{1} Book One

The story begins with infancy and boyhood, but the telling of the story begins with praise to God. Augustine struggles to find words by which to fulfill the deep desire of the human heart to praise God, just as the infant Augustine will struggle to find words to express the desires of his body—the Latin word for infancy, infantia, is literally “speechlessness”—and the boy Augustine will struggle to master words in the service of ambition. Augustine acknowledges God’s gifts in every aspect of his early life; he also acknowledges the misuse of those gifts, which—just like words themselves—are no less good for being misused; their misuse is lamentable precisely because they are good.

Augustine opens with praise to God and meditation on God’s nature (1.1.1–1.5.6). He recalls the gifts that sustained him in his infancy and the sin that is manifest even in infants (1.6.7–1.7.12). In his boyhood (1.8.13–1.19.30) he learns to speak (1.8.13) and begins his studies (1.9.14–1.10.16, 1.13.20–1.18.29); his baptism is deferred (1.11.17–1.12.19), and he already manifests the sins of lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, and worldly ambition (1.19.30). Nevertheless, Augustine thanks God for the gifts of his infancy and boyhood (1.20.31).

1.1 Great are you, Lord, and highly to be praised. [Ps. 47:2, 95:4, 144:3] Great is your power, and your wisdom is beyond measure. And human [Ps. 146:5] beings want to praise you—they who are just a portion of your creation, who carry around their mortality, who carry around the evidence of their own sin and the evidence that you resist the proud. [Prov. 3:34; Jas. 4:6; 1 Pet. 5:5] And yet human beings, this portion of your creation, want to praise you. You rouse them to take delight in praising you: for you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it comes to rest in you.

Grant to me, Lord, that I may know and understand whether we must call upon you before we praise you, and know you before we call upon you. [Ps. 104:1] But who calls upon you without knowing you? One who calls upon you without knowing you is apt to call upon something altogether different. Or do we instead call upon you in order that we may know you? Yet how will they call upon one in whom they have not believed? And how will they believe without a preacher? [Rom. 10:13–14] And those who seek the Lord will praise him, [Ps. 21:27 / Mt. 7:7 par. Lk. 11:9] for those who seek him find him, and those who find him will praise him. Let me seek you, Lord, by calling upon you; let me call upon you by believing in you; for you have been preached to us. It is my faith, Lord, that calls upon you: the faith {2} that you have given me, that you inspired in me through the humanity of your Son, through the ministry of your Preacher.1

2.2 And how will I call upon my God, my God and my Lord? For surely I call him into myself when I call upon him.2 And what place is there in me for my God to come into me? Where shall God come into me, God who made heaven and earth? [Gn. 1:1] Is it truly so, Lord my God? Is there something in me that can contain you? Do even heaven and earth, which you made, and in which you made me, contain you? Or does it turn out that whatever is contains you, because without you whatever is would not be? And so because I too am, why am I asking you to come into me, who would not be unless you were in me? I am not hell, after all; and yet even in hell, you are present; for if I descend into hell, you are there. [Ps. 138:8] I would not be, my God, I would not be at all if you were not in me. Or is it rather that I would not be if I were not in you, from whom, through whom, and in whom are all things? [Rom. 11:36; 1 Cor. 8:6] This too, Lord; this too. What place do I call you into, when I am in you? From what place do you come into me? To what place beyond heaven and earth may I retreat so that my God can come into me there, my God who said, “I fill heaven and earth”? [Jer. 23:24]

3.3 Then do heaven and earth contain you, because you fill them? Or do you fill them and something remains, because they do not contain you? And into what do you pour out [Acts 2:17, 2:18; Joel 2:28–29; Is. 44:3] what remains of you after heaven and earth have been filled? Or have you, who contain all things, no need to be contained in any place, because it is by containing them that you fill the things you fill? They are not vessels that are full of you and thereby give you shape and solidity; if they are shattered, you are not poured out. And when you are poured out over us, you do not run down to the lowest level, but instead you lift us up [Ps. 145:8] to the heights; you are not dispersed, but instead you gather us into one. But you, the whole of you, fill all the things you fill, and you fill all things. Or, because all things cannot contain the whole of you, do they contain some part of you, and all things contain the same part of you at the same time? Or does each thing contain a different part, bigger things containing bigger parts and smaller things smaller parts? So then is one {3} part of you bigger than another? Or are you everywhere as a whole, and no thing contains the whole of you?

4.4 What are you, then, my God? What are you, I ask, if not the Lord God? For who is the Lord besides the Lord? Who is God besides our God? [Ps. 17:32] O highest, best, most powerful, most all-powerful, most merciful and most just, most hidden and most present, most beautiful and most steadfast, unwavering and incomprehensible, [Jer. 32:19; Rom. 11:33 / Wisd. 7:27] unchangeable but changing all things, never new, never old, making all things new and bringing old age upon the proud, [Job 9:5] though they know it not: you are always at work, always at rest, gathering, but not from any need, upholding and filling and protecting, creating and nourishing and bringing to maturity, going forth to seek even though you lack nothing. You love and do not burn with passion; you are jealous [Ex. 20:5, 34:14; Joel 2:18; Zech. 1:14, 8:2 / Gn. 6:6–7; 1 Kgs. 15:35 / Ex. 4:14; Deut. 9:20] and free from anxiety; you repent and do not sorrow; you are angry and undisturbed. You change your works and do not change your plan. You take back what you find and have never lost. Though never in need, you are glad of gain; though never greedy, you demand interest. People [Mt. 25:27] offer you more than is required [Lk. 10:35] so that they will make a debtor of you, and yet who has anything that is not already yours? [1 Cor. 4:7] You repay debts, though you owe no one anything; you cancel debts but lose nothing. And what have we said, my God, my life, [Jn. 11:25, 14:6] my holy sweetness? What does anyone say when speaking of you? But woe to those who keep silent [Ps. 31:3] about you, for though they prattle on and on, they are mute in all that matters.3

