Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

Saint Augustine, Confessions, transl., intro & notes by Henry Chadwick, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford, 1998

The elaborate manner of late Latin oratory, with its love of antitheses even if they were artificial (as some of Augustine’s were), was a style that contemporaries admired but were accustomed to associate with insincerity. Augustine himself records that when he had to deliver a panegyric for the tenth anniversary of the accession of the emperor Valentinian II, he was not only filled with absurd nervousness about his public performance (some of which may have been due to Italian mockery of his African accent), but ashamed of the lies and bogus flattery that, as everyone knew, filled his discourse. (x)

Augustine shows an awareness that he will have Christian readers suspicious of his elaborate rhetorical style; at v. vi (10) their fears are expressly mentioned. These suspicious persons are no doubt identical with the puritan critics who felt that immediately upon his [x] conversion he ought to have resigned his professorship of grammar and literature instead of waiting until the vacation to hand in his letter of formal resignation (IX. Ii (4)). He felt bound to concede that his profession of ‘selling words’ in the ‘bazaar of loquacity’ was vulnerable to moral criticism. At the same time he expressed remarkable doubts and hesitations whether skill in public speaking can be acquired from a teacher (VIII. Vi (13)). He was conscious that his own high ability in this respect was a natural endowment, a gift of God, not something he had learnt from any of the second-rate teachers whose instruction he had endured in youth. (x-xi)

The work was written during the last three years of the fourth century AD by a man in his mid-forties, recently made a bishop, needing to come to terms with a past in which numerous enemies and critics showed an unhealthy interest. 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. (xiii)

Cicero’s remarks on the way in which the majority of mankind look for happiness in the wrong place initially led him to pick up his Latin Bible. Its style, especially the Old Testament, was often close to translationese, painful to an admirer of Cicero and Virgil. Before Jerome’s revision of the Latin Bible, produced during the years from 383 to 405, the Old Latin Bible composed by the second-century missionaries in Italy and Africa was colloquial and at times obscure to the point of being barbaric. (xiv)

He was drawn to the theosophy of Mani, a Mesopotamian Gnostic of the third century whose religion was zealously propagated by the underground missionary work, despite fierce prohibitions from the imperial government. The religion of Mani’s followers, called in Latin Manichaei, Manichees, expressed disgust at the physical world and especially at the human reproductive system. Procreation imprisoned divine souls in matter, which his inherently hostile to goodness and light. Manichees had a vegetarian diet, and forbade wine. There were two classes, Elect who were strictly obliged to be celibate, and Hearers allowed wives or concubines as long as they avoided procreating children, whether by contraceptives or by confining intercourse to the ‘safe’ period of the monthly cycle. …Mani strongly denied the historical reality of the crucifixion of Jesus; for him the Cross was a symbol of the suffering of humanity. [xiv] … God is good but not omnipotent, and though resistant to evil not strong enough to defeat it. … The Confessions shows that he continued in association with the Manichee community for a decade, even though towards the end of that time he was rapidly losing confidence in the system. In youth he had accepted Manicheism because he believed to be valid both its claim to be true Christianity and its grounds for rejecting Catholic orthodoxy. By the time he reached Milan he still regarded its negative criticisms of orthodoxy as valid, but had ceased to accept the Manichee mythology without which the system seemed to disintegrate. (xiv-xv)

At Milan Augustine still had with him the Carthaginian mate, of low social status, whom he had picked up at the age of 17. She was no intellectual companion for him. Early in their liaison she produced a son, unwanted but then deeply loved. Named Adeodatus, he was clever and a source of pride to his father. (He died when only 17). If at Milan Augustine’s ambitions were to be realized, his concubine was a liability. She would hardly do at government house, but in any event only when a wife with a fat dowry could bring success. His mate’s inferior social status made marriage out of the question in law and in social convention. So she returned to Carthage, and the parting was exquisitely painful on both sides. Meanwhile the strenuous efforts on Monica produced a fiancée; the marriage was deferred because the girl was still only 10 or 11 years old. In Roman law the minimum age was 12. / To modern readers nothing in Augustine’s career seems more deplorable than his dismissal of his son’s mother, the concubine of fifteen years. In the mentality of the fourth century no one would have been outraged unless the person concerned were a professing and baptized Christian, which at the time Augustine was not. Texts other than Augustine’s disclose that for a young man it was regular custom to take a concubine until such time as he found a suitable fiancée, marriage being understood as a property deal between the two families. (xvi)

After he had become a bishop, the counseling of married couples in trouble occupied much of his time and care, … (xviii)

Adeodatus’ mother was uneducated. Augustine came to find his own mother Monica possessed of great wisdom, but she spoke in a demotic syntax. In short, although he knew that well-educated and cultured women existed, yet they were the far side of the horizon. He himself never had one among his own circle of friends. (xviii)

At Milan his lost belief in Mani was replaced by a skepticism about the possibility of any certainty. He devoured the writings of skeptical philosophers of the Academic school telling him that certainty is not available except in questions of pure mathematics. The psychological transition from radical skepticism to faith is sufficiently common to make it likely that his skeptical period on arrival at Milan prepared the ground for the coming conversion. (xix)

…he ‘came to Ambrose the bishop’, and discovered how different Christian faith was from what he had supposed. Ambrose’s sermons were certainly very different from the kind of thing he might have heard in some of the North African churches, where discourses lacked much rational structure. (xx)

Plotinus provided Augustine with a model and a vocabulary for a mystical quest directed to the union of the soul with God in a beatific vision. In book VII Augustine set out to describe his attempt to attain this union with the One, the supreme Good, by the methods he had learnt from the Neoplatonists. He was disappointed by the transience of the experience and by the fact that, when it had passed away, he found himself as fiercely consumed by pride and lust as ever. (xxi)

Our use of words in which meaning is conveyed by one sound after another, never in a simultaneous present, is for Plotinus, as for Augustine, a symptom of the fallen condition of humanity (5.3.17.24). … The answer to the question he finds in the reception of scripture in the Christian community. The Bible consists of words, human indeed but for the believing community a gift of God so that within the sign there is also a divine reality. (xxii)

The Bible text used by Augustine was the Old Latin version made from the Greek of both Old and New Testaments during the second century. This version has the authority of being based on very ancient Greek manuscripts, but its text occasionally produces forms differing in some respects from those familiar to users of the English translations. (xxvi)

The medieval manuscripts [of Confessions] have only the divisions into thirteen books. The chapter numbers, given in small Roman numerals, go back to the early printed editions of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The paragraph numbers were first provided in the great edition of all the works of Augustine (as far as then known) by the French Benedictines of Saint-Maur, published at Paris in 1679. (xxvi)

‘You are great, Lord, and highly to be praised (Ps. 47: 2) ([opening] Book I. section i. page 3)

‘Grant me Lord to know and understand’ (Ps. 118: 34, 73, 144) which comes first—to call upon you or to praise you, and whether knowing you precedes calling upon you. …In seeking him, they find him, and in finding they will praise him. (I. i. 3)

Even so, Lord, even so. (I. ii. 4)

Who then are you, my God? [4] …always active, always in repose, gathering to yourself but not in need,…you love without burning, you are jealous in a way that is free of anxiety, you ‘repent’ (Gen 6:6) without the pain of regret, you are wrathful and remain tranquil. …But in these words what have I said, my God, my life, my holy sweetness? What has anyone achieved in words when he speaks about you? Yet woe to those who are silent about you because, though loquacious with verbosity, they have nothing to say. (I. iv. 4-5)

What am I to you that you command me to love you, and that, if I fail to love you, you are angry with me and threaten me with vast miseries? (I. v. 5)

…I do not contend with you like a litigant because, ‘if you take note of iniquities, Lord, who shall stand?’ (Ps. 129: 3). (I. vi. 6)

Tell me, God, tell your suppliant, in mercy to your poor wretch, tell me whether there was some period of my life, now dead and gone, which preceded my infancy? (I. ix. 7)

I have personally watched and studied a jealous baby. He could not yet speak and, pale with jealousy and bitterness, glared at his brother sharing his mother’s milk. (I. xi. 9)

If ‘I was conceived in iniquity and in sins my mother nourished me in her womb’ (Ps. 50:7), I ask you, my God, I ask, Lord, where and when your servant was innocent? But of that time I say nothing more. I feel no sense of responsibility now for time of which I recall not a single trace. (I. xii. 10)

…what delusions when in my boyhood it was set before me as my moral duty in life to obey those who admonished me with the purpose that I should succeed in this world, and should excel in the arts of using my tongue to gain access to human honours and to acquire deceitful riches. (I. ix. 11)

Though I was only a small child, there was great feeling when I pleaded with you that I might not be caned at school. And when you did not hear me, which was so as ‘not to give me to foolishness’, (Ps. 21:3), adult people, including even my parents, who wished no evil to come upon me, used to laugh at my stripes, which were at that time a great and painful evil to me. [In spite of the criticism of Quintilian (1.3.13-17), corporal punishment was universal in schools of Augustine’s time.] (I. 14. 11)

