{163} Book Ten

Augustine has been testifying to what he once was; now he testifies to what he is at the time of writing his Confessions. He loves God, but how does he know God, and where does he find God? Following the inward-and-upward path he has traveled before, he looks for God first in creatures outside himself, then in the powers of his own soul, from least to greatest, until he comes to memory. There he finds an endlessly mystifying power, storing and retrieving images of sensible things, intelligible realities, the affections of the soul, memory itself—even, paradoxically, forgetfulness. He finds God through the universal human desire for the happy life: the happy life is joy in truth, and God is Truth. Augustine examines his present life under the headings of the lust of the flesh (taking each of the five senses in turn), the lust of the eyes, and worldly ambition, concluding with an appeal for reconciliation with God through the Mediator.

Augustine ponders the benefit of confessing what he has been and what he is now (10.1.1–10.5.7). He looks for God in creatures (10.6.8–10), in the powers of his own soul (10.7.11), and finally in memory (10.8.12–10.28.39). Examining his present life, Augustine first considers the lust of the flesh (10.30.41–10.34.53), considering the temptations of touch (10.30.41–42), taste (10.31.43–47), smell (10.32.48), hearing (10.33.49–50), and sight (10.34.51–53). He then examines the lust of the eyes (10.35.54–57) and, finally, his greatest continuing struggle, worldly ambition or pride (10.36.58–10.39.64). After giving an overview of his discussion of memory and his self-examination (10.40.65–10.41.66), Augustine concludes by invoking Christ as Mediator, priest, intercessor, and atoning sacrifice (10.42.67–10.43.70).

1.1 O you who know me: let me know you; let me know even as I am known. [1 Cor. 8:2–3, 13:12; Gal. 4:9] Strength of my soul, come into her and mold her to yourself, so that you might hold her and take her as your own, without spot or blemish. [Eph. 5:27] This is my hope. It is the reason I am speaking, and in that hope I rejoice, [Rom. 12:12] when my rejoicing is sound. But as for the other things of this life, the more we weep over them, the less they deserve our tears; and the less we weep when we are in the midst of them, the more we ought to weep. For behold, you have loved the truth, [Ps. 50:8] because the one who does the truth comes to the light. [Eph. 4:15; 1 Jn. 1:6 / Jn. 3:21] I am resolved to do the truth in my heart before you in my confession, and to do the truth in my writing before many witnesses.

2.2 And indeed, Lord, to whose eyes the depths of the human conscience are laid bare, [Sir. 42:18; Heb. 4:13] even if I were not willing to confess to you, what {164} in me would be hidden from you? I would only hide you from myself, not myself from you. But now that my groaning testifies that I am displeased with myself, you shed your light upon me and please me; you are loved and longed for. And so I blush for myself; I throw myself away and choose you; it is from you alone that I please either you or myself.

So to you, Lord, I am fully known, [2 Cor. 5:11] known exactly as I am. I have explained what benefit I have from my confession to you, a confession I make not in bodily words and sounds, but through the words of my soul and the clamor of my thinking that have reached your ear. For when I am wicked, to confess to you means being displeased with myself; when I am righteous, to confess to you means not ascribing my righteousness to myself. For you, Lord, bless the just; [Ps. 5:13] but first you justify the unrighteous. [Rom. 4:5] And so, my God, the confession that I make in your sight [Ps. 95:6] is made to you both silently and not silently: my speech is silenced, but my affections cry out. For if I tell other people anything of value, it is only what you have already heard from me; and if you hear any such thing from me, it is only what you have already told me.

3.3 So what does it matter to me that human beings should hear my confessions—as though they were the ones to heal all my diseases? [Ps. 102:3; Mt. 4:23] They are a race that is energetic in prying into other people’s lives but lethargic about correcting their own. Why should they seek to hear from me what I am when they refuse to hear from you what they are? And from what source will they know, when they hear from me about myself, whether I am telling the truth, since no one among human beings knows what goes on inside a human being except the human spirit that is within? [1 Cor. 2:11] But if instead they hear from you about themselves, they will not be able to say, “The Lord is lying.” For to hear from you about oneself is simply to know oneself. And if one knows oneself and says, “This is false,” one must be lying. But since charity believes all things—at any [1 Cor. 13:7] rate among those whom it binds together into one—I too, [Eph. 4:2–4] Lord, confess to you in such a way that human beings may hear, even though I have no way of showing them that I am telling the truth; yet those whose ears are opened to me by charity believe me.

3.4 Even so, Physician of my inmost self, I ask you to make clear to me what benefit I am to gain from doing this. For when people read and hear the confessions of my evil deeds in the past—deeds that you have forgiven and covered over [Ps. 31:1] so that you might make me happy in you, transforming my soul through faith and your Sacrament—their hearts are roused, so that instead of falling asleep in their despair and saying, “I cannot,” they remain wakeful, [Song 5:2; Mt. 25:13] in love with your mercy and {165} the sweetness of your grace, which gives power to all those who, though weak, [2 Cor. 12:9–10] are brought by that very grace to an awareness of their own weakness. And those who are good are pleased to hear about the past sins of those who are now free from those sins: pleased, not because they are sins, but because the sins that once were are no longer.

But, my Lord, to whom my conscience makes its confession day by day, more confident in the hope of your mercy than in its own innocence, I ask you: what benefit do I gain if, in your presence, I also confess within these pages to human beings, not who I once was, but who I am now? I have already seen and declared the benefit of confessing who I once was. But many people want to know who I am now—now, in this very moment of writing my confessions—both people who know me and people who do not know me. They have heard me, or heard something about me, but have not had their ears up against my heart, where I am whoever I am. So they want to hear as I confess what I am within myself, beyond the reach of their eye or ear or mind. Yet what they want, surely, is not something they will know, but only something they will believe. For the charity that makes them good tells them that I am not lying as I make my confession about myself, and that very charity in them believes me. [1 Cor. 13:7]

4.5 But what benefit do they want from this? Do they desire to rejoice with me when they hear how close I have come to you through your gift, and to pray for me when they hear how much I am held back from you by my own heaviness? To people like this I will disclose myself. It is indeed no meager benefit, O Lord my God, when many people give thanks to you on our behalf, and many prayers [2 Cor. 1:11] are brought before you for our sake. Let brotherly minds love in me what you teach should be loved and lament in me what you teach should be lamented. But let it be a brotherly mind that does this, not one that is estranged, not one of the foreign children whose mouth has spoken vanity and whose right hand is a right hand of iniquity, [Ps. 143:7–8, 143:11] but a brotherly mind, one that rejoices when it sees good in me and is grieved when it sees something amiss in me. For whether it sees good in me or sees something amiss in me, it loves me. To people like this I will disclose myself, so that they might find relief in what is good in me and grief in what is bad. The good things in me are your works and your gifts; the bad things are my own transgressions and your judgments. Let them find relief in the good things and grief in the bad, and let brotherly hearts, your censers, [Rev. 8:3–4] raise up a hymn and a lamentation before you. But of you, Lord, who take delight in the fragrance of your holy temple, [1 Cor. 3:17] I ask that you have mercy upon me according to your great mercy, [Ps. 50:3] for your own Name’s {166} sake, [Mt. 10:22, 24:9; Jn. 15:21 / Phil. 1:6] and that you by no means abandon the work you have begun in me, but complete what remains unfinished.

4.6 This, then, is the benefit in confessing not what I once was but what I am now: that I make my confession not only before you, with a hidden rejoicing mixed with trembling and a hidden sorrow mixed with hope, [Ps. 2:11; Phil. 2:12] but also in the ears of those among the children of men who are believers, companions in my joy and sharers in my mortality, my fellow citizens and fellow pilgrims, those who have gone before and those who will follow and those who journey with me in this life. They are your servants, my brothers and sisters; you have chosen them to be your sons and daughters and my masters. You have commanded me to serve them if what I want is to live with you and in dependence on you. And this word of yours would be of little account if it were only a spoken command, but it has also gone before me and done as you have commanded. [Jn. 13:15] I carry out this charge in deeds and in words; I carry it out under your wings, and the danger would be too great if my soul were not sheltered [Ps. 61:2 / Ps. 16:8, 35:8] beneath your wings and my weakness were not known to you. I am no more than a little child, but my Father lives always, and my Guardian is all-sufficient. For the very one [Ps. 101:28 qtd. Heb. 1:12] who has begotten me also guards me, and you are yourself every good thing that is mine, O Almighty; you are with me even before I am with you. So to people like these, whom you have commanded me to serve, I will disclose not who I once was, but who I am now, and who I continue to be. But neither do I judge myself. [1 Cor. 4:3] May I be heard, therefore, in just this way.

5.7 For it is you, Lord, who judge me. True, no one knows what is in human beings except the human spirit that is within; [1 Cor. 2:11] yet there is something in each of us that not even the human spirit within us knows. But you, Lord, know everything that is in us, because you made us. And as for me, though in your sight I despise myself and account myself dust and ashes, [Gn. 18:27; Job 42:6 VL; Sir. 10:9] there is nonetheless something I know about you that I do not know about myself. Truly we now see in a mirror, dimly, and not yet face to face; [1 Cor. 13:12] and so as long as I am wandering away from you, [2 Cor. 5:6] I am more present to myself than to you. Yet I know that you are utterly incapable of falling into dishonor, but I do not know which temptations I will succeed in resisting and which I will not. There is hope, because you are faithful and will not allow us to be tempted beyond what we can bear; but along with temptation you make a way of escape, so that we can endure. [1 Cor. 10:13] Therefore, I will confess what I know about myself, and I will confess what I do not know about myself; for whatever I know about myself, I know it because you shine your light {167} upon me, and whatever I do not know about myself, I will continue not to know it until my darkness becomes as the noonday [Is. 58:10] in the light of your countenance. [Ps. 89:8]

6.8 I know within myself, unwaveringly and with full conviction, that I love you. You pierced my heart with your word, and I fell in love with you. Heaven and earth and all that is in them—from every direction they tell me I should love you; they do not cease to say this to all, so that they are without excuse. [Rom. 1:20] But you, from on high, will be merciful to whomever you will, [Rom. 9:15 qtg. Ex. 33:19 / Ps. 68:35] and will show compassion to whomever you will; if it were not so, heaven and earth would be singing your praises to deaf ears.

But what do I love when I love you? Not physical beauty or transient grace, not the resplendence of light, so pleasing to our eyes; not the sweet melodies of all kinds of music; not the lovely fragrance of flowers and perfumes and spices; not manna and honey; not bodies that we delight to embrace: these are not what I love when I love my God. And yet I do love a certain light and sound and fragrance and nourishment and embrace when I love my God: a light, sound, fragrance, nourishment, and embrace in my innermost self, where there is a radiance upon my soul that no place can contain, a sound that time does not destroy, a fragrance that no wind disperses, a taste that does not grow stale no matter how eagerly I feed, an embrace of which I could never tire, which I could never seek to escape. This is what I love when I love my God.

