Book 1: Infancy and Childhood
1. Great are you, Lord, and greatly to be praised. Great is your power, and your wisdom has no end. And a human being, a part of your creation, desires to praise you, though he carries his mortality with him, the witness of his sin and the witness that you “resistest the proud.” Yet this human being, this part of your creation, desires to praise you. You awaken us to delight in praising you, for you made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
Lord, teach me to know and understand which should come first: calling on you or praising you, and knowing you or calling on you. But who calls on you without knowing you? For someone who does not know you may call on you as though you were something other than you are. Or perhaps we call on you so that we may know you. “But how shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? or how shall they believe without a preacher?” Those who seek the Lord will praise him, for those who seek will find him, and those who find him will praise him. Let me seek you, Lord, by calling on you, and call on you by believing in you, for you have been preached to us. Lord, my faith calls on you, the faith you have given me and breathed into me through the incarnation of your Son and the ministry of your preacher.
2. How shall I call upon my God, my God and my Lord? For when I call on him, I ask him to come into me. And what place is there in me into which my God can come? Where can God come within me, even the God who made heaven and earth? Is there anything in me, Lord my God, that can contain you? Do heaven and earth, which you made and in which you made me, truly contain you? Or, since nothing could exist without you, does everything that exists contain you?
Why, then, do I ask you to come into me, since I already exist and could not exist if you were not in me? I am not yet in hell, but you are even there, for “if I go down into hell Thou art there.” Therefore I could not exist, could not exist at all, my God, unless you were in me. Or should I say instead that I could not exist unless I were in you, from whom, through whom, and in whom all things exist? Yes, Lord, it is so. Where do I call you to, since you are in me? From where could you come into me? Where outside heaven and earth could I go, so that from there my God might come into me, when you have said, “I fill heaven and earth”?
3. Since you fill heaven and earth, do they contain you? Or, because they do not contain you, do you fill them while some part of you remains beyond them? And when heaven and earth are filled, where do you pour out what remains of you? Or do you, who contain all things, have no need to be contained by anything, since you fill the things you fill by containing them?
The vessels you fill do not support you, for even if they were broken, you would not be poured out. When you are poured out upon us, you are not cast down, but we are lifted up. You are not scattered, but we are gathered together. Yet since you fill all things, do you fill them with your whole self? Or, because all things together cannot contain the whole of you, do they contain only a part? Do they all contain the same part at once, or does each contain its own part, the greater things more and the smaller things less? Is one part of you greater and another smaller? Or are you wholly present everywhere, while nothing contains you wholly?
4. What, then, are you, my God? What are you, I ask, but the Lord God? “For who is Lord but the Lord? or who is God save our God?” You are most high, most excellent, most powerful, most omnipotent, most merciful and most just; most hidden and most near; most beautiful and most strong. You are stable, yet contained by nothing; unchangeable, yet changing all things; never new and never old. You make all things new, yet bring old age upon the proud without their knowing it. You are always at work, yet always at rest; gathering, yet needing nothing; sustaining, pervading, and protecting; creating, nourishing, and developing; seeking, yet possessing all things.
You love without burning with passion. You are jealous, yet free from anxiety. You repent without sorrow and are angry while remaining serene. You change your works without changing your purpose. You recover what you find, though you have never lost it. You are never in need, yet rejoice in gain; never covetous, yet you require interest. More than enough is given to you so that you may owe, yet who possesses anything that is not yours? You pay debts while owing nothing, and when you forgive debts, you lose nothing.
Yet, my God, my life and my holy joy, what have I said? What can anyone say when speaking of you? Still, woe to those who remain silent, since even those who say the most are as though mute.
5. How shall I find rest in you? Who will bring you into my heart to intoxicate it, so that I may forget my sorrows and embrace you, my only good? What are you to me? Have compassion on me so that I may speak. And what am I to you, that you command me to love you and, unless I do, are angry with me and threaten me with great sorrows? Is it such a small sorrow merely not to love you?
Alas, alas! In your compassion, Lord my God, tell me what you are to me. “Say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.” Speak so that I may hear. Look, Lord, the ears of my heart are before you. Open them and “say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.” When I hear, may I run and take hold of you. Do not hide your face from me. Let me die, lest I die, if only I may see your face.
