Book 1

1. You are mighty, Master, and to be praised with a powerful voice: great is your goodness, and of your wisdom there can be no reckoning.^*1 Yet to praise you is the desire of a human being, who is some part of what you created; a human hauling his deathliness in a circle,^*2 hauling in a circle the evidence of his sin, and the evidence that you stand against the arrogant.^*3

But still a mortal, a given portion of your creation, longs to extol you. In yourself you rouse us, giving us delight in glorifying you, because you made us with yourself as our goal, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

Grant me, Master, to know and understand whether a person ought first to call on you or to praise you; and which of the following is first, to know you or to call on you? But who invokes you without knowing you? In his ignorance, he might call on the wrong thing. Or instead, are you invoked in order to be known? But how will people invoke a being in whom they don’t believe already? And how will they believe without a preacher?^*4

But those who search for God will praise him, since by seeking him they will find him,^*5 and by finding him they will praise him. Let me search for you, Master, even while calling on you, and while believing in you, let me call on you. The faith you gave me—which you breathed into me through your son’s human life and through the service your preacher performed—calls on you, Master.^*6

2. So how will I call on my God, my God and my Master, since inevitably calling on him is calling him into myself? But what place is there in me to come into for my God—for God to come into me—the God who made heaven and earth? Is it as if, God my Master, there is anything in me that could hold you? Could in fact the sky and the earth, which you created, and in which you created me, hold you? Or, because without you whatever is would not be, does it come about that whatever is holds you? Since, therefore, I also exist, why do I beg that you come into me, when I wouldn’t exist in the first place unless you were in me? I am not now in hell, and yet you are there, too, because if I go down into hell, there you are.^*7

To sum up, I would not exist, my God, I would not exist at all, unless you existed in me. Or is it rather that I would not exist unless I existed in you, from whom, through whom, in whom, everything exists?^*8 That’s it, Master, that’s it. To what place can I call you, if I am in you? And from what place can you come into me? Where would it be, outside heaven and earth, that I could withdraw, so that God could come into me there—the God who said, “Heaven and earth are filled with me”?^*9

3. So then do the sky and the earth hold you, since you fill them? Or do you fill them, with some left over, since they don’t hold you? And where do you pour back what remains of you after you’ve filled earth and sky? Or do you not need to be held within anything—you who contain everything, since the things you fill, you fill by containing them? The vessels that are full of you don’t make you stationary, because you don’t spill out even though they break. And when you spill out over us,^*10 you don’t lie inert on the ground but instead lift us up. You don’t scatter in all directions but instead gather us together. But the everything that you fill, you fill with all your being. Or, because everything that exists can’t hold the whole of you, does everything contain a part of you, with everything containing the same part at the same time? Do single things hold single parts of you, and larger things larger parts, and smaller things smaller parts? Then is some part of you larger, and some part smaller? Or are you everywhere whole, and can no thing hold the whole of you?

4. Then what are you, my God? What are you, I ask, except God the Master? Who is a master except—the Master? Or who is a god except our God?^*11 The highest, the most excellent, the most powerful, all-powerful beyond all-powerful, most merciful and most just, most remote and most present, most beautiful and most powerful, unmoving but ungraspable, unchangeable but changing everything, never new, never old, but making all things new^*12 while leading the arrogant into decrepitude, though they are unaware of it. You are always active and always at rest, gathering in but not in need, carrying and filling and protecting, creating and nurturing and bringing to fulfillment, searching though you lack nothing. You love, but you do not burn with love, you are jealous yet carefree, you repent but you do not grieve, you are angry yet serene,^*13 you change your works but you do not change your plan, you take back what you find but have never lost. You are never poor, but you rejoice in what you gain, never greedy, but you exact interest;^*14 more is paid to you than owed, but the result is that you owe us. Yet who has anything that doesn’t belong to you? You pay your debts though you owe no one, you remit your debts but lose nothing. And what have we said now, my God, my life, my holy sweetness, or what does anyone ever say in speaking of you? But woe to those who are silent about you; however garrulous they are in general, they are mute about what counts.

5. Who will grant me repose in you? Who will grant your arrival in my heart and the drunkenness that comes from you, making me forget the evils that are mine^*15 and embrace the single good that belongs to me, which is you?

Have pity on me and let me speak. What am I to you, in myself, that you command love for yourself from me?—but unless I give it to you, you inveigh against me and menace immense miseries. Is my misery a petty thing if I don’t love you? Pitiful me, in that case!

