Confessions

by Augustine of Hippo

THE life of Saint Augustine has a special appeal because he was a great sinner who became a great saint, and greatness is all the more admirable if it is achieved against odds. From his own account we know that he lived a life of sin until the age of thirty-two, and even after he was intellectually convinced of Christian truth he was prevented from accepting the faith by weakness in dealing with sexual temptation.

Add to this the obvious fact that he was a serious and studious youth and it becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that the terms in which he writes of his sinful past are unnecessarily harsh. Perhaps his training as a teacher of rhetoric accounts for this. He was, after all, trying to make out a case against himself before an audience which was predisposed to believe him a saintly man.

and one of the reasons why he wrote was to persuade his admirers that any good qualities he had were his by the grace of God, who had saved him so often from himself.

For when, as a young man, he became curious about the world and its origin and started his search for the truth, instead of turning to God in simple faith he accepted the theories by which the Manichees explained away these problems. As a catechumen he had received some instruction, but he had no clear idea of what Christians believed. As literature, the Scriptures compared poorly with the polished prose of Cicero and he thought them fit only for the simple-minded.

could not account for the presence of evil in a world created by a God who was good, nor could he understand that God is a spiritual Being.

He was only eighteen when he first allied himself with the Manichees. Their founder Manes, or Mani, a fanatic who regarded himself as the Paraclete, had been crucified in Persia in 277. His religion spread rapidly both during and after his lifetime, and when Saint Augustine came under its influence a century later, there were groups of Manichees throughout the Roman world, especially in North Africa.

Manes did not entirely reject Christianity, but since he held that its teaching was only partially true, he supplemented it by borrowing from other religions and adding his own theories. He alleged that there were inconsistencies in the Scriptures and that the text was corrupt and therefore untrustworthy. In particular he denied the virgin birth and Christ's crucifixion, since the flesh was tainted with evil and any association with it was unworthy of God. This belief was derived from the fundamental doctrine of Manicheism, which was that in the beginning there were two independent principles described as Good and Evil or Light and Darkness. The evil power invaded the kingdom of the good power and in part captured it, so that the two became mixed.

Good and evil were permanently in conflict because the captive particles of good or light were always struggling to escape from the evil or darkness which enveloped them.

Once he had made this decision his mind was open to other influences. He was introduced to the philosophy of the Neo-Platonists and their books helped him towards a conception of the spiritual nature of God. At the same time he began to understand that evil results from man's misuse of free will. This was the beginning of conversion.

He went on to read Saint Paul's Epistles, where for the first time he heard of God's mercy and grace and learned to think of Christ as the Redeemer and no longer simply as a specially gifted teacher.

Saint Augustine's decision to accept the faith is of course the central point of the Confessions. After it he continues the narrative in order to include his baptism and the beginning of the return journey to Africa, during which his mother died.

What better answer could be made to the Manichean theory of the twin powers of good and evil than God's own statement that he made heaven and earth and that he saw what he had made and found it very good? Saint Augustine was satisfied that this was all that was needed to reduce the fundamental principle of Manicheism to absurdity.1

In the first place it is a confession of the writer's sin and error, in the second a recognition of God's goodness and truth. These two purposes are complementary

CAN any praise be worthy of the Lord's majesty?1 How magnificent his strength! How inscrutable his wisdom!2

The thought of you stirs him so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.

Only, how are they to call upon the Lord until they have learned to believe in him? And how are they to believe in him without a preacher to listen to?4 Those who look for the Lord will cry out in

this is so, since I too exist, why do I ask you to come into me? For I should not be there at all unless, in this way, you were already present within me. I am not in hell, and yet you are there too, for if I sink down to the world beneath, you are present still.1 So, then, I should be null and void and could not exist at all, if you, my God, were not in me. Or is it rather that I should not exist, unless I existed in you? For all things find in you their origin, their impulse, the centre of their being.2

And when you pour yourself out over us, you are not drawn down to us but draw us up to yourself: you are not scattered away, but you gather us together.

You fill all things, but do you fill them with your whole self? Or is it that the whole of creation is too small to hold you and therefore holds only a part of you?

What, then, is the God I worship? He can be none but the Lord God himself, for who but the Lord is God? What other refuge can there be, except our God?1 You, my God, are supreme, utmost in goodness, mightiest and all-powerful, most merciful and most just.

You are unchangeable and yet you change all things. You are never new, never old, and yet all things have new life from you. You are the unseen power that brings decline upon the proud. You are ever active, yet always at rest. You gather all things to yourself, though you suffer no need.

but your purpose is one and the same. You welcome all who come to you, though you never lost them. You are never in need yet are glad to gain, never covetous yet you exact a return for your gifts. We give abundantly to you so that we may deserve a reward; yet which of us has anything that does not come from you?

You are my God, my Life, my holy Delight, but is this enough to say of you? Can any man say enough when he speaks of you? Yet woe betide those who are silent about you! For even those who are most gifted with speech cannot find words to describe you.

Lord my God. Tell me why you mean so much to me. Whisper in my heart, I am here to save you.1 Speak so that I may hear your words. My heart has ears ready to listen to you, Lord. Open them wide and whisper in my heart, I am here to save you.

There is no one but you to whom I can say: if I have sinned unwittingly, do you absolve me. Keep me ever your own servant, far from pride.2 I trust, and trusting I find words to utter.3 Lord, you know that this is true. For have I not made my transgression known to you? Did you not remit the guilt of my sin?4

that my malice should be selfbetrayed.6 No, I do not wrangle with you, for, if you, Lord, will keep record of our iniquities, Master, who has strength to bear it?7

For all I want to tell you, Lord, is that I do not know where I came from when I was born into this life which leads to death – or should I say, this death which leads to life? This much is hidden from me.