6. The dwelling of my soul is cramped. Enlarge it so that you may enter. It lies in ruins; restore it. There are things in it that must offend your eyes. I confess and know this, but who will cleanse it? To whom shall I cry but you? “Cleanse me from my secret sins, O Lord,” and keep your servant from the sins of others. I believe, and therefore I speak. Lord, you know. Have I not confessed my transgressions to you, my God, and have you not put away the wickedness of my heart?
I do not contend with you in judgment, for you are the Truth. Nor would I deceive myself, lest my wickedness lie against itself. Therefore I do not contend with you in judgment, for “if Thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?”
7. Still, allow me to speak before your mercy, though I am only “dust and ashes.” Allow me to speak, for it is your mercy I address, not some mocking human being. Perhaps even you laugh at me, but when you turn toward me, you will have compassion on me.
What do I wish to say, Lord my God, except that I do not know where I came from into this life, if I should call it a dying life or a living death? Yet the comforts of your mercy sustained me, as I have heard from my parents, from whose substance you formed me, since I cannot remember it myself. I was received by the comfort of human milk. Neither my mother nor my nurses filled their own breasts; through them, you gave me the nourishment of infancy, according to your ordinance and the bounty underlying all things.
You caused me not to desire more than you gave, and caused those who nourished me willingly to give what you had given them. By an instinctive affection, they desired to give me what you had abundantly supplied. It was good for them that my good came through them, though it did not come from them, but only by them. All good things come from you, God, and all my safety comes from my God. I discovered this later, as you revealed yourself to me through the blessings within and around me that you bestowed upon me. At that time, I knew only how to suck, to be content when comfortable, and to cry when in pain. Nothing more.
8. Afterward I began to laugh, first in my sleep and then while awake. I have been told this about myself, and I believe it, though I cannot remember it, because we see the same thing in other infants.
Little by little, I became aware of where I was and wanted to make my wishes known to those who might satisfy them, but I could not. My wants were within me, while they were outside me and could not enter my soul by any ability of their own. So I tossed my limbs and cried out, making the few feeble signs I could, which resembled what I wanted, though not very closely. When I was not satisfied, either because I was not understood or because what I wanted would have harmed me, I became indignant that my elders were not subject to me and that people on whom I had no claim did not wait upon me. I took revenge on them with tears.
I have learned that infants behave like this by watching them. Though they knew nothing, they showed me more clearly what I had been than my nurses, who knew me then, could have done.
9. My infancy died long ago, and I am alive. But you, Lord, live forever, and in you nothing dies. Before the world existed, and indeed before anything that can be called “before,” you existed. You are the God and Lord of all your creatures. In you remain fixed the causes of all unstable things, the unchanging sources of everything changeable, and the eternal reasons for all irrational and temporal things.
Tell me, God, as I plead with you. Merciful one, tell your miserable servant whether my infancy followed another age of mine that had already perished. Was it the time I spent in my mother’s womb? Something of that life has been made known to me, and I have seen pregnant women myself. And what, my God and my joy, came before that life? Was I anywhere? Was I anyone? No one can tell me these things, neither father nor mother, the experience of others, nor my own memory. Do you laugh at me for asking such things and command me to praise and confess you for what I do know?
10. I thank you, Lord of heaven and earth, and praise you for my first existence and infancy, of which I have no memory. You have enabled a person to draw conclusions about himself from others and to believe many things about himself on the authority of frail women.
Even then I had life and being. As my infancy ended, I was already looking for signs by which I could make my feelings known to others. Where could such a creature come from but you, Lord? Can anyone be skillful enough to fashion himself? Is there any other channel through which being and life flow into us except that “Thou, O Lord, hast made us”? In you, being and life are one, because you yourself are being and life in the highest degree.
You are supreme, and “Thou changest not.” This present day does not come to an end in you, though it comes to an end within you, since all such things exist in you. They would have no way to pass away unless you sustained them. Since “Thy years shall have no end,” your years are one ever-present day. How many of our days and our ancestors’ days have passed through this day of yours, receiving from it their measure and form of being! Other days still to come will receive the same and pass away. “But Thou art the same.” Everything of tomorrow and all the days to come you will do today, and everything of yesterday and all the days past you have done today.
What does it matter to me if someone does not understand? Let him still rejoice and ask, “What is this?” Let him rejoice even then and prefer to find you while failing to discover, rather than to discover and yet fail to find you.