6.9 And what is this? I asked the earth, and it said, “It is not I.” And everything that is in the earth made the same confession. I asked the sea and the depths [Job 28:14 VL / Gn. 1:20] and the creeping things with living souls, and they replied, “We are not your God; seek him above us.” I asked the blowing winds, and all the air with its inhabitants said, “Anaximenes1 was wrong; I am not God.” I asked the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars: “neither are we the God whom you are seeking,” they said. And I said to all these things that surround the gateways of my flesh, “Tell me about my God—the God who you are not—tell me something about him.” And they cried out with a loud voice, “He is the one who made us.” [Ps. 99:3] My scrutiny of them posed the question; their beauty answered it.

Then I turned my attention toward myself. “And you: who are you?” I asked myself; and I replied, “A human being.” And indeed I am intimately aware that there is in me a body and a soul, one of them {168} outward and the other inward. From which of them should I have set forth to seek my God? I had already sought him through the body all the way from earth to heaven, as far as I could send my messengers, the rays from my eyes. But what is inward is better. It was, surely, to this inward part that all the messengers of the body delivered their messages; it was this inward part that oversaw and judged the answers of heaven and earth and all that is in them when they said, “We are not God” and “He is the one who made us.” The inward human being came to know these things through the assistance of the outward human being. I, the inward human being, [Rom. 7:2; 2 Cor. 4:16; Eph. 3:16] came to know them; I, the mind, came to know them through my body’s senses. I questioned the vast expanse of the world about my God, and it answered me, “I am not God, but he is the one who made me.”

6.10 Is not this beauty evident to all whose senses are intact? Then why does it not say the same thing to them all? Creatures both small and great [Ps. 103:25] see it, but they cannot ask it questions; for reason has not been given to them as overseer, as judge of the messages conveyed by the senses. Human beings, by contrast, can ask it questions; and thus, through the things that have been made, they can look with understanding upon the invisible things of God. [Rom. 1:20] Yet through love they become subject to created things, and subjects cannot pronounce judgment. These things answer questions only for those who pronounce judgment. They do not change their words—that is, their beauty—because one person merely sees whereas another sees and questions; they do not appear one way to the first and another way to the second. Instead, their beauty appears exactly the same to both; but to the first it is mute, and to the second it speaks. Or rather, it speaks to everyone, but it is understood only by those who compare the word received from outside with the truth that dwells within. It is truth, you see, that says to me, “Your God is not earth and heaven; it is not any body.” Their nature says this. Do you see? Their nature is an expanse, less in any part than in the whole. Surely you are better—I am speaking to you, my soul—because you quicken the expanse of your body by giving it life, which no body offers to a body. Now your God is also the life of your life.

7.11 What, then, do I love when I love my God? Who is this God who is above the pinnacle of my soul? Through my soul itself I will ascend to him. I will pass through the power of mine by which I cling to a body and fill its structure with life. It is not by that power that I find my God. For if it were, horse and mule, which have no understanding, [Ps. 31:9] would find him; it is by that same power that their bodies, {169} too, have life. But there is another power, by which I do not merely quicken my flesh but also endow it with sensation. The Lord created this power in me, commanding the eye not to hear and the ear not to see, [Rom. 11:8] but giving me eyes so that I might see and ears so that I might hear, bestowing on each of the senses in turn its proper dwelling place and its proper function. I act through them, doing various things; but I who act am one mind. I shall pass through even this power of mine—for horse and mule have it too; they, too, perceive by means of the body.

8.12 So I will pass through even this nature of mine, climbing step by step to the one who made me; and I come into the open fields and spacious mansions of memory, where there are storerooms of countless images brought in by the senses from all kinds of things. There, too, is found whatever we think by enlarging or reducing or in any way varying the things our senses have perceived, and anything else that has been brought in and stored and has not yet been swallowed up and buried by forgetfulness. When I am there, I ask for whatever I want to be brought out for me. Some things come forth right away, but for others I must search a long time, as though I had to retrieve them from some well-concealed hiding place. Still others rush forward like an army, and though I am asking for and seeking something else altogether, they intrude, saying, “perhaps we are the ones.” With the hand of my heart I drive them away from the face of my recollection until the cloud is dispersed and what I want emerges from its concealment and comes into view. Other things are brought out easily and in exactly the right order, just as I have asked for them; earlier things give way to later ones, and as they give way they are put back in storage so that they can be produced again when I want them. All this takes place when I tell a story from memory.

8.13 Every single thing, by whatever path it may have made its entry, is stored there distinctly and according to its proper kind: as light and all colors and the shapes of bodies entered through the eyes, and every kind of sound through the ears; all smells made their entry through the nostrils and all tastes through the mouth; and by the sense of the whole body we detect what is hard or soft, hot or cold, smooth or rough, heavy or light, whether outside the body or inside it. The vast storehouse of memory, with its hidden and indescribable recesses that evade my knowledge, receives all these things so that when there is need they can be retrieved and thought about again. All these things enter memory by their own gateways and are stored there—though indeed it is not the things themselves that enter memory; instead, images of things sensed are on hand in memory for thought to recall them.

{170} Who can say how these images are produced? It is clear, though, which senses captured them and stored them within us. For even when I dwell in darkness and silence, I can bring forth colors in my memory if I so choose, and I distinguish between white and black and any other colors I want to think about; sounds do not interrupt and disturb my consideration of these images drawn from the eyes, even though sounds are there too, hidden away, as it were, in their own compartments. If I feel like it, I can ask for them too, and there they are; with my tongue at rest and my throat stilled, I can sing as much as I like, and those images of colors—which are no less present in memory—do not interfere or break in when I am reexamining that other storehouse of images that came in through the ears. In the same way I recall at will other things that were brought in and collected through the other senses: I distinguish the smell of lilies from that of violets even though I am smelling nothing, and I prefer honey to sweet wine or something smooth to something rough simply by memory, without tasting or touching anything.

8.14 It is within myself that I do these things, in the remarkable chambers of my memory, where heaven and earth and sea are at hand, together with everything I have been able to perceive in them, apart from what I have forgotten. There too I encounter myself and recollect myself: I remember what I did, and when and where; I remember my state of mind when I did it. Everything I remember—whether I experienced it or believed it—is there. From this same storehouse I draw out likenesses of experiences and of things believed on the basis of what I have experienced; I weave them together with things past to envision future actions, events, and hopes, and I contemplate all these things as present.2 In that remarkable treasure-house of my mind, full of so many images, images of so many things, I say to myself, “I shall do this and that”—and this or that follows. I say to myself, “Oh, that this or that were the case!” or “May God prevent this or that!”—and when I say these things, the images of everything I am talking about are at hand from that same storehouse of memory; and indeed I would not be able to say any of these things if those images were lacking.

8.15 This power of memory is a great power—indeed, an exceedingly great power, my God, a vast and boundless sanctuary. Who has ever penetrated to its furthest reaches? And it is a power of my own {171} mind; it belongs to my nature, and I cannot contain everything that I am. Is the mind, then, too small to contain itself—so that we must ask, “Where is this part of the mind that the mind itself does not contain? Is the mind outside itself and not within itself? How does the mind not contain itself?”

Great wonder springs up in me concerning this; amazement overtakes me. People go forth to wonder at the heights of mountains, the vast waves of the sea, waterfalls of immense breadth, the expanse of the ocean, the courses of the stars—but [Wisd. 13:2] they pay no heed to themselves. Nor do they wonder at the fact that as I was speaking of all these things, I was not seeing them with my eyes, and yet I could not have spoken of them unless I saw within myself, in my memory, the mountains and waves and rivers and stars that I have seen, and the ocean that I have believed in—and saw them in their full extent, just as if I were seeing them outwardly. Yet when I saw them with my eyes, I did not take them into myself by seeing them; it is not the things themselves, but their images, that are within me, and I know which of the body’s senses impressed each image on me.

9.16 Yet even this does not exhaust the immense capacity of my memory. Here too, stored in some placeless place, are all the things I have learned in the liberal arts and not forgotten—and it is not their images that I possess, but the things themselves. What grammar is, what the art of disputation is, how many kinds of questions there are: any of these things that I know is in my memory, and not as though I retained an image but left the thing itself outside me. These things did not sound and then pass away like a noise impressed by my ears, leaving behind a trace by which I can recollect it as though it were still sounding, even though it sounds no longer. They are not like a smell that, as it is passing away and is scattered by the winds, affects the sense of smell and casts into memory an image of itself, which we repeat when we remember the smell; or like food that no longer has a taste in the stomach but still has a kind of taste in memory; or like something that is perceived when the body touches it and is imagined by memory even after it is separated from us. Obviously these things are not conveyed into memory; only their images are captured with amazing quickness, stored in amazing places of safekeeping (as it were), and brought forth in an amazing way for remembering.

10.17 By contrast, when I hear that there are three kinds of questions—“Does it exist?” “What is it?” “What is it like?”—I do of course retain images of the sounds of which these words were composed, and I know that those sounds rumbled through the air and passed {172} away and are no more: but the things themselves that are signified by those sounds did not reach me by any bodily sense. I have never seen them, except in my mind; and what I have hidden away in memory is not their images, but the things themselves. Let them tell me, if they can, from what source they came into me. For I run through all the gateways of my flesh and do not find the one by which they made their entrance. The eyes say, “If they were colored, we are the ones who reported them”; the ears say, “If they made a sound, it is we who made them known”; the nostrils say, “If they had a smell, they entered through us”; the sense of taste says, “If it is not a flavor, do not ask me”; touch says, “If they were not bodily, I did not handle them; and if I did not handle them, I did not make them known.” From what source, then, and by what path did these things enter my memory? I do not know how they entered. For when I learned them, I did not put my faith in someone else’s heart; no, I examined them in my own heart and pronounced that they were true, and then I entrusted them to my heart, as though putting them where I could retrieve them whenever I might wish. So they were there even before I learned them, yet they were not in memory. So where were they? And how is it that when I heard about them, I recognized them and said, “That is right; that is true,” unless they were already in memory, but so remote, shoved so far back in the most obscure hiding places, that if they had not been dug out by someone who drew them to my attention, I might never have been able to think about them?