5.5 Who will grant me rest in you? To whom shall I appeal for you to come into my heart and so intoxicate it that I forget what is bad in myself and embrace you, my one good? What are you for me? Have mercy, that I may speak. What am I to you that you command me to love you, and if I do not, you are angry with me and threaten me with overwhelming misery? Is not my very failure to love you great misery in itself? Woe is me! Tell me, Lord, through your acts of mercy, [Ps. 106:8, 106:15, 106:21, 106:31] what {4} you are to me. Say to my soul, “I am your salvation.” [Ps. 34:3] Speak these words in such a way that I can hear them. Even now the ears of my heart are before you, Lord. Open them, and say to my soul, “I am your salvation”; I will chase after the sound until I have you in my grasp. Do not hide your face from me. [Deut. 31:17, 32:20 / Ex. 33:23] Let me die, lest I die,4 that I might see your face.

5.6 The house of my soul is too small for you to enter: [Is. 49:20] make it spacious. It is in shambles: restore it. There are things in it that [Ez. 36:10, 36:33] you grieve to look upon: I acknowledge and know this. But who will make it clean? It is to you, and to no other, that I cry out, “Cleanse me, O Lord, from the hidden faults that come from within me, and spare your servant from those that come from without.”5 [Ps. 18:13–14] I believe, and because I believe, I speak, [Ps. 115:10; 2 Cor. 4:13] Lord: this you know. In your presence, my God, I have spoken judgment against myself for my sins, and you have forgiven the ungodliness of my heart. [Ps. 31:5 / Jer. 2:29] I do not contend in judgment with you, who are Truth itself; nor would I deceive myself, lest my [Jn. 14:6] iniquity lie to itself. [Ps. 26:12] So I do not contend in judgment with you: for if you, Lord, should make note of iniquities, O Lord, who will endure [Ps. 129:3] it?

6.7 Yet even so, allow me to speak in the presence of your mercy; dust and ashes though I am, [Gn. 18:27; Job 42:6 VL] allow me to speak. For truly it is to your mercy that I am speaking, and not to human beings who mock me. Perhaps you, too, mock me; but you will turn and have mercy on me. [Ps. 70:20; Jer. 12:15] For what do I want to say, Lord, except that I do not know from where I came here, into this—what shall I call it?—this life that dies, this death that lives? I do not know. The comforts of your acts of mercy upheld me, as I have heard from the parents of my flesh, from whom and in whom6 you formed me in time; for I do not remember. The comforts of human milk welcomed me; neither my mother nor my nurses filled their own breasts, but you, through them, provided the nourishment of my infancy in the way that you have appointed, through the riches that you have provided even for the lowest of things. It was your gift as well that I did not want more than you gave, your gift that those who {5} nourished me wanted to give me what you had given them—for so well-ordered was their affection that they wanted to give to me out of the abundance they had received from you. It was good for them that I should have from them what was good for me, a good that came not from them, but through them. Indeed all good things come from you, God, and from my God comes all my salvation. It was only later that I came to know all this, when you cried out to me through these very things that you bestow both within and without. But in those early days all I knew was how to suck, to be content with bodily pleasures, and to cry over bodily pain: nothing more.

6.8 Later I also began to smile, first when I was asleep but then when I was awake. For so I have been told about myself, and I believe it, since we see other infants do so; of course I do not remember these things about myself. Little by little I became aware of where I was, and I wanted to make my desires apparent to those who could satisfy them, but I could not: for my desires were inside me, whereas they were outside, and no sense of theirs could give them entry into my soul. And so I tossed out gestures and noises, signs like my desires—such small and weak signs as I was able to make—and indeed they were not really like my desires. And when my elders did not do as I demanded, either because they did not understand me or because it would not have been good for me, I was furious that my betters were not under my control, that free people were not my servants, and I took my revenge on them by crying. The infants whom I have had the opportunity to observe have taught me that infants are like this. Unaware of it as they are, they are the ones who have informed me that I too was like this, more than my nurses, who knew me.

6.9 And now my infancy is long dead, but I am alive. But you, Lord, who are always alive, in whom nothing dies—because before the beginning of the ages, before anything that can be called “before,” you are, and you are the God and Lord of all you have created, and in you the causes of all feeble things stand firm, the sources of all changeable things abide unchangeably, and the reasons of all reasonless and temporal things live eternally—answer my prayer, O God, and in your pity tell me, pitiable as I am, whether there was an earlier age of mine that died and gave way to infancy. Was it the age that I spent in my mother’s womb? I have been told something about that age as well, and I have seen pregnant women myself. And what about the time before that, my sweetness, my God? Was I somewhere? Was I someone? I have no one who can tell me about such things: neither my father nor my mother could, nor yet the experience of others or my own memory. Or do you {6} laugh at me [Ps. 36:13] for asking these questions and command me instead to praise you and give thanks to you for what I do know?