Before about 400, the intense significance attached to baptism as sacrament of the remission of sins, led many Christian parents to postpone baptism, often until the deathbed. [note, page 13]

…one day, when I was still a small boy, pressure on the chest suddenly made me hot with fever and almost at death’s door. …I then begged for the baptism… My physical mother was distraught. …She hastily made arrangements for me to be initiated and washed in the sacraments of salvation,…But suddenly I recovered. My cleansing was deferred on the assumption that, if I lived, I would be sure to soil myself; and [13] after that solemn washing the guilt would be greater and more dangerous if I then defiled myself with sins. / So I was already a believer, as were my mother and the entire household except for my father alone. Though he had not yet come to faith, he did not obstruct my right to follow my mother’s devotion, so as to prevent me believing in Christ. She anxiously laboured to convince me that you, my God, were my father rather than he, and in this endeavour you helped her to gain victory over her husband. His moral superior, she rendered obedient service to him, for in this matter she was being obedient to your authority. / 18. I beg of you, my God, I long to know if it is your will, what was your purpose when at that time it was decided to defer my baptism? (I. 17-18. 14)

Augustine was never fluent in Greek, but could make his own translations when needed. He knew more Greek than he sometimes admits. [note, pg 15]

Why then did I hate Greek which has similar songs to sing? Homer was skilled at weaving such stories, and with sheer delight mixed vanity. Yet to me as a boy he was repellent. I can well believed that Greek boys feel the same about Virgil when they are forced to learn him in the way that I learnt Homer. The difficulty lies there: the difficulty of learning a foreign language at all. (I. 23. 17)

‘Lord hear my prayer’ (Ps. 60: 2) that my soul may not collapse (Ps. 83:3) under your discipline (Ps. 54:2), and may not suffer exhaustion in confessing to you your mercies,… (I. 24. 17)

May I dedicate to your service my power to speak and write and read and count; for when I learnt vanities, you imposed discipline on me and have forgiven me the sin of desiring pleasure from those vanities. (I. 24. 18)

It is as if we would not know words such as ‘golden shower’ and ‘bosom’ and ‘deceit’ and ‘temples of heaven’ and other phrases occurring in the passage in question, had not Terence [Eunuch 585, 589 f.] brought on to the stage a worthless young man citing Jupiter as a model for his own fornication. He is looking up at a mural painting: ‘there was this picture representing how Jupiter, they say, sent a shower of gold into Danae’s lap and deceived a woman.’ … There is no force, no force at all, in the argument that these words are more easily learnt through this obscene text. … I learnt this text with pleasure and took delight in it, wretch that I was. For this reason I was said to be a boy of high promise. (I. 26. 19)

When one considers that the men proposed to me as models for my imitation, it is no wonder that in this way I was swept along by vanities and travelled right away from you, my God. They would be covered in embarrassment if, in describing their own actions in which they had not behaved badly, they were caught using a barbarism or a solecism in speech. But if they described their lusts in a rich vocabulary of well constructed prose with a copious and ornate style, they received praise and congratulated themselves. [20] …Certainly the knowledge of letters is not as deepseated in the consciousness as the imprint of the moral conscience, … (I. 29. 20-21)

Like most of the Church Fathers, Augustine was against capital punishments. [note, 21]

I also used to steal from my parents’ cellar and to pocket food from their table either to satisfy the demands of gluttony or to have something to give to boys who, of course, loved playing a game as much as I, and who would sell me their playthings in return. Even in this game I was overcome by a vain desire to win and was often guilty of cheating. … Is that childish innocence? It is not, is it? (I. 30. 22)

My sin consisted in this, that I sought pleasure, sublimity, and truth not in God but in [22] his creatures, in myself and other created beings. (I. 31. 22-23)

At one time in adolescence I was burning to find satisfaction in hellish pleasures. I ran wild in the shadowy jungle of erotic adventures. ‘My beauty wasted away and in your sight I became putrid’ (Dan. 10:8), by pleasing myself and by being ambitious to win human approval. (II. 1. 24)

If only someone could have imposed restraint on my disorder. … Then the stormy waves of my youth would have finally broken on the shore of marriage. Even so, I could not have been wholly content to confine sexual union to acts intended to procreate children, as your law prescribes, Lord. (II. 3. 25)

Had I paid careful attention to these sayings and ‘become a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt. 19:12), I would have been happier finding fulfillment in your embraces. (II. 3. 25)

Where was I in the sixteenth year of the age of my flesh? …Sensual folly assumed dominion over me, and I gave myself totally to it in acts allowed by shameful humanity but under your laws illicit. My family did not try to extricate me from my headlong course by means of marriage. The only concern was that I should learn to speak as effectively as possible and carry conviction by my oratory. (II. 4. 26)

Her concern (and in the secret of my conscience I recall the memory of her admonition delivered with vehement anxiety) was that I should not fall into fornication, and above all that I should not commit adult with someone else’s wife. These warnings seemed to me womanish advice which I would have blushed to take the least notice of. But they were your warnings and I did not realize it. …I was ashamed not to be equally guilty of shameful behaviour when I heard them boasting of their sexual exploits. (II. 7. 27)

[at 16 yrs. old] I wanted to carry out an act of theft and did so, driven by no kind of need other than my inner lack of any sense of, or feeling for, justice. Wickedness filled me. I stole something which I had in plenty and of much better quality. My desire was to enjoy not what I sought by stealing but merely the excitement of thieving and the doing of what was wrong. There was a pear tree near our vineyard laden with fruit, though attractive in neither colour nor taste. To shake the fruit off the tree and carry off the pears, I and a gang of naughty adolescents set off late at night after (in our usual pestilential way) we had continued our game in the streets. We carried off a huge load of pears. But they were not for our feasts but merely to throw to the pigs. Even if we ate a few, nevertheless our pleasure lay in going what was not allowed. …It was foul, and I loved it. (II. 8. 29)

It was all done for a giggle, as if our heats were tickled to think we were deceiving those who would not think us capable of such behaviour and would have profoundly disapproved. (II. 17. 33)

I rushed headlong into love, by which I was longing to be captured. …I was glad to be in bondage, tied with troublesome chains, with the result that I was flogged with the red-hot iron rods of jealousy, suspicion, fear, anger, and contention. [Beating with red-hot rods was part of the standard arsenal of the torturer, normally employed in Roman lawcourts on naked bodies in criminal cases to secure evidence, especially from slaves.] (III. 1. 36)

During the celebration of your solemn rites within the walls of your Church, I even dared to lust after a girl and to start an affair that would procure the fruit of death. [That is, sin: Rom. 7:5.] (III. 5. 37)

I was already top of the class in the rhetor’s school, and was pleased with myself for my success and was inflamed with conceit. Yet I was far quieter than the other students. [A contemporary student later recalled the young Augustine as being a quiet and bookish man. (ep. 93. 51)] (III. 6. 38)

Following the usual curriculum I had already come across a book by a certain Cicero, whose language (but not his [38] heart) almost everyone admires. … I was 18 years old and my father had been dead for two years. (III. 7. 38-39)

…decided to give attention to the holy scriptures and to find out what they were like. And this is what met me: something neither open to the proud nor laid bare to mere children; a text lowly to the beginner but, on further reading, or mountainous difficulty and enveloped in mysteries. I was not in any state to be able to enter into that, or to bow my head to climb its steps. What I am now saying did not then enter my mind when I gave my attention to the scripture. It seemed to me unworthy in comparison with the dignity of Cicero. [ The humble style of the Bible, together with a concern for maintaining the family property, is mentioned by Augustine as a major deterrent to conversion for the educated and well-to-do classes (De catechizandis rudibus 13). The second-century Old Latin (i.e. pre-Jerome) version was painfully close to translationese for large parts of the Old Testament. On the other hand, the sublimity of Genesis I and the prologue of St. John’s Gospel moved some non-Christian readers to deep admiration.] My inflated conceit shunned the Bible’s restraint, and my gaze never penetrated to its inwardness. Yet the Bible was composed in such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them. I disdained to be a little beginner. Puffed up with pride, I considered myself a mature adult. (III. 9. 40)

When I wrote poetry [Augustine was soon to win a public poetry competition (IV. Iii. 5). The first five books of his work On Music are devoted to metre. The only surviving verse from his pen is three lines of an evening hymn sung at the lighting of the candle (City of God 15.22)] I was not allowed to place a foot where I wished, but had to use different kinds of feet at different points in different metres. Even in the same verse one could not put the same foot in any and every place. The art of poetic composition did not have different rules in different places. But had all the same rules at all times. I had not the insight to see how the justice, to which good and holy people were obliged to submit, embraces within its principles all that it prescribes for all times in a far more excellent and sublime way, and, although it is in no respect subject to variation, yet it is not given all at once, but at various times it prescribed in differing contexts what is proper for the circumstance.[Augustine’s ethic regards the Golden Rule as absolute, its application being relative to the situation and to the motive or intention of the doer. The criterion of every moral precept is love (Enchiridion 121)]. (III. 14. 45)