Tell me, in the name of your mercies, you, Master, who are my God, what you are to me. Say to my soul, “I myself am your rescue.”^*16 Say it in such a way that I hear it. Here before you are the ears with which my heart hears, Master. Open them and say to my soul, “I myself am your rescue.” I will run after the sound of your voice and lay hold of you. Do not hide your face from me.^*17 Let me die, to keep me from dying, and let me see your face.^*18

6. My soul’s house is too meager for you to visit; enlarge it. It is falling down; rebuild it. Inside it are things that would disgust you to see: I confess this, and I know it. But who’s going to clean it? Or rather, to whom else am I going to shout, “Clean away from me, Master, the hidden things that are my own, and spare your slave from the hidden things coming from others!”?^*19

I believe, and because I believe, Master, I speak;^*20 you know it, Master. Didn’t I openly divulge to you my offenses, my God, confronting myself, and didn’t you acquit my heart’s guilt?^*21 I won’t contest the matter in court with you,^*22 who are the truth, and I don’t want to mislead my own mind and let my wrongdoing commit perjury against itself.^*23 So I won’t contest the matter with you in court, because if you, Master, are witness to my wrongdoings—who can make that stand up?^*24

7. But nevertheless allow me to speak in the face of your mercy. I am dust and ashes,^*25 but nevertheless let me speak; because here is your mercy—and not a human being who will only make fun of me—to which I am speaking. Maybe you too make fun of me, but you will turn around and pity me.

What is it, after all, that I want to say, Master, except that I don’t know where I came from to this place, into this—do I call it a deathly life or a living death? I don’t know. But taking me in their arms to rear up as their own were the solaces of your mercies—as I heard from the parents of my body, the man from whom and the woman in whom you shaped me in the realm of time; I myself don’t remember, naturally.

Yes, the comforts of human milk took me under their care, but it wasn’t my mother or my nurses who filled their own breasts; you yourself gave me, through them, the nourishment of infancy, according to your dispensation; you gave me your riches, which you’ve allocated clear down to the lowest place in the universe. You gave me the gift of not wanting more than you gave me, and to those who nursed me, you gave the desire to give to me what you gave to them. They wanted, through the feelings you ordained, to give to me what overflowed in them, coming from you. Their good was my good coming from them, because it wasn’t actually from them, but only through them.

All good things, in fact, are from you, God, and from my God is my full deliverance. I became aware of this later, when you shouted at me through these very things you bestow inside me and outside me. But at first, back then, I knew enough to suckle, and to find satisfaction with pleasures, and to cry at physical annoyances—and I knew nothing else.

8. Later I started to smile as well, first while I was sleeping, and then wakefully. People have told me this about myself, and I believe it, since this is what we see babies in general doing; I myself certainly don’t remember doing it.

And there I was, gradually perceiving where I was, and desiring to make my desires known to people who could grant them—but I couldn’t show my desires, because they were inside me, whereas other people were outside, and no perception that they possessed had the power of entering into my consciousness; so I threw around my arms and legs, and I threw off sounds, making signs resembling my wishes—the few signs I could make, that is, and as good as I could make them; there wasn’t really any resemblance. And when compliance was not forthcoming, either because people didn’t understand me or wouldn’t do something to my disadvantage, I was wrathful that my elders wouldn’t submit themselves to me, and that free people wouldn’t be my slaves, and I wreaked vengeance on them—by crying.

I’ve been instructed, by those babies in a position to instruct me, that this is how they are; and they, though hardly knowing the facts, have informed me that I was like them, and informed me better than those knowledgeable people who nurtured me.

9. So here we are: my babyhood died long ago, but I myself am still alive. But you, Master, who live forever, and in whom nothing dies; since before the origins of all ages, and before anything that could even be called “before,” you exist, and you exist as the God and the Master of all things, which you created, and in your presence every impetus of unstable things stands fast, and the immutable sources of all mutable things remain unmovable, and the reasons for all unreasoning and time-bound things have their eternal life: God, tell me, your suppliant, in your pity tell me, a pitiful human being belonging to you, whether my babyhood followed on some other, expired stage of my life?

Was that the stage I spent inside my mother’s womb? About that age a certain amount has been told me, and I personally have seen pregnant ladies. My delight, my God, tell me what took place even before that? Was I anywhere or anyone? I have no one who can tell me this. My father and mother couldn’t, nor could other people’s experience or my own memory. But are you laughing at me as I ask these questions, and commanding praise and testimony from me for yourself that draws on what I do know?

10. I testify to you, Master of the sky and the earth, reciting praise to you out of the earliest days of my babyhood, which I don’t remember. You have granted to a human being the power to conjecture about himself based on the evidence of others, and to trust as authoritative many utterances even of trivial womenfolk about him.

