More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
So I made up my mind to examine the holy Scriptures and see what kind of books they were.
But these were not the feelings I had when I first read the Scriptures. To me they seemed quite unworthy of comparison with the stately prose of Cicero, because I had too much conceit to accept their simplicity and not enough insight to penetrate their depths. It is surely true that as the child grows these books grow with him. But I was too proud to call myself a child. I was inflated with self-esteem, which made me think myself a great man.
I fell in with a set of sensualists, men with glib tongues who ranted and raved and had the snares of the devil in their mouths.
But while my hunger was for you, for Truth itself, these were the dishes on which they served me up the sun and the moon, beautiful works of yours but still only your works, not you yourself nor even the greatest of your created things.1 For your spiritual works are greater than these material things, however brightly they may shine in the sky.
would have been better to love the sun itself, which at least is real as far as we can see. But I gulped down this food, because I thought that it was you. I had no relish for it, because the taste it left in my mouth was not the taste of truth – it could not be, for it was not you but an empty sham.
Where were you in those days? How far away from me? I was wandering far from you and I was not even allowed to eat the husks on which I fed the swine. For surely the fables of the poets and the penmen are better than the traps which those impostors set! There is certainly more to be gained from verses and poems and tales like the flight of Medea than from their stories of the five elements disguised in various ways because of the five dens of darkness.
Verses and poems can provide real food for thought, but although I used to recite verses about Medea's flight through the air, I never maintained that they were true; and I never believed the poems which I heard others recite. But I did believe the tales which these men told.
the topmost height that I could reach. I had blundered upon that woman in Solomon's parable who, ignorant and unabashed, sat at her door and said Stolen waters are sweetest, and bread is better eating when there is none to see.1
was only departing the further from it. I did not know that evil is nothing but the removal of good until finally no good remains.
The people of whom I am speaking have the same sort of grievance when they hear that things which good men could do without sin in days gone by are not permitted in ours, and that God gave them one commandment and has given us another. He has done this because the times have demanded it, although men were subject to the same justice in those days as we are in these.
But I did not discern that justice, which those good and holy men obeyed, in a far more perfect and sublime way than poetry contains in itself at one and the same time all the principles which it prescribes, without discrepancy; although, as times change, it prescribes and apportions them, not all at once, but according to the needs of the times. Blind to this, I found fault with the holy patriarchs not only because, in their own day, they acted as God commanded and inspired them, but also because they predicted the future as he revealed it to them.
Sins against nature, therefore, like the sin of Sodom, are abominable and deserve punishment wherever and whenever they are committed. If all nations committed them, all alike would be held guilty of the same charge in God's law, for our Maker did not prescribe that we should use each other in this way. In fact the relationship which we ought to have with God is itself violated when our nature, of which he is the Author, is desecrated by perverted lust.
But if God commands a nation to do something contrary to its customs or constitutions, it must be done even if it has never been done in that country before. If it is a practice which has been discontinued, it must be resumed, and if it was not a law before, it must be enacted.
How much more right, then, has God to give commands, since he is the Ruler of all creation and all his creatures must obey his commandments without demur! For all must yield to God just as, in the government of human society, the lesser authority must yield to the greater.
With sins of violence the case is the same as with sins against nature. Here the impulse is to injure others, either by word or by deed, but by whichever means it is done, there are various reasons for doing it.
These are the main categories of sin. They are hatched from the lust for power, from gratification of the eye, and from gratification of corrupt nature – from one or two of these or from all three together. Because of them, O God most high, most sweet, our lives offend against your ten-stringed harp,1 your commandments, the three which proclaim our duty to you and the seven which proclaim our duty to men.