I was ignorant of these principles and laughed at your holy servants and prophets. By my mockery I only achieved the result that I became ridiculous to you. Gradually and unconsciously I was [48] led to the absurd trivialities of believing that a fig weeps when it is picked, and that the fig tree its mother sheds milky tears. Yet if some [Manichee] saint ate it, provided that the sin of picking it was done not by his own hand but by another’s, then he would digest it in his stomach and as a result would breathe out angles, or rather as he groaned in prayer and retched would bring up bits of God. [The diet of the Manichee Elect, gathered and cooked for them by the Hearers (or catechumens), included certain fruits, the digestion of which was believed to assist in liberating from the body imprisoned particles of divinity. Permitted fruits did not include apples, because of Adam’s Fall. Below IV. i. (I)] These bits of the most high and true God would have remained chained in that fruit, if they had not been liberated by the tooth and belly of that elect saint. And I in my pathetic state believed that more mercy should be shown to the fruits of the earth than to human beings for whose sake the fruits came to be. Indeed, if some hungry person, not being a Manichee, had asked for this food, and if one gave him a piece, that morsel would have been considered to be condemned to capital punishment. (III. 18. 48-49)

During this same period of nine years, from my nineteenth to my twenty-eighth year,…Publicly I was a teacher of the arts which they call liberal, [Literature, rhetoric and dialectic, leading on to the mathematical studies of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy; called ‘liberal’ because they were the mark of a cultivated gentleman.] privately I professed a false religion—in the former role arrogant, in the latter superstitious, in everything vain. ON the one side we pursued the empty glory of popularity, ambitious for the applause of the audience at the theatre when entering for verse competitions to win a garland of mere grass, concerned with the follies of public entertainments and unrestrained lusts. On the other side, we sought to purge ourselves of that filth by supplying food to those whose title was the Elect and Holy, so that in the workshop of their stomach they could manufacture for us angels and gods to bring us liberation. [In Manichee texts, every meal of the Elect is a holy feeding on particles of light concealed in fruits and plants, helping to grain remission of sins for those Hearers who prepare it. Above, III. x. 18.] (IV. 1. 52)

…I preferred to have virtuous students (virtuous as they are commonly called). Without any resort to a trick I taught them the tricks of rhetoric, not that they should use them against the life of an innocent man, but that sometimes they might save the life of a guilty person. [Augustine formulates the principle that an advocate should not throw dust in the eyes of the court, but is entitled to require that the prosecution prove their case, even when he may think his client is guilty. He holds that it is worse for an innocent person to be condemned than for a guilty person to be acquitted. The theme is already in Cicero, De officiis 2.51] (IV. 2. 53)

In those years I had a woman. She was not my partner in what is called lawful marriage. I had found her in my state of wandering desire and lack of prudence. Nevertheless, she was the only girl for me, and I was faithful to her. With her I learnt by direct experience how wide a difference there is between a partnership of marriage entered into for the sake of having a family and the mutual consent of those whose love is a matter of physical sex, and for whom the birth of a child is contrary to their intention—even though, if offspring arrive, they compel their parents to love them. (IV. 2. 53)

Helvius Vindicianus…I asked him why it was that many of their [astrology’s] forecasts turned out to be correct. He replied that the best answer he could give was the power apparent in lots, a power everywhere diffused in the nature of things. So when someone happens to consult the pages of a poet whose verses and intention are concerned with a quite different subject, in a wonderful way a verse often emerges appropriate to the decision under discussion. He used to say that it was no wonder if from the human soul, by some higher instinct that does not know what does on within itself, some utterance emerges not by art but by ‘chance’ which is in sympathy with the affairs or actions of the inquirer. [Vindicianus’ arguments failed to dissuade Augustine (VII. Vi. 8) His position was not that a correct astrological prediction is the result of a purely random chance, but that ‘chance’ is our name for a cause we do not know, and in this instance the correctness of prediction is the result of the internal sympathy of all parts of the cosmos. So also Plotinus 2.3. The poetry of Virgil was often used for sortilege; Christians used the Bible, to the anxiety of bishops including Augustine, though it was crucial in the garden at Milan, below VIII. Xii. 29] (IV. 5. 55)

[my dead friend] I found myself heavily weighed down by a sense of being tired of living and scared of dying. I suppose that the more I loved him, the more hatred and fear I felt for the death which had taken him from me, as if it were my most ferocious enemy. I thought that since death had consumed him, it was suddenly going to engulf all humanity. That was, to the best of my memory, my state of mind. (IV. 11. 59)

How stupid man is to be unable to restrain feelings in suffering the human lot! That was my state at that time. so I boiled with anger, sighed, wept, and was at my wits’ end. I found no calmness, no capacity for deliberation. (IV. 11. 59)

Where should I go to escape from myself? Where is there where I cannot pursue myself? And yet I fled from my home town, for my eyes sought for him less in a place where they were not accustomed to see him. And so from the town of Thagaste I came to Carthage. [Augustine left Thagaste without telling his mother, his travel costs being paid by the rich neighbour Romanianus. Probably there is a double allusion to the parable of the prodigal son and to Horace Odes. II 16.19 (‘what exile from home escape himself?’)] (IV. 12. 60)

The reason why that grief had penetrated me so easily and deeply was that I had poured out my soul on to the sand by loving a person sure to die as if he would never die. The greatest source of repair and restoration was the solace of other friends, with whom I loved what I loved as a substitute for you; and this was a vast myth and a long life. (IV. 13. 60)

This is what we love in friends. We love to the point that the human conscience feels guilty if we do not love the person who is loving us, and if that love is not returned—without demanding any physical response other than the marks of affectionate good will. Hence the mourning if a friend dies, the darkness of grief, and as the sweetness is turned into bitterness the heart is flooded with tears. The lost life of those who die become the death of those still living. (IV. 14. 61)

He who for us is life itself descended here and endured our death and slew it by the abundance of his life. [Death dies—a theme in a famous sonnet of John Donne: frequent in Augustine.] (IV. 19. 64)

I used to say to my friends: ‘Do we love anything except that which is beautiful? What then is a beautiful object? And what is beauty? What is it which charms and attracts us to the things we love? It must be the [64] grace and loveliness inherent in them, or they would in no way move us.’ I gave the subject careful attention, and saw that in bodies one should distinguish the beauty which is a kind of totality and for that reason beautiful, and another kind which is fitting because it is well adapted to some other thing, just as part of the body is adapted to the whole to which it belongs as a shoe to a foot and like instances. (IV. 20. 64-65)

I would not have wanted to be praised and loved like actors, though I myself used to praise and [65] love them. I would have preferred to live in obscurity than to be well known in that way, and would rather be hated than loved like them. [Actors, charioteers, combatants in the amphitheatre, enjoyed only low social status in antiquity, and were commonly thought morally disreputable.] (IV. 22. 65-66)


For I did not know that 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. (IV. 25. 68)

I was about 26 or 27 years old when I wrote that work, turning over in my mind fictitious physical images. (IV. 27. 68)

What good did it do me that at about the age of twenty there came into my hands a work of Aristotle which they call the Ten Categories? [A Latin translation of the Categories had been made not long before Augustine’s time by Marius Victorinus, on whom see below VIII. Ii. (3)] My teacher in rhetoric at Carthage, and others too who were reputed to be learned men, used to speak of this work with their cheeks puffed out with conceit, and at the very names I gasped with suspense as if about to read something great and divine. Yet I read it without any expositor and understood it. (IV. 28. 69)

Moreover, what advantage came to me from the fact that I had by myself read and understood all the books I could get hold of on the arts which they call liberal, at a time when I was the most wicked slave of evil lusts? I enjoyed reading them, though I did not know the source of what was true and certain in them. (IV. 30. 70)

What profit, then, was it for me at that time that my agile mind found no difficulty in these subjects, and that without assistance from a human teacher I could elucidate extremely complicated books, when my comprehension of religion was erroneous, distorted, and shamefully sacrilegious? (IV. 31. 71)

Let my soul praise you that it may love you, and confess to you your mercies that it may praise you (Ps. 118: 175; 145: 2). (V. 1. 72)

Let the restless and wicked depart and flee from you (Ps. 138: 7). You see them and pierce their shadowy existence: even with them everything is beautiful, though they are vile. [In Augustine’s Platonic and aesthetic interpretation of evil, the wicked are like the dark in the chiaroscuro of a beautiful picture: City of God 11.23. The idea is already in Plotinus 3.2.11.10 ff.] (V. 2. 72)

Augustine’s Literal Commentary on Genesis is severely critical of Christians who bring their faith into discredit by treating Genesis as creation-science. Nevertheless, he could also argue that the correct literal interpretation of Genesis is a matter of such uncertainty that none can assert it to be at variance with science anyway. [note, 77]

