Confessions

by Augustine of Hippo

Indeed all good things come from you, God, and from my God comes all my salvation.

Who will recount for me the sin of my infancy? For in your eyes no one is free from sin, not even the infant who has lived but one day on the earth.

we enjoyed playing, and we were punished for it by people who, of course, behaved in exactly the same way themselves. But when adults waste their time, they call it “business,” whereas when children do such things, they are punished.

For this was my sin: I sought pleasures, exaltations, and truths not in him, but in his creatures—in myself and in the rest of them—and so I rushed into pains, embarrassments, and errors.

I was unable to conceive of any substance other than the sort that can be seen by the eyes of the flesh. I did not conceive of you, O God, in the shape of a human body;

But I was at a loss as to how else I might conceive of you; human being as I was—and such a human being!—I tried to conceive of you, the supreme and only and true God. [Jn. 17:3] And I believed in the very marrow of my bones that you were incorruptible and inviolable and unchangeable, for although I did {99} not know on what basis or in what way I knew this, I did nevertheless see quite clearly and was certain that what can be corrupted is lower than what cannot, and that I unhesitatingly preferred what could not be violated to what was violable, and that what undergoes no change is better than what is subject to change.

I was compelled to conceive of you as something bodily, extended in space—perhaps infused in the world or perhaps also diffused through infinite space beyond the world—but also incorruptible and inviolable and unchangeable, which I ranked higher than what was corruptible and violable and changeable.

In the same way I also thought of you, O Life of my life, as something immense, occupying infinite spaces in every direction, penetrating the whole mass of the world and the vast, boundless spaces beyond it, so that the earth contained you, the heavens contained you, all things contained you and were bounded within you, whereas you were in no way bounded.

What (he asked) was that darkness, whatever exactly it was, going to do to you—the darkness that according to them was a mass opposed to you—if you had been unwilling to fight against it? If the answer was that it would have done something to harm you, you would be violable and corruptible. But if they said that it could do you no harm, then they could offer no reason why you would fight against it, and indeed fight in such a way that some portion or part of you, or some offspring of your own substance, would become intermingled with hostile powers, natures not created by you, and would be so corrupted and degraded by them that it would fall from happiness into misery and would need help to be extricated and purified: and that this is the soul, enslaved, contaminated, and corrupted, which is helped by your word, free, pure, and sound. Yet your word would itself also be corruptible, since it comes from one and the same substance. And so if they said that you, whatever you are—that is, the substance by which you exist—are incorruptible, all these things would be false and detestable. If, however, they said that you are corruptible, that very claim is itself false; it should be rejected the very moment it is uttered.

still lacked a clear explanation of the cause of evil. Yet whatever that cause might be, I did realize that I would have to look for it as something that would not compel me to believe that the unchangeable God was changeable, lest I myself become the very thing I was seeking. And so I sought it without anxiety, convinced that what was said by those whom I wholeheartedly repudiated was false; for I saw that in their search for the cause of evil they were themselves filled with evil: [Rom. 1:29] the evil of believing that your substance undergoes evil rather than that their own substance does evil.

free choice of the will is the cause of our doing evil, and your upright judgment [Ps. 118:137] is the cause of our suffering evil.

But then I would ask, “Who made me? Was it not my God, who is not merely a great good but the Good itself? How, then, does it come about that I will evil and will against good? Is it so that I can justly suffer punishments? Who placed this in me? Who planted in me this seed of bitterness, [Heb. 12:15] when all that I am was made by my God, who is of surpassing sweetness? Suppose the devil was responsible. Then where did the devil come from? If it was by the perversity of his will that a good angel became the devil, where did the evil will by which he became the devil come from, since the {102} whole angel was made by the best possible Creator?”

