Book 2

1. I want to be mindful of the ugliness I engaged in back then, and the dissolution my body wreaked on my soul—not because I’m in love with any of that, but rather, my God, for the purpose of loving you.

I do this out of love for the love I have for you; I recollect the paths of my depravity in the bitterness of my inspection of myself, so that you grow sweet to me, with a sweetness, a charm that’s not deceitful but blessed and safe, binding me together against the scattering force that ripped me to pieces as long as I turned my back on your singularity and disappeared into multiplicity.

At one time, you see, in my youth, I caught the flame of desire to glut myself on the pit of hell, and recklessly grew a whole grove of shady love affairs, several species of them. Any beauty in me ran to ruin, and in your eyes I rotted from the inside out while I approved of myself so much, and yearned for approval in human eyes.

2. What used to delight me other than “loving” and “being loved”? But the limit did not hold, the limit that reaches merely from mind to mind, between which lies the well-lit boundary-land of friendship. No, mine were the putrid fumes rising from scummy bodily lust and the diseased eruption of puberty, befouling and befuddling my heart with their smoke, so that there was no telling the unclouded sky of affection from the thick murk of carnality.

I didn’t know which was which—they blended in my seething senses and dragged me, at this spineless age, off sheer cliffs of desires and sank me in a whirlpool of depravity. Your anger exercised its power over me, but I didn’t know it. The screeching chain of my deathly nature, the punishment for my soul’s arrogance, had deafened me, and I made my way farther and farther from you, and you let me.

I was storm-tossed, gushing out, running every which way, frothing into thin air in my filthy affairs—and you said nothing.^*1 Oh, you my joy were long in coming! You said nothing back then, and on I went, far away from you, sowing more and more seed that grew nothing but grief. This was the insolence of my humiliation and the restlessness of my slacking.

3. Who could have attuned my torment to temperance, turned to good use the fugitive beauties of these least things, which run last in the race? Who could have set a turning post in front of their blandishments, so that the surf of my youth would have broken on the shore of marriage?

If, for me, a contented (or at least contained) tranquillity could not have been found within boundaries of a state whose purpose is to beget children—as this is what your law prescribes,^*2 Master, you who craft an actual graft on our death, putting your puissant hand to gentle work in holding back the thorns shut out of your paradise, because your power over everything isn’t far off from us, even when we’re far off from you—I could at least have been more alert to the thunderous voice from your clouds:

“Those in this state will have much to endure in the body’s life; I, however, want to spare you,” and “It is good for a person not to touch a woman,” and “Whoever is without a wife thinks of the things that belong to God, but whoever is joined in marriage thinks of the things that belong to this world, namely how to please his wife.”^*3 I might, in short, have been wider awake and caught these words, and as a “eunuch for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,”^*4 I would have been happier waiting for your embrace.

4. But I boiled over in my torment, following my own flowing momentum and abandoning you. I went over all your lawful limits, and I didn’t escape the blows of your lash—what mortal, after all, can do this? You were always there, savaging me in your pity, scattering the most acrid upsets on everything illicit that that I enjoyed, and you did this to make me look for enjoyment without any upset and be unable to find it in anything but you, Master, in anything but you, who fashion pain as a lesson and lambaste us to heal us^*5 and kill us so that we don’t die away from you.

Where on earth was I? And how far away was my exile from the pleasures of your house^*6 in that fifteenth year of my body’s life?^*7 That was when a lunatic lust—which humankind licenses to our disgrace, but which your laws do not allow—had come to lord it over me, after I made a complete surrender. My family was not concerned to scoop me up into marriage as I slid into ruin; their sole preoccupation was for me to learn the most estimable style of speech making possible, and persuasion through the arrangement of words.

5. But during that year, in fact, came a gap in my studies. I was brought back from Madauros, the town in our district where I had already started to live away from home for the sake of imbibing literature and oratory. The money to pay for a sojourn farther away, in Carthage, was being arranged—more through the sheer enthusiasm of my father than his actual means: he was a citizen of Thagaste with property that was hardly substantial.