6.10 I give thanks to you, Lord of heaven and earth, [Mt. 11:25 par. Lk. 10:21] praising you for my earliest days and my infancy, which I do not remember. You have left it to human beings to infer these things about themselves from what they see of others, and to believe many things about themselves on the authority even of lowly women. Even then I was and I lived, and already as my infancy was coming to a close I was looking for signs by which to make my ideas known to others. From where could such an animal come if not from you, Lord? Can anyone be the artisan who fashions himself? Or is there any other spring from which being and living flow into us besides your making us, Lord? For you, being and living are not two different things, because supremely being and supremely living are the Selfsame.7 [Ps. 4:9] You are supreme being and you do not change. In you there is no “today” that runs its full length and comes to an end—and yet today does run its full length and come to an end in you, because all these things, too, are in you; [Rom. 11:36] and there would be no paths by which they could pass away if you did not contain them. And because your years do not fail, [Ps. 101:28] your years are a “today.” How many days—our own days and those of our ancestors—have already passed through your today! From your today they received their boundaries and existed in the way that you prescribed; still other days will succeed them, and they too will receive their boundaries from your today and exist as you prescribe. But you are the Selfsame, [Ps. 101:28] and it is today that you will accomplish, today that you have accomplished, all that is yet to come tomorrow in the ages beyond, and all that belonged to yesterday and to the yet more distant past. What is it to me if someone fails to understand this? May even those who ask “What is this?” [Ex. 13:14; Sir. 39:26] rejoice. May they rejoice even in their perplexity; may they be glad that in failing to find their answers they have found you, rather than finding answers but missing you.

7.11 Hear my prayer, O God. [Ps. 54:2 / Is. 1:4] Alas for human sins! And a human being says these things, and you have mercy on him, because you made him and did not make sin in him. Who will recount for me the sin of my infancy? For in your eyes no one is free from sin, not even the infant who has lived but one day on the earth. [Job 14:4–5] Who will recount them {7} for me? Surely all babies recount them for me now, because in them I see what I do not remember about myself. So what was my sin in those days? Was it that I cried in my eager desire for the breast? If I were to behave this way now (not desiring the breast, of course, but the food suitable for my age), I would be quite justly scorned and rebuked. So what I did then deserved rebuke; but custom and reason alike forbade any rebuke because I would not be able to understand it. We root out such behavior and get rid of it as people grow up, and I have never seen anyone knowingly throw away something good when clearing his ground. Or were those things indeed good—for that time? Crying for what I wanted, even if getting it would be harmful? Growing bitterly angry when free people—my elders, even my parents, people who were far wiser than I—did not serve me, did not obey every whim of mine? Striking out, doing my best to hurt them, because they did not yield to my demands, when their yielding would only have harmed me? It is the bodily weakness of infants that is innocent, not their minds. I have seen and experienced an infant who was jealous: he could not yet speak, but he grew pale and gave a nasty look to another infant who was sharing his milk. Everyone knows about this sort of thing. Mothers and nurses say they have ways of correcting such behavior, though I do not know what they are. But we can hardly call it “innocence” when a baby cannot bear that someone else in direst need should have a share in this life-giving nourishment, even though the fountain of milk pours forth its riches unstintingly and in great abundance. We gently tolerate such behavior, not because it is trivial or inconsequential, but because it will be left behind as the child grows up—as is proved by the fact that we will not put up with such things in someone who is older.

7.12 And so, O Lord my God, who gave an infant life and a body that, as we see, you have furnished with senses, fashioned limb by limb, adorned with due proportion, and infused with all the vital forces needed to keep it whole and sound: you command me to praise you for all these things, to give thanks to you and sing praises to your Name, O Most High, [Ps. 91:2] for you are God, almighty and good, even if you had made only these things, which no one could make but you, O One and Only, from whom is all measure, O Most Beautiful, who give beautiful form to all things and set all things in order by your law.8 I do not {8} remember living through this time—I believe what others have told me, and I infer from what I observe of other infants what I must have done, though these inferences are quite reliable—and so I hesitate to consider it part of the life that I am living in this present day. [Tit. 2:12] It is hidden in a darkness beyond the reach of my memory, every bit as much as my life in my mother’s womb. If indeed I was conceived in iniquity, and in sins my mother nourished me in her womb, [Ps. 50:7] where, I beseech you, my God, where or when, O Lord, was I, your servant, [Ps. 115:16] innocent? But look: I will say no more about that time. What is it to me now? I cannot remember even a trace of it.

8.13 And thus I moved on from infancy and entered boyhood. Or is it rather that boyhood entered me and displaced infancy? Infancy did not depart from me—for where would it go?—and yet it was no more. I was no longer a speechless infant; now I was a boy who could talk. I remember this, and later I came to understand how I learned to talk. My elders did not teach me by putting words in front of me according to some settled method of instruction, as a little later they taught me to read. No, I myself, using the mind that you, my God, had given me, tried with groans and various noises and gestures to convey the thoughts of my heart, so that my desires would be known; but when I could not express everything I wanted or make myself understood by everyone, I grasped with my memory: when my elders called something by its name and responded to that same sound by moving toward the thing, I took note of this and remembered that the sound they made when they wanted to indicate the thing was their name for it. That this is what they intended was evident from the movements of their bodies, which are like a natural, universal language: the expression of the face, the movement of the eyes, the gestures of the limbs, and the tone of the voice all expressing the disposition of the mind concerning the things that it seeks, possesses, spurns, or flees. And in this way, by hearing these words again and again in their proper context in various sentences, I gradually learned which things they were the signs of; and once my mouth had acquired facility with these signs, I was able to use them to express my desires. Thus I came to share with those among whom I lived in the use of signs for expressing desires, and I was drawn more fully into the tempestuous fellowship of human life, though I was still subject to the authority of my parents and the will of my elders.