11. Hear me, God! Alas for the sins of humanity! A human being says this, and you have compassion on him, for you created him but did not create the sin within him. Who brings the sin of my infancy to my remembrance? Before you no one is free from sin, not even an infant who has lived only one day upon the earth. Who reminds me of it? Is it not every little child in whom I see what I cannot remember about myself?
In what, then, did I sin? Was it that I cried for the breast? If I cried that way now, not for the breast but for food suited to my age, I would rightly be laughed at and rebuked. What I did then deserved rebuke, but because I could not understand those who rebuked me, neither custom nor reason allowed me to be rebuked. As we grow, we root out and cast away such habits. I have never seen a wise person, when purging something, throw away what is good.
Or was it good, even at that age, to strive by crying to obtain something that would have harmed me if it were given? Was it good to be bitterly indignant that free people older than I, those to whom I owed my existence, and many others wiser than I would not obey my slightest wish? Was it good to struggle as hard as I could to harm them because they would not obey commands that could only have been obeyed to my injury? The innocence of infants lies in the weakness of their limbs, not in their will.
I have seen and known an infant to be jealous, though it could not speak. It grew pale and looked bitterly at its foster brother. Who does not know this? Mothers and nurses tell us that they cure such behavior by remedies of one kind or another. Can it be called innocence when, though the fountain of milk flows fresh and abundantly, one needy child will not allow another to share it, even though the other needs that nourishment to live?
Yet we look leniently on these things, not because they are not faults or because the faults are small, but because they will disappear with age. Though such behavior may be tolerated now, you could not calmly endure it in an older person.
12. Therefore, Lord my God, you gave life to the infant. As we see, you endowed its body with senses, joined it together with limbs, beautified its form, and introduced all its vital energies for its general good and safety. You command me to praise you for these things, “to give thanks unto the Lord, and to sing praise unto Thy name, O Most High.” You are an omnipotent and good God, even if you had done nothing but these things, which no one but you can do. You alone made all things, most beautiful one; you made all things beautiful and ordered them according to your law.
This period of my life, Lord, which I do not remember, which I believe on the word of others and infer from other infants, I am reluctant, though the inference is sound, to count as part of the life I lead in this world. In the darkness of my forgetfulness, it resembles the time I passed in my mother’s womb. But if “I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me,” where, my God, where or when was I, your servant, innocent? But I pass over that time. What do I have to do with it, when I can recall no memories of it?
13. Did I not grow out of infancy and enter boyhood? Or rather, did boyhood come to me and succeed infancy? My infancy did not go anywhere, yet it no longer remained, because I was no longer a speechless infant but a talking boy.
I remember this, and later I observed how I had learned to speak. My elders did not teach me words by a set method, as they later taught me letters. With the mind you gave me, my God, I stored sounds in my memory. I had been unable to express everything I wanted to whomever I wished, except through whimpering, broken sounds, and various motions of my limbs with which I tried to enforce my wishes. When people named something and moved their bodies toward it as they spoke, I saw and understood that the object they pointed out was called by the name they uttered.
Their bodily movements made their meaning clear through the natural language shared by all peoples: facial expression, glances of the eyes, movements of other limbs, and tones of voice revealing the mind’s feelings as it seeks, possesses, rejects, or avoids something. By repeatedly hearing words placed properly in different sentences, I gradually learned what things they signified. Once I had trained my mouth to pronounce these signs, I used them to express my will.
In this way I exchanged with those around me the signs by which we express our wishes and advanced more deeply into the stormy fellowship of human life, still depending on the authority of my parents and the direction of my elders.
14. My God, what miseries and mockeries I experienced then! Obedience to my teachers was set before me as proper for a boy, so that I might prosper in this world and distinguish myself through the art of speech, which would win honor among people and deceitful riches. I was sent to school to gain learning whose purpose I, worthless as I was, did not understand. Yet if I was slow to learn, I was beaten. Our ancestors considered this praiseworthy, and many who had passed through the same course before us established these troublesome paths along which we were compelled to travel, multiplying labor and sorrow for the sons of Adam.
