Confessions

by Augustine of Hippo

its form is extraordinary—a prose-poem addressed to God, intended to be overheard by anxious and critical fellow-Christians.

In several places in the Confessions and elsewhere Augustine’s term for contemporary pagan culture was ‘loquacity’: it used fine words, even rococo elaboration, but had little or nothing to say.

he expressed remarkable doubts and hesitations whether skill in public speaking can be acquired from a teacher

in 391 he had gone to Hippo Regius on the coast, and on attending the Church service on the Sunday morning he had been spotted by the old bishop, Valerius, a Greek-speaker from southern Italy. In his sermon the bishop pointed out his need for a presbyter, and suggested that Augustine would do well. It was far from uncommon at this period for ordination to be forced upon the candidate by the coercion of the congregation. Augustine was allowed no escape, and had to submit.

Augustine was now presiding over a minority community in Hippo, under the necessity of fighting for its life against a militant majority.

Aurelius Augustinus had been born on 13 November 354 to parents of modest means, who owned a few acres of farmland at the small town of Thagaste, then in the Roman province of Numidia, now Souk-Ahras in the hills of eastern Algeria about 45 miles inland from the coast.

Mani strongly denied the historical reality of the crucifixion of Jesus; for him the Cross was a symbol of the suffering of humanity.

Central to Manichee belief was their answer to the problem of evil, namely that God is good but not omnipotent, and though resistant to evil not strong enough to defeat it.

Augustine himself in episcopal retrospect came to judge his liaison with his partner as ‘my sin’. As the couple were entirely faithful to one another and as, for the Church (as is shown by a canon of a Council at Toledo in 400), cohabitation by persons not legally married was no bar to communion provided they kept wholly to one another, this negative judgement may seem strong.

The Pelagian controversy, however, led him to see the process of reproduction as the transmitter of the irrationality and egotism that infects the sexual urge. By his stress on ‘concupiscence’ (uncontrolled desire) he set the West on the path to identifying sin with sex; that was not his intention.

‘evil’ is not Being but a lack of it, a deficiency inherent in having been placed on a lower step than higher entities. Since to exist is for a Platonist to be a ‘substance’, evil has no ‘substance’.

Decisions made with no element of Christian motive, without any questing for God or truth, brought him to where his Maker wanted him to be.

The creation, made out of nothing, is involved in the perpetual change and flux of time. It falls into the abyss of formless chaos, but is brought to recognize in God the one source of order and rationality.

calling upon you is an act of believing in you.

Can I move outside heaven and earth so that my God may come to me from there? For God has said ‘I fill heaven and earth’ (Jer. 23: 24).

Where do you put the overflow of yourself after heaven and earth are filled?

You will a change without any change in your design.

‘Cleanse me from my secret faults, Lord, and spare your servant from sins to which I am tempted by others’ (Ps. 31: 5).

I abandoned you to pursue the lowest things of your creation. I was dust going to dust.

free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion.

I believed you were silent, and that it was only she who was speaking, when you were speaking to me through her.

Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart. You had pity on it when it was at the bottom of the abyss.

The blindness of humanity is so great that people are actually proud of their blindness.

Nevertheless, the one thing that delighted me in Cicero’s exhortation was the advice ‘not to study one particular sect but to love and seek and pursue and hold fast and strongly embrace wisdom itself, wherever found’.

Yet the Bible was composed in such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them.

Therefore shameful acts31 which are contrary to nature, such as the acts of the Sodomites (Gen. 19: 5 ff.), are everywhere and always to be detested and punished. Even if all peoples should do them, they would be liable to the same condemnation by divine law; for it has not made men to use one another in this way.

‘The word spoken to me was not “Where he is, there will you be also”, but “Where you are, there will he be also”.’

I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost.

Where should my heart flee to in escaping from my heart? Where should I go to escape from myself? Where is there where I cannot pursue myself?

Things rise and set: in their emerging they begin as it were to be, and grow to perfection; having reached perfection, they grow old and die.

Not everything grows old, but everything dies.

Rest in him and you will be at rest.

He went away and behold, here he is. He did not wish to remain long with us, yet he did not abandon us. He has gone to that place which he never left, ‘for the world was made by him’ (John 1: 10); and he was in this world, and ‘came into this world to save sinners’ (1 Tim. 1: 15).

Even this you forgave me, mercifully saving me from the waters of the sea, when I was full of abominable filth, so as to bring me to the water of your grace [in baptism]. This water was to wash me clean, and to dry the rivers flowing from my mother’s eyes which daily before you irrigated the soil beneath her face.

But I had grown in shame and in my folly used to laugh at the counsels of your medicine. Yet you did not allow me to die in this sad condition of both body and soul.

I liked to excuse myself and to accuse some unidentifiable power which was with me and yet not I. But the whole was myself and what divided me against myself was my impiety. That was a sin the more incurable for the fact that I did not think myself a sinner.

From sinners such as I was at that time, salvation is far distant. Nevertheless, gradually, though I did not realize it, I was drawing closer.

I had not yet attained the truth, but I was rescued from falsehood.

You who are most high and most near, most secret and most present, have no bodily members, some larger, others smaller, but are everywhere a whole and never limited in space.7 You are certainly not our physical shape. Yet you made humanity in your image, and man from head to foot is contained in space.

‘The letter kills, the spirit gives life’ (2 Cor. 3: 6).

Then little by little, Lord, with a most gentle and merciful hand you touched and calmed my heart.

I sighed and you heard me. I wavered and you steadied me. I travelled along the broad way of the world, but you did not desert me.

But ‘he who is faithful in little is faithful also in much’ (Luke 16: 10–22).

I longed for the happy life, but was afraid of the place where it has its seat, and fled from it at the same time as I was seeking for it.

I dragged my chain, but was afraid to be free of it.

You are present, liberating us from miserable errors, and you put us on your way, bringing comfort and saying: ‘Run, I will carry you, and I will see you through to the end, and there I will carry you’ (Isa. 46: 4).

I had no clear and explicit grasp of the cause of evil.

Who put this power in me and implanted in me this seed of bitterness (Heb. 12: 15), when all of me was created by my very kind God? If the devil was responsible, where did the devil himself come from? And if even he began as a good angel and became devil by a perversion of the will, how does the evil will by which he became devil originate in him, when an angel is wholly made by a Creator who is pure goodness?’

Yet we still fear. Thus either it is evil which we fear or our fear which is evil. Where then does it come from since the good God made everything good?

I no longer wished individual things to be better, because I considered the totality. Superior things are self-evidently better than inferior. Yet with a sounder judgement I held that all things taken together are better than superior things by themselves.