in that time, especially as I hasten to other and greater things? For my recollection calls me back, and it becomes sweet to me, O Lord, to confess to you by what inward goads you subdued me, and how you leveled me—the mountains and hills of my thoughts—and made straight my crooked ways and smoothed my rough ones; in what manner too you subjected even Alypius himself, the brother of my heart, to the name of your only-begotten, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, which at first he disdained to have inserted into our writings. For he wished them rather to savor of the cedars of the schools, which the Lord has now ground to powder, than of the wholesome herbs of the Church, effective against serpents.
What cries, my God, did I give to you, when I read the psalms of David, the songs of faith, the sounds of piety that exclude the swelling spirit—I, a novice in genuine love of you, a catechumen at leisure in the country house with the catechumen Alypius, my mother cleaving to us, in womanly garb, with manly faith, with the security of old age, with motherly charity, with Christian piety! What cries did I give to you in those psalms, and how was I inflamed toward you by them, and kindled to recite them, if I could, throughout the whole world against the pride of the human race! And yet they are sung throughout the whole world, and there is none that can hide himself from your heat.
With what vehement and bitter pain was I indignant at the Manichees, and again pitied them, because they knew not those sacraments, those medicines, and were mad against the antidote by which they might have been made whole! I could have wished that they were somewhere near at that time, and without my knowing that they were there, that they might behold my face and hear my cries, when I read the fourth psalm in that leisure then—what that psalm wrought upon me: When I called upon you, you heard me, O God of my righteousness; in tribulation you have enlarged me. Have mercy upon me, O Lord, and hear my prayer.
They would hear me without my knowing whether they heard, lest they should suppose I spoke for their sake the things I uttered amid these words; for indeed I would neither speak such things nor speak them in that way, were I to perceive myself being heard and seen by them, nor, if I did speak them, would they receive them in the way I did with myself and to myself in your presence, concerning the intimate affection of my soul. I shuddered with fear, and in the same place I glowed with hope and exulted in your mercy, Father. And all these things issued forth through my eyes and my voice, when your good Spirit, turning toward us, said to us: 'Sons of men, how long will you be heavy of heart? Why do you love vanity and seek a lie?' For I had loved vanity and sought a lie.
And you, Lord, had already magnified your Holy One, raising him from the dead and seating him at your right hand, whence he might send forth from on high his promise, the Paraclete, the Spirit of truth. And he had already sent him, but I knew it not. He had sent him, because he had already been magnified, rising from the dead and ascending into heaven. But before then the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified. And the prophecy cries out: 'How long will you be heavy of heart? Why do you love vanity and seek a lie? And know that the Lord has magnified his Holy One.'
It cries 'how long,' it cries 'know'; and I, so long without knowing, had loved vanity and sought a lie, and therefore I heard and trembled, since these things are said to such a one as I remembered myself to have been. For in the phantasms which I had held for truth there was vanity and a lie. And I sounded forth many things heavily and forcefully in the grief of my remembrance. Would that those had heard them who even now still love vanity and seek a lie: perhaps they would have been troubled and would have vomited it forth, and you would have heard them when they cried to you, since by a true death of the flesh he died for us, who intercedes for us. I read:
'Be angry, and sin not'; and how I was moved, my God, who had now learned to be angry with myself over things past, that henceforth I might sin no more—and rightly angry, since it was not some other nature of a race of darkness that sinned in me, as those say who are not angry with themselves and store up wrath for themselves against the day of wrath and of the revelation of your righteous judgment. Nor were my goods now outside, nor were they sought with fleshly eyes in this sun. For those who wish to rejoice outwardly easily grow empty and are poured out upon the things which are seen and are temporal, and with famished thought they lick at their images. O if only they would grow weary in their hunger and say: 'Who will show us good things?' And let us say, and let them hear: 'The light of your countenance is sealed upon us, O Lord.'
For we are not the light which enlightens every man, but we are enlightened by you, that we, who once were darkness, may be light in you. O if only they could see the inward eternal light, which, because I had tasted it, I gnashed my teeth that I could not show it to them, even if they brought their heart to me in their eyes that wandered outside away from you and said: 'Who will show us good things?' For there, where I was angry with myself, within in my chamber, where I was pricked with compunction, where I had sacrificed, slaying my old self, and beginning the meditation of my renewal, hoping in you—there you had begun to grow sweet to me, and had given gladness in my heart.