But we found people praying to you, Lord, and from them we learned, as far as we were able, to think of you as some great being who, though invisible to our senses, could hear and help us. As a boy I began to pray to you, my “help” and my “refuge.” In calling on you, I loosened the bonds of my tongue, and though I was little, I earnestly begged you not to let me be beaten at school. When you did not hear me, though by refusing you did not abandon me to foolishness, my elders and even my own parents, who wished me no harm, laughed at the beatings that were then a great and grievous evil to me.
15. Is there anyone, Lord, so high-minded and united to you by so strong an affection, though even a kind of dullness might produce such courage, that through devout attachment to you he can make light of racks, hooks, and other varied tortures? Throughout the world, people plead with you in great fear to be spared such things. Could anyone mock those who fear them bitterly, as our parents mocked the torments our teachers inflicted on us as boys?
We feared our pains no less and prayed to you no less earnestly to escape them. Yet we sinned by writing, reading, or thinking about our lessons less than was required of us. We did not lack memory or ability, Lord, for by your will we had enough for our age. But we delighted only in play, and we were punished for this by people who were doing much the same themselves. The idleness of adults is called business, while boys who behave in the same way are punished by those adults, and no one pities either boys or men.
Would any sensible person approve of my being beaten because, as a boy, I played ball and was therefore slower to learn lessons by which, as a man, I would play more shameful games? The man who beat me did much the same. If he was defeated in some minor dispute with a fellow teacher, he was more tormented by anger and envy than I was when a playmate defeated me in a ball game.
16. Yet I did wrong, Lord God, Creator and Governor of everything in nature, though only the governor, not the creator, of sin. I did wrong, Lord my God, by acting against the wishes of my parents and teachers. Whatever their motives, I might afterward have used well the learning they wanted me to acquire.
I disobeyed them not because I had chosen a better path, but because I loved play. I loved the honor of victory in contests and loved having my ears tickled by lying tales, making them itch still more fiercely. The same curiosity shone increasingly through my eyes toward the shows and sports of my elders. Yet those who provide such entertainments are held in such high esteem that nearly everyone desires that distinction for his children. At the same time, they are willing to have their children beaten if those games keep them from the studies through which the parents hope they will someday become providers of the same entertainments.
Look down on these things with compassion, Lord, and deliver us who now call upon you. Deliver those also who do not call upon you, so that they may call upon you and you may deliver them.
17. Even as a boy I had heard of the eternal life promised to us through the humility of the Lord our God, who stooped down to our pride. I was marked with the sign of his cross and seasoned with his salt from my mother’s womb, for she greatly trusted in you.
You saw, Lord, how once, while I was still a boy, I was suddenly seized by stomach pains and came near death. You saw, my God, for even then you were my keeper, with what intensity of mind and what faith I asked my devout mother and your Church, the mother of us all, for the baptism of your Christ, my Lord and my God. My earthly mother was deeply troubled. With a heart pure in your faith, she labored more lovingly to give birth to my eternal salvation, and if I had not quickly recovered, she would immediately have arranged for me to be initiated and washed by your life-giving sacraments, confessing you, Lord Jesus, for the forgiveness of sins.
So my cleansing was postponed, as though, if I lived, I would inevitably become further polluted, because the guilt contracted by sin after baptism would be greater and more dangerous. At that time, I believed together with my mother and the whole household except my father. Yet he did not overcome my mother’s devout influence upon me or prevent me from believing in Christ, though he had not yet believed in him. She desired that you, my God, should be my Father rather than he, and in this you helped her overcome her husband. Though she was the better of the two, she obeyed him, because in doing so she obeyed you, who commanded it.
18. I beg you, my God, and would gladly know, if it is your will, why my baptism was postponed. Was it for my good that the reins were loosened, as it were, so that I might sin? Or were they not loosened? If they were not, why do we still hear on every side, “Leave him alone. Let him do as he likes, for he is not yet baptized”? Yet when bodily health is at stake, no one cries, “Let him be wounded still more seriously, for he has not yet been cured!”
How much better it would have been for me to be healed at once, and then, through my own diligence and that of my friends, to keep my soul’s restored health safe under your protection, for you had given it. Better indeed. But my mother foresaw the many great waves of temptation that seemed to hang over me beyond childhood. She preferred that the unformed clay should be exposed to them rather than the finished image.
19. During my childhood, which was much less feared for me than my youth, I did not love learning and hated being forced to study. Yet I was forced, and this was good for me, though I did not act well, for I would not have learned unless compelled. No one does well against his will, even when what he does is good.