At any rate, I existed and I lived even then, and already near the end of babyhood, in its borderland, I was seeking the signals by which I could make my perceptions known to others. Where would such an organism come from, if not from you, Master? Will anyone emerge as the craftsman who makes himself? Or is any channel drawn from anywhere else, by which existence and life can run into us? Is this channel anything except your making of us, Master, for whom being and living are not two different things, because to be, in the highest sense, and to live, in the highest sense, are one and the same?

You are the highest, and you do not change,^*26 and the day that is today does not pass by in you—and yet it does pass by in you, because in you are also all these lower things: they would not have their paths on which to pass by, unless you contained these paths. And since your years do not fall short,^*27 your years are the day that is today. How many days, our own and our ancestors’, have passed through your today, and from it have taken their limits, and in whatever way have existed! And other days will pass through and take their limits and in whatever way will exist.

You, however, are yourself, the same one, and all things that are tomorrow and beyond, and all that are yesterday and before, you will make to be today, you have made to be today. What is it to me, if someone doesn’t understand? Let even the one who says “What is this?” have joy. Let him have joy even in saying it, and let him love finding you through not finding you out, rather than not find you by trying to find you out.

11. Listen to me, God! Tragic, the sins of humankind! A human being says this, and you have pity on him, since you made him yet didn’t make the sin in him. Who will bring to my mind the sin of my infancy, since no one is clean of sin in your eyes, not even a baby whose life on earth is only a day long? Can any tiny little one at all recall this for me, a child in whom I see what I don’t remember about myself?

So how was I sinning at that time? Was it because I strained, greedily drooling and wailing, toward my nurses’ breasts? If I did that now, fixating in this way not on breast milk but on some food suitable to my age, I would be laughed at and very rightly taken to task. Back then, therefore, I was doing things that merited a scolding, but since I couldn’t have understood anyone scolding me, custom and common sense didn’t allow me to be scolded. As we grow up, we pull up behavior of that sort by the roots and toss it out. I haven’t seen anyone, when cleaning something out, consciously throw away good things.

But could even that temporary behavior have been good: weeping for something that would have been harmful if handed over; getting bitterly angry at free people and grown-ups, the baby’s own progenitors, who refuse to subject themselves to him; striking at and struggling to hurt, to the limits of his powers, many people besides who know better than him and don’t submit to the slightest gesture that indicates his sovereign will—because they won’t obey commands that it would be disastrous to obey?

Being weak, babies’ bodies are harmless, but babies’ minds aren’t harmless. I myself have observed (carefully enough that I know what I’m writing about) a tiny child who was jealous: he couldn’t speak yet, but his face was pale and had a hateful expression as he glared at the child who shared his nurse. Who doesn’t know that this happens? Mothers and nurses say that they avert this curse with one kind of cure or another. The alternative would be to believe that this is really “harmlessness” or “innocence”: where a wellspring of milk is flowing and overflowing from the very bosom of abundance, he doesn’t tolerate an adjunct who absolutely needs this resource and is still drawing his life from this single food. But these things are gently put up with, not because they’re nothing, or because they’re small matters, but because at a more advanced age they’ll disappear. You can confirm this by the fact that you can’t calmly endure the very same faults when you detect them in someone older.

12. You, therefore, Master, who gave life to that baby, and gave him a body, which, as we perceive, you fitted out with the physical senses, you composed from its various parts, you beautified with its shape, and for its wholeness and wholesome security you placed in its bosom all the impulses of a living being: you command me to praise you even for these small things, and to make my testimony to you and chant psalms to your name, to you the most high, because you are God, all-powerful and good—and this would be the case even if you’d made nothing but these small things, as no one but you, the One, can make them. From you comes every form, from you who are most sublimely becoming—the most beautiful, that is—you who form all things and arrange all beings in order through your law.

This was an age, then, Master, through which I don’t remember living, and for an account of which I trust others, and through which only on the evidence of other babies I can conclude that I passed (though the conclusion seems highly reliable): so I shrink from placing this age in the same category as this conscious life of mine that I live in the world. To the degree that babyhood belongs to the darkness of my forgetting, it is like the time during which I lived in my mother’s womb. But if I was conceived in wrongdoing and in her sins my mother nourished me in her womb,^*28 then where—I beg you to tell me, my God and my Master—where and when was I your slave innocent? Well then, let me leave aside that time: What, after all, does it have to do with me now, since I can’t recollect any trace of it?

13. Didn’t I move onward from there, from babyhood, and come to boyhood? Or rather did boyhood come into me and take over from babyhood? Babyhood didn’t leave me—what “away” did it have to go to? Yet now it wasn’t there. I wasn’t an “in-fant,” or “non-speaker,” any longer but a boy, talking.