And I said, “Here is God, and here is what God created. God is good, vastly and incomparably more excellent than creatures. But this good God created good things, and see how he encompasses and fills them. Where then did evil come from? From where and by what path did it invade creation? What is its root and seed? “Or does evil not exist at all? Why then do we fear and avoid what does not exist? Or if our fear is in vain, that fear is surely itself an evil by which the heart is disturbed and tormented for no reason. And the more we fear this non-existent evil, the greater the evil is—and we do fear it. So either there is evil that we fear, or the very fact that we fear is itself an evil. “How, then, is there evil, given that God is good and made all these things good? A greater—indeed the greatest—Good made these lesser goods, and yet both the Creator and all created things are good. So where does evil come from? Did he perhaps make them from some matter that was evil, which he formed and ordered, yet left something in it that he did not turn to good? Why would that be? Did he lack the power to turn and transform the whole of matter so that no evil remained? But he is all-powerful. “Finally, why did he will to make something from matter rather than using his omnipotence to bring it about that there was no matter at all? Or indeed how could matter exist contrary to his will? Or if it was eternal, why did he allow it to exist through the infinite reaches of time past, and on...

And so I saw, and it was made plain to me, that you made all things good and that there are no substances that you did not make. And it is because you did not make all things equal that all things exist: for individually they are good, and taken together they are very good, because our God made all things very good. [Gn. 1:31; Sir. 39:21] 13.19 For you evil does not exist at all—and not only for you, but for your whole creation, since there is nothing outside it that breaks in and corrupts the order you have imposed upon it. To be sure, certain parts of it are regarded as bad because they do not fit harmoniously with other parts; but even they fit with still other parts and thus are good, and they are also good in themselves. And all these things that do not fit harmoniously with each other are well suited to the inferior portion of things, which we call earth, which has a cloudy and windy sky suited to it.

8.15 This power of memory is a great power—indeed, an exceedingly great power, my God, a vast and boundless sanctuary. Who has ever penetrated to its furthest reaches? And it is a power of my own {171} mind; it belongs to my nature, and I cannot contain everything that I am. Is the mind, then, too small to contain itself—so that we must ask, “Where is this part of the mind that the mind itself does not contain? Is the mind outside itself and not within itself? How does the mind not contain itself?”

25.36 But where do you abide in my memory, Lord? Where do you abide there? What sort of dwelling place have you fashioned for yourself? What kind of sanctuary have you built for yourself? You have conferred upon my memory the dignity of abiding in it, but in what part of it do you abide? That is what I am seeking to understand. For in remembering you I have passed beyond the parts of memory that even the beasts have, because I did not find you there, among images of bodily things. Then I went to the parts of memory to which I have entrusted the affections of my mind, and neither did I find you there. Then I entered the residence of the mind itself, where the mind dwells in my memory—for the mind also remembers itself—and you were not there, because just as you are not an image of something bodily or an affection of something living, as when we rejoice, grieve, desire, fear, remember, forget, and so on, so also you are not the mind itself, because you are the Lord and God of the mind. And all these things undergo change, but you abide unchangeably above them; and from {183} the time that I first learned about you, you have seen fit to dwell in my memory. And what do I mean by asking in what place you dwell, as though there were really places in memory? Certainly you dwell in my memory, because from the time I first learned about you I have remembered you; and when I recall you, I find you in my memory.

Then the mind compared these words that sounded in time with your eternal Word in his silence, and it said, “They are far different. They are far different. These temporal words are far beneath me; nor do they really have being, since they flee and pass away. But the Word of my God is above me, and he abides for ever.” [Is. 40:8] So if it was by words that sounded and then passed away that you spoke, so that heaven and earth might be made, and in that way you made heaven and earth, then there was already some bodily creature before you made heaven and earth, and by the temporal movements of that creature your utterance was extended through time.

13.16 It is not in time that you precede times, since otherwise you would not precede all times. No, it is by the loftiness of ever-present eternity that you precede all past things, and you surpass all future things because they are future, and once they have come, they will be past.

14.17 Therefore, there was no time at which you had not made anything, because you made time itself. And no times are coeternal with you, since you persist, whereas they would not be times if they persisted.

Surely no one will be so brazen as to say that what does not exist can be measured. So while time is passing, it can be experienced and measured; but once it has passed, it cannot, because it does not exist.