And I cried out as I read these things outwardly and recognized them inwardly, nor did I wish to be multiplied with earthly goods, devouring times and devoured by times, while I had in eternal simplicity another corn and wine and oil. And I cried out in the following verse with a loud cry of my heart: 'O in peace! O in the Selfsame!' O what did it say: 'I will lay me down and take my sleep'? For who shall stand against us, when the word shall come to pass that is written: 'Death is swallowed up in victory'? And you are exceedingly the Selfsame, you who change not, and in you is rest that forgets all toils, since there is no other with you, nor for the obtaining of other things which are not what you are; but you, Lord, alone have established me in hope.
I read and burned, nor did I find what to do for the deaf and dead, of whom I had been one—a pest, a bitter barker, blind against the writings that are honeyed with the honey of heaven and luminous with your light—and I wasted away over the enemies of this Scripture. When shall I recall all the things of those festive days? But neither have I forgotten, nor will I keep silent about, the severity of your scourge and the wonderful swiftness of your mercy. With pain of teeth you then tormented me, and when it grew so grievous that I could not speak, it came into my heart to admonish all my friends who were present, that they might pray to you for me, the God of every kind of salvation. And I wrote this on wax and gave it to be read to them. As soon as we bent our knees with simple affection, that pain fled.
But what pain? And how did it flee? I was terrified, I confess, my Lord and my God; for I had experienced nothing of the kind from my earliest age. And your nods were instilled into me in the depth, and rejoicing in faith I praised your name; and that faith did not allow me to be secure concerning my past sins, which had not yet been remitted to me through your baptism. When the vintage holidays were over, I gave notice that the Milanese should provide for their scholars another vendor of words, both because I had chosen to serve you, and because, by reason of my difficulty in breathing and the pain in my chest, I was not equal to that profession.
And I made known by letter to your bishop, the holy man Ambrose, my former errors and my present resolve, that he might advise what I should read above all from your books, by which I might become more prepared and fitted to receive so great a grace. But he bade me read the prophet Isaiah—I believe because, beyond the rest, he is a more open foreteller of the Gospel and of the calling of the Gentiles. Nevertheless, not understanding the first reading of him, and judging the whole to be of like sort, I deferred it to be taken up again when I should be more practiced in the Lord's discourse. Then, when the time came at which I ought to give in my name, leaving the country we returned to Milan.
It pleased Alypius also to be reborn in you with me, already clothed in humility befitting your sacraments, and a most valiant subduer of the body, even to the treading of Italian soil, frozen and icy, with bare foot in an unaccustomed daring. We also joined to ourselves the boy Adeodatus, born of me after the flesh, from my sin. You had made him well. He was about fifteen years old, and in talent he surpassed many grave and learned men. I confess your gifts to you, O Lord my God, creator of all and most mighty to fashion our deformities; for in that boy I had nothing but the sin. For that he was nurtured by us in your discipline, you had inspired in us, no other: I confess your gifts to you. There is a book of ours which is entitled 'On the Teacher':
he himself there converses with me. You know that all the thoughts are his which are inserted there in the person of my interlocutor, when he was in his sixteenth year. Many other more marvelous things of his I experienced. That talent was an awe to me: and who but you is the artificer of such wonders? Quickly you took his life from the earth, and I remember him more securely, fearing nothing for his childhood, nor his youth, nor for that man at all. We joined him, our coeval, to ourselves in your grace, to be brought up in your discipline; and we were baptized, and the anxiety of our past life fled from us. Nor in those days was I sated with the wonderful sweetness of considering the depth of your counsel concerning the salvation of the human race.
How greatly I wept amid your hymns and canticles, keenly moved by the voices of your sweetly singing Church! Those voices flowed into my ears, and the truth was distilled into my heart, and from it the affection of piety boiled up, and tears ran down, and it was well with me among them. Not long before, the Milanese church had begun to celebrate this kind of consolation and exhortation with great zeal of the brethren singing together with their voices and their hearts. Indeed it was a year, or not much more, since Justina, the mother of the boy-king Valentinian, was persecuting your man Ambrose for the sake of her heresy, by which she had been seduced by the Arians. The devout people kept watch in the church, ready to die with their bishop, your servant.