But how can sins of vice be against you, since you cannot be marred by perversion? How can sins of violence be against you, since nothing can injure you? Your punishments are for the sins which men commit against themselves, because although they sin against you, they do wrong to their own souls and their malice is self-betrayed.2
else their guilt consists in raving against you in their hearts and with their tongues and kicking against the goad,3 or in playing havoc with the restrictions of human society and brazenly exulting in private feuds and factions, each according to his fancies or his fads. This is what happens, O Fountain of life, when we abandon you, who are the one true Creator of all that ever was or is, and each of us proudly sets his heart on some one part of your creation instead of on the whole. So it is by the path of meekness and devotion that we must return to you. You rid us of our evil habits and
...more
stomach and teeth of one of the elect. I was foolish enough to believe that we should show more kindness to the fruits of the earth than to mankind, for whose use they were intended. If a starving man, not a Manichee, were to beg for a mouthful, they thought it a crime worthy of mortal punishment to give him one.
But you sent down your help from above1 and rescued my soul from the depths of this darkness because my mother, your faithful servant, wept to you for me, shedding more tears for my spiritual death than other mothers shed for the bodily death of a son. For in her faith and in the spirit which she had from you she looked on me as dead.
The dream had given new spirit to her hope, but she gave no rest to her sighs and her tears. Her prayers reached your presence1 and yet you still left me to twist and turn in the dark.
DURING the space of those nine years, from the nineteenth to the twenty-eighth year of my life, I was led astray myself and led others astray in my turn. We were alike deceivers and deceived in all our different aims and ambitions, both publicly when we expounded our so-called liberal ideas, and in private through our service to what we called religion. In public we were cocksure, in private superstitious, and everywhere void and empty.
During those years I was a teacher of the art of public speaking. Love of money had gained the better of me and for it I sold to others the means of coming off the better in debate.
In those days I lived with a woman, not my lawful wedded wife but a mistress whom I had chosen for no special reason but that my restless passions had alighted on her.
Does not the soul which pines for such fantasies break its troth with you?1 Does it not trust in false hopes and play shepherd to the wind?2
And it is wrong to impose upon your readiness to forgive, taking it as licence to commit sin. Instead we must remember Our Lord's words to the cripple: You have recovered your strength. Do not sin any more, for fear that worse should befall you.3 This truth is our whole salvation, but the astrologers try to do away with it. They tell us that the cause of sin is determined in the heavens and we cannot escape it, and that this or that is the work of Venus or Saturn or Mars.
This is a disease that only you can cure, you who thwart the proud and keep your grace for the humble.6
He said that people sometimes opened a book of poetry at random, and although the poet had been thinking, as he wrote, of some quite different matter, it often happened that the reader placed his finger on a verse which had a remarkable bearing on his problem. It was not surprising, then, that the mind of man, quite unconsciously, through some instinct not within its own control, should hit upon some thing that answered to the circumstances and the facts of a particular question. If so, it would be due to chance not to skill. This answer which he gave me, or rather which I heard from his lips,
...more
For though they cling together, no friends are true friends unless you, my God, bind them fast to one another through that love which is sown in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, who is given to us. Yet there was sweetness in our friendship, mellowed by the interests we shared. As a boy he had never held firmly or deeply to the true faith and I had drawn him away from it to believe in the same superstitious, soul-destroying fallacies which brought my mother to tears over me.
Can it be that though you are present everywhere, you have thrust aside our troubles? You are steadfast, constant in yourself; but we are tossed on a tide that puts us to the proof, and if we could not sob our troubles in your ear, what hope should we have left to us?
Or is weeping, too, a bitter thing, becoming a pleasure only when the things we once enjoyed turn loathsome and only as long as our dislike for them remains?
why do I talk of these things? It is time to confess, not to question. I lived in misery, like every man whose soul is tethered by the love of things that cannot last and then is agonized to lose them. Only then does he realize the sorry state he is in, and was in even before his loss. In such a state was I at that time, as I wept bitter tears and found my only consolation in their very bitterness. This was the misery in which I lived, and yet my own wretched life was dearer to me than the friend I had lost.
True or not, the story goes that Orestes and Pylades were ready to die together for each other's sake, because each would rather die than live without the other. But I doubt whether I should have been willing, as they were, to give my life for my friend. I was obsessed by a strange feeling, quite the opposite of theirs, for I was sick and tired of living and yet afraid to die. I suppose that the great love which I had for my friend made me hate and fear death all the more, as though it were the most terrible of enemies, because it had snatched him away from me.
