Confessions (Modern Library)

by Augustine of Hippo

Your best functionary is the one who by preference doesn’t pay regard as much to hearing what he wants from you, as to wanting what he hears from you.

took too long to fall in love with you! But there you were, inside, and I was outside—and there I searched for you, and into those shapely things you made, my misshapen self went sliding. You were with me, but I wasn’t with you. Those things, which wouldn’t exist unless they existed in you, held me back, far from you. You called and shouted and shattered my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you put my blindness to flight. You smelled sweet, and I drew breath, and now I pant for you. I tasted you, and now I’m starving and parched; you touched me, and I burst into flame with desire for your peace.

Even in sleep it will not only stop committing those shameful acts, sources of corruption, because of brute images that succeed in making the body flow dissolutely out of itself; my soul will not even share in those sensations.

I’m more delighted with the truth itself than with praise. If I had the choice whether to be raving mad and in error about everything while getting praise from the whole world, or to be firm and unshakable in the truth though everyone castigated me, I’m clear on which I’d choose.

It couldn’t have been for nothing that you wanted so many pages of dimly lit, recondite things written: those forests of words have stags native to them, who retire inward and revive themselves, walking around and grazing, reclining and ruminating.*14

given that your mercy is superior to such lives,*63 look how my life is overextended and stretched out of shape; but your right hand has upheld me*64 in my Master, the son of humankind, the mediator between you the one and us the many,*65 who are spread thin through many things and over many things.

But now my years are spent in groaning;*70 yet you are my comfort, Master, you are my eternal father. But as it is, I have exploded into pieces of time whose sequence I don’t know; and in a riot of contradictory states of being, my thoughts, the inmost viscera of my soul, are mangled—and I’ll continue this way until I’m cleansed in the fire of your passion and made fluid and run into you.

Have pity, our God and Master, and keep those who are walking down the road from trampling into nothing the chick who has no feathers yet, and send your angel to put him back in the nest, so that he lives until he can lift himself on his wings.

let Truth itself beget agreement between our hearts, and may our God in his mercy let us use the law lawfully, for the purpose for which it was made, which is unsullied love.*83

And the soul does not require mighty prodigies of portents to foster its faith; nor does it fail to believe unless it sees signs and miracles,*171 since the faithful and committed earth is now separate from the earth’s waters, which are bitter with faithlessness; and speaking in tongues is a sign for the benefit of the faithless, not the faithful.*172

Unable to slap the author until he explains, I can merely construe that he is still talking about the material elaboration of eternal abstractions.

This book is dedicated to my husband, TOM CONROY, and I’m sorry, Tom, that the previous book dedicated to you was The Golden Ass;