Confessions

by Augustine of Hippo

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 repay us what we deserve, and yet you owe nothing to any. You release us from our debts, but you lose nothing thereby. 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?

though, of course, it did not come to me from them but, through them, from you, because you, my God, are the source of all good and everywhere you preserve me.

But what came before that, O God my Delight? Was I anywhere? Was I anybody?

Where could such a living creature come from if not from you, O Lord?

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

But, true though my conclusions may be, I do not like to think of that period as part of the same life I now lead, because it is dim and forgotten and, in this sense, it is no different from the time I spent in my mother's womb. 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?

Sinful from the womb.

I can remember that time, and later on I realized how I had learnt to speak. It was not my elders who showed me the words by some set system of instruction, in the way that they taught me to read not long afterwards; but, instead, I taught myself by using the intelligence which you, my God, gave to me.

for there is a kind of universal language, consisting of expressions of the face and eyes, gestures and tones of voice, which can show whether a person means to ask for something and get it, or refuse it and have nothing to do with it.

I 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.

General revelation.

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.

So it was wrong of me as a boy to prefer empty romances to more valuable studies. In fact it would be truer to say that I loved the one and hated the other.

Fiction vs. Non-fiction reading.

There was of course the difficulty which is found in learning any foreign language, and this soured the sweetness of the Greek romances. For I understood not a single word and I was constantly subjected to violent threats and cruel punishments to make me learn.

This clearly shows that we learn better in a free spirit of curiosity than under fear and compulsion.

Profound statement on learning.

If we refused to drink, we were beaten for it, without the right to appeal to a sober judge. With your eyes upon me, my God, my memory can safely recall those days. But it is true that I learned all these things gladly and took a sinful pleasure in them. And for this very reason I was called a promising boy.

And in the games I played with them I often cheated in order to come off the better, simply because a vain desire to win had got the better of me.

But my sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in him but in myself and his other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error.