My heart lies before you, O my God. Look deep within. See these memories of mine, for you are my hope. You cleanse me when unclean humours such as these possess me, by drawing my eyes to yourself and saving my feet from the snare.1
felt that our two souls had been as one, living in two bodies, and life to me was fearful because I did not want to live with only half a soul. Perhaps this, too, is why I shrank from death, for fear that one whom I had loved so well might then be wholly dead.
But I left my native town. For my eyes were less tempted to look for my friend in a place where they had not grown used to seeing him. So from Thagaste I went to Carthage.
Blessed are those who love you, O God, and love their friends in you and their enemies for your sake. They alone will never lose those who are dear to them, for they love them in one who is never lost, in God, our God who made heaven and earth and fills them with his presence, because by filling them he made them. No one can lose you, my God, unless he forsakes you. And if he forsakes you, where is he to go? If he abandons your love, his only refuge is your wrath. Wherever he turns, he will find your law to punish him, for your law is the truth and the truth is yourself.
O God of hosts, restore us to our own; smile upon us, and we shall find deliverance.1 For wherever the soul of man may
Even though it clings to things of beauty, if their beauty is outside God and outside the soul, it only clings to sorrow. Yet these things of beauty would not exist at all unless they came from you. Like the sun, they rise and set. At their rise they have their first beginning; they grow until they reach perfection; but, once they have reached it, they grow old and die.
thoughts ranged only amongst material forms. I defined them in two classes, those which please the eye because they are beautiful in themselves and those which do so because they are properly proportioned in relation to something else.
of the soul, but my misconception of spiritual things prevented me from seeing the truth, although it forced itself upon my mind if only I would see it. Instead I turned my pulsating mind away from the spiritual towards the material.
But I did not know what I was saying, because no one had taught me, and I had not yet found out for myself, that evil is not a substance and man's mind is not the supreme good that does not vary.
Sins of self-indulgence are committed when the soul fails to govern the impulses from which it derives bodily pleasure. In the same way, if the rational mind is corrupt, mistaken ideas and false beliefs will poison life. In those days my mind was corrupt.
it is you, Lord, that keep the lamp of my hopes still burning and shine on the darkness about me.2 We have all received something out of your abundance.3 For you are the true Light which enlightens every soul born into the world,4 because with you there can be no change, no swerving from your course.5
Myself a man of flesh and blood I blamed the flesh. I was as fickle as a breath of wind,1 unable to return to you. I drifted on, making my way towards things that had no existence in you or in myself or in the body.
But I was all words, and stupidly I used to ask them, ‘If, as you say, God made the soul, why does it err?’ Yet I did not like them to ask me in return, ‘If what you say is true, why does God err?’ So I used to argue that your unchangeable substance, my God, was forced to err, rather than admit that my own was changeable and erred of its own free will, and that its errors were my punishment.
defined substance, such as man, and its attributes. For instance, a man has a certain shape; this is quality. He has height, measured in feet, which is quantity. He has relation to other men; for example, he is another man's brother. You may say where he is and when he was born, or describe his position as standing or sitting. You may name his possessions by saying that he has shoes or carries arms. You may define what he does and what is done to him.
read and understood by myself all the books that I could find on the so-called liberal arts, for in those days I was a good-for-nothing and a slave to sordid ambitions. But what advantage did I gain from them? I read them with pleasure, but I did not know the real source of such true and certain facts as they contained.
For what good to me was my ability, if I did not use it well? And ability I had, for until I tried to instruct others I did not realize that these subjects are very difficult to master, even for pupils who are studious and intelligent, and a student who could follow my instruction without faltering was reckoned a very fine scholar.
What, then, was the value to me of my intelligence, which could take these subjects in its stride, and all those books, with their tangled problems, which I unravelled without the help of any human tutor, when in the doctrine of your love I was lost in the most hideous error and the vilest sacrilege?
