Confessions

by Augustine of Hippo

Time is not inert. It does not roll on through our senses without affecting us. Its passing has remarkable effects on the mind. See: it came and went ‘from day to day’ (Ps. 60: 9), and by its coming and going it implanted in me new hopes and other experiences to be remembering.

Why then are you perversely following the leading of your flesh? If you turn away from it, it has to follow you. All that you experience through it is only partial; you are ignorant of the whole to which the parts belong. Yet they delight you. But if your physical perception were capable of comprehending the whole and had not, for your punishment, been justly restrained to a part of the universe, you would wish everything at present in being to pass away, so that the totality of things could provide you with greater pleasure.

How is it that I love in a human being what I would hate to be, when I also am human? Man is a vast deep, whose hairs you, Lord, have numbered, and in you none can be lost (Matt. 10: 30). Yet it is easier to count his hairs than the passions and emotions of his heart.

Just as crimes occur when the mind’s motive force, which gives the impetus for action, is corrupt and asserts itself in an insolent and disturbed way, and as vicious acts occur if obsession has captured the mind’s affective part which is at the root of the impulse to carnal pleasures, so also errors and false opinions contaminate life if the reasoning mind is itself flawed.

the soul needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth.

But I was unhappy, incapable of following a woman’s example, and impatient of delay. I was to get the girl I had proposed to only at the end of two years. As I was not a lover of marriage but a slave of lust, I procured another woman, not of course as wife. By this liaison the disease of my soul would be sustained and kept active, either in full vigour or even increased, so that the habit would be guarded and fostered until I came to the kingdom of marriage. But my wound, inflicted by the earlier parting, was not healed. After inflammation and sharp pain, it festered. The pain made me as it were frigid but desperate.

To my mind Epicurus would have been awarded the palm of victory, had I not believed that after death the life of the soul remains with the consequences of our acts, a belief which Epicurus rejected; and I asked: If we were immortal and lived in unending bodily pleasure, with no fear of losing it, why should we not be happy? What else should we be seeking for? I did not realize that that is exactly what shows our great wretchedness. For I was so submerged and blinded that I could not think of the light of moral goodness and of a beauty to be embraced for its own sake—beauty seen not by the eye of the flesh, but only by inward discernment. In my sombre state I did not consider from what fountain came the flow of delightful conversation with friends (though on such sordid subjects), nor the fact that without friends I could not be happy even when my mind was at the time a flood of indulgence in physical pleasures.

My friends I loved indeed for their own sake; and I felt that in return they loved me for my sake.

For both wills are evil when someone is deliberating whether to kill a person by poison or by a dagger; whether to encroach on one estate belonging to someone else or a different one, when he cannot do both; whether to buy pleasure by lechery or avariciously to keep his money; whether to go to the circus or the theatre if both are putting on a performance on the same day, or (I add a third possibility) to steal from another person’s house if occasion offers, or (I add a fourth option) to commit adultery if at the same time the chance is available.

He had fallen into that ditch of pernicious [Manichee] error which taught him to believe that the flesh of your Son, the truth, was illusory.

to anyone the tumult of the flesh has fallen silent, if the images of earth, water, and air are quiescent,26 if the heavens themselves are shut out and the very soul itself is making no sound and is surpassing itself by no longer

thinking about itself, if all dreams and visions in the imagination are excluded, if all language and every sign and everything transitory is silent—for if anyone could hear them, this is what all of them would be saying, “We did not make ourselves, we were made by him who abides for eternity” (Ps. 79: 3, 5)—if after this declaration they were to keep silence, having directed our ears to him that made them, then he alone would speak not through them but through himself. We would hear his word, not through the tongue of the flesh, nor through the voice of an angel, nor through the sound of thunder, nor through the obscurity of a symbolic utterance.

The human race is inquisitive about other people’s lives, but negligent to correct their own. Why do they demand to hear from me what I am when they refuse to hear from you what they are?

by thinking we, as it were, gather together ideas which the memory contains in a dispersed and disordered way, and by concentrating our attention we arrange them in order as if ready to hand, stored in the very memory where previously they lay hidden, scattered, and neglected. Now they easily come forward under the direction of the mind familiar with them.

The mind is one thing, the body another. Therefore it is not surprising if I happily remember a physical pain that has passed away. But in the present case, the mind is the very memory itself. For when we give an order which has to be memorized, we say ‘See that you hold that in your mind’, and when we forget we say ‘It was not in my mind’ and ‘It slipped my mind’. We call memory itself the mind. Since that is the case, what is going on when, in gladly remembering past sadness, my mind is glad and my memory sad? My mind is glad for the fact that gladness is in it, but memory is not saddened by the fact that regret is in it. Surely this does not mean that memory is independent of the mind. Who could say that? No doubt, then, memory is, as it were, the stomach of the mind, whereas gladness and sadness are like sweet and bitter food. When they are entrusted to the memory, they are as if transferred to the stomach and can there be stored; but they cannot be tasted. It is ridiculous to think this illustration offers a real parallel; nevertheless, it is not wholly inapposite.