11.18 So we find that learning things whose images we do not draw in through the senses, but which instead we see within us—directly, as they are, and without images—is simply a matter of taking things that memory already contained, but in a scattered and disorderly way, and gathering them together in thought, giving them our careful attention so that we have them at our fingertips, so to speak, in our memory; where formerly they were lying hidden, dispersed and unheeded, they now present themselves readily to the mind’s accustomed gaze. My memory contains many such things that have already been discovered and placed at my fingertips; these are the things that we are said to have learned and to know. Yet if for even a short time I cease to recall them, they are buried once again; they are torn apart and hidden piece by piece in the most obscure places, and once again I have to think them out afresh as if for the first time, gathering them from those same places (for there is nowhere else for them to have gone) and bringing them together so that they can be known, as though gathering them from their dispersion. That is how we get the word “think” (cogito): for {173} cogito is to cogo as agito to ago and factito to facio.3 But the mind has claimed this word for itself, so that in current usage what is brought together elsewhere is not properly said to be thought (cogitari), but only what is brought together—that is, gathered (cogitur)—in the mind itself.

12.19 Memory also contains the innumerable principles and laws of numbers and dimensions, which are not impressed by any bodily sense, since they have no color or sound or smell or taste or feel. I have heard the sounds of the words by which they are signified when someone discusses them, but those sounds are not the same thing as the principles themselves. The sounds, after all, are different in Greek from what they are in Latin; but the principles are not Greek or Latin or any other kind of speech. I have seen the lines drawn by architects, as thin as can be, like spiders’ silk. But these principles are something different; they are not images of things that my bodily eyes have reported to me, and anyone who knows them has recognized them inwardly, without any thought of a body of any kind. With all the bodily senses I have perceived the numbers that we count, but these are not the same as—nor are they images of—the numbers by which we count, which therefore have a mighty existence of their own. Someone who does not see those numbers may perhaps laugh at me for talking about them, and I will feel sorry for him for laughing at me.

13.20 I hold all these things in my memory; I even hold in my memory how I learned them. I have heard many utterly misguided objections raised against them, and those too I hold in my memory; the objections are false, but it is not false that I remember them. I also remember that I distinguished between the truths and the false objections raised against them, and I see that my distinguishing between them now is different from my remembering that I have often distinguished between them in the past when I thought about them, as I often did. So I remember that I have often understood these things, and I also store up in my memory the fact that I now distinguish between them and understand them, so that later I can remember that I understood them now. So I also remember that I have remembered; and later, if I should recall that I was able to remember these things now, it will surely be through the power of memory that I recall it.

{174} 14.21 This same memory contains the affections of my mind—not in the way in which the soul has them when it is undergoing them, but in a very different way that is appropriate to the power of memory. For when I am not happy, I remember that I used to be happy; when I am not sad, I recall my past sadness; sometimes, though I feel no fear, I remember that I was once afraid; and without experiencing any desire I remember my former desire. Sometimes what I remember is the opposite of what I am experiencing: I am happy and remember my past sadness, or sad and remember my past happiness. Now it is not surprising that this should be true of what concerns the body. Mind and body are distinct, after all; and so if, when I am in a state of joy, I remember my past pain, there is nothing surprising about that. But the cases I have been talking about are different. For the mind is also memory itself. (Note that when we instruct someone to remember something, we say, “Be sure to keep it in mind”; and when we forget, we say, “It wasn’t in my mind” or “It slipped my mind.” Thus we call memory itself mind.) And given that this is so, how is it that when I am happy and remember my past sadness, my mind contains happiness and my memory contains sadness, and my mind is happy because it contains happiness, yet my memory is not sad because it contains sadness? Does memory not belong to the mind? Who would say such a thing? Undoubtedly memory is like the mind’s stomach, and happiness and sadness are like sweet and bitter food: when they are entrusted to memory, they are conveyed into the stomach, where they can be stored but not tasted. It is ridiculous to think memory is like the stomach, and yet they are not completely dissimilar.

14.22 Now notice that when I say there are four disturbances of the mind—desire, happiness, fear, sadness4—I bring this forth from my memory. And that is where I find anything that I can say in explaining them, classifying each in terms of genus and species, stating their definitions; I bring it all forth from my memory. And yet when I call these disturbances to mind by remembering them, I am not disturbed by any of them. And they were already there before I recalled and reconsidered them; that is precisely why I was able to retrieve them from there. So perhaps when we remember these things, they are brought forth from memory in something like the way food is brought forth from the stomach when an animal chews its cud. Why, then, does someone who discusses these things—and thus remembers them—not taste the sweetness of happiness or the bitterness of sorrow in the mouth {175} of thought? Is this where the analogy—for it is merely an analogy—fails? Who, after all, would be willing to talk about such things if every time we spoke of sadness or fear we could not help experiencing sorrow or terror? And yet we could not talk about them unless we found in our memory not merely the sounds of the words (in the form of images impressed by our bodily senses) but the notions of the things themselves. And we did not receive those notions through any gateway of the flesh: the mind itself perceived these passions by experiencing them, and then it entrusted them to memory—or else memory simply retained them even though they were not entrusted to it.

15.23 But does this happen by means of images or not? It would be hard for anyone to say. I speak of a stone or the sun when the things themselves are not present to my senses, but of course their images are on hand in my memory. I speak of physical pain when no such pain is present and nothing is hurting me; yet if no image of pain were present in my memory, I would not know what I was saying, and I would not be able to give an account distinguishing pain from pleasure. I speak of physical health when I am physically healthy; then, certainly, the thing itself is present to me. But if its image were not also present in my memory, I would have no way of remembering what the sound of the word “health” means; and sick people, hearing the word “health,” would not understand what was being said if they did not hold that same image in the power of memory, though the thing itself is absent from their body. I speak of the numbers by which we count; the numbers themselves, not their images, are present in my memory. I speak of the image of the sun, and that image is present in my memory; after all, I do not recall an image of that image, but the image itself, which is on hand when I remember. I speak of memory and I recognize what I am speaking of. And where do I recognize it? Precisely in memory itself. And surely memory is not present to itself through an image of itself, rather than through itself.

16.24 I speak of forgetfulness and in just the same way as before I recognize what I am speaking of. How would I recognize it unless I remembered it? (I do not mean the sound of the word; I mean the thing it signifies. If I had forgotten the thing, I would of course have no way of recognizing the meaning of the sound.) Now when I remember memory, memory itself is present to itself through itself. So when I remember forgetfulness, both memory and forgetfulness are present: memory, by which I remember, and forgetfulness, which I remember. But what is forgetfulness other than a privation of memory? So how is forgetfulness present so that I can remember it, when its presence {176} means that I cannot remember? Moreover, if we did not remember forgetfulness, we would in no way be able to recognize the thing that is signified by that word; but what we remember, we hold in our memory—which means that we hold forgetfulness in our memory. Therefore, the very thing that, when present, makes us forget is present so that we do not forget. Are we to understand from this that when we remember forgetfulness, it is present in memory not through itself but through its image, because if forgetfulness were present through itself, it would cause us to forget rather than remember? Who can search this out and fully grasp how this can be?

16.25 Certainly, Lord, this is a struggle for me, a struggle within myself. I have become for myself a stretch of ground to be worked with difficulty and much sweat. [Gn. 3:17, 3:19] We are not now exploring the expanses of the sky or measuring the distances of stars or inquiring after the weight of the earth. [Job 28:25 VL] I am the one whom I remember: I, the mind. It is no great surprise if what I am not is far from me: but what is closer to me than I myself? And yet I do not fully grasp the power of my own memory, even though apart from my memory I could not so much as speak of myself. What am I to say, then, when I am certain that I remember forgetfulness? Shall I say that what I remember is not in my memory? Shall I say that forgetfulness is present in my memory in order that I might not forget? Both possibilities are utterly ridiculous.

And what of the third possibility? Can I somehow say that when I remember forgetfulness, what is held in my memory is not forgetfulness itself, but an image of forgetfulness? How can I say that? For when an image of something is impressed on memory, the thing itself must first be present as the source of the image. That is how I remember Carthage, how I remember all the places I have been, the faces of the people I have seen, and the things reported by the other senses; it is how I remember the health or suffering of the body. When these things were present, memory captured images from them, images that I could behold as present and consider again in my mind when I recalled the things themselves, now absent. So if forgetfulness is held in memory through an image rather than through itself, it must at least have been present at some point, so that its image could be captured. But when it was present, how did it inscribe its image in memory, since its presence erases from memory whatever has already been marked down there? And yet somehow—how, exactly, is incomprehensible and inexplicable—I am certain that I remember the very forgetfulness that wipes out what we once remembered.

{177} 17.26 The power of memory is great indeed, something terrifying, my God, a deep and boundless multiplicity. And this is the mind; it is I myself. What am I, then, my God? What nature am I? A various, manifold, and powerfully vast life. Behold the countless fields and caves and chasms of my memory, uncountably full of countless kinds of things: whether by means of images, as with all bodies, or through the presence of the things themselves, as with the liberal arts, or through some sort of notions or notings, as with the affections of the mind (for the memory retains these even when the mind is not experiencing them, and whatever is in memory is in the mind). I hasten through all these things, I fly here and there; I make what progress I can, but I never come to the end of it. So great is the power of memory, so great is the power of life in human beings who live only to die.

What, then, shall I do, my God, you who are my true life? [Jn. 14:6] I will pass beyond even this power of mine that is called memory; I will pass beyond it so that I can progress toward you, O sweet Light. [Eccl. 11:7] What are you saying to me? See, I am making my ascent through my soul to you, who abide above me; I will pass beyond even this power of mind that is called memory, eager to touch you in whatever way you can be touched, to embrace you in whatever way you can be embraced. For even beasts and birds have memory. Otherwise they would not find their way back to their dens or nests, or do the many other things that they are accustomed to doing; indeed, without memory they could not become accustomed to doing anything at all. So I will pass beyond even memory and reach the One who has separated me from four-footed beasts and made me wiser than the birds of the air. [Job 35:11 VL] I will pass beyond even memory so that I might find you—where? Where will I find you, my true good, my sure sweetness? If I find you outside my memory, I have no memory of you. And how will I find you if I have no memory of you?

18.27 A woman had lost a coin, and she looked for it by the light of a lamp.5 [Lk. 15:8] If she had not remembered the coin, she would not have been able to find it. For once it was found, how would she know whether that was indeed it, unless she remembered it? I remember many times that I have looked for, and found, things that I had lost. From those occasions I know that when I was looking for something, if someone said to me, “Might this be it?” “Might that be it?” I would keep saying no until the thing I was looking for was produced. If I had not remem {178} bered that thing, whatever it was, I would not have found it even if it had been produced for me, because I would not have recognized it. Such is always the case when we look for and find something we have lost. Now if something—some visible body—is lost to the eyes, not to memory, an image of that thing is retained within us, and the search continues until the thing is brought back into view; once it has been found, it is recognized through that image within us. We do not say that we have found something that had been lost if we do not recognize the thing, and we cannot recognize it if we do not remember it. But it was lost only to the eyes; it was retained in memory.