And I do remember this, and afterward I realized how it came about that I learned to talk. Older people didn’t teach me, purveying the words in a fixed order in lessons, as they taught me to read and write later on. Instead, I used the mind you gave me, my God. With various murmurs and other sounds, and with parts of my body moving in different ways, I tried to deliver the impressions of my heart, in order to enforce obedience to my will. When I couldn’t prevail in everything, or with everyone, I would grab with my memory. That is, when people around me named some object and, in accordance with that word, moved their bodies toward something, I saw, and I grasped that they were naming the object in this way, by the sound that they made when they wanted to indicate it. The evidence of this was their physical movements, a sort of natural worldwide language arising from facial expressions and movements of the eyes, and actions of other parts of the body, and the voice’s pitch that shows the mind’s disposition in seeking out, retaining, discarding, and avoiding things.

In due course, when I had heard words often in their proper places in a variety of sentences, I gradually deduced what they were symbols for; and once I had tamed my mouth and made it use these symbols, I could announce my wishes through them. Thus I began to share with those around me the symbols for making wishes known, and I ventured farther from shore on the stormy sea of our common human life—depending on my parents’ authority and the power of people older than myself.

14. God, my God, what wretchedness I experienced there, what a mockery was made of me; but this was in fact set before me, as a boy, as the proper way to live. I was to submit to those guiding my views, that I might flourish in this world and excel in the science of garrulity, which would pander slavishly to the penchant for prestige you find among humankind and to wealth that was in reality no such thing.

Hence, I was handed over to a school to learn reading and writing—though I was woefully unfamiliar with what use there could be in these things. Nevertheless, if I was sluggish in learning, I found myself being pounded. This recourse was in fact praised by our ancestors, who, as they before us passed through this poor life in their multitudes, built ahead of themselves pathways of anguish that we were forced to walk to the end, with multiples of hardship for the sons of Adam.^*29

However, Master, we did encounter people who prayed to you, and we learned from them. We understood—as far as we could understand—that you were a mighty someone who, though not evident to our physical senses, could give ear to us and come to our aid.

As a boy, then, I began to pray to you, my help and my refuge, and in invoking you I broke the knots around my tongue. As a little one, I prayed to you with no little fervor to keep me from a pounding in school. When you didn’t listen, because you didn’t want to indulge me into idiocy, my welts were a source of laughter for older people, including my parents, who didn’t want any fisticuffs of misfortune to come my way—but to me the beating was a tremendous, grievous evil.

15. Is anyone’s courage so great, because it clings to you with mammoth devotion; is there anyone, I ask—and come to think of it, a certain kind of cement-headedness could achieve this, so in fact there is someone—who in clinging to you reverently is so enormously devoted that he can pooh-pooh, in this grown-up manner, racks and hooks and similar devices for torture, panicked pleas to escape which rise to you from all over the earth? Could he love those harboring a razor-sharp fear of such things and yet, as our parents did, laugh at the torments our teachers inflicted on us? We boys didn’t fear these torments any less than we would have feared full-blown torture, and we didn’t entreat you less passionately to let us evade them.

Nevertheless, we did sin by writing or reading or thinking about our studies less than the school was trying to exact from us. Our memory was adequate, and we were bright enough: it was your will that we be well enough provided, for our age. But we enjoyed playing, and were punished for this by those who, for their own part, were busy with similar activities. The inanity of adults is called “business,” but when boys behave like that, adults punish them, and no one has compassion for the boys—or for the adults, when it comes to that.

But no—some respectable man weighing up matters may well approve of my being beaten because as a boy I played ball, and by playing ball I was blocked from a swifter training in letters, with which as an adult I could play in a much uglier way. Did the activities of the actual man who beat me show a different attitude? He was the sort who, if his partner in teaching defeated him in some silly debate, was tortured by greater gall and envy than I felt when my partner in play conquered me in the contest of a ball game.

16. But nevertheless I sinned, Master, my God, creator and regulator of all natural things, but only the regulator of sins; Master, my God, I sinned in acting against the instructions of my parents and those teachers. I could in fact make good use of literacy later on—no matter the spirit in which those around me wished me to imbibe it. And it wasn’t from superior judgment that I was disobedient, but from a passion for playing, as I was hot for swaggering victories in our contests, and I lusted to have my ears tickled, until they burned and itched incrementally, with tales that weren’t true.^*30

It was the same kind of burning interest that flashed in my eyes when they were directed toward shows, at which adults play. The producers, however, are endowed with such preeminent prestige that almost all parents hope their little ones will take up the same profession. The parents—however—are quite happy to let their children be assaulted if such shows get in the way of their studies—through which the parents are keen to have the children reach the goal of producing shows.^*31

Look on this sort of thing with pity in your heart, Master, and set free those who already call on you, and have pity also on those who still don’t, so that they call on you and you can set them free.