{9} 9.14 O God, my God, what miseries I endured,9 and for such trivialities! I was told that it was right for me as a young boy to submit to those who were advising me about how to make my way in the world and excel in the rhetorical skills by which I could gain a reputation and earn deceitful riches. So I was sent to school to learn letters,10 though, wretch that I was, I had no idea of what was genuinely useful in this study. And yet if I slacked off in my work, I was beaten—which drew praise from my elders. And indeed many who came before us in this life had laid down the paths of suffering on which we were compelled to go, as labor and sorrow were multiplied upon the sons of Adam.11 [Gn. 3:16; Sir. 40:1]

We did encounter people who prayed to you, Lord, and we learned from them, thinking of you (so far as we could) as someone great who, though not manifest to our senses, could hear us and come to our help. For as a boy I began to pray to you, my help and my refuge. [Ps. 93:22] I untied my tongue to call upon you; small as I was, it was with no small eagerness that I prayed to you that I would not be beaten at school. And when you did not heed me and thereby give me over to my foolishness, my beatings were most amusing to my elders—even to my parents, who did not want any evil to befall me. But the beatings were a great and serious evil to me in those days.

9.15 O Lord, is there anyone so courageous, so powerfully and eagerly devoted to you, that he disdains the rack and hooks and other such tortures from which people throughout the world beg you, with great terror, to deliver them? Is there such a one, I ask, who is so high-minded because of his fervent devotion to you (for stupidity can produce the same attitude) that he regards these torments as trivial, even though he loves those who fear them so bitterly, as our parents made fun of the sufferings that our teachers inflicted on us boys? For we were no less afraid of them, no less earnest in our prayers to be delivered from them. And yet we sinned by not doing as much writing or reading or studying as was demanded of us. For it was not that we lacked {10} the capacity12 or the talent, Lord—by your will you had given us those things, enough for our age—but that we enjoyed playing, and we were punished for it by people who, of course, behaved in exactly the same way themselves. But when adults waste their time, they call it “business,” whereas when children do such things, they are punished. And no one feels sorry for the children or the adults. In fact, a fine judge of the matter would no doubt approve of my being beaten because my ball-playing as a boy interfered with my learning letters, which I would use as an adult to play a much more depraved game. And did the teacher who beat me act any differently? If he had been bested by a fellow teacher in some trivial dispute, he would have been racked with greater bitterness and envy than I felt when a playmate of mine outscored me in a ball game.

10.16 And yet I sinned, Lord God, ruler and creator of all natural things, though of sins only the ruler: O Lord my God, I sinned by disobeying the commands of my parents and teachers. Whatever they might have had in mind for me, I would be able afterward to make good use of the letters that they wanted me to learn. I was not disobedient because I was choosing better things; I simply loved playing. I loved the glory of victory in our games. I loved having my ears tickled by false tales [2 Tim. 4:3–4] that made them itch all the more insistently, and that same curiosity drew my eager eyes to the spectacular shows that are games for adults. Those who put on these spectacles enjoy such esteem and status that nearly all parents would be happy for their children to attain it; and yet they gladly allow their children to be beaten if such spectacles get in the way of the studies that they hope will someday enable their children to put on exactly those sorts of shows. Look mercifully on these things, O Lord, and deliver us [Ps. 24:16–18, 78:9] who call upon you now; deliver, too, those who do not yet call upon you, so that they may call upon you and you may deliver them.

11.17 For even as a boy I had heard about the eternal life promised to us through the humility of the Lord our God [Phil. 2:8] in stooping to encounter our pride, and I was signed with the sign of his cross and salted with his salt13 even from the time I came forth from the womb of my mother, who trusted firmly in you. You saw, Lord, when I was still a {11} boy, how one day I suddenly fell ill with a stomach ailment and burned with fever and was on the verge of death. You saw, my God—for even then you watched over me—with what agitation of mind, with what faith, I begged for the baptism of your Christ, my God and my Lord, [Jn. 20:28] throwing myself on the mercy of my mother and of the mother of us all, [Gal. 4:26] your Church. And the mother of my flesh was greatly troubled, for in her heart, made chaste by her faith in you, she was more lovingly bringing my everlasting salvation to birth. She would have seen to it that I was hurriedly initiated and washed clean in your health-giving sacraments, confessing you, Lord Jesus, for the forgiveness of sins, had I not recovered right away. And so my cleansing [Lev. 16:30] was deferred, on the grounds that if I lived, I would inevitably become still more defiled, because the guilt incurred in the defilement of sins would be greater and more dangerous after that washing [Tit. 3:5] than before. I was already a believer, as were my mother and the whole household, except for my father alone. Yet though he did not yet believe in Christ, he did not keep me from believing; my mother’s devotion had a grip on me, and he did not break it. For she did everything in her power to see to it that you, my God, would be my father more truly than he was, and you so helped her in this that she had the victory over her husband, whom she served—though she was the better of the two—because in doing so she was also serving you, who gave her this command.