You were at work in persuading me to go to Rome and to do my teaching there rather than at Carthage. …The principal and almost sole reason was that I heard how at Rome the young men went quietly about their studies and were kept in order by a stricter imposition of discipline. They did not rush all at once and in a mob into the class of a teacher with whom they were not enrolled, nor were pupils admitted at all unless the teacher gave them leave. By contrast at Carthage the license of the students is foul and uncontrolled. They impudently break in and with almost mad behaviour disrupt the order which each teacher has established for his pupils’ benefit. They commit many acts of vandalism with an astonishing mindlessness, which would be punished under the law were it not that custom protects them. (V. 14. 80)

At Rome my arrival was marked by the scourge of physical sickness, and I was on the way to the underworld, bearing all the evils I had committed against you, against myself, and against others—sins both numerous and serious, in addition to the chain of original sin [This is the earliest occurrence of this phrase to describe inherent human egotism, the inner condition contrasted with overt actions] by which ‘in Adam we die’ (1 Cor. 15:22). (V. 16. 82)

Even during this period at Rome I was associated with those false and deceiving Saints—not only with their Hearers, one of whom was the man in whose house I had lain sick and recovered health, but also with those whom they call Elect. I still thought that it is not we who sin, but some alien nature which sins in us. …You had not yet ‘put a guard on my mouth and a gate of continence about my lips’ (Ps. 140:2), to prevent my heart slipping into evil words to find excuses for sinning with ‘people who do iniquity’ (Ps. 140:3). That is why I was still in close association ‘with their Elect’ (Ps. 140:4), even though I had already lost hope of being able to advance higher in that false doctrine. I had decided to be content to remain with them if I should find nothing better; but my attitude was increasingly remiss and negligent. (V. 18. 84)

The though had come into my mind that the philosophers whom the call Academics were shrewder than others. They taught that everything is a matter of doubt, and that an understanding of the truth lies beyond human capacity. For to me that seemed clearly to be their view, and so they are popularly held to think. I did not yet understand their intention. [Augustine (Against the Academics III) accepted from Porphyry the opinion that the skepticism of the ancient Academy about the possibility of assured knowledge about anything went with an esoteric positive doctrine. Their intention was to safeguard Plato’s spiritual metaphysic from the materialism of Stoics and Epicureans.] [84] … The Manichees had turned me away from that. I thought it shameful to believe you to have the shape of the human figure, and to be limited by the bodily lines of our limbs. When I wanted to think of my God, I knew of no way of doing so except as a physical mass. Nor did I think anything existed which is not material. That was the principal and almost sole cause of my inevitable error. / [start 20] For the same reason I also believed that evil is a kind of material substance… When my mind attempted to return to the Catholic faith, it was rebuffed because the Catholic faith is not what I though. My God,…I thought it better to believe that you had created no evil—…rather than to believe that the nature of evil, as I understood it, came from you. [85] …I thought a nature such as his could not be born of the Virgin Mary without being mingled with flesh. …I was afraid to believe him incarnate lest I had to believe him to be defiled by the flesh. Today your spiritual believers will kindly and lovingly laugh at me when they read these my confessions. (V. 19-20. 84-86)

I began to be busy about the task of teaching the art of rhetoric for which I had come to Rome. I first gathered some pupils at my lodging, and with them and through them I began to be known. I quickly discovered that at Rome students behaved in a way which I would never have had to endure in Africa. Acts of vandalism, it was true, by young hooligans did not occur in Rome; that was made clear to me. But, people told me, to avoid paying the teacher his fee, numbers of young men would suddenly club together and transfer themselves to another tutor, [Augustine’s contemporary, a pagan Alexandrian schoolmaster named Palladas, has the identical complaint about his pupils, who would leave him for another teacher just as they were due to pay the annual fee of one gold solidus (The Greek Anthology 9, 174). At Antioch Libanius circumvented pupils’ dishonesty by making a contract with their parents (oratio 43). A teacher with 40 pupils would be doing reasonable well, but was not wealthy; moreover, he had to pay something to an usher to guard the entrance veil. Salries and fees would be higher in larger cities (see above, I. xvi. 26) Elsewhere Augustine says that in small towns there was only a single teacher; the market perhaps would not have supported a second.] … (V. 22. 86)

So after a notification came from Milan to Rome to the city prefect saying that at Milan a teacher of rhetoric was to be appointed with his travel provided by the government service, I myself applied through the mediation of those intoxicated with Manichee follies. My move there was to end my association with them, but neither of us knew that. An oration I gave on a prescribed topic was approved by the then prefect Symmachus, who sent me to Milan. (V. 23. 87)

And so I came to Milan to Ambrose the bishop, known throughout the world as among the best of men, devout in your worship. [87] …I began to like him, at first indeed not as a teacher of the truth, for I had absolutely no confidence in your Church, but as a human being who was kind to me. I used enthusiastically to listen to him preaching to the people, not with the intention which I ought to have had, but as if testing out his oratorical skill to see whether it merited the reputation it enjoyed or whether his fluency was better or inferior than it was reported to be. I hung on his diction in rapt attention, but remained bored and contemptuous of the subject-matter. ... [begin 24] While I opened my heart in noting the eloquence with which he spoke, there also entered no less the truth which he affirmed, spoke, though only gradually. … Above all, I heard first one, then another, then many difficult passages in the Old Testament scriptures figuratively interpreted, where I, by taking them literally, had found them to kill (2 Cor. 3:6). So after several passages in the Old Testament had been expounded spiritually, I now found fault with that despair of mine, caused by my belief that the law and the prophets could not be defended at all against the mockery of hostile critics. However, even so I did not think the Catholic faith something I ought to accept. [88] … the Catholic faith appeared not to have been defeated but also not yet to be the conqueror. / [begin 25] I then energetically applied my critical faculty to see if there were decisive arguments by which I could somehow prove the Manichees wrong. If I had been able to conceive of spiritual substance, at once all their imagined inventions would have collapsed and my mind would have rejected them. But I could not. However, in regard to the physical world and all the natural order accessible to the bodily senses, consideration and comparison more and more convinced me that numerous philosophers held opinions much more probable than theirs. Accordingly, after the manner of the Academics, as popularly understood, I doubted everything, and in the fluctuating state of total suspense of judgment I decided I must leave the Manichees, thinking at that peiod of my skepticism that I should not remain a member of a sect to which I was now preferring certain philosophers. But to these philosophers, who were without Christ’s saving name, I altogether refused to entrust the healing of my soul’s sickness. I therefore decided for the time being to be a catechumen in the Catholic Church, which the precedent of my parents recommended to me, until some clear light should come by which I could direct my course. (V. 23-25. 87-89)

In accordance with my mother’s custom in Africa, she had taken to the memorial shrines of the saints cakes and bread and wine, and was forbidden by the janitor. When she knew that the bishop was responsible for the prohibition, she accepted it in so devout and docile a manner that I myself was amazed how easy it was for her to find fault with her own custom rather than to dispute his ban. Her spirit was not obsessed by excessive drinking, … After bringing her basket of ceremonial food which she would first taste and then share round the company, she used to present not more than one tiny glass of wine diluted to suit her very sober palate. … When she learnt that the famous preacher and religious leader had ordered that no such offerings were to be made, even by those who acted soberly, to avert any pretext for intoxication being given to drinkers and because the ceremonies were like meals to propitiate the departed spirits and similar to heathen superstition [Ambrose (On Elias 62) mentions his ban. Augustine vainly tried to stop the inebriation at martyrs’ shrines in Africa, where (as one letter records) drink was a major social problem. The defensive tone here and in IX. viii (18) suggests rumours that Monica was addicted to the bottle. Plotinus (5.5.11) is sharply critical of pagan festivals which people attend for the beano rather than to honour the god.], she happily [91] abstained. Instead of a basket full of the fruits of the earth, she learned to bring a heart full of purer vows to the memorials of the martyrs. …she would not have yielded easily on the prohibition of this custom if the ban had come from another whom she did not love like Ambrose. For the sake of my salvation she was wholly devoted to him,… When he saw me, he often broke out in praise of her, congratulating me on having such a mother, unaware of what kind of son she had in me—someone who doubted all these things and believed it impossible to find the way of life. (VI. 2. 91-92)

Ambrose…I could not put the questions I wanted to put to him as I wished to do. I was excluded from his ear and from his mouth by crowds of men with arbitrations to submit to him, to whose frailties he ministered [In consequence of I Cor. 6:1 ancient bishops expended vast time and energy to arbitrations between memers of their flock. Cf. VI. ix (15) below.]. When he was not with them, which was a very brief period of time, he restored either his body with necessary food or his mind by reading. When he was reading, his eyes ran over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. [92] …We wondered if he read silently perhaps to protect himself in case he had a hearer interested and intent on the matter, to whom he might have to expound the text… Besides, the need to preserve his voice, which used easily to become hoarse, could have been a very fair reason for silent reading. Whatever motive he had for his habit, this man had a good reason for what he did. [In antiquity silent reading was uncommon, not unknown.] (VI. 3. 92-93)

Augustine disapproved of planetary names for days of the week: ‘One should say Dominica for Sunday.’ [note, 93]

Being ignorant what your image consisted in, I should have knocked (Matt. 7:7) and inquired about the meaning of this belief, and not insulted and opposed it, as if the belief meant what I thought. (VI. 5. 94)