17. Before I was out of my boyhood, I had heard of the eternal life promised to us by the lowly embodiment of the Master, our God, who came down to meet our lofty pride. The sign of his cross was repeatedly made on me, and I was again and again “preserved” with his salt,^*32 right from the time I came out of my mother’s womb, as my mother had a strong hope in you.

You saw, Master, that when I was still a boy I had some sort of stomach affliction and a fever that brought me close to death; you saw, my God, because you were already my guardian, how excitedly and with how much trust I demanded baptism in the Anointed One, who is your son and my God and Master; I demanded it in the name of my mother’s duty to God, and the duty of your church, which is the mother of us all.

The mother of my body’s life was deeply shaken. With her pure heart and her faith in you, she was already in labor with more love than before, at the start of my life, and now it was to save me for an endless life as well. Now she would have seen to it, in a great flurry, that I was inducted and washed in the saving sacraments while I testified to your power, Jesus my Master, for the pardoning of sins.

But just then, I recovered. Therefore my cleansing was delayed—as if it were required that I continue getting dirty if I was going to live; the reason for the delay being, clearly, that after that cleansing the liability for dirty crimes of mine would be graver and place me in greater jeopardy.

That’s what I already believed then, and so did my mother and the whole household—except for a sole person, my father; he, however, didn’t prevail against the right over me asserted by my mother’s piety; he couldn’t keep me from believing in Christ, in line with his own unbelief at the time. In fact, she made a considerable bustle to ensure that you, my God, were my father, rather than him. And in this you helped her conquer her husband, to whom she was enslaved even though she was a better person. Even in replacing him, she was his dutiful slave, because at any event she was obedient to your command.^*33

18. I beg of you, my God: I want to know, if you also want me to know, what the rationale was in putting me off from being baptized then. Was it for my own good that the reins holding me back from sinning would be let loose, so to speak? Were they not in fact let loose? On the same rationale, even now, all around me the cry echoes in my ears concerning one person or another, “Let him alone, let him do it: he’s not baptized yet.”

Yet where physical health is concerned, we don’t say, “Let him go on being injured: he isn’t healed yet.” How much better if I had been healed quickly, and my treatment had been conscientiously carried out by those around me, and by myself, so that my soul’s rescue, once in my possession, would have been safe under the guardianship of you who had rescued me.

Better, for certain. Yet how many huge waves of temptation seemed to be looming for me after childhood; indeed, my mother was aware of them already, and she preferred to launch on them the earth out of which I was still going to be formed in the time to come, rather than the baptized image of my maker.^*34

19. But in my boyhood itself, which gave rise to less dread than my youth did about what I might do, I had no passion for reading and writing and hated to be pushed into them, yet I was pushed into them, and this turned out to be for my good. I didn’t do good, as I didn’t learn unless I was forced to; no one does good against his will, even if what he does is good. Nor did those who were pushing me do good, but rather good gradually arose for me from you, my God. People didn’t examine the purpose to which I was putting what I learned, unless that purpose was to sate insatiable greed for what was in reality poverty aplenty and degrading glory.

But you, who know the number of hairs on our heads,^*35 put to use the wrongheaded pressure everyone was putting on me to learn, and turned it to true utility for me. My wrongheadedness, on the other hand, in not wanting to learn, you used to punish me, because I did deserve to be worked over with the penalties, tiny boy yet immense sinner that I was. In this way you did right by me through those doing wrong, and you requited me justly for my sins. This is your command, and it is carried out in full, that every mind not conforming to your law is its own punishment.

20. But what was the reason I hated studying Greek, in which I was initiated as a very small boy? Even now, I haven’t fully solved this mystery. I was infatuated with Latin—not the part taught by primary school teachers, but by those called grammarians. The rudiments, or the instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, I treated as just as burdensome, and just as much of a punishment, as the whole of the Greek curriculum.

Where would the blame be, if not in my sinfulness and my nugatory nature, by virtue of which I’m nothing but flesh and breath walking on its way and never returning to where it’s been?^*36

At any event, those rudiments are better, because they’re more solid. Through them developed in me, and came to fruition, and remains in my possession, the ability to read any piece of writing I come across and to write something if I want to; that’s better than the training in which I was forced to memorize the wanderings of some Aeneas or other, while I had no sense of my own wanderings; and to bewail the death of Dido, because she “died for love,”^*37 when all the time I endured dry-eyed the utter misery of myself dying away from you, God, my life.