11.18 I ask you, God: I would like to know—if only you were willing for me to know— for what purpose my baptism was delayed. Was it for my good that the reins of sin were in a manner loosened for me? Or were they indeed loosened? How is it that even now we hear voices from all sides, saying of all kinds of people, “Leave them alone; let them do as they please. They have not yet been baptized.” Yet when it comes to the health of the body, we do not say, “Let them be wounded more severely. They have not yet been healed.” How much better it would have been if I had been healed right away and then looked after by my own care and that of my family, so that you, having restored the health of my soul, [Ps. 34:3] would also preserve it in your safekeeping. Truly it would have been better. But waves of temptation, many and great, could be seen approaching on the far side of my boyhood. My mother knew them, and she preferred to let them break on the earth from which I would afterward be formed, rather than on the new image itself.

12.19 Yet even in that very boyhood, about which there was so much less anxiety than there was about my adolescence, I did not like to study and hated being forced to; but I was forced to study, and it was a good thing for me that I was. I was not acting well, for I studied only {12} because I was compelled, and no one acts well unwillingly, even if what he does is good. Nor did those who forced me act well; it was you, my God, who acted well toward me. They did not see the use to which I would put the things they were compelling me to learn, beyond satisfying the insatiable cravings of a wealth that was really poverty and a glory that was really disgrace. But you, by whom our very hairs are numbered, [Mt. 10:30] used for my benefit the error of those who were insisting that I learn; and my own error, my unwillingness to learn, you used for my punishment. So small a boy, so great a sinner: I did indeed deserve the beatings I received. Thus you acted well toward me through those who were not acting well, and you justly punished me through my own sin. For you have commanded—and so it comes to pass—that every disordered mind is its own punishment.

13.20 But why was it that I hated learning the Greek I had to study as a boy? To this day I do not quite understand it. I loved Latin—not the elementary grammar but the literature.14 For I found those earliest lessons, in which I learned to read and write and do arithmetic, as much of a chore and a punishment as all my instruction in Greek. But that, too, came from sin, from the vanity of the life by which I was flesh and a breath going forth and not returning. [Ps. 77:39] For those first lessons were of course better than the later ones, because they were more dependable. I was being given the capacity, which I acquired and still have, to read any writing that I come across and to write things myself, if I choose. How much better than those later lessons in which I was forced to memorize the wanderings of Aeneas, whoever that was, forgetting my own wanderings, and to weep over dead Dido, who killed herself for love, when all the while I had no tear to shed for myself, wretch that I was, dying in the midst of these things, far away from you, O God my life.

13.21 For what is more wretched than a wretch who feels no sorrow for himself but mourns the death of Dido, caused by her love for Aeneas, yet does not mourn his own death, caused by a lack of love for you, O God, light of my heart, bread [Jn. 1:9, 3:19–21; 1 Jn. 1:5 / Jn. 6:35] of the inward mouth of my soul, power that marries my mind to the storehouse of my thought? I did not love you, and I was unfaithful to you, and from all around [Ps. 72:27–8] I heard {13} shouts of encouragement [Ps. 39:16] for my unfaithfulness. For friendship with this world is unfaithfulness to you, [Jas. 4:4] and those shouts of encouragement make one ashamed not to be that kind of person. For these things I shed no tear, but I wept for Dido, “slain by the sword, chasing after an end to her woe,”15 while I had left you behind to chase after the lowest of your creatures, dust returning to dust. [Gn. 3:19] And if I were forbidden to read them, I would be sad because I was not reading something that would make me sad. It is by such madness as this that the study of literature is regarded as more prestigious and more fruitful than the lessons in which I learned to read and write.

13.22 But now let my God cry out in my soul, and let your Truth say to me, “It is not so; it is not so. That earlier teaching is better by far.” I would certainly rather forget the wanderings of Aeneas and all that sort of thing than how to read and write. To be sure, curtains hang before the doorways of the schools of literature—not, however, to give honor to what they conceal, but to keep its errors out of sight. Let those buyers and sellers of literary study not cry out against me—I am no longer afraid of them—as I confess to you, my God, what my soul wishes to confess; let them not cry out against me as I come to rest in denouncing my evil ways [Ps. 118:101; Jer. 18:11] so that I may love your good ways. Suppose I were to ask these teachers whether it is true, as the poet says, that Aeneas once went to Carthage. The more ignorant among them would not know how to reply, but the well-instructed would say no, it is not true. But if I were to ask how the name “Aeneas” is spelled, everyone who has learned this would give the correct answer according to the convention and custom that human beings have established for the use of these signs. And if I were to ask which would be a greater hindrance in life, to forget how to read and write or to forget these poetic fancies, anyone not utterly out of his senses would know precisely how to answer. So I was sinning as a boy when I loved those worthless studies more than the quite useful ones—or rather hated the useful ones and loved the worthless. But “One plus one is two, two plus two is four” was an annoying singsong to me in those days, whereas the showcasing of vanity—a wooden ship full of soldiers and Troy ablaze and “the very shade of dead Croesus”16—was sweet to me above all else.