19.28 Yet suppose memory itself loses something, as happens when we forget and we seek to remember. Where do we seek, if not in memory itself? And if things other than what we are seeking should be produced there, we keep rejecting them until what we are looking for turns up. And when it does, we say, “This is it”—which we would not say if we did not recognize it, and we would not recognize it if we did not remember it. Surely, though, we had forgotten it. Did it perhaps not fall out of memory entirely, so that we used the part we retained in order to seek the other part, because memory was aware that it was not holding together what it had been used to holding together, and so, limping along, maimed by the loss of something to which it had been accustomed, it urgently demanded the restoration of what was missing? It is like when we catch a glimpse of someone we know, or think about him, but we have forgotten his name and are trying to recall it. If a name occurs to us that is not his, we do not connect it to him, because memory is not in the habit of thinking of him along with that name. And so each wrong name is rejected until the right name comes along; then our accustomed knowledge comes into alignment and is stable and at rest. And from where does the right name come along, if not from memory itself? Even if we remember it because someone else has reminded us, the name still emerges from memory: we do not believe what we are told, as though it were something new. Instead, we remember it and therefore affirm that what we are told is true—whereas if the name is completely erased from the mind, we do not remember it even if someone reminds us. For if we remember even the fact that we have forgotten, we have not entirely forgotten. We cannot seek what we have lost if we have forgotten it entirely.

20.29 How, then, do I seek you, Lord? For when I seek you, my God, I seek the happy life. I will seek you so that my soul may live. [Ps. 68:33] My body lives by my soul, and my soul lives by you. How, then, do I seek the happy life? The happy life is not mine until I can say, “This is {179} sufficient; the happy life is here.” It is incumbent on me to say how I seek it. Do I seek it by way of remembrance, as though I have forgotten it but still remember that I have forgotten it? Or do I seek it by way of a desire to learn something unknown, either something I have never known or something I have so thoroughly forgotten that I do not even remember that I have forgotten it? Is not this the happy life that all people want, that absolutely no one fails to want? Where did they come to know it, so that they could want it? Where did they see it, so that they could love it? Surely we have this happy life—but in what way we have it, I do not know. There is another way of having it; in that way, anyone who has it is thereby happy. There are also those who are happy through hope; they have the happy life in a way that is inferior to those who are already in fact happy, yet they are better than those who are happy neither in fact nor through hope. Yet even these last have the happy life in some way, for if they did not, they would not will to be happy, as in fact they most certainly do. I do not know how they have come to know the happy life and therefore have it—in some way that escapes me—in their knowledge.

I am struggling to determine whether this knowledge is in their memory. If it is there, we were happy at some time: whether each of us individually, or in the human being who first sinned, in whom we all died [1 Cor. 15:22] and from whom we are all born into unhappiness, I am not now asking. But I am asking whether the happy life is in memory. After all, we would not love it if we did not know it. We hear the words “happy life” and we all acknowledge that we desire the thing itself. It is not, of course, the sound that we find appealing. If a Greek speaker hears the words in Latin, he will find nothing appealing, because he will not know what is being said; but we find it appealing, just as he would if he heard the words in Greek, because the thing itself is neither Greek nor Latin, and speakers of Greek and Latin and other languages all long to attain it. It is therefore known to all of them, and if they could be asked in one voice, “Do you want to be happy?”, without hesitation they would respond that they do. And that would not happen unless the thing itself, which these words express, were retained in their memory.

21.30 Is it retained in the same way that someone who has seen Carthage remembers Carthage? No. The happy life is not seen with the eyes, since it is not a body. Is it retained in the same way that we remember numbers? No. Someone who knows numbers does not still seek to attain them, whereas we know the happy life and for that very reason love it and still seek to attain it, so that we might be happy. Is it retained in the way that we remember eloquence? No. Granted, {180} the cases are similar in certain respects: when people hear the word “eloquence” they remember the thing itself, even if they are not yet eloquent themselves; and many people do long to be eloquent (and from that fact it is evident that they know eloquence). But through the bodily senses they have observed other people who are eloquent, and they took pleasure in this and want to be eloquent themselves—though their pleasure in eloquence depends on some inward knowledge, and apart from that pleasure they would not want to be eloquent—whereas we do not experience the happy life in others through any bodily sense. Is it retained in the same way that we remember joy? Perhaps so. For though I am unhappy I remember the happy life, in the same way that I remember my own joy even when I am sad, and I never saw or heard or smelled or tasted or touched my joy by any bodily sense; rather, I experienced it in my mind when I was joyful, and the knowledge of that joy stuck to my memory so that I would be able to recall it, sometimes with contempt, sometimes with longing, in keeping with the variety of things I remember enjoying. For I have been flooded with a kind of joy even in disgraceful things, a joy that I detest and abhor as I recall it now; but sometimes I have rejoiced in good and noble things, and I recall that joy with longing, even if perhaps those good and noble things are absent and so I grieve when I recall my former joy.

21.31 So where and when did I experience this happy life of mine, so that I remember and love and desire it? And it is not just I, or I and a few others: truly, we all want to be happy. Now if we did not have some reliable knowledge of the happy life, we would not will it so reliably. But how can that be? Suppose two people are asked whether they want to join the military. It could certainly turn out that one of them says yes and the other says no. But if they are asked whether they want to be happy, both will say straightaway and without hesitation that they desire happiness—and one of them wants to join the military, and the other one does not, for no other reason than to be happy. Could it perhaps be the case that one person finds joy in one thing and another person in something else? In that way all people agree that they want to be happy, since they would all agree, if asked, that they want joy, and that very joy is what they call a happy life. So even if different people attain such joy from different things, there is still just one thing—joy—that everyone is seeking to acquire. And no one can claim never to have experienced joy, so when we hear the words “happy life,” we find joy in our memory and recognize it.

22.32 Far be it, Lord, far be it from the heart of your servant who is making his confession to you, far be it that I should think I am happy {181} for experiencing just any joy. For there is a joy that is not granted to the unrighteous, [Is. 48:22] but only to those who worship you without looking for any reward, because you are yourself their joy. To rejoice for you, in you, about you: this is itself the happy life, this alone, and no other. Those who think there is some other happy life are pursuing a joy that is no true joy, though their wills have not turned away altogether from some shadowy image of joy.

23.33 Therefore it is not certain that everyone wants to be happy, since not everyone wants to rejoice in you, which is the only happy life. So indeed not everyone wants the happy life. Or is it that all do want this, but because the flesh so lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh that they do not do what they want, [Gal. 5:17] they sink down into the kind of life they have the strength to lead and are content with that, because their will for the life that they lack the strength to lead is not great enough to empower them to lead it? For I would ask them all, “Would you rather rejoice in truth than in falsehood?” And as unhesitatingly as they had answered that they want to be happy, they would now answer that they would rather rejoice in truth. [1 Cor. 13:6] The happy life, in fact, is joy in truth: and that means joy in you, who are Truth, [Jn. 14:6] O God my light, the health of my countenance, my [Ps. 26:1 / Ps. 41:6, 41:12, 42:5] God.

All want this happy life; all want this life, which alone is happy; all want joy in truth. I have known many people who want to deceive, but not one who wanted to be deceived. Where, then, did they come to know this happy life? Surely it was where they also came to know truth. For they do love truth, since they do not want to be deceived; and because they love the happy life, which is nothing other than joy in truth, they must of course love truth as well. And they would not love truth if there were no knowledge of truth in their memory. Why, then, do they not rejoice in truth? Why are they not happy? It is because they devote more energy to things that make them wretched than to the one hazily remembered thing that would make them happy. For there does remain a little light in human beings. Let them walk, let them walk, so that the darkness does not overcome them. [Jn. 12:35]

23.34 How is it, then, that truth breeds hate,6 that your man became their enemy by preaching the truth? [Gal. 4:16] How is this so, given that people love the happy life, which is nothing other than joy in truth? It must be that this is how they love the truth: they want what they love, whatever that might be, to be the truth; and because they do not want to be deceived, they do not want their mistakes to be exposed as such. So {182} they hate truth [Jn. 3:20] for the sake of the thing that they love as truth. They love truth when it puts them in a good light; they hate truth when it exposes their error. For because they do not want to be deceived—but they do want to deceive—they love truth when it reveals itself but hate truth when it reveals them. And this will be their reward: those who do not want the light of truth to show them for what they are will be exposed by the truth against their wills, but truth itself will refuse to show itself to them. This, even this, is the state of the human mind: blind and listless, so foul and unsightly that it wants to stay hidden, but unwilling that anything should be hidden from it. And how is it repaid? With the very opposite of what it wants: it cannot hide from truth, but truth is hidden from it. And yet even in this state, wretched though it is, it would rather have joy in true things than in false. So it will be happy if it rejoices without hindrance and without interruption in the one and only Truth by which all true things are true.

24.35 Look how widely I have ranged in my memory looking for you, Lord, and I have not found you outside it. For I have found nothing of you that I did not remember, since the time that I learned about you; for since the time I learned about you, I have not forgotten you. Yes: where I found truth, that is where I found my God, Truth Itself, which I have not forgotten from the time I learned it. And so, beginning with the time I first learned about you, you abide in my memory; and when I remember you, that is where I find you and delight in you. [Ps. 36:4] These are my sacred delights, which you in your mercy have given me, looking with favor on me in my poverty. [Ps. 10:5; Lk. 1:48]

25.36 But where do you abide in my memory, Lord? Where do you abide there? What sort of dwelling place have you fashioned for yourself? What kind of sanctuary have you built for yourself? You have conferred upon my memory the dignity of abiding in it, but in what part of it do you abide? That is what I am seeking to understand. For in remembering you I have passed beyond the parts of memory that even the beasts have, because I did not find you there, among images of bodily things. Then I went to the parts of memory to which I have entrusted the affections of my mind, and neither did I find you there. Then I entered the residence of the mind itself, where the mind dwells in my memory—for the mind also remembers itself—and you were not there, because just as you are not an image of something bodily or an affection of something living, as when we rejoice, grieve, desire, fear, remember, forget, and so on, so also you are not the mind itself, because you are the Lord and God of the mind. And all these things undergo change, but you abide unchangeably above them; and from {183} the time that I first learned about you, you have seen fit to dwell in my memory. And what do I mean by asking in what place you dwell, as though there were really places in memory? Certainly you dwell in my memory, because from the time I first learned about you I have remembered you; and when I recall you, I find you in my memory.

26.37 So where did I find you so that I could learn you? For you were not already in my memory before I learned you. So where did I find you so that I could learn you, if not in yourself, above me? It is nowhere, this “place”; and though we approach it and draw back from it, it is nowhere, a place that is no place. You, Truth, preside everywhere, and to all who seek to learn from you, however varied their questions, you give an answer, all in a single moment. You give your answer clearly, though not all of them hear it clearly. They all ask you about what they want to learn, but they do not always hear what they want to hear. Those who serve you best are not so much intent on hearing from you whatever they already want, but instead on wanting whatever they hear from you.