My infancy is long since dead, yet I am still alive. But you, Lord, live for ever and nothing in you dies, because you have existed from before the very beginning of the ages, before anything that could be said to go before, and you are God and Lord of all you have created. In

Have pity, then, on me, O God, for it is pity that I need. Answer my prayer and tell me whether my infancy followed upon some other stage of life that died before it. Was it the stage of life that I spent in my mother's womb? For I have learnt a little about that too, and I have myself seen women who were pregnant. But what came before that, O God my Delight? Was I anywhere? Was I anybody?

do acknowledge you, Lord of heaven and earth, and I praise you for my first beginnings, although I cannot remember them. But you have allowed men to discover these

Surely we can only derive them from our Maker, from you, Lord, to whom living and being are not different things, since infinite life and infinite being are one and the same. For you are infinite and never change. In you ‘today’ never comes to an end: and yet our ‘today’ does come to an end in you, because time, as well as everything else, exists in you. If it did not, it would have no means of passing. And since your years never come to an end, for you they are simply ‘today’. The countless days of our lives and of our forefathers’ lives have passed by within your ‘today’.

And so it will be with all the other days which are still to come. But you yourself are eternally the same. In your ‘today’ you will make all that is to exist tomorrow and thereafter, and in your ‘today’ you have made all that existed yesterday and for ever before.

For it is better for them to find you and leave the question unanswered than to find the answer without finding you.

Hear me, O God! How wicked are the sins of men! Men say this and you pity them, because you made man, but you did not make sin in him.

harm. This shows that, if babies are innocent, it is not for lack of will to do harm, but for lack of strength.

You, O Lord my God, gave me my life and my body when I was born. You gave my body its five senses; you furnished it with limbs and gave it its proper proportions; and you implanted in it all the instincts necessary for the welfare and safety of a living creature. For these gifts you command me to acknowledge you and praise you and sing in honour of your name,1

But if I was born in sin and guilt was with me already when my mother conceived me,2 where, I ask you, Lord, where or when was I, your servant, ever innocent?

But, O God my God, I now went through a period of suffering and humiliation. I was told that it was right and proper for me as a boy to pay attention to my teachers, so that I should do well at my study of grammar and get on in the world. This was the way to gain the respect of others and win for myself what passes for wealth in this world.

was still a boy when I first began to pray to you, my Help and Refuge. I used to prattle away to you, and though I was small, my devotion was great when I begged you not to let me be beaten at school. Sometimes, for my own good, you did not grant my prayer, and then my elders and even my parents, who certainly wished me no harm, would laugh at the

No one pities either the boys or the men, though surely we deserved pity, for I cannot believe that a good judge would approve of the beatings I received as a boy on the ground that my games delayed my progress in studying subjects which would enable me to play a less creditable game later in life. Was the master who beat me himself very different from me? If he were worsted by a colleague in some petty argument, he would be convulsed with anger and envy, much more so than I was when a playmate beat me at a game of ball.

And yet I sinned, O Lord my God, creator and arbiter of all natural things, but arbiter only, not creator, of sin. I sinned, O Lord, by disobeying my parents and the masters of whom I have spoken.

The patrons who pay for the production of these shows are held in esteem such as most parents would wish for their children. Yet the same parents willingly allow their children to be flogged if they are distracted by these displays from the studies which are supposed to fit them to grow rich and give the same sort of shows themselves. Look on these things with pity, O Lord, and free us who now call upon you from such delusions. Set free also those who have not yet called upon you, so that they may pray to you and you may free them from this

Had I not quickly recovered, she would have hastened to see that I was admitted to the sacraments of salvation and washed clean by acknowledging you, Lord Jesus, for the pardon of my sins. So my washing in the waters of baptism was postponed, in the surmise that, if I continued to live, I should defile myself again with sin and, after baptism, the guilt of pollution would be greater and more dangerous.

For I would not have studied at all if I had not been obliged to do so, and what a person does against his will is not to his own credit, even if what he does is good in itself. Nor was the good which came of it due to those who compelled me to study, but to you, my God. For they had not the insight to see that I might put the lessons which they forced me to learn to any other purpose than the satisfaction of man's insatiable desire for the poverty he calls wealth and the infamy he knows as fame.

and you used the mistake I made myself, in not wishing to study, as a punishment which I deserved to pay, for I was a great sinner for so small a boy.

For this is what you have ordained and so it is with us, that every soul that sins brings its own punishment upon itself.

But in the later lessons I was obliged to memorize the wanderings of a hero named Aeneas, while in the meantime I failed to remember my own erratic ways. I learned to lament the death of Dido, who killed herself for love, while all the time, in the midst of these things, I was dying, separated from you, my God and my Life, and I shed no tears for my own plight.

But I did not love you. I broke my troth with you1 and embraced another while applause echoed about me. For to love this world is to break troth with you,2 yet men applaud and are ashamed to be otherwise. I did not weep over this, but instead I wept for Dido, who surrendered her life to the sword, while I forsook you and surrendered myself to the lowest of your created things.

The schoolmasters need not exclaim at my words, for I no longer go in fear of them now that I confess my soul's desires to you, my God, and gladly blame myself for my evil ways so that I may enjoy the good ways you have shown me.

But in those days ‘one and one are two, two and two are four’ was a loathsome jingle, while the wooden horse and its crew of soldiers, the burning of Troy and even the ghost of Creusa made a most enchanting dream, futile though it was.