14.23 Why, then, did I hate Greek literature, which is also full of such stories? For Homer too was adept at weaving such fictions, and there is great sweetness in his vanity, but to me as a boy he was bitter. I {14} believe Virgil seems this way to Greek children when they are forced to learn him as I was forced to learn Homer. It must be the difficulty, the very great difficulty, of learning a foreign language that sprinkled gall over all the sweetness of marvelous tales told in Greek. I knew none of the words, and I was sternly threatened with savage terrors and punishment to get me to learn them. Of course, there had been a time as an infant when I knew no Latin words either, and yet I learned, simply by paying attention, without any fear or struggle, amidst the endearments of my nurses and the jests and laughter and banter of those around me. I needed no threat of punishment to impel me to learn them, because my own heart impelled me to bring forth its thoughts, and there was no way to do so without learning some words, from people who were not teaching but simply talking, and in their hearing I brought forth whatever I was thinking. This shows clearly enough that unrestrained curiosity is a greater force for learning these things than is fearful constraint. But such constraint keeps curiosity in bounds according to your laws, O God—your laws, which from the schoolteacher’s cane to the martyrs’ trials can mix up the bitter medicine that calls us back to you from the destructive delight that is the path along which we run away from you.

15.24 Hear my cry, O Lord, [Ps. 54:2 / Ps. 83:3] lest my soul grow faint under your discipline, lest I grow faint in confessing to you your acts of mercy, by which you delivered me from all my very evil ways, [2 Kgs. 17:13; 2 Chron. 7:14; Jer. 36:3, 36:7] so that you may become sweeter to me than all the allurements that I once followed, and I may love you with all my strength and take hold of your hand with the deepest affection, and you will deliver me from all temptation [Ps. 17:30; Mt. 6:13 / Ps. 15:10, 37:7, 67:17; 1 Cor. 1:8 / Ps. 5:3, 43:5 ] even to the end. For truly, O Lord, my King and my God, I want everything useful I learned as a boy to be of service to you; let my speaking and writing and reading and counting be of service to you. For when I was learning empty trifles, you gave me your discipline; you have forgiven me the sins of my delights in such vanity. I did, after all, learn many useful words in the course of my studies; but those words could have been taught apart from all that foolishness, and that is the safe path in which children ought to walk.17

16.25 But woe to you, torrent of human custom! Who will withstand you? [Ps. 75:8] How long will it be until you are at last dried up? For how long will you toss the children of Eve [Gn. 3:20] into that great and fearsome sea which even those who have come on board the wooden vessel are scarcely {15} able to cross in safety?18 Did I not read in you that Jupiter was both the Thunderer and an adulterer? Of course he could not be both: but the story is told in this way so that the false thunderbolt will accredit his genuine adultery as worthy of imitation. Is anyone among these gowned masters content to listen to one of their own, a combatant in the same arena, who cries out and says, “Homer invented these tales, ascribing human qualities to the gods; but how much better to ascribe divine qualities to us”?19 Yes, Homer invented these tales: but it would be truer to say that he ascribed divine qualities to human depravity, so that shameful acts would no longer be accounted shameful, and those who indulge in them would think that they are emulating the very gods of heaven instead of corrupt human beings.

16.26 And yet, you hellish torrent, the children of men are cast into you, fees in hand, so that they can learn these things. There is great interest when this is offered openly in the marketplace, in view of the law that appoints a public salary over and above the private fees. And you break upon the rocks and make your noise: “This is the place to learn words! This is the place to acquire the eloquence that is so essential for persuasion and argument!” So then do you mean that we would not know the words “golden rain,” “lap,” “trick,” and “heavenly temples,” and the other words that appear in that passage, if Terence had not used them to tell of a wicked young man who took Jupiter as a model for his own fornication? He looks at a wall painting that shows how Jupiter tricked a woman by sending a shower of golden rain into Danae’s lap. Look how he incites his own lust under this heavenly tutelage: “Oh, what a god,” he says, “who shakes the temples of heaven with his mighty thunder! Mortal that I am, I cannot call down thunder; but his other act I have indeed accomplished, and with pleasure!”20 Such filth does not make these words at all easier to learn, but such words embolden those who would perpetrate this filth. I do not blame the words, which are chosen and precious vessels. I blame the wine of error that was poured into them by drunken teachers who would beat us if we did not drink what they set before us and would not permit any appeal to a sober judge. And yet, my God, in whose sight I can now remember this without anxiety, I took pleasure in learning these things. Wretch that I was, I enjoyed them, and thus I acquired a reputation as a promising young man.

{16} 17.27 Permit me, my God, to say something of my intelligence, which was your gift, and of the acts of madness by which it was squandered. I was given an assignment that greatly unsettled me: for my reward would be either praise or disgrace and, I feared, a beating. I was to declaim a speech that Juno made when she was angry and grieved because she could not repel the Trojan king from Italy.21 Juno had never made such a speech, I was told; but we were forced to follow the wandering footprints of poetic fictions and express in prose what the poet had expressed in verse. And the speaker who would gain the most applause would be the one who, without compromising the dignity of the person being portrayed, most effectively conveyed the emotions of anger and grief and found suitable words to express his meaning. And what good did it do me, O true life, my God, that I received greater acclaim for my speech than my many fellow students of my own age? Are not all those things smoke and wind? Was there no other subject in which I could have put my intelligence and my tongue to work? Yes: your praises, O Lord; your praises, given in your Scriptures, could have propped up the branch of my heart so that it would not be carried off by these empty trifles, a prey to the birds of the air. For there is more than one way to sacrifice to fallen angels.