Those who think that the happy life is found elsewhere, pursue another joy and not the true one. Nevertheless their will remains drawn towards some image of the true joy.22

The happy life is joy based on the truth.

Yes indeed: the human mind, so blind and languid, shamefully and dishonourably wishes to hide, and yet does not wish anything to be concealed from itself.

You have taught me that I should come to take food in the way I take medicines. But while I pass from the discomfort of need to the tranquillity of satisfaction, the very transition contains for me an insidious trap of uncontrolled desire.30 The transition itself is a pleasure, and there is no other way of making that transition, which is forced upon us by necessity. Although health is the reason for eating and drinking, a dangerous pleasantness joins itself to the process like a companion. Many a time it tries to take first place, so that I am doing for pleasure what I profess or wish to do only for health’s sake. They do not have the same measure: for what is enough for health is too little for pleasure. And often there is uncertainty whether the motive is necessary care of the body seeking sustenance or the deceptive desire for pleasure demanding service. In this uncertainty the unhappy soul finds a source of cheerfulness and by means of it has a ready-made defence and excuse.

I heard another utterance of yours: ‘Do not go after your lusts and forbid yourself from your pleasure’ (Ecclus. 18: 30). By your gift I have also heard the saying which I have much loved: ‘Neither if we eat are we the better, nor if we do not eat are we the worse’ (1 Cor. 8: 8). That means that neither will eating make me prosperous nor will not eating bring me adversity. I have also heard another saying: ‘I have learnt in whatever state I am that it is sufficient. I have learnt to be prosperous and I have learnt to suffer poverty. I can do all things in him who comforts me.’ (Phil. 4: 11–12). See in this text the soldier of the heavenly host, not the dust which we are. But remember, Lord ‘that we are but dust’ (Ps. 102: 14).

For the beautiful objects designed by artists’ souls and realized by skilled hands come from that beauty which is higher than souls; after that beauty my soul sighs day and night (Ps. 1: 2). From this higher beauty the artists and connoisseurs of external beauty draw their criterion of judgement, but they do not draw from there a principle for the right use of beautiful things. The principle is there but they do not see it, namely that they should not go to excess, but ‘should guard their strength for you’ (Ps. 58: 10) and not dissipate it in delights that produce mental fatigue. But, although I am the person saying this and making the distinction, I also entangle my steps in beautiful externals.

to wish to be feared or loved by people for no reason other than the joy derived from such power, which is no joy at all. It is a wretched life, and vanity is repulsive.

Every day, Lord, we are beset by these temptations. We are tempted without respite. The human tongue is our daily furnace (Prov. 27: 21). In this respect also you command us to be continent: grant what you command, and command what you will. In this matter you know the ‘groaning’ of my heart towards you (Ps. 37: 9), and the rivers which flow from my eyes (Ps. 118: 136). I cannot easily be sure how far I am cleansed from that plague (Ps. 18: 13). I have great fear of my subconscious impulses which your eyes know but mine do not (Ecclus. 15: 20).

The saying ‘he judges all things’ is the meaning of the text that man has power over the fish of the sea and the birds of heaven and all cattle and wild beasts over all the earth, and all creeping things which creep upon the earth (Gen. 1: 26). He judges by an act of intelligence, by which he perceives ‘what things are of the Spirit of God’ (1 Cor. 2: 14; 3: 10). Contrariwise, ‘a man in a position of honour has lacked understanding: he is compared to the mindless beasts, and has become like them’ (Ps. 48: 13).

For ‘you made man male and female’ in your spiritual grace to be equal, so that physical gender makes no distinction of male and female, just as there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free person’ (Gal. 3: 28). So spiritual persons, whether they preside or are subject to authority, exercise spiritual judgement (1 Cor. 2: 15). They do not judge those spiritual intelligences which are ‘lights in the firmament’; it would be inappropriate to judge such sublime authority. Nor do they sit in judgement on your book, even if there is obscurity there. We submit our intellect to it, and hold it for certain that even language closed to our comprehension is right and true.

What then is the reason for your rejoicing, great Paul? Why your joy? Where do you find your nourishment? You are a man ‘renewed in the knowledge of God after the image of him who created you’ (Col. 3: 10), a ‘living soul’ of great continence, a tongue which flies like the birds as it proclaims mysteries. It is indeed to such living souls that this food is due. What then is it which gives you nourishment? Joy. Let me hear what follows: ‘Nevertheless’, he says, ‘you did well in taking a share in my tribulations’ (Phil. 4: 14). The ground for his joy and for his nourishment is that the Philippians had acted well, not that his trouble was relieved. He says to you ‘In tribulation you gave me a large room’ (Ps. 7: 21), for in you who strengthen him he ‘knew how to abound and how to suffer penury’. He says: ‘You Philippians know how at the first preaching of the gospel when I came from Macedonia, no Church except you shared with me in the matter of giving and receiving, for not once but twice you sent support for my needs to Thessalonica’ (Phil. 4. 14–16). He now rejoices at their return to these good works and is glad at their revival, like a field that is recovering its fertility.