To whom am I telling this story? It isn’t of course to you, my God, but in your presence I’m telling it to my race, the human race, however minute a snippet out of that might stumble on my writing, such as it is. And what’s the story’s purpose? Obviously, it’s so that I and whoever reads this can contemplate from what depths we must cry out to you.^*8 But what’s closer to your ears, if the heart humbles itself in confession and the life is lived in faith?

But whose praises, at the time, didn’t raise on high a mere human being, my father, because he taxed the family property beyond its strength, spending whatever it took for his son to study, even when that meant living quite far from home? Many citizens, far wealthier than he was, went to no such trouble for their children’s sake; but at the same time, the father who was showing them up made no fuss about how I was growing up in your judgment, and how pure I was, as long as my oratorical skill developed, even if I was a devastated land and nothing was developed in me by you, God, who are the one true and good owner, or master, of your field, my heart.^*9

6. But when during that fifteenth year of mine,^*10 that interval of leisure due to the family’s financial straits, I began in my parents’ house a holiday from schooling of any kind, the thorn bushes of desire grew higher than my head, and no hand was there to tear them up by the roots. Just the opposite: when, in the baths, my father saw I was growing the hair that’s the clothing of restless young manhood, he was practically over the moon, even at this early date, about the grandchildren this development was supposed to promise, and in his glee he told my mother—it was the sort of tipsy glee in which this sorry world has forgotten you, its creator, and fallen in love instead with something you’ve created;^*11 it’s from the unseen wine of a self-willfulness distorted and tipped down into the depths.

But in my mother’s breast you’d already started to build your temple, laying the foundations of your holy dwelling-place,^*12 whereas he was still a convert under instruction before baptism,^*13 and a recent convert besides. It was therefore she who endured a violent spasm of reverent, tremulous trepidation, and though I hadn’t yet committed myself to the faith, she nevertheless feared the crooked paths walked by those who show you their backs and not their faces.^*14

7. Oh, the state of me! Do I actually dare to say that you were silent, my God, when I went farther away from you? But were you truly silent to me at the time? Whose words were those if not yours, the words you chanted in my ears through my mother, who was devoted to you? But from that source nothing made its way down into my heart to make me obey.

At that period she didn’t want me—and I remember how she took me aside and warned me with huge agitation—to engage in sexual immorality, and absolutely not to debauch anyone’s wife. These seemed to be nothing but the sort of warnings women typically give, so complying would have been mortifying.

But they were your warnings, and I didn’t know. I thought you were silent and she was speaking, though it was through her that you weren’t silent. In the form of her, you were held in contempt by me, her son, the son of your female slave, which made me your male slave.^*15

But I didn’t know this, and I was going straight downhill in such thorough blindness that among boys my age I was embarrassed at having disgraced myself less than they had, since I heard them tossing around stories of their crimes and preening more intensely the more disgusting these were; and I felt like doing the thing not only because I craved it, but also because of the plaudits that went with it.

What deserves to be reviled, if not vile behavior? But to avoid reprobation, I made myself a worse reprobate, and when I had no basis for confessing to compete with those depraved people, I pretended to have done what I hadn’t, so that I wouldn’t seem more despicable the less I was to blame, and worth less the purer I kept myself.

8. So there they were, the comrades with whom I pursued my course through the streets of Babylon,^*16 and I rolled in the mud as if it were cinnamon and expensive perfumes. And to keep me stuck more tightly to the city’s umbilical cord, the unseen enemy trod on me and led me astray, prone to straying as I was.

The mother of my life in the body—who had by this time fled from Babylon’s downtown^*17 but was still strolling in other districts—didn’t follow through on her warning in favor of chastity; she didn’t take steps to confine within the boundary markers of married attachment (if she couldn’t cut it to the bone) what she’d heard about from her husband concerning me and understood to be already a ravaging disease, one that could prove quite dangerous for the days to come.

She didn’t take these steps for fear of shackling my otherwise hopeful future with a wife. I don’t mean the hope my mother had in you for the life to come, but the hope of an education, which both parents were overly eager for me to obtain, he because his thinking about you was practically nonexistent, while about me it was frivolous; whereas for her part she considered that the traditional curriculum would mean not only no impediment but actually a certain advancement on my way toward you.