21. What was more pitiful than me, a pitiful person not pitying himself but weeping for the death of Dido, which came about through her “love” of Aeneas; while I didn’t weep for my own death, which was coming about through not loving you, God, the light of my heart and the bread I eat within my soul, and the manliness that actually marries my mind and is a legitimate husband to the bosom of my meditations?

I didn’t love you, and I cheated on you like a true slut,^*38 and as I cheated there rang around me the words “Excellent, excellent!” A “loving” attachment to this world is cheating on you, and that expression “Excellent, excellent!” makes a person ashamed if it doesn’t describe him. But I didn’t cry for these reasons; I cried about Dido and her life quenched when she sought to end it by the sword; but I was seeking the last, the least things in your creation and left you behind; I was earth going into the earth.^*39 If I had been forbidden to read those works, I would have grieved to be unable to read what made me grieve. This is the insanity of considering such literary training more respectable and more fertile than the training by which I learned to read and write.

22. So now let my God shout in my soul, and let your truth say to me, “That isn’t better training! It isn’t!” Absolutely better is the primary schooling. Just take me, for example: I’m far more apt to forget the wanderings of Aeneas and everything else of the kind than to forget to read and write.

Yes, curtains hang in the doorways of literary classrooms, but they stand less for prestigious exclusivity than for the obscuring of wandering error. People I’m not afraid of any longer may as well not yell at me, as I testify to you now, in the manner my soul desires, my God, and as a means to love your good paths I second your censure of the evil paths I took.

The hawkers of literary studies—and the customers as well—might as well not yell at me, because if I challenge them by asking whether it’s true what the poet said, that Aeneas came to Carthage way back when, those who are less well educated will answer that they don’t know, while those who are better educated will say that it isn’t true. But if I ask how Aeneas’s name is spelled, everybody who’s learned to spell it will tell me the truth, according to the generally accepted human compact established for the use of those symbols.

Likewise, if I were to ask which it would be a greater drawback in this life of ours for any given person to forget, reading and writing or those poetic fairy tales, who (unless he’d forgotten his own existence, i.e., was brain-dead) wouldn’t see what the answer needed to be?

I sinned, when I was small, by placing my passion for these idiocies before more useful resources—or rather I reviled the latter and was enamored with the former. At the time “One plus one equals two, two plus two equals four” was a revolting singsong to me, but I found adorable that extravaganza of emptiness, the wooden horse full of armed warriors and the conflagration of Troy and—just imagine!—the ghost of Creusa.^*40

23. Why, then, did I despise the Greek curriculum, when it warbled comparable material? Homer, too, is an expert in spinning little yarns of a similar kind, and his works comprise excessively sweet nothingness. Yet he was distasteful to me as a boy.

I believe that it’s the same for Vergil with Greek boys, when they’re forced to learn him the way I was forced to learn Homer. Plainly, it was the difficulty, it was nothing but the difficulty of learning a foreign language thoroughly, that sprinkled a sort of gall all over the savors of fictive storytelling in Greek.

I didn’t know any of those words, yet savage threats and violent punishments loomed over me to make me know. At one point in the past, of course, as a baby, I hadn’t known any Latin words, either, but I took note and learned them without any terror or torture, amid the sweet talk of my nurses and the jokes of people who were chuckling to me and the pleasure I shared with people who played with me. Really, I learned without any penal burden from instructors pressing down on me, since my own heart pressed me forward into giving birth to the things it conceived. This couldn’t have happened unless I learned some words not from teachers but from mere talkers, in whose hearing even I could begin to labor in bringing forth whatever was in my mind.

From this, it’s clear enough that free inquisitiveness has a greater power for learning than timorousness under compulsion. But the latter chokes off the flow of the former according to your laws, God, your laws that reach from teachers’ switches clear to the ordeals of the martyrs; your laws that have the power to blend wholesome bitterness into our life and call us back to you from the noxious pleasure through which we have withdrawn from you.

24. Listen to my supplication, Master, so that my soul doesn’t stagger under your instruction, so that I don’t stumble in testifying to your mercies, by which you tore me away from all my ruinous pathways. Thus you’ll grow sweet to me beyond all that led me wrong, in my willingness to follow it. Thus I’ll love you most mightily, and grasp your hand with all the strength of my inmost being. Thus you’ll tear me away from every trial, clear to the end.^*41

Here you are, Master, my king and my God. May whatever useful thing I learned as a boy be your slave, may whatever I speak and write and read and count serve you, because when I learned frivolity, you gave me your instruction, and you forgave the sins of my frivolous enjoyments. In the course of my studies I did learn many useful words—but they can also be learned in serious study, and that path is the safe one for boys to walk.

25. Oh, you woeful river of human ways! Who’s going to stand against you? How long will you flow without drying up? How long will you go on sweeping the sons of Eve into the vast and fearsome sea, barely to be crossed by those who have embarked on that piece of wood, the cross?