From this time on, however, I now gave my preference to the Catholic faith. I thought it more modest and not in the least misleading to be told by the Church to believe what could not be demonstrated—whether that was because a demonstration existed but could not be understood by all or whether the matter was not one open to rational proof—rather than from the Manichees to have a rash promise of knowledge with mockery of mere belief, and then afterwards to be ordered to believe many fabulous and absurd myths impossible to prove true. Then little by little, Lord, with a most gentle and merciful hand you touched and calmed my heart. (VI. 7. 95)

So sine we were too weak to discover the truth by pure reasoning and therefore needed the authority of the sacred writings, I now began to believe that you would never have conferred such preeminent authority on the scripture, now diffused through all lands, unless you had willed that it would be a means of coming to faith in you and a means of seeking to know you. Already the absurdity which used to offend me in those books, after I had heard many passages being given persuasive expositions, I understood to be significant of the profundity of their mysteries. The authority of the Bible seemed the more to be venerated and more worthy of a hold faith on the ground that it was open to everyone to read, while keeping the dignity of its secret meaning for a profounder interpretation. The Bible offered itself to all in very accessible words and the most humble style of diction, while also exercising the concentration of those who are not ‘light of heart’ (Ecclus. 19:4). It welcomes all people to its generous embrace, and also brings a few to you through narrow openings (cf. Matt. 7:13-14). Though the latter are few, they are much more numerous than would be the case if the Bible did not stand out by its high authority and if it had not drawn crowds to the bosom of its holy humility. (VI. 8. 96)

I aspired to honours, money, marriage, and you laughed at me. In those ambitions I suffered the bitterest difficulties; that was by your mercy—so much the greater in that you gave me the less occasion to find sweet pleasure in what was not you. (VI. 9. 97)

Alpius…but some of his friends and fellow-pupils on their way back from a dinner happened to meet him in the street and, despite his energetic refusal and resistance, used friendly violence to take him into the amphitheatre during the days of the cruel and murderous games. …He kept his eyes shut and forbade his mind to think about such fearful evils. Would that he had blocked his ears as well! A man fell in combat. A great roar from the entire crowd struck him with such vehemence that he was overcome by curiosity. Supposing [100] himself strong enough to despise whatever he saw and to conquer it, he opened his eyes. …he found delight in the murderous contest and was inebriated by bloodthirsty pleasure. He was not now the person who had come in, but just one of the crowd… (VI. 13. 100-101)

I myself was exceedingly astonished as I anxiously reflected how long a time had elapsed since the nineteenth year of my life when I began to burn with a zeal for wisdom, planning that when I had found it I would abandon all the empty hopes and lying follies of hollow ambitions. And here I was already thirty, and still mucking about in the same mire in a state of indecision, avid to enjoy present fugitive delights which were dispersing my concentration, while I was saying: ‘Tomorrow I shall find it:…Faustus will come an explain everything. … The books of the Church we now know not to contain absurdities. … Let me fix my feet on that step where as a boy I was placed by my parents, until clear truth is found. But where may it be sought? / ‘When can it be sought? Ambrose has no time. There is no time for reading. Where should we look for the books we need? [104] … The deity would not have done all that for us, in quality and in quantity, if with the body’s death the soul’s life were also destroyed. Why then do we hesitate to abandon secular hopes and to dedicate ourselves wholly to God and the happy life? … It is a considerable thing to set out to obtain preferment to high office. And what worldly prize could be more desirable? [105] … Provided that we are single-minded and exert much pressure, it should be possible to obtain at least the governorship of a minor province. It would be necessary to marry a wife with some money to avert the burden of heavy expenditure [Necessary for douceurs to influential court officials to fix the appointment, all important public offices at this period being up for sale. Distinction in rhetoric was generally regarded as a qualification for public office, and the axiom was seldom disputed (an exception being Gregory of Nazianzus who thought it ludicrous, Oral. 4. 43). But money was also required.] , and that would be the limit of our ambition. Many great men entirely worthy of imitation have combined the married state with a dedication to the study of wisdom.’ (VI. 19. 105-106)

A vivid picture of the social system presupposed here is given by the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus (14.6. 12-13) in a jaundiced account of the Roman aristocracy. In the later Roman Empire it was common for highly placed persons to feel an obligation towards dependent clients from the same region. The concentration of people from North Africa in and around the Milan court at this time, reflected in Augustine’s circle of friends, strongly suggests that there was at least one highly placed person from Africa who had power. In the next paragraph Augustine remarks that he had ‘plenty of influential friends.’ [note, 105]

Alypius discouraged me from marrying a wife. …In his early adolescence he had an initial experience of sexual intercourse, but he had not continued with it. Rather had he felt revulsion for it and despised it, and thereafter lived in total continence. I resisted him by appealing to the examples of those who, though married, had cultivated wisdom and pleased God and kept loyal and loving friendships. [106] … [begin 22] Whenever we argued on this subject among ourselves, I used to assert that it was out of my power to live a celibate life. I defended myself when I saw his amazement, and used to say that there was a vast difference between his hurried and furtive experience, which he could now hardly remember and so could easily despise without the least difficulty, and the delights of my own regular habit. If the honourable name of marriage had been added to my life, he would have had no reason to be surprised that I could not despise married life. So he himself began to desire marriage, overcome by curiosity, not in the least by lust for sexual pleasure. He used to say that he wanted to know what it was without which my life, which met with his approval, would have seemed to me not life but torture. … Neither of us considered it more than a marginal issue how the beauty of having a wife lies in the obligation to respect the discipline of marriage and bring up children. (VI. 21-22. 106-107)

…a girl was promised to me principally through my mother’s efforts. Her hope was that once married I would be washed in the saving water of baptism. [107] … She [mother] used to say that, by a certain smell indescribable in words [In Augustine’s age it was common belief that evil spirits caused an unpleasant odour (e.g. City of God 10. 19)] , she could tell the difference between your revelation and her own soul dreaming. Nevertheless, pressure for the marriage continued, and the girl who was asked for was almost two years under age for marriage [Under Roman law the minimum age was 12. Augustine ascribes here to Monica moral and religious reasons for fostering the marriage rather than his need to marry money to achieve his secular ambitions, mentioned above VI. xi. 19]. But she pleased me, and I was prepared to wait. (VI. 23. 107-108)

Meanwhile my sins multiplied. The woman with whom I habitually slept was torn away from my side because she was a hindrance to my marriage. My heart which was deeply attached was cut and wounded, and left a trail of blood. She had returned to Africa vowing that she would never go with another man. She left with me the natural son I had by her. 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. (VI. 25. 109)

By now my evil and wicked youth was dead. I was becoming a grown man. But the older I became, the more shameful it was that I retained so much vanity as to be unable to think any substance possible other than that which the eyes normally perceive. From the time that I began to learn something of your wisdom, I did not conceive of you, God, in the shape of the human body. I always shunned this, and was glad when I found the same concept in the faith of our spiritual mother, your Catholic Church. But how otherwise to conceive of you I could not see. … With all my heart I believed you to be incorruptible, immune from injury, and unchangeable. Although I did not know why and how, it was clear to me and certain that what is corruptible is inferior to that which cannot be corrupted; … My heart vehemently protested against all the physical images in my mind, … (VII. 1. 111)

I did not see that the mental power by which I formed these images does not occupy any space, though it could not form them unless it were some great thing [Similarly Plotinus 4.2.1]. I conceived even you, life of my life, as a large being, permeating infinite space on every side, penetrating the entire mass of the world, … This was my conjecture, for I was incapable of thinking otherwise; but it was false. For on that hypothesis a larger part of the earth would possess more of you and a smaller part less, and all things would be full of you in the sense that more of you would be contained by an elephant’s body than a sparrow’s to the degree that it is larger and occupies more space; … And that is not the case. But you had not yet ‘lightened my darkness’ (Ps. 17:29). (VII. 2. 112)

…I had no clear and explicit grasp of the cause of evil. Whatever it might be, I saw it had to be investigated, if I were to avoid being forced by this problem to believe the immutable God to be mutable. Otherwise I might myself become the evil I was investigating. Accordingly, I made my investigation without anxiety, certain that what the Manichees said was untrue. With all my mind I fled from them, because in my inquiry into the origin of evil I saw them to be full of malice, in that they though it more acceptable to say your substance suffers evil than that their own substance actively does evil. / [begin 5] I directed my mind to understand what I was being told, namely that the free choice of the will is the reason why we do wrong and suffer your just judgment [Augustine could hear this theme (from Plato) in Ambrose’s sermons, or read it in Plotinus 5.1.1]; but I could not get a clear [113] grasp of it. … I saw that when I acted against my wishes, I was passive rather than active; and this condition I judged to be not guilt but punishment [On sin and suffering as divine justice see Plotinus 4.3.16]. … But again I said: ‘Who made me? Is not my God not only good but the supreme Good? Why then have I the power to will evil and reject good? …’ These reflections depressed me once more and suffocated me. But I was not brought down to that hell of error where no one confesses to you (Ps. 6:6), because people suppose that evil is something that you suffer rather than an act by humanity. (VII. 4-5. 113-114)