18.28 But it was hardly surprising that I was carried away from you, my God, and into vanities, considering the people who were held up as examples for me to emulate. If, in recounting some acts of theirs that were not at all bad, they had fallen into some error of pronunciation or grammar,22 they would have been mortified and held in contempt; but if they told the story of their lusts in well-chosen words and with style and elegance, they would be proud of themselves and win praise from others. You see all this, Lord, and you keep silent; you are long-suffering and rich in mercy and truth. [Ps. 85:15, 102:8] Will you always keep silent? Even now you deliver from this monstrous pit [Ps. 85:13] the soul that seeks you and thirsts [Ps. 41:3–4, 62:2] for your delights, whose heart says, “I have sought your face. Your face, O Lord, will I seek”: [Ps. 26:8] for I was far from your face in the darkness of my affection. It is not by walking, not by spatial distance, that we journey away from you and return to you. That younger son of yours23 did not look for horses or chariots or ships, or fly away on visible wings or make his journey by any movement of his limbs, to go live in that far country where he would waste in riotous living what {17} you had given him on his departure. You were a loving father in giving to him, and still more loving when he returned empty-handed. So it is by the lustfulness, the darkness, of our affections that we are far away from your face.

18.29 Look down, Lord God; look down, as you always do, with forbearance. See how carefully the children of men observe the conventions about letters and syllables that they have received from previous speakers but give no heed to the eternal covenant of everlasting salvation that they have received from you—so much so that those who uphold and teach the standard pronunciation would give greater offense by saying “’uman being,” without the aspirate, in violation of the orthodoxies of literate culture, than they would by hating a fellow human being, in violation of your commandments. As if there were any greater danger from a human enemy than from the very hatred that one feels toward him! As if one did more serious harm to someone else by persecuting him than to one’s own heart by stoking one’s hostility! And certainly no knowledge of literature lies as deep within us as what is written on our conscience, [Rom. 2:15] that we are doing to another what we would not want done to ourselves. [Tob. 4:16; Mt. 7:12; Lk. 6:31 / Is. 33:5] How hidden you are, dwelling on high in silence, O God, who alone are great! In accordance with your never-failing law, you scatter the punishment of blindness over unlawful cravings. Someone who is seeking a reputation for eloquence will take the greatest care not to make a grammatical error24 when excoriating his enemy with the most savage hatred before a human judge and with a crowd standing around; but against the prospect that his fury will cut off a human being from human society he will take no precaution at all.

19.30 I lingered on the threshold of this kind of life throughout my boyhood, wretch that I was. This was my training ground, one where I was more fearful of mispronouncing a word than I was concerned, if I made such an error, not to envy those who did not. I say these things and confess to you, my God, the things for which I was praised by those whose good opinion meant to me that I was living a worthy life. For I was blind to the abyss of wickedness into which I had been cast, [Ps. 30:23] far from your eyes. What indeed could have been more disgusting in your eyes than I was? Even my fellows were put off by the countless lies I told to deceive the servant who accompanied me to {18} school, my teachers, and my parents, and all because I loved to play and was absurdly eager to watch worthless shows and imitate them. I stole things from my parents’ cellar and from the table, driven by gluttony or in order to have things to give to the other boys as payment for playing with me; for they would not play unless I gave them something, even though they enjoyed our games as much as I did. In our play I cheated in order to win, overcome by my pointless craving for superiority. But I could not bear it if others did to me as I was doing to them: if I caught someone else cheating, I denounced him ferociously. And if someone else caught me and denounced me, I preferred to lash out rather than to give way. Is this the innocence of boyhood? It is not, O Lord; it is not. I beseech you, my God. As the years go by, these sins concerning servants and teachers, marbles, balls, and pet sparrows, yield to sins concerning magistrates and kings, gold, estates, and slaves; and the master’s cane likewise yields to more severe punishment. So, our King, when you said that “of such is the kingdom of heaven,” [Mt. 19:14] it was only the small stature of children that you commended as a sign of humility.

20.31 Yet even if it had been your will, O Lord, that I should not live past boyhood, I would have owed thanks to you, our God, most excellent and supremely good Creator and Governor of the universe. For even then I had being, I lived, and I had sensation; I looked after my own health and wholeness, a trace of that deeply hidden Oneness from which I had my being; by an inner sense I guarded the integrity of my outer senses; and in my small thoughts about small things I delighted in truth. I hated to be deceived, I had an excellent memory, I was well furnished with speech, I was touched by friendship. I avoided pain, humiliation, and ignorance. In such a living creature how astonishing, how worthy of praise, were all these things! But they were all gifts from my God. I did not give them to myself; they are good, and all of them together make me who I am. Therefore, the one who made me is good, and he is himself my good, and in him I rejoice [Ps. 2:11] for all the good things that made me who I was even as a boy. For this was my sin: I sought pleasures, exaltations, and truths not in him, but in his creatures—in myself and in the rest of them—and so I rushed into pains, embarrassments, and errors. I give thanks to you, my sweetness, my honor, and my assurance; my God, I thank you for your gifts. [2 Cor. 9:15] Preserve them for me, I pray. For so you will preserve me, and your gifts to me will be enlarged and brought to completion; and I myself will be with you, for my very being is also your gift.