Those who forced me did not themselves act well, but the good done to me came from you, my God. They did not consider how I would use what they compelled me to learn, except to satisfy the disordered desires of a wealthy poverty and a shameful glory. But you, by whom the very hairs of our heads are numbered, used for my good the error of everyone who pressed me to learn. You also used my unwillingness to learn as my punishment, which I deserved, though I was so small a boy and so great a sinner.
Thus, through the actions of those who did not act well, you did good for me, and by my own sin you justly punished me. For you have ordained that every disordered affection carries its own punishment.
20. What caused my dislike of Greek literature, which I studied from boyhood, I still cannot understand. I greatly loved Latin, though not the Latin taught by my first instructors, but what the teachers of grammar taught. I considered the elementary lessons of reading, writing, and arithmetic just as burdensome and punishing as Greek.
Where did this attitude come from except the sin and vanity of this life? For I was “but flesh, a wind that passeth away and cometh not again.” Those elementary lessons were certainly better because they were more dependable. Through them I gained, and still retain, the power to read whatever I find written and to write whatever I wish. In the other lessons, I was compelled to learn about the wanderings of a certain Aeneas while forgetting my own wanderings, and to weep for the dead Dido because she killed herself for love. At the same time, with dry eyes I endured my own wretched self dying far from you amid those things, God, my life.
21. What can be more wretched than a wretch who does not pity himself? I shed tears over Dido’s death for love of Aeneas, but shed none over my own death in not loving you, God, light of my heart, bread of the inward mouth of my soul, and power that joins my mind to my innermost thoughts.
I did not love you and committed fornication against you, while those around me who behaved in the same way cried, “Well done! Well done!” Friendship with this world is fornication against you, and people cry, “Well done! Well done!” until someone is ashamed not to be that kind of person. I shed no tears for this, though I wept for Dido, who sought death at the sword’s point. Meanwhile, having forsaken you, I sought the lowest of your creatures, earth tending toward earth. If I was forbidden to read these stories, I grieved because I was not permitted to read what made me grieve. Such madness is considered a more honorable and fruitful education than the learning by which I learned to read and write.
22. But now, my God, cry out to my soul, and let your Truth say to me, “It is not so, it is not so. That first teaching was much better.” I would rather forget the wanderings of Aeneas and all such stories than forget how to read and write.
It is true that a veil hangs over the entrance to the grammar school, but it is less a sign of majestic mystery than a covering for error. Let those whom I no longer fear not cry out against me while I confess to you, my God, what my soul desires and agree to condemn my evil ways so that I may love your good ways. Nor let those who buy or sell grammatical learning cry out against me.
If I ask them whether it is true, as the poet says, that Aeneas once came to Carthage, the uneducated will answer that they do not know, while the educated will deny that it is true. But if I ask with which letters the name Aeneas is written, everyone who has learned to write will answer correctly, in accordance with the conventional agreement people have reached about these signs. Again, if I ask which loss would cause the greater inconvenience in our lives, forgetting how to read and write or forgetting these poetic fictions, who cannot see how everyone who has not completely forgotten himself would answer?
I was wrong, then, when as a boy I preferred those vain studies to the more useful ones, or rather, when I loved one and hated the other. “One and one are two, two and two are four” was truly a hateful song to me, while the wooden horse full of armed men, the burning of Troy, and the “spectral image” of Creusa were a most delightful spectacle of vanity.
23. Why, then, did I dislike Greek learning, which was filled with similar tales? Homer too was skilled at inventing such stories and was most sweetly vain, yet as a boy I found him disagreeable. I believe Virgil would have seemed the same to Greek children if they had been forced to learn him as I was forced to learn Homer.
The difficulty, the sheer difficulty, of learning a foreign language mixed gall into all the sweetness of those fabulous Greek stories. I did not understand a single word, and to make me understand, my teachers drove me on with cruel threats and punishments.
There was also a time in infancy when I knew no Latin, but I learned it without fear or torment, simply by paying attention amid my nurses’ caresses, the jokes of those who smiled at me, and the playfulness of those who amused me. I learned it without the pressure of punishment. My own heart urged me to express its thoughts, which I could not do without learning words, not from formal teachers but from people who talked to me. Into their ears I, in turn, brought forth whatever I perceived.