This is what I conclude, at any rate, when I recall as well as I can my parents’ attitudes. The reins were actually slackened to let me caper around at will, to an extent beyond a mere compromise of strictness, and to a point where my dispostion broke down in a number of ways, and in all these things there was a fog shutting me off, my God, from the clear sky of your truth, and it was as if I was fattened up and bursting with iniquity.^*18

9. Stealing—for certain, the law you wrote punishes it,^*19 Master; as does the law written in human hearts,^*20 which not even iniquity itself can erase. What kind of thief, however well provided, would stomach the depredations of another thief, however poor that one’s provisions? But I wanted to commit this crime, and commit it I did, though destitution didn’t drive me to it—unless I was starving for what was right but turning my nose up at it anyway, and at the same time stuffed and swollen with my own sinfulness:^*21 so I stole a thing I had a better sort of in lush supply already; and I didn’t want to enjoy the thing my hand grasped for—the actual stealing, the transgression, was going to be my treat.

There was a pear tree in the neighborhood of our vineyard, but the fruit weighing it down offered no draw either in its look or its taste. After playing in vacant lots clear till the dead of night—that was the behavior we visited on the town as our habit—we young men, full of our endless mischief, proceeded to this tree to shake it down and haul away the goods. We filched immense loads, not for our own feasting but for slinging away to swine, if you can believe it. But in fact, we did devour some pears; our only proviso was the potential for liking what was illicit.

Look at my heart, God, look at my heart, which you took pity on at the very bottom of the abyss. Let it tell you now, this heart you see, what it was looking for there, let it tell you how I was evil entirely on the house, and how there was no cause for my viciousness except viciousness. She was ugly, and I loved her, I loved my own demise, I loved my failing—not the thing for the sake of which I failed, but the failing itself, as in the hideousness of my soul I plunged down from your steady structure that held me up, into utter annihilation; I wasn’t looking for what I could get from infamy, but looking for infamy.

10. There is in fact an impressiveness in lovely material things—gold and silver and everything, and in contact with the flesh an accord between it and what it touches has huge appeal; and each of the other senses, too, has a specially arranged accommodation with objects. Worldly honor and the power to give orders and maintain the upper hand have their own kind of attraction, from which also the hunger for retribution rises.

When it comes down to it, in getting all these things a person must not depart from you, Master, or turn aside from the path of your law. The life we live here has its own enticement, because of a certain measure of charm that belongs to it and the attunement to all these beautiful things of the lowest order. Friendship between human beings is sweet in its cherished bond, because it creates a unity out of many separate souls.

Because of all these things, and other worldly things as well, sin is committed when an unchecked leaning toward these, given that they are the lowest order of good things, causes a desertion of the better and the highest, namely you, God our Master, and your truth and your law. These lowest things do have their delights, but not in comparison to you, my God, who made everything. The just person delights in God’s self, and God himself is the delight of those with righteous hearts.^*22

11. When, therefore, people investigate a crime and why it was committed, it’s usual for no one to believe the explanation unless it’s based on evidence of a drive for getting one of these good things we’ve just called the lowest, or else a fear of losing one. They’re beautiful and worthy of esteem, after all, though in comparison with the good things that are higher and make a person truly happy, they’re debased and lie in the dirt.

A man’s committed a murder. Why did he do it? He fell in love with his victim’s wife or his land, or he wanted to live off the proceeds of a violent robbery, or he was afraid of losing something in these categories at the victim’s hands, or he’d been wronged and was on fire for revenge. A person doesn’t commit a murder for no reason, just for the fun of it, does he? Who would believe that?