Didn’t I read, among your works, that Jupiter both caused the thunder and committed adultery? Certainly, he couldn’t do both, but the story set out was such that real-life adultery would have the sanction to imitate him, with fictional thunder playing the pimp.

Who among the professors in their hooded gowns gives a serious hearing even to someone in their same arena who’s loudly declaiming, “Homer made these things up and was giving human traits to the gods; I’d rather he’d given divine traits to us”? But it’s more true to say that, yes, Homer made these things up, but his method was to attribute divine traits to mortals behaving outrageously, so that outrages wouldn’t be considered outrages, and so that whoever committed them would seem to be imitating not abandoned human beings but the gods in heaven.

26. And yet, you river of the underworld, the sons of humankind are tossed into you, and their fare along with them, so that they can learn these things; and it’s a great business when a transaction of this nature is enacted in the public square, before the faces of the magistrates who decide the teaching stipend to be granted on top of the private fees. You, the river, clash your boulders with a crash, intoning, “Hence words are learned, hence eloquence is acquired, and they are eminently necessary for effecting persuasion and elucidating opinions.”

Does it really follow that we wouldn’t understand the words “rain of gold” and “bosom” and “sham” and “heaven’s precincts,” and other words that are written in the passage, unless Terence brought onto the scene a worthless young man using Jupiter as a justification for rape, while he contemplates some picture or other, painted on a partition, this wall-painting depicting “the manner in which, as they say, Jupiter made a golden rain run into Danae’s bosom, once upon a time—a sham through which he managed to impose upon a woman”? Just look at how the young man lashes himself on in his lust, as if according to a heavenly precept:

Oh, what a god! (quoth he). At the sky’s summit he thunders, with a wrenching, a roiling of heaven’s precincts!

And I, a petty mortal, wouldn’t do it? No, I did it, and quite gladly.^*42

These words aren’t in the least more opportunely learned through this indecency; in fact, through these words, indecency of that stripe is more boldly practiced. I’m not blaming the words; they’re like choice, costly containers;^*43 but the wine of wrongheadedness in them was used by drunken educators to start us on a round ourselves, and unless we drank, we were beaten up, and we weren’t allowed to call in an arbitrator who was sober. Nevertheless, my God—under whose gaze my recollection is now carefree—I was actually glad to learn these things, and I enjoyed my ordeal, and for this reason I was called a promising boy.

27. My God, let me say something about my mind, your gift to me, and about the delusions by which it was worn down. A job was assigned to me, and it proved quite a source of disturbance for my soul, as I might be rewarded with praise, yet I was in terror of disgrace or a whipping: I was to give a speech of Juno in her aggrieved rage at being unable to keep the king of the Trojans from coming to Italy^*44—a speech that, as I had heard, Juno never gave. But we were forced, in our wanderings, to follow in the steps of poetic fabrications, and to express something in prose approximating what the poet had expressed in verse. And the boy who earned more praise for speaking was the one whose emoting stood out as more like aggrieved rage, as befit the worthiness of the character he was sketching, with the words clothing the sentiments in an appropriate manner.

But what should it have mattered to me, you true life, my God, that I was applauded for my performance, more than the rest of the large class, my fellow scholars of the same age? Wasn’t all of this only smoke and wind? Wasn’t there, then, any other possible exercise for my mind and my tongue? Your praise, Master, your praise as read in the scriptures would have been a stake to hold up the vine-shoot that was my heart, so that futile triviality wouldn’t leave it a despicable prey to the birds of the air. There’s more than one way to make a sacrifice to those angels who’ve changed their allegiance.^*45

28. Why was it amazing that I was whisked off into empty places, leaving your home, my God? The men who were set before me to imitate were devastated if scolded for divulging, with some foreign impropriety in pronunciation or a mistake in grammar, any innocent actions of theirs; but if they told of their lustful indulgences faultlessly, with pure and flowing diction, eloquently and elaborately, they would preen with the flattery accorded them.

You see this, Master, yet stay silent, long-suffering and with so much mercy in your heart, and speaking the truth yourself. You won’t always be silent, will you? Even now you pluck from this monstrous abyss^*46 the soul that seeks you and thirsts for your delights,^*47 the soul saying to you from the heart, “I have sought your face.”^*48

Let me seek your face again, Master: a long way from your face is a life in the murk of emotion. And it isn’t on foot and over a physical distance that a person goes away from you or returns to you; nor, in reality, did that younger son in your scripture seek out horses or chariots or ships, and he didn’t fly away on wings for everyone to see, or even stir a step in his journey, in order to live in a faraway country and extravagantly waste what you gave him when he set off; you were a kind father in conferring it on him, but an even kinder one when he returned to you needy.^*49 To live in the emotion of desire, therefore, is to live in the murk of emotion, and this is to live a long way from your face.

