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the Confessions of Augustine, bishop of Hippo Regius (a Roman provincial city within the territory of present-day Algeria), written at the very end of the fourth century.
Augustine was born in North Africa, into a mixed pagan-Christian household, and in early adulthood he moved to Italy to further his career as a rhetor,
His movement toward devout commitment as a follower of Christ was decades long, rather plodding and dithering, and occasionally silly, not sudden and dramatic like Paul’s. But the results were perhaps no less momentous for the history of ideas and institutions.
The recent consensus of scholars holds that there was no hard division between the pre-Constantinian “pagan” and the post-Constantinian “Christian” Roman Empire.
It may seem odd to many modern readers that he considered marriage incompatible with the highest kind of Christian life, but this makes more sense in light of contemporary facts.
aspirants like Augustine and his friends believed that they would be outranked as Christians if they lived in sexual and household partnerships.
It would take an encyclopedia just to summarize all the fragmentation in early Christianity, or even all that Augustine was concerned with over the course of his religious career.
Augustine was able, through his words, to imagine and to some degree ensure what happened afterward: The Christian church became the center of civilization.
The work sets forth an individual life from its very start (and this itself would have been striking to his readers: babyhood was no common preoccupation of the ancients) and assigns it universal and eternal meaning.
In book 1, Augustine carefully and plausibly discusses himself as a baby, recounting how he must have misbehaved and started to learn language, though he admits he can remember nothing.
His purpose is always to show human worthlessness extravagantly blessed with gifts from God (as a fretful, demanding baby is blessed with instinctive care and nurturance, and as a selfish, distractible child is given the full benefit of a traditional education), and appalling human sinfulness showered with God’s grace, which if accepted leads to blissful eternal life. It’s necessary, in this schema, for the author to denigrate his own expressive genius even as he parades it, and he makes this reversal many times with considerable wit and charm.
book 2 and start again from there: From his late teens, when he was sorely exercised about what to do with his body—
My main justification for this new translation, after several learned and serviceable ones have become established, is the previously hidden degree to which Augustine makes his life and ideas vivid in the style of his Latin. (The fusion of form and content
In Augustine, the manner of presentation is especially compelling, because of his stress on beauty and joy on the one hand, and intellectual helplessness on the other.
“I was, you see, holding my heart back from any admission of the truth, as I feared the sheer drop into it; but hanging (myself) in the air above it was more like killing myself.”
a translator must govern her distaste and try to make her author’s thought and experience as vivid and sympathetic as it plainly was to his contemporaries. Otherwise, there can be no limits to the demands of a condescending, manipulative, and anachronistic political correctness.
Augustine’s famous cry to God, “I took too long to fall in love with you, beauty so ancient and so new” (book 10, chapter 38),
I maintain that the Augustine of the Confessions was a feeling man more than a thinking one—
As a partly folksy, sometimes smirking writer—or just as a man of his time—Augustine sometimes commits himself where his translators have wished he wouldn’t, and this has led them to gloss over what he does plainly express.
This layout allows Augustine more explicit latitude, whereas the long paragraphs of previous English translations hardly separate prayer, narrative, homily, and speculation, jamming all these together both physically and, as implied, logically.
Perhaps some of these divisions are themselves clumsy, but if they only provoke debate and thereby bring more attention to the task of translating this astonishing author, I’ll count that as progress.
leading the arrogant into decrepitude, though they are unaware of it.
Being weak, babies’ bodies are harmless, but babies’ minds aren’t harmless.
No, mine were the putrid fumes rising from scummy bodily lust and the diseased eruption of puberty, befouling and befuddling my heart with their smoke, so that there was no telling the unclouded sky of affection from the thick murk of carnality.
You were always there, savaging me in your pity, scattering the most acrid upsets on everything illicit that that I enjoyed, and you did this to make me look for enjoyment without any upset and be unable to find it in anything but you, Master, in anything but you, who fashion pain as a lesson and lambaste us to heal us*5 and kill us so that we don’t die away from you.
To whom am I telling this story? It isn’t of course to you, my God, but in your presence I’m telling it to my race, the human race, however minute a snippet out of that might stumble on my writing, such as it is. And what’s the story’s purpose? Obviously, it’s so that I and whoever reads this can contemplate from what depths we must cry out to you.*8 But what’s closer to your ears, if the heart humbles itself in confession and the life is lived in faith?