There my mother, your handmaid, holding the chief place in solicitude and vigils, lived by prayers. We, still cold from the warmth of your Spirit, were nevertheless stirred by the astonished and troubled city. Then it was instituted that hymns and psalms should be sung after the manner of the eastern regions, lest the people should waste away with the weariness of sorrow: a practice retained from that time to this very day, with many—indeed almost all—of your flocks throughout the rest of the world imitating it. Then by a vision you revealed to your aforesaid bishop the place where lay hidden the bodies of the martyrs Protasius and Gervasius, which through so many years you had stored up incorrupt in the treasury of your secret, whence you might opportunely bring them forth to curb the fury that was womanish, but royal.
For when they were brought forth and dug up and with due honor transferred to the Ambrosian basilica, not only were those whom unclean spirits vexed healed, the same demons confessing it, but also a certain citizen, blind for many years and very well known to the city, when amid the tumultuous joy of the people he had asked the cause and heard it, leaped up and begged that one might lead him there as his guide. Led thither, he obtained leave to be admitted, that he might touch with his handkerchief the bier of those whose death is precious in your sight, the death of your saints. When he had done this and applied it to his eyes, they were at once opened. Thence rumor ran abroad, thence your praises burned bright and shining, thence the mind of that enemy woman, though not brought to the soundness of believing, was nevertheless restrained from the frenzy of persecuting.
Thanks to you, my God! Whence and whither did you lead my remembrance, that I should confess to you these things also, which, being great, I had forgotten and passed over? And yet then, when the odor of your ointments was so fragrant, we were not running after you; therefore I wept the more amid the songs of your hymns, long sighing for you and at last drawing breath, as far as the air can reach in a house of hay. You who make those of one mind to dwell in a house joined to us also the young man Evodius, from our own town. When, employed in state affairs, he was doing military service, he was converted to you before us, and baptized, and forsaking the secular warfare he girded himself in yours. We were together, about to dwell together by a holy purpose. We sought what place might more usefully hold us as we served you: together we were returning to Africa.
And when we were at Ostia on the Tiber, my mother died. Many things I pass over, because I greatly hasten. Receive my confessions and my thanksgivings, my God, for things innumerable even in silence. But I will not pass over whatever my soul brings forth concerning that handmaid of yours, who brought me forth—both in the flesh, that I might be born into this temporal light, and in heart, that I might be born into the eternal light. Not her own, but your gifts in her will I tell. For neither had she made herself nor educated herself: you created her, and neither father nor mother knew what would come to be of them. And the rod of your Christ, the rule of your Only-begotten, instructed her in your fear, in a faithful house, a good member of your Church.
Yet she would extol not so much her mother's diligence concerning her discipline as that of a certain decrepit servingwoman, who had carried her father as an infant, as little ones are wont to be carried on the back of grown-up girls. For which reason, and on account of her old age and excellent character, she was sufficiently honored by her masters in that Christian house. Whence she also diligently bore the charge committed to her of her masters' daughters, and in restraining them, when there was need, she was vehement with holy severity, and in teaching them sober in prudence. For apart from those hours in which they were most temperately fed at their parents' table, even if they were burning with thirst, she would not allow them to drink even water, guarding against an evil habit and adding a sound word:
'Now you drink water, because you have no wine in your power; but when you come to husbands and are made mistresses of storerooms and cellars, water will seem mean, but the habit of drinking will prevail.' By this method of instructing and authority of commanding she bridled the greed of the more tender age and shaped the very thirst of the girls to an honorable measure, so that they no longer relished what was not seemly. And yet a love of wine had crept in, as your handmaid told me, her son. For when, as a sober girl, she was bidden by her parents according to custom to draw wine from the cask, holding the cup beneath where it opens above, before she poured the unmixed wine into the little flagon, she would sip a tiny bit with the tips of her lips, because she could take no more, her taste recoiling.
For she did this not from any drunken desire, but from certain overflowing excesses of her age, which bubble up in playful movements and in childish years are wont to be pressed down by the weight of elders. And so, by adding daily a little to that daily little—since he who despises small things falls little by little—she had lapsed into such a habit that she would now greedily drain little cups almost full of unmixed wine. Where then was the shrewd old woman and that vehement prohibition? Could anything at all avail against the hidden malady, unless your medicine, O Lord, kept watch over us? Father and mother and nurturers being absent, you were present, who created, who call, who also through men set over us work some good toward the salvation of souls.