From this it is clear that free curiosity has more power to help us learn such things than fearful compulsion. Yet compulsion restrains the excesses of that freedom through your laws, God. From the schoolmaster’s rod to the martyr’s trials, your laws effectively mix in a healing bitterness that calls us back to you from the destructive pleasures that lure us away.
24. Hear my prayer, Lord. Do not let my soul grow faint under your discipline, and do not let me grow weary of confessing your mercies, by which you have saved me from all my most harmful ways. May you become sweeter to me than all the enticements I once followed. May I love you entirely, take hold of your hand with my whole heart, and be delivered by you from every temptation to the very end.
Lord, my King and my God, let every useful thing I learned as a boy be devoted to your service: what I speak, write, and count. Even when I learned vain things, you gave me your discipline, and you have forgiven my sinful delight in those vanities. I learned many useful words through them, but those words can also be learned through things that are not vain, and that is the safe path for the young to follow.
25. But woe to you, stream of human custom! Who will stop your course? How long will it be before you run dry? How long will you carry the sons of Eve down into that vast and terrifying ocean, which even those who have embarked upon the cross can scarcely cross?
Do I not read in you about Jove, the thunderer and adulterer? He certainly could not be both, but the fictitious thunder served as a cloak, giving people authority to imitate real adultery. Yet which of our robed teachers will listen calmly to a man from his own school who cries, “These were Homer’s fictions; he transfers things human to the gods. I could have wished him to transfer divine things to us”? It would have been truer to say, “These were indeed his inventions, but he attributed divine qualities to sinful people so that crimes would not be considered crimes, and so that whoever committed them would seem to imitate the gods of heaven rather than abandoned men.”
26. Yet into you, stream of hell, the sons of men are thrown, and they are rewarded for learning these things. It is treated as a matter of great importance when this occurs publicly in the forum, under laws that provide a salary in addition to the students’ rewards. You beat against your rocks and roar, “This is where words are learned. This is where eloquence is attained, which is essential for persuading people to your opinion and explaining your thoughts.”
So, apparently, we could never have understood such words as “golden shower,” “bosom,” “intrigue,” and “highest heavens,” or other words written in the same passage, unless Terence had brought a worthless young man onto the stage and made Jove his example of lust:
“Viewing a picture, where the tale was drawn, Of Jove’s descending in a golden shower To Danaë’s bosom . . . with a woman to intrigue.”
See how he excites himself to lust as though supported by heavenly authority when he says:
“Great Jove, Who shakes the highest heavens with his thunder, And I, poor mortal man, not do the same! I did it, and with all my heart I did it.”
The words are not learned any more easily because of this filth, but through the words the filth is committed with greater confidence. I do not blame the words, which are like choice and precious vessels, but the wine of error poured into them for us by drunken teachers. If we refused to drink, we were beaten, and we had no freedom to appeal to a sober judge.
Yet, my God, in whose presence I can now safely remember these things, I learned them willingly and with delight, unhappy as I was, and for this I was called a boy of great promise.
27. Bear with me, my God, while I say a little about the abilities you gave me and the follies on which I wasted them. An assignment troubling enough to my soul was set before me, with praise as my hope and shame or beatings as my fear. I had to speak the words of Juno as she raged and grieved that she could not
“Latium bar From all approaches of the Dardan king,”
even though I had heard that Juno never spoke those words. We were compelled to wander in the footsteps of these poetic fictions and to turn into prose what the poet had written in verse. The student received the greatest praise when, in keeping with the reputation of the characters portrayed, he reproduced the emotions of anger and grief most vividly and clothed them in the most fitting language.
But what does it matter to me, my true Life and my God, that my recitation was applauded more than those of many contemporaries and fellow students? Was all this not smoke and wind? Was there nothing else on which I could exercise my intelligence and speech? Your praise, Lord, your praises through your Scriptures, might have supported the tender shoots of my heart. Then it would not have been dragged away by these empty trifles, a shameful prey for the birds of the air. For people sacrifice to fallen angels in more than one way.
28. Why should it be surprising that I was carried away toward vanity and departed from you, my God, when the people held up for me to imitate behaved like this? If, while relating some action of their own that was not itself evil, they committed a barbarism or solecism, they were embarrassed when corrected. But when they delivered a full and ornate speech, in well-chosen words, about their own immoral behavior, they boasted when applauded.