Such questions revolved in my unhappy breast, weighed down by nagging anxiety about the fear of dying before I had found the truth. But there was a firm place in my heart for the faith, within the Catholic Church, in your Christ, ‘our Lord and Saviour’ (2 Pet. 2:20). In many respects this faith was still unformed and hesitant about eh norm of doctrine. Yet my mind did not abandon it, but daily drank in more and more. (VII. 7. 116)

…you exist and are immutable substance and care for humanity and judge us; moreover, that in Christ your Son our Lord, and by your scriptures commended by the authority of your Catholic Church, you have provided a way of salvation whereby humanity can come to the future life after death. These matters, therefore, were secure and firmly fortified in my mind while I was seeking feverishly for the origin of evil. (VII. 11. 119)

…you brought under my eye some books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin. [Translated by Marius Victorinus, the texts were of Plotinus and his disciple Porphyry.] [121] … [begin 15] So also I read of… Your firstborn people honoured an animal’s head instead of you, ‘being turned in heart towards Egypt’ (Acts 7:39) and making your image, their own soul, bow down before a calf that eats hay (Ps. 105:20). I found this in those books and did not feed on it. [The Platonist books offered good philosophy, marred by bad polytheism.] [122] … And I had come to you from the Gentiles and fixed my attention on the gold which you willed your people to take from Egypt, since the gold was yours, wherever it was. [The spoiling of the Egyptians by the Hebrews (Exod. 3.22; 11:2) was for Irenaeus and Augustine (here and elsewhere ) an allegory of the Christian right to select truth from pagan texts without accepting polytheism. The Exodus passage was ridiculed by the Manichees.] (VII. 13-15. 121-123)

For you evil does not exist at all, and not only for you but for your created universe, because there is nothing outside it which could break in and destroy the order which you have imposed upon it. But in the parts of the universe, there are certain elements which are thought evil because of a conflict of interest. These elements are congruous with other elements and as such are good, and are also good in themselves. All these elements which have some mutual conflict of interest are congruous with the inferior part of the universe which we call earth. Its heaven is cloudy and windy, which is fitting for it. (VII. 19. 125)

I learnt by experience that it is no cause for surprise when bread which is pleasant to a healthy palate is misery to an unhealthy one; and to sick eyes light which is desirable to the healthy is one; and to sick eyes light which is desirable to the healthy is hateful. The wicked are displeased by your justice, even more by vipers and the worm which you created good, being well fitted for the lower parts of your created. To these lower parts the wicked themselves are well fitted, to the extent that they are dissimilar to you, but they can become fitted for the higher parts insofar as they become more like you. I inquired what wickedness is; and I did not find a substance but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance, you O God,… (VII. 22. 126)

I was astonished to fin that already I loved you, not a phantom surrogate for you. But I was not stable in the enjoyment of my God. I was caught up to you by your beauty and quickly torn away from you by my weight. [Closely similar language in Plotinus. 6.9.4.16-23. Plotinus also asks why the experience of mystical union with God is so transient (6.9.10). See also below X. xl (65).] With a groan I crashed into inferior things. This weight was my sexual habit. (VII. 23. 127)

Alypius, on the other hand, thought Catholics believed him to be God clothed in flesh in the sense that in Christ there was only God and flesh. He did not think they held him to possess a human soul and mind. Because he was quite convinced that the actions recorded in the memorials of Christ could not have been done except by a created being endowed with life and reason, his move towards the Christian faith was slower. But later when he knew that this was the error of the Apollinarian heretics [Alypius was held back by his beliefs (a) that the gospels describe a real human being, (b) that the Church holds the incarnate Lord to the God veiled in flesh only, without a human mind. He was liberated when he found that the latter opinion had been censured as heresy when taught by Apollinarius of Laodicea in Syria during the 360s and 370s. Ambrose of Milan empathically rejected Apollinaris’ opinion.], he was glad to conform to the Catholic faith. (VII. 25. 129)

I began to want to give myself airs as a wise person. I was full of my punishment, but I shed no tears of penitence. Worse still, I was puffed up with knowledge (I. Cor. 8:1). (VII. 26. 130)

Drunkards eat salty things to make their desire uncomfortable. As drinking extinguishes the desire, there is delightful sensation. It is established custom that betrothed girls are not immediately handed over, les the husband hold the bride being given to him to be cheaply gained if he has not sighed after her, impatient at the delay. (VIII. 7. 138)

Later on, he added, in the time of the emperor Julian when a law was promulgated forbidding Christians to teach literature and rhetoric [Julian’s edict of 17 June 362 was based on the presupposition (shared by puritan Christians) the pagan literature and pagan religion are indissoluble. Christians such as Gregory of Nazianzus resented it. The admiring pagan Ammianus Marcellinus thought it should be condemned to everlasting silence as disgraceful. At Athens the famous sophist Prohaeresius declined to accept the special exemption granted him by Julian and, like Victorinus at Rome, resigned. Augustine himself (City of God 18.52) thought the edict an act of persecuting intolerance.], Victorinus welcomed [139] the law and preferred to abandoned the school of loquacious chattering rather than your word, by which you make ‘skilled the tongues of infants’ (Wisd. 10:21). I felt that he was not so much courageous as fortunate to find occasion for dedicating all his time to you. (VIII. 10. 139-140)

…no longer had my usual excuse to explain why I did not yet despise the world and serve you, namely, that my perception of the truth was uncertain. By now I was indeed quite sure about it. yet I was still bound down to the earth. I was refusing to become your soldier [From Tertullian on (AD 200), Latin Christians spoke of baptism in military terms as enlistment in Christ’s army by an oath (sacramentum), with the cross as the standard (vexillum, signum) and the sign of the cross over the forehead.], and I was afraid of being rid of all my burdens as I ought to have been at the prospect of carrying them. (VIII. 11. 140)

The burden of the world weighed me down with a sweet drowsiness such as commonly occurs during sleep. The thoughts with which I mediated about you were like the efforts of those who would like to get up but are overcome by deep sleep and sink back again. No one wants to be asleep all the time, and the sane judgment of everyone judges it better to be awake. Yet often a man defers shaking off sleep when his limbs are heavy with slumber. Although displeased with himself he is glad to take a bit longer, even when the time to get up has arrived. … I had no answer to make to you when you said to me ‘Arise, you who are asleep, rise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light’ (Eph. 5:14). Though at every point you showed that what you were saying was true, yet I, convinced by that truth, had no answer to give you except merely slow and sleepy words: ‘At once’—‘But presently’—‘Just a little longer, please’. (VIII. 12. 141)

Many years of my life had passed by—about twelve—since in my nineteenth year I had read Cicero’s Hortensius, and had been stirred to a zeal for wisdom. But although I came to despise earthly success, I put off giving time to the quest for wisdom which should be preferred even to the discovery of treasures and to ruling over nations and to the physical delights available to me at a nod.’ [A quotation or at lease paraphrase of Cicero (Hortensius, fragment 106 Grilli). Cf. XII. i. (I) below.] But I was an unhappy young man, wretched as at the beginning of my adolescence when I prayed you for chastity and said: ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.’ (VIII. 17. 145)

I turned on Alypius and cried out: ‘What is wrong with us? What is this that you have heard? Uneducated people are rising up and capturing heaven (Matt. II:12), and we with our high culture without any heart—see where we roll in the mud of flesh and blood. … Our lodging had a garden. We had the use of it as well as of the entire house, for our host, the owner of the house, was not living there. The tumult of my heart took me out into the garden where no one could interfere with the burning struggle with myself… Alypius followed me step after step. Although he was present, I felt no intrusion on my solitude. How could he abandon me in such a state? We sat down as far as we could from the buildings. (VIII. 19. 146.)