One psychotic, sadistic man is supposed to have been brutally evil for its own sake, yet the reason’s made quite clear: “so that his hand and his mind,” the author states, “wouldn’t lose their aptitude from lack of work.” You can ask a further question: “Why did he act that way?” Plainly it was because if he’d been able, through his active proficiency in crime, to seize control of the city, he would have attained high public offices, the command of armies, and wealth—and fear of the law wouldn’t have been a factor for him; likewise any material hardship he was experiencing due to the “reduced circumstances of his household and his bad conscience from his outrages.” Not even Catiline himself, it follows, loved his crimes; without a doubt, it was something else he loved that caused him to commit crimes.^*23

12. What did I, pathetic dupe that I was, love in you, theft of mine, nighttime crime of mine committed during the fifteenth year of my life?^*24 You weren’t beautiful, since you were, well, theft. But were you actually anything, to justify my speaking to you now? That fruit we stole was beautiful, because you created it, you, the most beautiful of all things, creator of all things, the good God, God the highest good and my true good. That fruit was beautiful, but my pathetic soul didn’t yearn for it in itself. I had plenty of better fruit, but I picked this in order to steal, as once I’d picked it, I threw it away, and the banquet I had from it was only my own evil-mindedness—that I enjoyed with glee. If any of that fruit actually entered my mouth, my crime was the flavoring on it.

And now, God my Master, I want to know what it was that gave me pleasure in that theft, and here’s the answer: there was in fact nothing attractive about it. I’m of course talking not about the attractiveness of probity or good judgment, but also not of human intelligence or memory or the senses, or living energy; nor am I talking about the attractiveness such as we find in the heavenly bodies, stately in their spheres, or on the earth or in the sea, full of their young born to take the place of those departing; and I don’t mean even that faulty attractiveness shadowed over by the failings that delude us.

13. Prideful human exaltation, for its part, only mimics transcendence, since you’re the one exalted over everything, the transcendent God. What does ambition seek but honors and glory?—whereas you’re the one to be honored before all, and full of glory into eternity. The brutality of power wishes to be feared, but who should be feared but God alone? And what can be seized or purloined from his power? When, or where, or through what, or by whom? Lewd people’s sweet talk shows a wish to be desired, but nothing is sweeter than your loving care; and there’s no desire more wholesome and sweeter than for her, the most shapely and shining of all things, your truth.

Curiosity seems like a mere pretense for the pursuit of knowledge, when you know everything to the highest degree. Even ignorance itself, even stupidity hides under the name of simplicity and innocence—a sham, because nothing can be found that’s simpler than you. What is more innocent than you?—whereas to wicked people even their own acts are their enemies. Laziness makes as if it’s striving for repose, but what secure repose is there except in the Master? Overindulgence longs to be called “having enough” and “living the good life.” But you are fullness and abundance of pleasure that never goes off or runs short. Overspending tries to take on the cover of generosity, but the most profuse spendthrift of all good things is you.

Greed wants to own a lot: you own everything. Envy makes a formal case against the greatest merit: what has more merit than you? Anger seeks to inflict punishment: Who punishes more justly than you do? Fear shakes in its shoes at unfamiliar and sudden things, which oppose what it loves, and is paranoid in advance of events. To you, what is unfamiliar? What happens suddenly? Who separates you from the object of your care?^*25 And where is solid safety except in your presence? Grief wastes away when it loses what amused its acquisitive passion; it doesn’t want anything taken away from it—as in fact nothing can be taken away from you.

14. In these ways the soul goes whoring, when it turns away from you^*26 and seeks beyond you those things it can’t find in clean and clear forms, unless it returns to you. It’s the kind of backward imitation of you performed by all the people who place themselves far from you and try to exalt themselves at your expense. But even by imitating you in this way, they disclose that you’re the creator of all the natural world, and that therefore there is, in every sense, nowhere for anyone to draw back from you.

What, then, did I care for in that theft of mine, through what did I imitate my Master in that vicious and twisted way? Did I like to break the law because I could at least do it sneakily, as no great endowment of power allowed me to act, and I was a sort of maimed prisoner trying to achieve a one-handed liberty by going unpunished for doing what was forbidden, in the shady guise of omnipotence? Here’s that slave we all know about, running away from his master and chasing the shadows. The putrefaction of it, the abomination of life and the depths of death! Could I have liked what wasn’t allowed for no reason other than that it wasn’t allowed?