29. Look, God the Master, and look with forbearance (as in fact you do), on how carefully the sons of men mind the rules of spellings and syllables handed down to them from speakers in the past, but disregard the eternal and unending laws of their rescue handed down to them by you.

If someone who upholds and teaches those ancient tenets should, against the rules of the language, pronounce the word homo, or “human being,” without an aspiration in the first syllable, as ’omo, he would offend other human beings more than if, in violation of your decrees, he hated a member of the humanity to which he belongs. It’s as if he experienced that any enemy in the world could be more ruinous to him than the hatred that incites him against his enemy; or that anyone could wreak more grievous devastation on another person by hounding him than on his own heart by making an enemy. But surely, the art of letters isn’t closer to his heart than what’s written on his conscience,^*50 which says that he’s doing to someone else what he wouldn’t want done to himself.^*51

How far apart from us you are, living on high and in silence, God who alone are great, you who in accordance with your tireless law strew cases of blindness—penalties in themselves—over cravings that aren’t allowed: such as when a human being, hot on the trail of a reputation for eloquence, in front of a human judge, and with a human crowd standing all around him, lights into his enemy with the most brutal hatred, yet stays on absolutely unflagging guard against his tongue making a mistake and saying “among we human beings” (that is, with the wrong grammatical case), while, in his lunacy, he doesn’t guard against removing a human being from among humankind (with the right case to go with that preposition).

30. As a mere boy, I sprawled like a forlorn lover on the threshold of such ethics. In this arena, on this wrestling floor, I was more wary of making a mistake in pronunciation than of envying people who didn’t make one when I did.

I tell you, I testify to you, my God, about the things I was praised for by people whose approval meant a respectable life for me. I didn’t have a view of the vortex of disgrace into which I’d been hurled out of your sight.^*52 In your sight, what was more disgusting than myself at this point, when even people like that disapproved of me for fobbing off with innumerable lies the slave who was in charge of me, and my teachers and parents, out of my infatuation with playing, and my passion to be a spectator of twaddle, and my acting-up mimicry of comic nonsense?

I made thieving raids on my parents’ storeroom and their table, whether under the incessant commands of my greedy gullet, or for the wherewithal to buy participation in games from boys who in fact enjoyed them just as much as I did.

In games themselves, I often laid traps to catch cheating victories, out of a brainless lust for superiority. And what was I less willing to endure, what did I so pitilessly prosecute, if I detected it, than the same thing I was doing to the other boys? But if I was detected and prosecuted, I preferred to go on the attack rather than give ground. Is that childhood innocence? It isn’t, Master, it isn’t.

But I beseech you, God, and I beseech you because these are exactly the sins that make the transition, from babysitting attendants and teachers, nuts and marbles to play with, and sparrows as pets, to governors and kings, gold, landed estates, slaves; these are in every respect the sins that make the transition as we grow greater and one stage of our life follows another; and accordingly, punishments grow greater following teachers’ canings. You, our king, accordingly commended childhood’s slight stature as a token of lowliness, when you said, “To such belongs the kingdom of heaven.”^*53

31. Notwithstanding, Master, to you as the absolutely superior and the perfect originator and regulator of everything that is, to you as our God thanks are due—even had it been your will that I be nothing beyond a boy.

Even at that early stage, I existed, I lived and was conscious, and I was concerned with my body’s soundness, which was a trace of that most secret oneness from which my being came; I guarded my physical senses, keeping them inviolable through an inward sensibility, and I delighted in the truth even in my small meditations about small matters. I didn’t like to be misled, I had a strong memory, I was on the way to being equipped with articulate speech, I was soothed by friendship, I avoided pain, humiliation, empty-headedness.

In a living being like me, what shouldn’t have amazed, shouldn’t have evoked praise? But all those things, such as they are, are gifts from my God. I didn’t give them to myself, but they are good gifts, and all of them make up myself. Therefore the one who made me is good, and he himself is my good, and in his name I rejoice in all the good things that comprised me, even as a boy.

My sin was that I sought not in God himself, but in things he had created—in myself and the rest of his creation—delights, heights, and perceptions of what was true and right, and in this way I collapsed into sufferings, embarrassments, and erring ways.

Thanks be to you, my sweetness and my honor and my faithfulness, my God, thanks be to you for your gifts; but you must preserve them for me, and by doing this you will preserve me, and what you have given me will grow and come to fulfillment, and I will be with you, because it was your gift that I exist at all.