27.38      Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new!

     Late have I loved you!

      And behold, you were within, but I was outside and looked for you there, and in my ugliness I seized upon these beautiful things that you have made.

      You were with me, but I was not with you.

      Those things held me far away from you—
things that would not even exist if they were not in you.

      You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness;
you flashed, you shone, and you dispersed my blindness;
you breathed perfume, and I drew in my breath and pant for you;
I tasted, [Ps. 33:9; 1 Pet. 2:3 / Mt. 5:6; 1 Cor. 4:11 / Ps. 4:9] and I hunger and thirst;
you touched me, and I was set on fire for your peace.

28.39      When at last I cling to you with all that I am,

         there will be no place in me for pain and struggle; [Ps. 89:10]

         my life will be wholly alive, filled wholly with you.

      But as things stand now, I am a burden to myself,
because I am not filled with you—
for you uphold those whom you fill.

      The joys that I ought to bewail do battle with the sorrows in which I ought to rejoice, and which side will prevail I do not know.

      {184} My evil sorrows do battle with my good joys, and which side will prevail I do not know.

      How wretched I am!
Lord, have mercy on me! [Ps. 30:10]
How wretched I am!

      Look: I do not conceal my wounds.
You are the Physician, I am ill;
you are merciful, I am miserable.

      Is not human life on this earth a trial? [Job 7:1 VL]
Who would want to encounter its troubles and difficulties?
You command us to endure them, not to love them.
People do not love what they endure, even if they love enduring.
Though they are glad that they endure, they would prefer that there be nothing to endure.
In times of adversity, I long for good fortune;
in times of good fortune, I fear adversity.
What is the middle ground between these two, the place where human life is not a trial?

      Cursed is the good fortune of this world, and doubly cursed, by the fear of adversity and the destruction of happiness.

      Cursed are the adversities of this world, doubly and triply cursed, by the longing for good fortune and the hardness of adversity and the anxiety that adversity will break down our endurance.

      Is not human life on this earth an unrelenting trial?

29.40 All my hope is in your abundantly great mercy.

Grant what you command, and command what you will. You enjoin continence on us. As a certain writer says, “When I knew that no one can be continent unless God grants it, the knowledge of who grants continence was itself an element of wisdom.”7 [Wisd. 8:21] Through continence we are gathered together and brought back to the One, whom we abandoned by dispersing ourselves amongst the many. For those who love anything alongside you, unless they love it for your sake, love {185} you too little. O Love, ever-burning and never extinguished, ­Charity, my God: enkindle me! You command continence: grant what you command, and command what you will.

30.41 Certainly you command that I restrain myself from the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and worldly ambition. [1 Jn. 2:16] You commanded me not to sleep with my mistress, and concerning marriage you encouraged me to take a better path [1 Cor. 7:38] than the one you left open for me. And because you granted it, it was done, even before I became a steward [1 Cor. 4:1] of your Sacrament. Yet even now the images of such things are alive in my memory, about which I have spoken at such great length. The kind of life to which I was once accustomed impressed those images firmly on my memory, and they intrude upon my thoughts. They have no power when I am awake, but when I am asleep they lure me not merely into pleasure but even into consent and something very much like action. The deceitful image in my soul has such power in my flesh that false visions induce me to do in my sleep what true visions cannot when I am awake. Am I not myself when I am asleep, O Lord my God? Yet there is such a difference between myself and myself in that moment in which I pass from wakefulness to sleep or return from sleep to wakefulness! When I am asleep, where is reason? For when I am awake, it is by reason that I resist such suggestions and remain unshaken even if the things themselves are presented to me. Is reason shut down when I shut my eyes? Does reason fall asleep along with the bodily senses? And how does it come about that even in dreams we often resist such suggestions, remaining mindful of our resolve and persevering in it with perfect chastity, and give no assent to such enticements? And yet there is a great difference. For if it turns out otherwise, upon waking we return to a conscience that is at ease; that very difference between waking and sleeping shows us that what grieves us was not something we did, but something that was in some sense done in us.

30.42 Is not your hand mighty enough, [Num. 11:23] Almighty God, to heal all the infirmities [Ps. 102:3] of my soul and, by your even more abundant grace, to still these lustful stirrings in my sleep? Lord, you will increase your gifts in me more and more, rescuing my soul from the honey-trap of concupiscence so that it will follow me to you and not be in conflict with itself: so that not even in its dreams will it carry out—or even consent to—the disgusting corruptions that arise from bestial images and pollute the flesh. To you, Almighty, who can do more than we ask, more than we understand, [Eph. 3:20] it is no great task to ensure that no such thing, even so slight an inclination that the merest nod would check it, {186} troubles the chaste mind of a sleeper, not merely at some point in this life but even at my present age.

But now I have told my good Lord what I am even now, in this aspect of the evil of my life; I have told it to you rejoicing with trembling [Ps. 2:11] in what you have given me, grieving that I am still unfinished, hoping that you will complete your mercies in me until I reach that perfect peace that my inward and outward self will have in your presence when death has been swallowed up in victory. [1 Cor. 15:54]

31.43 There is another evil of the day—would that it were sufficient for it! [Mt. 6:34] For we repair the daily devastations of the body by eating and drinking, until you destroy food and the stomach, [1 Cor. 6:13] killing insatiable desire with a marvelous satisfaction, and clothing this corruptible body with everlasting incorruption. [1 Cor. 15:53] But for now, this neediness is sweet to me. I fight against this sweetness so that I will not be overcome by it. I wage daily war in fasting, bringing my body into submission again and again, [1 Cor. 9:26–27] and my sufferings are driven out by pleasure—for hunger and thirst [2 Cor. 11:27] are indeed sufferings of a sort; they burn, they destroy us like a fever, unless the medicine of food and drink brings us relief. That medicine is always at hand, thanks to the consolation of your gifts, in which land and water and sky minister to our weakness; and so our distress is called delight.

31.44 You have taught me that I should take food and drink in the same way that I take medicine. But as I am passing from the discomfort of craving to the satisfaction of fullness, a snare is set for me, hidden in that very movement. It is the snare of concupiscence. For that movement is a pleasure, and there is no other way to pass through it; there is only the path along which necessity compels us. And although we eat and drink for the sake of health, there is a dangerous pleasure that attends eating and drinking like a servant—and often this servant tries to lead the way, so that I do for the sake of pleasure what I say I do, or intend to do, for the sake of health. Nor is there the same measure for both: what is enough for health is too little for pleasure, and it is often hard to tell whether a genuine need of the body still requires provision or a deceptive pleasure of greed is demanding indulgence. A wretched soul is thrilled with such uncertainty and uses it to provide a pretext and an excuse, delighted that what is enough for the modest requirements of health is difficult to judge, so that it can disguise its preoccupation with pleasure as a concern for health. I try every day to resist these temptations, and I call upon your right hand; [Ps. 79:18] I bring my uncertainties to you, for in this matter I have not yet found a stable resolution.

{187} 31.45 I hear the voice of my God commanding me, “Do not let your hearts be weighed down with overindulgence and drunkenness.” [Lk. 21:34] Drunkenness is far from me: you will have mercy, so that it does not come near me. But overindulgence does sometimes sneak up on your servant: you will have mercy, so that it stays far from me. For no one can be continent unless you grant it. [Wisd. 8:21] You give us many things in answer to our prayers, and whatever good things we received before we prayed, we received from you; and the fact that we realize afterward that we received them from you, that too we received from you. I have never been a drunkard, but I have known drunkards whom you have made sober. So it is your doing that some have never been drunkards; it is your doing that others who once were drunkards did not always remain so; and it is your doing that both of these know that this is your doing.

I have heard another voice from you: “Do not run after your desires; turn away from your pleasure.” [Sir. 18:30] This voice, too, I have heard through your Gift, and I have loved it dearly: “Neither if we eat will we abound, nor if we do not eat will we lack anything”; [1 Cor. 8:8] that is to say, the one will not enrich me and the other will not distress me. And I have heard another: “I have learned, you see, to be satisfied in whatever condition I am in. I know how to abound, and I know how to endure poverty. I can do all things through him who gives me strength.” [Phil. 4:11–13] So speaks a soldier of the heavenly hosts, not dust, [Ps. 102:14] such as we are. Yet remember, Lord, that we are dust, and you have made man8 from the dust of the earth; he was lost, but now he has been found. [Lk. 15:24, 15:32] He had no strength in himself, for he was that same dust—dust into which you breathed your inspiration, so that he said these words that have kindled my love for him: “I can do all things,” he says, “through him who gives me strength.” [Phil. 4:13] Give me strength, so that I may be able to do all things. Grant what you command, and command what you will. This man confesses that he has received, that when he boasts, he boasts in the Lord. [1 Cor 1:31; 2 Cor. 10:17] I have heard another praying in such a way that he deserves to receive: “Take from me,” he says, “the desires of the belly.” [Sir. 23:6] Thus, my holy God, it is evident that when what you command to be done is done, it is because you grant it.

31.46 You have taught me, good Father, that to the pure all things are pure, [Tit. 1:15] but it is bad for the person whose eating causes another to {188} stumble; [Rom. 14:20–21] that every creature of yours is good, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving; [1 Tim. 4:4] that food does not commend us to God, [1 Cor. 8:8] and no one should judge us in matters of food or drink; [Col. 2:16] that one who eats should not look down on one who does not eat, and one who does not eat should not judge one who eats. [Rom. 14:3] These things I have learned: thanks and praise be to you, my Teacher, who knock on my ears [Rev. 3:20] and shine on my heart. Rescue me from all temptation. [Ps. 17:30] It is not impurity in my food that I fear, but the impurity of ravenous desire. I know that Noah was permitted to partake of every kind of meat [Gn. 9:3 / 1 Kgs. 17:6] that is good for food, that Elijah was fed with meat, that John, with his wondrous gift of abstinence, was not polluted by animals but had locusts as his food. [Mt. 3:4] I know too that Esau was tricked through his desire for lentils, [Gn. 25:34] that David reproached himself for his desire for water, [2 Sam. 23:15–17] and that our King was tempted not with meat but with bread. [Mt. 4:3] It was not because the people in the wilderness desired meat that they earned condemnation, but because in their desire for food they murmured against the Lord. [Num. 11:1–20]

31.47 So, surrounded as I am by these temptations, I struggle every day against concupiscence in eating and drinking—for this is not something I can decide once and for all to give up and never touch again, as I was able to do with sex. I must keep a temperate hand on the bridle of my throat, the reins neither too firm nor too slack. Is there anyone, Lord, who is not pulled a little too far, past the boundary marker, which is need? Whoever he is, he is a great man: let him proclaim the greatness of your Name. [Ps. 68:31; Lk. 1:46; Rev. 15:4 / Lk. 5:8] I am not the one, for I am a sinful man. Yet I too proclaim the greatness of your Name, and the One who has overcome the world intercedes with you on account of [Jn. 16:33 / Rom. 8:34] my sins, counting me among the weak members of his Body. For your eyes [Rom. 12:5; 1 Cor. 12:12, 12:22] have looked upon what is yet unfinished in his Body, and everyone will be inscribed in your [Ps. 138:16] book.