1. Who is “your Preacher”? Some say Ambrose, but how would Augustine expect his readers to recognize an allusion to someone he has not even mentioned yet? (Chadwick cites Letter 147.23.52, but Augustine does not in fact call Ambrose “Preacher” there.) The most natural reading in context is that “the ministry of your Preacher” is parallel to “the humanity of your Son.” Augustine is saying that the Incarnation is God’s “fundamental act of revelation” (O’Donnell I:17), and the Preacher is the Incarnate Word.

2. “Call upon” is invocare; “call . . . into” is vocare in.

3. Literally: “for the talkative are mute” (quoniam loquaces muti sunt). My translation follows the interpretation given by O’Donnell (and borrows some of his language). Augustine frequently describes the Manichees (though not only them) as talkative, a fault he associates with curiosity and vanity. The point here is that those who say nothing about God—they may use the word “God,” but they never succeed in saying anything true about the real God—spout a lot of words about other things but are hopelessly tongue-tied about the one crucial subject (“human beings want to praise you”). An alternative interpretation, frequently adopted, is that “those who say most say nothing,” that is, nothing genuinely worthy of God, who is beyond our capacity to describe. But in that case it is hard to see how the second part of the sentence provides a reason for the first part, as the conjunction “for” (quoniam) requires. How is the impossibility of speaking worthily about God a reason to condemn those who keep silent? Shouldn’t it be just the opposite?

4. Sermon 213.3.3: “Now someone who has not yet died or been resurrected is still living badly; and if he is living badly, he is not alive. Let him die, lest he die. What does this mean, ‘Let him die, lest he die’? Let him be changed, lest he be damned. . . . ‘For you are dead, and your life is hidden with Christ in God’ (Col. 3:3).”

5. Augustine interprets “the hidden faults that come from within” as sins that arise in the natural course of our own thinking (spontanea cogitatione) and “those that come from without” as those we commit at the suggestion or persuasion of someone else (persuasione alterius). See De lib. arb. 3.10.29, Enarr. in Ps. en. 1.14 and en. 2.13.

6. The first “whom” is masculine, referring to Augustine’s father; the second is feminine, referring to his mother.

7. Augustine takes “the Selfsame” to be a name for God as immutable Being itself, in line with the divine self-revelation of Exodus 3:14, “I am who I am.” The word also occurs in the Confessions at 7.9.14 in emphatic affirmation of the divinity of Christ (“since he is by nature the very same as God,” quia naturaliter idipsum est) as well as at 9.4.11, 9.10.24, and 12.7.7.

8. The triad measure/form/order is frequent in the Confessions. Augustine understands measure as a thing’s mode of being, form as its distinctive character as a certain kind of thing, and order as the dynamic interrelationship of things. He associates measure with God the Father, form with God the Son, and order with God the Holy Spirit. This triad gives shape to the last three books of the Confessions, with Book 11 devoted to measure, emphasizing the initial creation of formed matter, Book 12 devoted to form, emphasizing the forming of unformed matter into distinct kinds of things, and Book 13 devoted to order, emphasizing the work of the Holy Spirit in orienting believers to God.

9. Terence, Adelphoe 867.

10. Litteras is hard to translate. It is sometimes “letters”—either in the sense of the symbols that are combined to produce written words or in the sense that survives in English largely in the name “College of Arts and Letters”—sometimes “literature” or even “literary culture.” Here Augustine intends the full range of meaning but particularly emphasizes reading, writing, and the study of literature.

11. “You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,” said Aslan. “And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor in earth. Be content” (C. S. Lewis, Prince Caspian [New York: Macmillan, 1970], 211–212). In Lewis, the expression “Son of Adam” is variously an endearment, a rebuke, and a badge of honor; but in Augustine, the emphasis is always on the shame, not the honor. See also 8.9.21, 8.10.22, 13.21.30.

12. Memoria here (as often in Augustine) means not merely memory but the total capacity of the mind for learning and retention. “Talent” translates ingenium, which can mean someone’s “cast of mind”—the quality or distinctive character of someone’s thinking—or, as here, brilliance, intellectual talent.

13. These practices marked Augustine as a catechumen, a status in the Church short of full membership, which came with baptism.

14. Literally, “I loved Latin litteras, not [the litteras] that the first masters [teach] but [the litteras] that those who are called grammatici teach.” By “the first masters” he means those who taught reading, writing, and grammar (as well as arithmetic); the grammatici taught literature, especially poetry. See fn. 10 for the range of meaning of litteras. In the present context, we lack a single expression in English that will cover the whole ground from basic reading to literary criticism, so I have left the word out altogether.

15. Virgil, Aeneid 6.457.

16. Virgil, Aeneid 2.772.

17. “empty trifles,” “vanity,” and “foolishness” all translate forms of vanus; the variety of translations is intended to convey the many nuances of that word.

18. “the wooden vessel”: literally, “the wood” (lignum). The metaphor, of course, requires a ship; but the language makes it clear that the wooden vessel that allows safe passage is the Cross of Christ.

19. The quotation is from Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.26.65.

20. Augustine takes the story, and much of his language in recounting it, from Terence, Eun. 583–591.

21. Virgil, Aeneid 1.38.

22. Augustine gives an example of mispronunciation (barbarismus) in the second sentence of 18.29 and an example of a grammatical mistake (solecismus) in the last sentence of that paragraph.

23. “That younger son of yours”—that is, the prodigal son in the parable found in Luke 15.

24. Augustine actually gives a specific example of a grammatical error, but because it involves using the ablative case with a preposition that requires the accusative (inter hominibus instead of inter homines), it obviously would not survive translation into English.