[in the garden] Nevertheless it was now putting the question very half-heartedly. For from that direction where I had set my face and towards which I was afraid to move, there appeared the dignified and chaste Lady Continence, serene and cheerful without coquetry, enticing me in an honourable manner to come and not to hesitate. To receive and embrace me she stretched out pious hands, filled with numerous good examples for me to follow. There were large numbers of boys and girls, a multitude of all ages, young adults and grave widows and elderly virgins. In every one of them was Continence herself, in no sense barren but ‘the fruitful mother of children’ (Ps. 112:9), the joys born of you, Lord, her husband. And she smiled on me with a smile of encouragement as if to say: ‘Are you incapable of doing what these men and women have done? Do you think them capable of achieving this by their own resources and not by the Lord their God? This Lord God gave me to them. Why are you relying on yourself, only to find yourself unreliable? Cast yourself upon him, do not be afraid. He will not withdraw himself so that you fall. Make the leap without anxiety; he will catch you and heal you.’ [151] … But once more it was as if she said: ‘ “Stop your ears to your impure members on earth and mortify them” (Col. 3:5). They declare delights to you, but “not in accord with the law of the Lord your God”’ (Ps. 118:85). This debate in my heart was a struggle of myself against myself. Alypius stood quite still at my side, and waited in silence for the outcome of my unprecedented state of agitation. / [begin 28] From a hidden depth a profound self-examination had dredged up a heap of all my misery and set it ‘in the sight of my heart (Ps. 18:15). That precipitated a vast storm bearing a massive downpour of tears. To pour it all out with the accompanying groans, I got up from beside Alypius (solitude seemed to me more appropriate for the business of weeping), and I moved further away to ensure that even his presence put no inhibition upon me. … Rivers streamed from my eyes, a sacrifice acceptable to you (Ps. 50:19), and (though not in these words, yet in this sense) I repeatedly said to you: ‘How long, O Lord? How long, Lord, will you be angry to the uttermost? Do not be mindful of our old iniquities.’ (Ps. 6:4). For I felt my past to have a grip on me. … [begin 29] As I was saying this and weeping in the bitter agony of my heart, suddenly I heard a voice from the nearby house [The oldest manuscript reads here ‘from the house of God’. This child’s voice is in any event a divine oracle to Augustine. The variant may echo Ps. 41:5] chanting as if it might be a boy or a girl (I do not know which), saying and repeating over and over again ‘Pick up and read, pick up and read.’ At once my countenance changed, and I began to think intently whether there might be some sort of children’s game in which such [152] a chant is used. But I could not remember having heard of one. I checked the flood of tears and stood up. I interpreted it solely as a divine command to me to open the book and read the first chapter I might find. For I had heard how Anthony happened to be present at the gospel reading, and took it as an admonition addressed to himself when the words were read: ‘Go, sell all you have, give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me’ (Matt. 19:21). [Athanasius, Life of Antony 2] By such an inspired utterance he was immediately ‘converted to you’ (Ps. 50:15). So I hurried back to the place where Alypius was sitting. There I had put down the book of the apostle when I got up. I seized it, opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit: ‘Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts’ (Rom. 13:13-14). / I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled. … [begin 30] From there we went in to my mother, and told her. She was filled with joy. We told her how it had happened. She exulted, feeling it to be a triumph, and blessed you who ‘are powerful to do more than we ask or think’ (Eph. 3:20). … The effect of your converting me to yourself was that I did not [153] now seek a wife and had no ambition for success in this world. (VIII. 27-30. 151-154)

Who am I and what am I? what was not evil in my deeds or, if not deeds, in my words or, if not words, in my intention? But you, Lord, ‘are good and merciful’ (Ps. 102:8). (IX. 1. 155)

I made a decision ‘in your sight’ (Ps. 18:15) not to break off teaching with an abrupt renunciation, but quietly to retire from my post as a salesman of words in the markets of rhetoric. I did not wish my pupils, who were giving their minds not to your law (Ps. 118:70) nor to your peace, but to frenzied lies and lawcourt squabbles, to [155] buy from my mouth weapons for their madness. Fortunately there were only a few days left before the Vintage Vacation [22 August 15 October]. I decided to put up with them so that I could resign with due formality. … It was agreed among us that it was not to be published generally. … [begin 3] You pierced my heart with the arrow of your love, [The symbol of Christ as heavenly Eros was familiar from the Latin version of Origen’s commentary of the Song of Songs. Augustine’s African critic, Arnobius the younger, could write of ‘Christ our Cupid’. Cf. below X. vi. 8] …it would have seemed like ostentation if, rather than waiting for the imminent vacation period, I were prematurely to resign from a public position which had a high profile before everyone. [The argument answers the implied criticism of puritan Christians that if his conversion had been 100 per cent real, he would immediately and dramatically have renounced so profane a profession. The criticism from other secular professors of literature he had already scorned: I. xiii. 22] (IX. 2-3. 155-156)

Augustine followed I John 5:16-17 in the distinction between pardonable sins and ‘sins unto death’ and the early Christian interpretation of the latter to mean major sins (apostasy, murder, adultery) bringing shame on the community, not only the individual; the major sins required some formal act by the Church to give full restoration after penitential discipline had manifested serious sorrow. But Augustine also saw that no clear-cut line can be drawn between venial and mortal (City of God 21. 27) [note, 157]

The day came when I was actually liberated from the profession of rhetor,… I set out for the country villa with all my circle. The books that I wrote there were indeed now written in your service, and attest my discussion with those present and with myself alone before you. [At Cassiciacum during the months between conversion (July 386) and baptism at Milan by Ambrose at Easter 387, Augustine used shorthand transcripts of the conversations with his circle as the basis for a set of philosophical dialogues: Against the Academics, The Happy Life, Order (of providence), Soliloquies. The dialogues and the correspondence with Nebridius, which Augustine published probably as a memorial to his dead friend, are deeply Neoplatonic, while explicitly Christian. They also have numerous literary echoes of Cicero, Terence, etc.] But they still breathe the spirit of the school of pride, as if they were at the last gasp. (IX. 7. 159)

It is hard to recount all those days on vacation. But I have not forgotten them,… [162] At that time you tortured me with toothache, and when it became so bad that I lost the power to speak, it came into my heart to beg all my friends present to pray for me to you, God of health of both soul and body. I wrote this on a wax tablet and gave it to them to read. As soon as we fell on our knees in the spirit of supplication, the pain vanished. But what agony it was, and how instantly it disappeared! I admit I was terrified, ‘my Lord my God’ (Ps. 37:23). I had experienced nothing like it in all my life. … [begin 13] At the end of the Vintage Vacation my resignation took effect and I notified the people at Milan that they should provide another salesman of words to their pupils. The reasons were both that I had chosen to serve you, and that I had insufficient strength for that profession because of breathing difficulty and pain on the chest. By letter I informed your bishop, the holy man Ambrose, of my past errors and my present desire, asking what he would especially recommend me to read out of your books to make me readier and fitter to receive so great a grace. He told me to read the prophet Isaiah, I think because more clearly than others he foretold the gospel and the calling of the Gentiles. But I did not understand the first passage of the book, and thought the whole would be equally obscure. So I put it on one side to be resumed when I had had more practice in the Lord’s style of language. / [begin 14] When the time came for me to give in my name for baptism, we left the country and returned to Milan. Alypius also decided to join me in being reborn in you. …We associated with us the boy Adeodatus, my natural son begotten of my sin. You had made him a [163] fine person. He was about fifteen years old, and his intelligence surpassed that of many serious and well-educated men. … We associated him with us so as to be of the same age as ourselves in your grace. We were baptized [24 April 387, at the baptistery of Milan cathedral by bishop Ambrose. Adeodatus’ death, whether by illness or accident, occurred about two years later, not long after the discussions written up by Augustine in The Teacher (which show that the boy was educated both in scripture and in Virgil, and had some knowledge of Punic).], and disquiet about our past life vanished from us. (IX. 12-14, 162-164)

We looked for a place where we could be of most use in your service; all of us agreed on a move back to Africa. / While we were at Ostia by the mouths of the Tiber, mother died. I pass over many events because I write in great haste. (IX. 7. 166)

Monica [mother]’s mother-in-law was at first stirred up to hostility towards her by the whisperings of malicious maidservants. Monica won even her over by her respectful manner and by persistence in patience and gentleness. The result was that her mother-in-law denounced to her son the interfering tongues of the slavegirls. …he [father] met his mother’s wish by subjecting the girls of whom she complained to a whipping. [The inferior status of the slave was enforced in antiquity by subjection to corporal punishment, the prime distinction between a slave and a free person being the fact that a slave ‘has to answer for all offences with his body’ (Demosthenes 22. 25; ct. 21. 72). John Chrysostom (on Ephesians, 15:3) judged it a monstrous offence for a Christian wife to call in her husband to strip a slavegirl naked and whip her. Unlike Augustine who accepted corporal punishment, John thought it quite unfitting in a Christian household for a slave to be struck.] (IX. 20. 169)

On the ninth day of her illness, when she was aged 56, and I was 33, this religious and devout soul was released from the body. (IX. 28. 174)

Augustine deliberately refused to express a firm opinion on the question how the soul is united to the embryo, whether by heredity from the parents (as Manichees believed), or by special creative act by God, or because pre-existent. Cf. similar agnosticism in I. vi (7) above. Despite fierce criticism for his suspense of judgment, Augustine to the last refused to decide. (note, 178)

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? (X. 3. 180)

Good people are delighted to hear about the past sins of those who have now shed them. The pleasure is not in the evils as such, but that though they were so once, they are not like that now. [The paragraph shows Augustine sensitive to the possibility that some among his readers may have a prurient interest in the record of his sexual excesses in youth.] (X. 4. 180)

I will therefore rise above that natural capacity in a step by step ascent to him who made me. I come to the fields and vast palaces of memory [Memoria for Augustine is a deeper and wider term than our ‘memory’. In the background lies the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis, explaining the experience of learning as bringing to consciousness what, from an earlier existence, the soul already knows. But Augustine develops the notion of memory by associating it with the unconscious (‘the mind knows things it does not know it knows’), with self-awareness, and so with the human yearning for true happiness found only in knowing God.], where are the treasuries of innumerable images of all kinds of objects brought in by sense-perception.] (X. 12. 185)