32.48 As for the enticements of smells, I am not overly concerned about them. I do not seek them out if they are absent; I do not spurn them if they are present; I am always ready to do without them. Or so it seems to me—perhaps I am mistaken about this. There is a lamentable darkness in me that obscures what I am really capable of, so that when my mind interrogates itself about its powers, it realizes that it can scarcely trust its own answer. For there is so much in the mind that is largely hidden unless it comes to light in experience; and in this life, which is described as temptation from start to finish, [Job 7:1 VL] those who have been able to rise from worse to better dare not be confident that they {189} will not fall from better to worse. There is one hope, one assurance, one steadfast promise: your mercy.

33.49 The pleasures of the ears had entangled me and enslaved me with great ferocity, but you loosed me and set me free. Now, I admit, I do take some pleasure in the sounds to which your words9 give life, when they are sung with a sweet and well-trained voice—but not so much pleasure that I am strongly attached to them; no, I can arise and depart when I wish. Nevertheless, these sounds claim a place of some dignity in my heart alongside the meanings they convey, by which they are alive and gain admittance into me, and I scarcely know what sort of place is fitting for them. Sometimes I think I honor them more than is right, when I consider that our hearts are enkindled with the flame of piety more devoutly and more intensely by the very same holy words when they are sung than if they were not sung, and that all the affections of our spirit, in all their variety, are aroused—each in its own way—by voice and song, through some hidden kinship that I do not profess to understand. My mind ought not to be given over to the pleasure of the flesh, lest it grow weak; but such pleasure often leads me astray: sense ought to accompany reason patiently, as its follower, for sense deserves admittance only for reason’s sake; but instead sense tries to go first and lead the way. Thus I sin in these matters without being aware of it; only later do I realize it.

33.50 Yet sometimes I go too far in avoiding this danger and make the mistake of being too strict. In such a frame of mind I would banish from my own ears, and from the ears of the Church, every sweet melody to which the Psalms of David are sung; it seems safer to me to follow the words of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, of which I have so often been reminded. He instructed the reader of the Psalm to use so little inflection in his voice that it was closer to reading than to singing. Yet when I remember the tears I shed over the Church’s song in those earliest days when I had recovered my faith—and even now, whenever10 I am moved not by the singing but by the things sung, when {190} they are sung by a serene voice and with the most suitable melody—I acknowledge again the great usefulness of this practice.

Thus I waver between the danger of pleasure and the experience of something wholesome. Though I offer no definitive opinion, I am more inclined to approve the custom of singing in church, so that through the pleasures of the ears a weaker mind may arise to the fervor of devotion. But when it happens to me that the singing moves me more than the things sung, I confess my sin and my need for chastisement; and in such a case I would prefer not to hear the singer. Look at my state! Weep with me—weep for me—any of you who are stirred by something good within you from which good acts spring forth. For if you are not stirred, these things will not move you. But you, O Lord my God, hear me: look with favor upon me and behold me, [Ps. 12:4, 79:15] have mercy upon me and heal me. [Ps. 6:3, 9:14, 24:16] For in your eyes I have become a question to myself, and this is my infirmity. [Ps. 102:3; Mt. 4:23]

34.51 If we are to complete this account of the temptations of the lust of the flesh that continue to assail me as I groan, longing to put on my heavenly dwelling, [2 Cor. 5:2] there remains yet the pleasure of the eyes of this flesh, which I confess in the hearing of the ears of your temple, [1 Cor. 3:16, 6:19; 2 Cor. 6:16] brotherly and devout ears. My eyes love beautiful forms in all their variety, bright and pleasant colors. Let these things not hold my soul in their power; no, let God, who made them all very good, [Gn. 1:31] take possession of my soul; he is my good, and not these things. Every day they impress themselves upon me throughout my waking hours, and I have no respite from them as I have from the sounds of singing—sometimes, in silence, from all sounds. For wherever I might be during the daytime, the very queen of colors, the light that floods everything we perceive, furtively makes its way to me and caresses me while I am doing something else and paying no heed to it. Yet it imposes its presence with such great force that if it is suddenly taken away, we seek it with longing; and if it is absent for a long time, the mind is grieved.

34.52 O Light that Tobit saw, [Tob. 4:2ff.] though the eyes of his flesh were blind, when he taught his son the way of life and walked before him on the feet of charity, never going astray. O Light that Isaac saw, [Gn. 27:1–40] though the lights of this bodily world were dimmed and obscured by age, when he blessed his sons without recognizing them, and in blessing them earned the gift of recognizing them aright. O Light that Jacob saw, though his eyes too were weak because of his great age, when his heart shone with radiant light as he blessed his sons and prophesied the peoples who would one day come forth from them, [Gn. 49] and with mystical insight {191} crossed his hands and laid them upon the heads of his grandsons by Joseph, acting not as Joseph admonished him outwardly, but as he himself discerned inwardly.11 [Gn. 48:10–20] This is itself the one Light, and all who see and love it are likewise one. [Jn. 17:22]

But this bodily light of which I was speaking has an alluring and dangerous sweetness by which it fashions a worldly life for those who are blind in their love for it. But when they learn to praise you for it, O God, Creator of all things,12 it no longer lulls them asleep; instead they take it up in a hymn to you—and this is what I long to do. I fight against the enticements of the eyes, lest the feet by which I walk in your way become entrapped; and I lift unseen eyes to you, that you might free my feet from the snare. [Ps. 24:15] And again and again you set them free, for they do indeed become ensnared. You do not cease to set them free, even though I so often yield to the temptations that beset me on every side, for you who keep watch over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. [Ps. 120:4]

34.53 And human beings have added so many things, countless things, to the temptations of the eyes: the products of various trades and artisans, clothing, footwear, pottery and all sorts of craftworks, even paintings and various images, far beyond what is needed for use, restrained within reasonable bounds, and expressive of some devout meaning. They run after the outward things that they make and depart inwardly from the One by whom they themselves are made and banish from their minds what they were made to be.

But even for these things, O my God, my Beauty, I will sing a hymn to you and offer a sacrifice of praise [Ps. 115:17] to the One who offered himself as a sacrifice for me, because the beautiful things that are brought forth from our souls by skilled hands come from the Beauty that is above all souls, the Beauty for which my soul sighs day and night. It is from that Beauty that those who craft beautiful things and those who run after them derive the standard by which they acclaim such beauty, but they fail to take from there the standard of right use. It is there, but they do not see it, and so they depart further from you; they do not entrust their strength to your safekeeping [Ps. 58:10] but disperse it in delights that can only make them weary.

But I who say these things and recognize their truth still get my feet entangled by these beautiful things: yet you set them free, O Lord, you {192} set them free, [Ps. 24:15 / Ps. 25:3] because your mercy is before my eyes. For I am held captive in misery, but you in mercy set me free: sometimes when I am not even aware of it, because I have stumbled only slightly, but sometimes with suffering, because I have already become stuck.

35.54 There is yet another kind of temptation, one that is far more dangerous. For besides the lust of the flesh, which concerns the enjoyment of all the senses and of pleasures—ruinous to those whom it enslaves, who take themselves far away from you—there [Ps. 72:27] is in the soul a certain empty and inquisitive13 passion, not for enjoyment in the flesh, but for experience through the flesh, through the same bodily senses, a passion that disguises itself under the name of understanding and knowledge. Now because this passion is a desire to know, and the eyes are foremost among the senses as sources of knowledge, the language of Scripture calls it “the lust of the eyes.” [1 Jn. 2:16] Strictly speaking, seeing is the function of the eyes, but we use the verb “to see” of the other senses as well when we make use of them to know something. We do not say “hear how it glows red” or “smell how bright it is” or “taste how shiny it is” or “feel how it gleams”—but we do speak of seeing all these things. For we say not only “See how bright it is” (something only the eyes can perceive) but also “See how it sounds,” “See what it smells like,” “See how it tastes,” “See how hard it is.” And so, as I have said, the endeavor to gain knowledge through any of the senses is called “the lust of the eyes,” because the other senses claim for themselves by analogy the function of seeing, which belongs to the eyes first of all, whenever they seek any kind of knowledge.

35.55 From this we recognize more clearly what is done through the senses for the sake of pleasure and what is done out of curiosity. Pleasure attends things that are beautiful, harmonious, sweet-smelling, tasty, and gentle to the touch; but curiosity will seek out even their opposites simply to give them a try, not in order to suffer harm, but from a lust for experience and knowledge. For what pleasure is there in looking at a mangled corpse? It horrifies you. And yet people go running to wherever it lies, just so that they can feel gloomy and grow pale. They fear seeing such a thing in a nightmare, as if someone had forced them to look at it when they were awake or some report of its beauty had convinced them to seek it out. The same holds true for the other senses, though it would be tedious to name them one by one.

This disease of curiosity is the reason that stupendous sights are presented in shows. It is the reason that people pry into the mysteries {193} of the nature that is outside us, which it does no good for us to know—yet people have a passion to know them simply for the sake of knowing them. It is also the reason that some seek perverse knowledge through the practice of magic. Even in religion, it is the reason that some put God to the test, demanding signs and wonders [Mt. 4:1, 4:7 qtg. Deut. 6:16; Lk. 11:16; Jn. 4:48; 1 Cor. 1:22] not for the sake of salvation, but out of the sheer desire for experience.

35.56 In this vast thicket full of snares and dangers, see how many things I have cut off and driven away from my heart, as you have granted me the grace to do, O God of my salvation. [Ps. 17:47, 37:23, 50:16] Yet when do I dare to say—for all around us, every day of our lives, many things of this kind clamor for our attention—when do I dare to say that I am not drawn to gaze upon any such thing and captivated by some interest that amounts to nothing? Certainly the theater no longer has a grip on me; I have no interest in the courses of the stars; my soul has never sought answers from the shades of the departed; I detest all sacrilegious rites. The enemy has used so many tricks and insinuations to induce me to seek some sign from you, O Lord my God, before whom I ought to be a humble and guileless servant! But I beg you through our King and through Jerusalem our homeland, guileless and pure, that as consent is far from me now, so may it be always far from me, and ever further. But when I pray to you for someone’s salvation, my attention has a very different aim. You grant me, and you will continue to grant me, the grace to follow you gladly, whatever you choose to do with me.