15. How shall I pay back my Master for letting my memory go over those things without feeling any fear from them? I will love you, Master, and give thanks and testimony to your name, since you pardoned me from such terrible wrongdoings, from such unspeakable things that were my work. To your grace I give the credit, and to your mercy, that you’ve melted my sins like ice.^*27 And to your grace I impute it that I didn’t do other evil things, whatever they would have been.

What was I not capable of doing, since I actually loved crime for its own sake? I profess that I was released from everything, both what I did of my own free will and what, with your guidance, I didn’t do. But who on earth is there who, taking account of his weakness, dares ascribe his purity and harmlessness to his own strength? The result would be that he loves you less, as if he had less need of your pity, through which you write off the sins of those who’ve turned to you.

Whoever’s been called by you and has followed your voice, so as to avoid these things—things he’s reading the recollection and admission of in my own case—shouldn’t laugh at me because I was healed, when I was sick, by that same doctor who saw to it that he didn’t get sick in the first place, or rather that he got less sick than I did. On the contrary, he ought to love you just as much, and in fact more, for that very reason: he sees me shedding the overwhelming diseases of my sins by virtue of that same being who allowed him to escape such an entanglement.

16. For me as a pathetic youngster, what was, in the end, the harvest my behavior yielded, behavior the recollection of which makes me turn red^*28—especially that theft? I loved doing it for the fact of the theft itself, nothing else, since in itself it was nothing, and this made me that much more pathetic.

If I’d been alone, I wouldn’t have done it (this is how I remember my disposition then)—alone, there’s no way I would have done it. So in this instance I also loved the company of those with whom I did it. So didn’t I love something besides the theft? No, I loved nothing else, because such company itself is also nothing.

What is all this in reality? Who is there who can instruct me, unless it’s the one who shines a light in my heart and makes its shadows known? What else could have led my mind to inquire into and discuss and contemplate this matter?

If, you see, I’d been in love with the fruit I stole and longed to enjoy it, I could have done alone what I did. If the pleasure I was after had been a sufficient rationale for committing that crime, I wouldn’t have needed to rub up against accomplices’ minds to set alight my itching concupiscence. But since there was no pleasure for me in that fruit, the pleasure was in the crime itself, committed simultaneously by an association of sinners.

17. What was that attitude in my mind? It couldn’t be clearer that it was revolting in the extreme, and I’m one sorry person for having harbored it. And yet what was it? Who understands his own misconduct?^*29

We laughed, it tickled our hearts, because we’d fooled those who didn’t think we’d be doing this, and who would have strongly opposed it. Why, then, did I take pleasure in not doing it alone? Was it because no one finds it easy to laugh alone? That’s true, but it does happen once in a while, to people keeping their own company, when no one else is around, that a laugh gets the upper hand if something overly absurd presents itself to their senses or their mind. But I wouldn’t have done what I did alone, absolutely wouldn’t have done it alone.

Here, before your eyes, my God, is the living retrospection of my soul. Alone, I wouldn’t have committed that theft, from which there was no pleasure in what I stole but rather in the act of stealing. What would have given me absolutely no pleasure to do alone, I wouldn’t have done alone.

Oh, you friendship that couldn’t be more unfriendly! You led my mind astray on paths I couldn’t trace; you were a playful, joking greed for doing harm, an avarice for somebody else’s loss, absent any appetite for my own profit, or for reprisal. Instead, at the words “Come on, let’s do it,” there’s shame in not being shameless.

18. Who can disentangle that wretched immensity of distortions and contortions and knottedness? It’s a grotesque creature. I don’t want to pay any attention to her, don’t want to look at her. You’re the one I want, justice and innocence so beautiful and graceful; I want to enjoy you with honorable eyes and a satisfaction I can’t get enough of. Rest is with you, lavishly, and a life without distress. The one who enters into you enters into the joy of his Master,^*30 and he won’t fear, and he’ll do unsurpassably well in the one who’s unsurpassed. I flowed abruptly downward from you and wandered off, my God; in my young manhood I went on an awfully erratic course away from your steadfastness, and I turned myself into a famished land I had to live in.^*31