You see this, Lord, and remain silent, “long-suffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth.” Will you remain silent forever? Even now you draw from this vast deep the soul that seeks you and thirsts for your delights, whose “heart said unto Thee,” I have sought Thy face; “Thy face, Lord, will I seek.” I was far from your face because of my darkened affections.
We do not turn away from you or return to you by moving our feet or changing our location. Did the younger son need horses, chariots, or ships? Did he fly away on visible wings or travel by moving his limbs in order to waste in a distant country everything you had given him when he departed? You were a kind Father when you gave, and kinder still when he returned destitute. Distance from your face lies in wanton, that is, darkened affections.
29. Look, Lord God, and watch patiently, as you always do, how diligently the sons of men observe conventional rules of letters and syllables received from earlier speakers, while neglecting the eternal rules of everlasting salvation received from you. Someone who follows or teaches the inherited rules of pronunciation will offend people more by saying uman being without aspirating the first letter, contrary to grammatical usage, than by being a human being who hates another human being in defiance of your commandments.
It is as if anyone could believe that an enemy might be more destructive to him than the hatred that inflames him against that enemy, or that he could destroy the person he persecutes more completely than his own hostility destroys his soul. No knowledge of letters is more deeply written within us than the writing of conscience: that a person is doing to another what he himself would not endure.
How mysterious you are, God, the only great one, who silently “dwellest on high” and by an unwearied law impose the punishment of blindness upon unlawful desires! When a man seeking a reputation for eloquence stands before a human judge, surrounded by a crowded multitude, and attacks his enemy with the fiercest hatred, he watches most carefully that his tongue does not slip into a grammatical error. Yet he takes no care that the fury of his spirit does not cut one human being off from another.
30. These were the customs into which I, an unhappy boy, was cast. On that arena, I was more afraid of committing a barbarism than, after committing one, of envying those who had not. I declare and confess to you, my God, the things for which I was applauded by those whom I then believed it was my whole duty to please. I did not see the gulf of disgrace into which I had been cast, far from your eyes.
What was more disgraceful in your sight than I already was? I even displeased people like myself, deceiving my tutor, teachers, and parents with countless lies because I loved play, desired to see frivolous spectacles, and was restlessly eager to imitate what I saw onstage. I stole from my parents’ cellar and table, sometimes because gluttony enslaved me, and sometimes so that I would have something to give boys who sold me their participation in games they enjoyed as much as I did.
In those games I often sought dishonest victories, though I was myself conquered by the empty desire to excel. Nothing was harder for me to endure, and nothing made me condemn another person more violently when I discovered it, than the very things I did to others. When I was caught and condemned myself, I preferred to quarrel rather than yield.
Is this the innocence of childhood? No, Lord, no, Lord. I plead for your mercy, my God. As we grow older, these same sins are transferred from governors and teachers to magistrates and kings, from nuts, balls, and sparrows to gold, lands, and slaves, just as the schoolmaster’s rod is followed by more severe punishments. It was the small stature of childhood, then, that you, our King, approved as an emblem of humility when you said, “Of such is the kingdom of heaven.”
31. Yet thanks were due to you, Lord, most excellent and most good, Architect and Governor of the universe, even if you had willed that I should not survive my boyhood. I existed even then. I lived and felt, and I cared for my own well-being, a trace of that most mysterious unity from which I received my being. Through my inward sense, I guarded the wholeness of my senses. Even in insignificant pursuits and in my thoughts about insignificant things, I learned to delight in truth.
I disliked being deceived. I had a strong memory, possessed the power of speech, was softened by friendship, and avoided sorrow, meanness, and ignorance. In such a creature, what was not wonderful and praiseworthy? But all these were gifts from my God. I did not give them to myself. They are good, and together they constitute who I am.
Therefore, he who made me is good, and he is my God. Before him I will rejoice greatly for every good gift I possessed as a boy. My sin was that I sought pleasures, honors, and truths not in him but in his creatures, myself and others, and so fell into sorrows, troubles, and errors.
Thanks be to you, my joy, my glory, my confidence, and my God. Thanks be to you for your gifts. Preserve them for me, for in this way you will preserve me. The things you have given me will be developed and perfected, and I myself will be with you, for my being comes from you.