But I wanted to commit this crime, and commit it I did, though destitution didn’t drive me to it—unless I was starving for what was right but turning my nose up at it anyway, and at the same time stuffed and swollen with my own sinfulness:*21 so I stole a thing I had a better sort of in lush supply already; and I didn’t want to enjoy the thing my hand grasped for—the actual stealing, the transgression, was going to be my treat.
There was a pear tree in the neighborhood of our vineyard, but the fruit weighing it down offered no draw either in its look or its taste. After playing in vacant lots clear till the dead of night—that was the behavior we visited on the town as our habit—we young men, full of our endless mischief, proceeded to this tree to shake it down and haul away the goods. We filched immense loads, not for our own feasting but for slinging away to swine, if you can believe it. But in fact, we did devour some pears; our only proviso was the potential for liking what was illicit.
The just person delights in God’s self, and God himself is the delight of those with righteous hearts.*22
at the words “Come on, let’s do it,” there’s shame in not being shameless.
I offer as testimony to you, Master, my memory as best I can retrieve it
When the city rhetorician at Carthage, who was my teacher (his jaws flapping in a gale of pretension),
The self-restraint of a mind that testifies to its own weakness is more beautiful than the things I was hot to know.
mine was a form of sin harder to heal in that I didn’t consider myself to be the sinner; and it was a damnable wickedness that I preferred for you, the all-powerful God, to be defeated within me, for my own destruction, than for me to be defeated by you for my salvation.
I rejoiced also because the ancient writings of the law and the prophets were no longer presented to me for reading with the kind of gaze that had made them look ridiculous before, when I’d accused your holy followers of holding opinions that in fact they didn’t hold. I was happy in hearing Ambrose say often in his public sermons, as if he were recommending this very carefully as a basic principle, “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”*17 He was removing the ritual covering, as it were, from the deeper meaning, to disclose the spiritual sense of things that, when taken literally,
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You yourself said long ago, and wove it into your writings: “Find fault with a wise man, and he’ll love you.”*25
I didn’t stand still to enjoy my God. I was ravished into your presence by your beauty, yet soon torn away from you by the weight of myself, and I smashed down with a groan into those lower things I’ve been writing of.
Roman reckoning, male “youth” extended to the age of about thirty (the ordinary age of a first marriage), and “young manhood” into middle age.
Come, Master, and act, rouse us and call us back, set us alight and ravish us; blaze for us, grow sweet to us. Let us love you passionately, let us run to you.
you, Master, twisted me back to yourself, catching me from behind,*55 where I’d taken up a position in my unwillingness to pay any attention to what I was. You stood me firmly in front of my own face, so that I could see how ugly I was, how deformed and dirty, blotched with rashes and sores. I saw, and I shuddered with disgust, but I had nowhere to make off to.
I was afraid that you’d hear my prayer quickly and quickly cure me of the disease of lust, which I preferred to have satisfied rather than nullified.
The mind commands the body, and there’s instant obedience. The mind commands itself, and there’s resistance.
Thus I was inwardly at war and being laid waste by myself; yet this devastation was happening against my will. Nevertheless, this didn’t characterize a mind as a thing apart; rather, it showed the punishment of my own mind.
The nearer to me that moment moved at which I was to become something different, the more it struck terror into my heart. But it didn’t strike me back or turn me to the side; it just left me dangling there.
This dispute going on in my heart was nothing other than myself versus myself.
Hardly knowing where I was or what I was doing, I sprawled under a fig tree and gave my tears free rein. Rivers of them burst out of my eyes—
Now he doesn’t put his ear to my lips; instead, he puts his lips of the spirit to your spring, and he drinks all he can hold, wisdom in proportion to his thirst for it, in an ecstasy without end. And I don’t think he gets so drunk that he forgets about me—since you, Master, whom he’s guzzling, remember us.
I don’t confess with physical words, with the sounds of speech, but with the words of my soul and the shouts of my thoughts—which are familiar to your ear.
I asked the whole huge universe about my God, and it answered me, “I am not God, but God made me.”
The happy life is, after all, joy in the truth. This is joy through you, God, who are the truth,*45 my illumination, the salvation of my face,*46 my God. Everybody wants this happy life; this life, which alone is happy, everyone wants; everyone wants joy in the truth.