35.57 Yet who can recount the many utterly trivial and contemptible things by which our curiosity is tempted every day, and how often we fall? We begin by indulging people who speak of worthless things—not wanting to offend those who are weak—but very soon we are gladly paying attention. I no longer watch a dog chasing a rabbit when it happens in the circus; but in the country, if I happen to encounter it, the pursuit might divert me from some important thought and turn me to the hunt itself. It is not the body of the animal I am riding, but the inclination of my own heart, that compels me. And unless you make my weakness evident to me and swiftly remind me either to rise above that sight by turning my thoughts to you or else to scorn the whole thing and pass on by it, I linger there like a fool. And why is it that when I am sitting at home, a lizard catching flies or a spider trapping the insects that get entangled in its webs so often captures my attention? Does the fact that the animals are small make any difference? I quickly move on from there to praising you, the wondrous Creator and Orderer of all things, but that is not what first drew my attention. It is one thing to get up quickly, quite another not to fall in the first place.

{194} My life is full of such distractions, and there is only one hope for me: your abundantly great mercy. [Ps. 85:13] For when our hearts become a repository for such things and carry the heavy weight of throngs of idle thoughts, our prayers are often interrupted and thrown into disorder; and in your presence, as we are directing the voice of our hearts to your ears, trivial thoughts rush in from who knows where and abruptly put an end to an act of such great importance.

36.48 Are we to regard this as a fault too small to be worth worrying about? Surely not. And is there anything that can restore our hope besides your mercy, which we have come to know because you have begun to change us? You know how much you have changed me. First you healed me from my passion for self-justification, so that you might also forgive all my other sins and heal all my infirmities, that you might redeem my life from corruption and crown me with mercy and loving-kindness, that you might satisfy my desire with good things. [Ps. 102:3–5] You have curbed my pride through fear of you, and you have bowed my neck in submission under your yoke. Now I bear that yoke, and it is easy upon me, just as you promised, just as you made it. [Mt. 11:30] And indeed it was always so, but I did not know this when I was afraid to take it upon me.

36.59 But you, O Lord, you alone exercise lordship without arrogance, for you alone are the true Lord, [Is. 37:20] and no one is lord over you. I ask you: has the third kind of temptation14 ever ceased to trouble me? Can it ever, over the course of my whole life, cease to trouble me? I mean the desire to be feared and loved by other people, for no other reason than that it brings a joy that is no true joy. It is a miserable life and revolting ostentation, the foremost reason that we fail to love you and to fear you with a holy fear; [Ps. 18:10] and so you resist the proud and give grace to the humble; [Jas. 4:6, 1 Pet. 5:5 / Ps. 17:14, 28:3 / Ps. 17:8] you thunder against worldly ambitions, and the foundations of the hills quake. The enemy of our true happiness aggressively sets traps for those of us who must be loved and feared by others for the sake of our duties in human society,15 scattering cries of “Well done! Well done, indeed!” everywhere we turn, so that when we eagerly receive such acclaim we are captured without even realizing it; we cease to find our joy in your truth but find it instead in human deceit. We enjoy being loved and feared, not on account of you, but instead of you. In this way the enemy—who resolved to establish his {195} throne in the north, [Is. 14:13] so that those who dwell in darkness and cold would be slaves to him as he imitates you in his perverse and distorted way—makes us like himself, not in the charity that binds all together in harmony, but as sharers in his punishment.

But we, O Lord, are your little flock; [Lk. 12:32 / Is. 26:13 VL] hold us in your safekeeping. Stretch forth your wings, and let us flee for refuge beneath them. Be our glory: let us be loved for your sake; let it be your word that people fear in us. Those who desire human praise and disparage you will find no one to defend them from your judgment, and you will not spare them from your condemnation. Even when praise is not being given to those who are sinners in the desires of their heart, or blessing to those who work iniquity, [Ps. 9:24] but instead people are being praised for some gift that you have given them, those who have greater joy in receiving praise than in having the gift for which they are praised are disparaging you in accepting such praise, and then the one who offers praise is better than the one who receives it. For the one who offers praise delights in God’s gift, but the one who receives it has more delight in the praise he receives from human beings than in the gift he has from God.

37.60 We are tested by these temptations every day, O Lord; we are endlessly tempted. Our daily furnace16 [Prov. 27:21; Wisd. 3:6] is the human tongue. You demand continence of us in this domain as well: grant what you command, and command what you will. You know the groaning of my heart [Ps. 37:9] and the streams of tears from my eyes in this matter. For it is not easy for me to know how far my cleansing from this plague has come, and I fear the hidden depths of my heart, [Ps. 18:13–14 / Sir. 15:20] which your eyes see clearly but mine do not. I have some sort of capacity to examine myself concerning the other temptations, but concerning this one I have almost none. I can see how far I have come with regard to the pleasures of the flesh and needless curiosity for knowledge by my power to hold my mind in check when I do without those things, either by choice or because they are not at hand: for I ask myself how much it disturbs me not to have them. Moreover, people seek wealth in order to give themselves over to one of these three passions, or to two, or to all of them; if the mind cannot perceive clearly whether it scorns to have wealth, one can simply give it away in order to put oneself to the test. But how can we do without praise, and how can we know by experience that we can do so? Surely we are not to lead bad lives, so abandoned and savage {196} that all who know us loathe us. Could anything more insane than that be said or thought? But if praise ordinarily does and should accompany a good life and good deeds, it is no more right to avoid such praise than to avoid the good life itself. Yet it is only when I must do without something that I perceive whether its absence pains me, or whether I bear it with a mind undisturbed.

37.61 What, then, do I confess to you, Lord, concerning this third kind of temptation? That I love praise? But I love truth even more than praise. For if someone asked me whether I would rather be a madman or completely astray in all things but praised by everyone, or else steadfast and utterly resolute in the truth but disparaged by everyone, it is clear to me what I would choose. Yet I would not want someone else’s words of approval to increase my joy in any good of mine. But it does, I admit; and more than that: disparagement dampens my joy. When this wretchedness troubles me, I fall into making excuses for myself; you know, O God, how far my self-exoneration is justified, but it perplexes me.

For you have demanded of us not only continence but also justice: continence in restraining our love for certain things, and justice in bestowing our love on others. You have willed that we love not only you but also our neighbor. [Mt. 22:37–39] It does often seem to me that when I take pleasure in the praise of someone with good discernment, I am taking pleasure in the progress or hope of my neighbor, or that when I hear my neighbor disparage something he does not understand or something that is good, I am pained by what is bad in him. For I am also sometimes pained by praise that I receive, when I am praised for things in me that displease me, or even when lesser, inconsequential goods receive greater approval than they deserve. But once again, how can I know whether I react in this way because I do not want the person praising me to contradict my own opinion of myself, not because I care about what is beneficial for him, but because the good things in me that give me pleasure are more enjoyable to me when they also please someone else? In a way I am not really being praised if the praise does not conform to my own judgment about myself, when qualities that I dislike receive praise or qualities that I like less receive greater praise. Am I not right, then, in saying that in this matter I am unsure of myself?

37.62 Behold, in you, O Truth, [Jn. 14:6] I see that I ought to be moved by praise not for my own sake, but for the sake of what is beneficial for my neighbor. But whether I am indeed moved for that reason, I do not know. In this matter I know myself less well than I know you. I beg you, my God: show me myself, so that I may confess to my brothers and sisters, who will pray for me, the wound that I discover in myself.

{197} Let me question myself again, and this time more sharply. If what moves me when I am praised is my neighbor’s benefit, why am I less moved if someone else is unjustly criticized than if I am? Why does an insult hurled at me sting more than one hurled at someone else in my presence when both insults are equally unfair? Do I really not know the answer? Is there any explanation left but this: I deceive myself, [Gal. 6:3] and in your presence I do not do what is true [Jn. 3:21; Eph. 4:15; 1 Jn. 1:6 / Prov. 30:8] in my heart and with my tongue? O Lord, put this madness far from me, lest my own words provide the oil of the sinful to swell my head. [Ps. 140:5]

38.63 I am poor and needy, [Ps. 39:18, 108:22] but I am better for the lamentation that is hidden deep within me, better for being discontented with myself and seeking your mercy until what is lacking in me is made whole again and brought to perfection so that I attain that peace that the eye of the arrogant cannot know. Yet the words that fall from our lips, and the deeds that draw attention from other people, present an exceedingly dangerous temptation because of our love for praise, a love that begs for applause and treasures every bit of it to inflate one’s sense of personal superiority. It is a temptation for me even when I condemn it in myself, precisely because I condemn it in myself—my contempt for empty pride becomes a source of pride that is emptier still, and so I am not really proud of my contempt for empty pride, for one does not really have contempt for what one is proud of.17

39.64 And within us, deep within us, is another evil that belongs to this same kind of temptation: those who are pleased with themselves, though they do not please others or even displease them and care nothing about pleasing others, grow worthless. But those who please themselves are greatly displeasing to you, not only by taking what is not good in them to be good, but even by taking the genuinely good things they have from you to be their own accomplishments; or even if they recognize that those good things are from you, they act as if they received them because they deserved them; or if they acknowledge that they have those good things by your grace, they do not share their joy in a spirit of fellowship, but grudge their gifts to others.

You see how my heart trembles in the face of all these temptations and struggles, and many others like them. It is not that I no longer suffer these wounds—this I know—but rather that again and again you heal me.

{198} 40.65 Where, O Truth, have you not walked with me, teaching me what I should avoid and what I should seek, whenever I have brought before you what I have been able to see here below and sought to learn from you? I have observed the world by my outward senses to the best of my ability, and turned my thoughts to myself, to the life of my body and to my senses themselves. From there I entered into the recesses of my memory, intricate expanses wondrously full of uncountable treasures, and I examined them and was filled with dread. [Hab. 3:2] Apart from you I could not have recognized any of them, and I found that not one of them was you. Nor was I you: I who found them, who passed through all of them and tried to distinguish them all and evaluate the worth of each. Some I received from the reports of my senses, and I questioned them. Others—the very senses that reported those things to me—were, I realized, part of myself; I distinguished them and named them one by one. Still others were found in the broad expanses of memory: some I examined thoroughly, some I put away, some I drew out into the open. But I, when I was doing all this, was not you, nor was the power by which I was doing it—that power also was not you. For you are the Light [Jn. 1:9, 8:12, 9:5, 12:46; 1 Jn. 1:5] that abides for ever, the Light from which I sought to learn about all these things—whether they exist, what they are, how much they are to be valued—and I heard you teaching and commanding.