What did you then do, my God? Whence did you cure? Whence did you heal? Did you not bring forth a hard and sharp reproach from another soul, like a healing knife from your hidden provisions, and with one stroke cut away that rottenness? For a maidservant, with whom she used to go to the cask, quarreling with her younger mistress, as happens, alone with her alone, cast this reproach in her teeth with most bitter insult, calling her a wine-bibber. Struck by this goad, she looked upon her own foulness, and at once condemned it and put it off. Just as flattering friends pervert, so quarreling enemies for the most part correct. Yet you repay them not for what you do through them, but for what they themselves intended.
For she, being angry, sought to provoke her younger mistress, not to heal her, and that secretly—either because the place and time of the quarrel had so found them, or lest perhaps she herself should be endangered, for having betrayed it so late. But you, O Lord, ruler of things heavenly and earthly, turning the depths of the torrent to your own uses and ordering the turbulent flow of the ages, healed the one soul even by the madness of another, lest anyone, when he observes this, should attribute it to his own power, if another is corrected by his word, whom he wishes to be corrected.
Thus brought up modestly and soberly, and made subject by you to her parents rather than by her parents to you, when she had reached full years and was of marriageable age, she was given to a husband, whom she served as a lord, and busied herself to win him to you, speaking to him of you by her conduct, by which you made her beautiful and reverently lovable and wonderful to her husband. She so bore the wrongs of the marriage-bed that she never had any quarrel with her husband over this matter. For she awaited your mercy upon him, that, believing in you, he might be made chaste. But he was, besides, as outstanding in benevolence, so fervid in anger. Yet she had learned not to resist her angry husband, not only by deed, but not even by a word.
But when she now saw him calmed and quiet at a fitting opportunity, she would render an account of her action, if perchance he had been more inconsiderately stirred. In short, when many matrons, whose husbands were milder, bore the marks of blows even on their disfigured faces, and amid friendly conversations would blame the life of their husbands, she would blame their tongue, as it were in jest gravely admonishing them: that from the time they had heard those tablets which are called marriage contracts read aloud, they ought to have reckoned them as instruments by which they were made servants; and accordingly, mindful of their condition, they ought not to grow proud against their masters.
And when they, knowing what a fierce spouse she endured, marveled that it had never been heard, nor by any sign made clear, that Patricius had beaten his wife, or that they had been at odds with one another in domestic strife even for a single day, and when they familiarly asked the cause, she would teach them her practice, which I have mentioned above. Those who observed it, having tried it, gave thanks; those who did not observe it, being kept in subjection, were given no reprieve. Her mother-in-law too, at first irritated against her by the whisperings of wicked maidservants, she so overcame by services, persevering in patience and gentleness, that the woman of her own accord disclosed to her son the meddling tongues of the maidservants by which the domestic peace between herself and her daughter-in-law was disturbed, and demanded their punishment.
And so, after he, both obeying his mother and caring for the discipline of the household and looking to the concord of his own people, had with stripes chastised those betrayed, at the discretion of her who betrayed them, she promised that whoever should speak any evil of her daughter-in-law to her, in order to please her, ought to expect such rewards for herself; and, none any longer daring to do so, they lived together in a memorable sweetness of benevolence.
This also you had bestowed, my God, my mercy, as a great gift upon that good handmaid of yours, in whose womb you created me: that among any souls whatsoever that were at variance and discord, wherever she could, she so showed herself a peacemaker that, although she heard from both sides many most bitter things about each other—such as swelling and undigested discord is wont to belch forth, when to a present friend the crudity of hatreds is breathed out in acrid talk about an absent enemy—she would nevertheless betray nothing to the one about the other, except what might avail to reconcile them.
This would seem a small good to me, did I not sadly know by experience innumerable throngs—through I know not what dreadful pestilence of sins ranging far and wide—who not only betray to angry enemies the things said by angry enemies, but even add things that were not said; whereas, on the contrary, it ought to be too little for a humane man not to stir up or increase enmities among men by evil speaking, unless he has also striven to extinguish them by speaking well. Such was she, you teaching her, the inward Master, in the school of the heart. Finally she won even her own husband to you, now at the very end of his temporal life, nor did she mourn in him, now a believer, what she had borne in him while not yet a believer. She was also a servant of your servants.