And I return to you in this way often. It gives me great delight, and whenever I can have a respite from pressing duties, I take refuge in this pleasure. And in all the things through which I pass when I seek to learn from you, I find no safe place for my soul except in you, in whom the scattered fragments of myself are bound together, and no part of me will depart from you. And sometimes you lead me into a state of feeling quite unlike anything I ordinarily experience, a sweetness I cannot describe; if it should ever be brought to fullness in me, my life will be far different, though I cannot conceive what it will be like. But I fall back into ordinary things under the weight of my troubles; my usual affairs engross me again and hold me in their grip. My grief is powerful, but their grip on me is also powerful. How great is the burden of habit! I have strength to be here, where I do not want to be; I want to be elsewhere but lack the strength to go there; and for both these reasons I am wretched.

41.66 And so I have examined the infirmities of my sins according to this threefold lust,18 and I have called upon your right hand19 for my {199} salvation. For I have looked upon your glory with a wounded heart, and I reeled back and said, “Who can approach you?” I have been cast away from the sight of your eyes. [Ps. 30:23 / Jn. 14:6] You are the Truth that presides over all things, and I in my greed did not want to lose you, but I wanted to possess you alongside a lie, just as no one wants to say what is false in such a way that he loses his grip on what is true. And so I lost you, because you would not stoop to be possessed in company with a lie.

42.67 Was there anyone I could find to reconcile me with you? Was I to solicit help from angels? By what prayer? By what rites? Many who seek to return to you but lack the strength to do so by themselves have tried these things—so I hear—and they have fallen into a desire to pry into visions that do not concern them;20 they have been justly rewarded with delusions.21 For they sought you in pride, puffing out their chests in the arrogance of their teaching instead of beating their breasts,22 and they drew to themselves the powers of this air, [Eph. 2:2] whose hearts were like their own, as co-conspirators and companions in their pride. These powers deceived them through magic: they looked for a mediator through whom they could be made pure, but there was none to be found. For it was the devil, transforming himself into an angel of light. [2 Cor. 11:14] How great an enticement it was for proud flesh that the devil had no fleshly body! For they were mortal and sinful; but you, O Lord, with whom in their pride they sought to be reconciled, are immortal and sinless.

Now a mediator between God and humanity [1 Tim. 2:5] must have some likeness to God and some likeness to humanity: if he were like humanity in both respects, he would be far from God, and if he were like God in both respects, he would be far from humanity, and so he would not be a mediator. That is why the false mediator by whom their pride was deservedly deceived, according to your hidden judgments, has something in common with humanity, namely, sin, and wants to appear to have something in common with God: he presents himself as {200} being immortal because he is not clothed in the mortality of flesh. But because the wages of sin is death, [Rom. 6:23] what he has in common with human beings means that he, like them, is condemned to die.

43.68 But by your hidden mercy you have given conclusive testimony to the true Mediator and sent him to human beings so that by his example they might learn humility. The Mediator between God and humanity, the man Christ Jesus, [1 Tim. 2:5] has appeared, standing in between mortal sinners and the immortal Righteous One: mortal like human beings, righteous like God. And so, because the wages of righteousness is life and peace, [Rom. 8:6] by the righteousness he shared with God he emptied death of its power [2 Tim. 1:10 / Rom. 4:5] for the wicked whom he made righteous, whose death he chose to share. The saints of old received conclusive testimony of him so that by faith in his future suffering they might be saved, [Rom. 4:5; 1 Tim. 2:4] just as we have been saved by faith in his past suffering. He is Mediator insofar as he is human; but insofar as he is the Word, he is not intermediate: no, he is equal to God, [Phil. 2:6 / Jn. 1:1] God with God, and at once one God.

43.69     How much you have loved us, good Father, who did not spare

           your only Son, [Rom. 8:32 / Rom. 5:6] but gave him up for us, the ungodly!

      How much you have loved us!

    It was for our sake that he, who did not regard equality with you as something to be exploited,23 [Phil. 2:6] became obedient even unto death on a cross. [Phil. 2:8 ]

      He alone among the dead was free, [Ps. 87:6]
because he had the power to lay down his life and he had the power to take it up [Jn. 10:18] again.

      It was for our sake that he was victor and victim before you:
victor precisely because he was victim.

      It was for our sake that he was priest and sacrifice before you:
priest precisely because he was sacrifice. [Heb. 7:27]

      By being born of you to be our servant, he made us no longer servants, but sons and daughters. [Gal. 4:7]

      My hope in him is strong, and rightly so,
for you will heal all my infirmities [Ps. 102:3] through him who sits at your right hand and intercedes with you for us. [Rom. 8:34]

      {201} Otherwise I would be in despair,
for many and great are my infirmities,
many and great;
but your medicine is yet more abundant.

      We could have thought that your Word is far from any ­fellowship with human beings and so have fallen into despair,
had he not become flesh and dwelt among us. [Jn. 1:14]

 

43.70     Terrified by my sins and by the burden of my wretchedness,

          I was greatly troubled at heart,
and I had a mind to flee into solitude;
but you prevented me.

      You gave me strength, saying, “Christ died for all,
so that they might live no longer for themselves,
but for him who died for [2 Cor. 5:15] them.”

      Behold, O Lord, I cast my care upon you that [Ps. 54:23; 1 Pet. 5:7] I may live,
and I will meditate on the wonders of your [Ps. 118:18] law.

      You know my ignorance and [Ps. 24:5, 142:10] weakness:
teach me and heal [Ps. 6:3, 102:3] me.

      Your only Son, in whom are hidden all the treasures
of wisdom and [Col. 2:3] knowledge,
has redeemed me by [Rev. 5:9] his blood.

      Let not the proud deride [Ps. 118:22] me,
for I think upon the price [1 Cor. 6:20, 7:23] that has been paid for me,
and I eat it and drink it and [Jn. 6:54, 55, 57; 1 Cor. 10:31, 11:29] give it away;
poor man that I am,
I long to have my fill [Lk. 16:20–21] of it
among those who eat and are satisfied.

      And those who seek the [Ps. 21:27] Lord praise him.

1. Anaximenes was a pre-Socratic philosopher who taught that air was the first principle of all things.

2. Not “as though they were present”—there is no deception involved, no unclarity about the fact that these things are merely anticipations of the future; but “as present,” meaning, with the same directness and immediacy that characterizes the perception of things that are actually present.

3. “-ito” is a suffix denoting repeated or intense action. Thus, ago is “I act,” and agito is “I put into motion, impel”; facio is “I do” and factito is “I do frequently/habitually.” Augustine’s etymology, derived from Varro, posits the same relationship between cogo, “I gather,” and cogito, usually translated “I think,” but originally meaning (on this account) “I gather again and again.”

4. Augustine takes this list from Cicero, who gets it from the Stoics.

5. The Parable of the Lost Coin (one of ten coins) immediately follows the Parable of the Lost Sheep (one of a hundred) and immediately precedes the Parable of the Prodigal Son (one of two).

6. Terence, Andria 68: “For in these days flattery wins friends but truth breeds hate.”

7. Augustine does not finish the quotation: “I went to God and implored him.” That Augustine leaves off the conclusion—therefore I prayed for continence—recalls his earlier failure to ask for God to give him continence (6.11.20). But why leave it off here? Perhaps because the first two sentences of the paragraph (which will be repeated, in reverse order and with some variation of vocabulary, at the end of the paragraph) have already implicitly stated that prayer; perhaps because at this point Augustine is not interested in his past prayer (“I went . . . and implored”) but in what continues to need prayer.

8. Whenever possible I translate homo as “human being(s)” rather than “man” in order to avoid unnecessarily gendered language, but the masculine singular pronoun is important here, since Augustine is speaking of Paul as a kind of everyman; the masculine singular also allows the echo from the Prodigal Son story (at the end of this sentence) to be heard properly.

9. “your words”: eloquia tua, an expression frequent in Psalm 118, where it often has the sense “your promises” (thus, “word” as in “I give you my word”).

10. “whenever”: cum. Alternatively, “because,” which O’Donnell (III:219) describes as “on balance the more likely reading” and which is adopted by several translators. But Augustine has already told us that he does not always have (what he takes to be) the right kind of pleasure in church music, so “because” seems to go too far. Rather, he recognizes the utility of church music when he takes the right kind of pleasure in it—the kind of pleasure he had in his earliest days as a Christian.

11. Joseph brought his sons before Jacob in such a way that the firstborn, Manasseh, would be at Jacob’s right and the second son, Ephraim, at his left. But Jacob, over Joseph’s objections, laid his right hand on Ephraim and his left on Manasseh, prophesying that Ephraim would be greater than Manasseh.

12. From Ambrose’s evening hymn: see 9.12.32.

13. “inquisitive”: curiosa, but “curious” could be misread here as bearing the sense “peculiar, odd.”

14. That is, ambitio saeculi, worldly ambition, the third of the three temptations listed in 1 John 2:16.

15. Augustine particularly has in mind himself and his role as bishop, but he speaks here in the first-person plural.

16. The image of the furnace in which gold is purified is frequent in the wisdom literature of Scripture as a simile for testing and temptation. See, for example, Proverbs 27:21, “As the crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold, so a man is tested by the mouth of one who praises him”; Wisdom 3:6, “Like gold in a furnace he tested them.”

17. ”Proud” and “pride” here translate various forms of the noun gloria and the verb glorior, which I usually translate as “boast/boasting.” Clearly in the background here is the Scriptural injunction, “Let the one who boasts (gloriatur), boast in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:31, 2 Corinthians 10:17).

18. That is, under the general headings of the three sins named in 1 John 2:16: the lust of the flesh (10.30.41–10.34.53), the lust of the eyes (10.35.54–10.35.57), and worldly ambition (10.36.58–10.39.64).

19. “your right hand”: Christ. See 11.29.39.

20. “desire to pry into visions that do not concern them”: desiderium curiosarum visionum, that is, the desire for visions that are objects of the vice of curiosity.

21. Augustine is speaking of the neo-Platonic practice of theurgy, religious ritual aimed at self-purification and union with the One.

22. An outward sign of repentance, still seen in Christian liturgy. (It is prescribed, for example, at certain points in the Roman Rite, and many Anglicans make the gesture at the words “And although we are unworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto thee any sacrifice” in Cranmer’s Eucharistic Prayer.) The gesture calls to mind the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in Luke 18:9–14, in which the tax collector, “standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’” Augustine comments in Sermon 67.1.1, “What is it to beat one’s breast? Just this: to disclose what is in one’s breast (pectus) and to chastise one’s own hidden sin by an outwardly visible blow.”

23. “who did not regard equality with you as something to be exploited”: non rapinam arbitratus esse aequalis tibi. The reading of the Authorized Version, “thought it not robbery to be equal with [you],” gives a literal translation of the Latin text, but its sense is obscure to a contemporary reader.