Whoever of them knew her, greatly praised and honored and loved you in her, because he perceived your presence in her heart by the witness of the fruits of her holy conversation. For she had been the wife of one husband, had repaid the mutual debt to her parents, had governed her house piously, had testimony in good works. She had nurtured her sons, bringing them forth in travail as often as she saw them straying from you. Lastly, for all of us, O Lord—since by your gift you allow your servants to speak—who before her falling asleep were already living united in you, having received the grace of your baptism, she took such care as though she had given birth to us all, so served us as though she had been born of us all.
Now as the day was impending on which she was to depart from this life—which day you knew, though we were ignorant of it—it came about, as I believe, by your arranging through your hidden ways, that she and I stood alone, leaning at a certain window, from which the garden within the house that held us was looked out upon, there at Ostia on the Tiber, where, far removed from the crowds after the labor of a long journey, we were restoring ourselves for the voyage. We were conversing therefore alone very sweetly, and, forgetting the things that were behind and reaching forth to those that are before, we sought between ourselves, in the presence of the Truth, which you are, what the eternal life of the saints would be like, which neither eye has seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man.
But we panted with the mouth of the heart after the supernal streams of your fountain, the fountain of life, which is with you, that thence, being sprinkled according to our capacity, we might in some manner ponder so great a matter. And when the conversation was brought to this end, that the delight of the carnal senses, however great, in whatever bodily light, seemed, in comparison with the sweetness of that life, not worthy of comparison, nor even of mention, lifting ourselves up with a more ardent affection toward the Selfsame, we passed step by step through all bodily things, and through heaven itself, whence the sun and moon and stars shine upon the earth.
And still we ascended further inwardly, by thinking and speaking and marveling at your works, and we came into our own minds, and transcended them, that we might attain to the region of unfailing abundance, where you feed Israel forever with the food of truth; and there life is wisdom, through which all these things come to be, both those that have been and those that shall be; and it itself is not made, but is as it was, and so will be forever. Nay rather, to have been and to be about to be is not in it, but only to be, since it is eternal: for to have been and to be about to be is not eternal. And while we were speaking and panting after it, we attained to it slightly with the whole stroke of the heart;
and we sighed, and left there bound the first-fruits of the Spirit, and returned to the noise of our mouth, where a word is both begun and ended. And what is like to your Word, our Lord, abiding in himself without growing old, and yet renewing all things? We were saying therefore: 'If for anyone the tumult of the flesh were silent, silent the phantasms of earth and waters and air, silent also the poles, and the soul itself were silent to itself and should pass beyond itself by not thinking of itself, silent were dreams and imaginary revelations, every tongue and every sign, and whatsoever comes to be by passing away—if for anyone it were altogether silent—since, if any hear, all these things say:
We made not ourselves, but he made us who abides forever'—these things having been said, if now they should be silent, since they have raised their ear toward him who made them, and he himself should speak alone, not through them, but through himself, that we might hear his Word, not through the tongue of the flesh, nor through the voice of an angel, nor through the sound of a cloud, nor through the riddle of a likeness, but himself, whom in these things we love, himself without these we should hear—just as now we stretch ourselves out and with rapid thought attain to the eternal Wisdom abiding above all things—if this were continued, and other visions of a far inferior kind were withdrawn, and this one should ravish and absorb and hide its beholder in inward joys, so that everlasting life might be such as was that moment of understanding for which we sighed: is not this:
'Enter into the joy of your Lord'? And when shall this be? Surely when we all rise again, but shall not all be changed?' I was saying such things, even if not in this manner and with these words; yet, Lord, you know that on that day, while we were speaking such things and this world with all its delights was growing cheap to us amid our words, then she said: 'Son, as for me, I now find delight in nothing in this life. What I am to do here any longer, and why I am here, I know not, now that my hope in this world is consumed. There was one thing for which I desired to linger a little while in this life: that I might see you a Catholic Christian before I died. My God has granted this to me more abundantly, that I should see you, having even despised earthly felicity, his servant.