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I set on fire to attain the peace which is yours. [Augustine’s Latin in this chapter is a work of high art, with rhymes and poetic rhythms not reproducible in translation. He is fusing imagery from the Song of Solomon with Neoplatonic reflection on Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium, and simultaneously summarizing the central themes of the Confessions. For the five spiritual senses see above X. vi. 8.] (X. 38. 201)

You commanded me to abstain from sleeping with a girl-friend and, in regard to marriage itself, you advised me to adopt a better way of life than you have allowed (1Cor. 7:38) …But in my memory of which I have spoken at length, there still live images of acts which were fixed there by my sexual habit. These images attack me. While I am awake they have no force, but in sleep they not only arouse pleasure but even elicit consent, and are very like the actual act. … During this time of sleep surely it is not my true self, Lord my God? Yet how great a difference between myself at the time when I am asleep and myself when I return to the waking state. Where then is reason which, when wide-awake, resists such suggestive thoughts, and would remain unmoved if the actual reality were to be presented to it? Surely reason does not shut down as the eyes close. It can hardly fall asleep with the bodily senses. For if that were so, how could it come about that often in sleep we resist and, mindful of our avowed commitment and adhering to it with strict chastity, we give no assent to such seductions? Yet there is a difference so great that, when it happens otherwise than we would wish, when we wake up we return to peace in our conscience. From the wide gulf between the occurrences and our will, we discover that we did not actively do what, to our regret, has somehow been done in us. [Porphyry also held that nocturnal emissions do not pollute the conscience. An epigram in the Greek Anthology (5.2) turns on the greater vividness of an erotic dream in comparison with actuality.] (X. 41. 203)

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 tranquility of satisfaction, the very transition contains for me an insidious tarp of uncontrolled desire. [Plotinus I.2.5.18-22: insofar as the soul is involved in hunger, thirst, or sexual desire, there is never involuntary and uncontrolled desire.] The transition itself is a pleasure, and there is no other way of making that transition, which [204] 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. (X. 44. 204-205)

The pleasures of the ear had a more tenacious hold me, and had subjugated me; but you se me free and liberated me. As things now stand, I confess that I have some sense of restful contentment in sounds whose soul is your words, when they are sung by a pleasant and well-trained voice. Not that I am riveted by them, for I can rise up and go when I wish. Nevertheless, on being combined with the thoughts which give them life, they demand in my heart some position of honour, and I have difficulty in finding what is appropriate to offer them. Sometimes I seem to myself to give them more honour than is fitting. I feel that when the sacred words are chanted well, our souls are moved and are more religiously and with a warmer devotion kindled to piety than if they are not so sung. [207] … But my physical delight, which has to be checked from enervating the mind, often deceives me when the perception of the senses is unaccompanied by reason, and is not patiently content to be in a subordinate place. It tries to be first and to be in the leading role, though it deserves to be allowed only as secondary to reason. … [begin 50] Thus I fluctuate between the danger of pleasure and the experience of the beneficent effect, and I am more led to put forward the opinion (not as an irrevocable view) that the custom of singing in Church is to be approved, so that through the delights of the ear the weaker mind may rise up towards the devotion of worship. Yet when it happens to me that the music moves me more than the subject of the song, I confess myself to commit a sin deserving punishment, and then I would prefer not to have heard the singer. (X. 49-50. 207-208)

The very queen of colours, which bathes with light all that we see, wherever I may be during the day, comes down upon me with gentle subtlety through many media, while I am doing something else and not noticing it. But the light makes its way with such power that, if suddenly it is withdrawn, it is sought for with longing. And if it is long absent, that has a depressing effect on the mind. (X. 51. 209)

To entrap the eyes men have made innumerable additions to the various arts and crafts in clothing, shoes, vessels, and manufactures of this nature, pictures, images of various kinds, and things which go far beyond necessary and moderate requirements and pious symbols. Outwardly they follow what they make. Inwardly they abandon God by whom they were made, destroying what they were created to be. … But, although I am the person saying this and making the distinction, I also entangle my steps in beautiful externals. However, you rescue me, Lord, you rescue me. (X. 53. 210)

…there exists in the soul, through the medium of the same bodily senses, a cupidity which does not take delight in carnal pleasure but in perceptions acquired through the flesh. It is a vain inquisitiveness dignified with the title of knowledge and science. (X. 54. 211)

Pleasure pursues beautiful objects—what is agreeable to look at, to hear, to smell, to taste, to touch. But curiosity pursues the contraries of these delights with the motive of seeing what the experiences are like, not with a wish to undergo discomfort, but out of a lust for experimenting and knowing. What pleasure is to be found in looking at a mangled corpse, an experience which evokes revulsion? [Plato, Republic, 439e] … To satisfy this diseased craving, outrageous sights are staged in public shows. The same motive is at work when people study the operations of nature which lie beyond our grasp, when there is no advantage in knowing [211] and the investigators simply desire knowledge for its own sake. This motive is again at work if, using a perverted science for the same end, people try to achieve things by magical arts. Even in religion itself the motive is seen when God is ‘tempted’ by demands for ‘signs and wonders’ (John 4:48) desired not for any salvific end but only for the thrill. [That is to confuse means with ends, use with ‘enjoyment’, an error which is for Augustine fundamental.] (X. 55. 211-212)

…theatres do not now capture my interest. I do not study to understand the transit of the stars. My soul has never sought for responses from ghosts. I detest all sacrilegious rites. (X. 56. 212)

I now do not watch a dog chasing a rabbit when this is happening at the circus. But if by chance I am passing when coursing occurs in the countryside, it distracts me perhaps indeed from thinking out some weighty matter. [212] The hunt turns me to an interest in the sport, not enough to lead me to alter the direction of the beast I am riding, but shifting the inclination of my heart. …When my heart becomes the receptacle of distractions of this nature and the container for a mass of empty thoughts, then too my prayer are often interrupted and distracted; … (X. 57. 212-213)

Terrified by my sins and the pile of my misery, I had racked my heart and had meditated taking flight to live in solitude. [Perhaps because of the influence of Athanasius’ Life of Anthony: above, VIII. vi (14) This text is unique evidence of Augustine’s aspiration to be a hermit.] But you forbade me and comforted me saying: ‘That is why Christ died for all, so that those who live should not live for themselves , but for him who died for them’ (2 Cor, 5:15). (X. 70. 220)

May your scriptures be my pure delight, so that I am not deceived in them and do not lead others astray in interpreting them. … It is not for nothing that by your will so many pages of scripture are opaque and obscure. These forests are not without deer which recover their strength in them and restore themselves by waking and feeding, by resting and ruminating (Ps. 28:9). O Lord, bring me to perfection (Ps. 16:5) and reveal to me the meaning of these pages. [222] [begin 4] May it please you that in the sight of your mercy (Ps. 18:15) I may find grace before you, so that to me as I knock (Matt. 7:7) may be opened the hidden meaning of your words. (XI. 3-4. 222-223)

May I hear and understand how in the beginning you made heaven and earth (Gen. I, I). Moses wrote this. He wrote this and went his way, passing out of this world from you to you. He is not now before me, but if he were, I would clasp him and ask him and through you beg him to explain to me the creation. … Within me, within the lodging of my thinking, there would speak a truth which is neither Hebrew nor Greek nor Latin nor any barbarian tongue and which uses [223] neither mouth nor tongue as instruments and utters no audible syllables. It would say: ‘What his is saying is true.’ [Plotinus 4.3.18. 13ff. In the intelligible world they use no words, but communicate by intuition.] (XI. 5. 223-224)

If therefore it was with words which sound and pass away that you said that heaven and earth should be made, and if this was how you made heaven and earth, then a created entity belonging to the physical realm existed prior to heaven and earth; and that utterance took time to deliver, and involved temporal changes. However, no physical [225] entity existed before heaven and earth;… (XI. 8. 225-226)

You call us, therefore, to understand the Word, God who is with you God (John I: I). That word is spoken eternally, and by it all things are uttered eternally. It is not the case that what was being said comes to an end, and something else is then said, so that everything is uttered in a succession with a conclusion, but everything is said in the simultaneity of eternity. Otherwise time and change would already exist, and there would not be a true eternity and true immortality. This I know, my God, and give thanks. …whatever you say will come about does come about. You do not cause it to exist other than by speaking. Yet not all that you cause to exist by speaking is made in simultaneity and eternity. (XI. 9. 226)

You have made time itself. Time could not elapse before you made time. But if time did not exist before heaven and earth, [229] why do people ask what you were then doing? There was no ‘then’ when there was no time. [Like Augustine, Plotinus thinks time does not antedate the cosmos (3.7.12.23; as Plato, Timaeus 38b6).] (XI. 15. 229-230)

Between past and future humanity experiences what he will call a distending, a stretching out on a rack. Hence he picks up Aristotle’s suggestion (Physics 4.14) that time is an experience of the soul, but gives this idea a new development by seeing ‘memory’ as cardinal to the comprehension of time. [note, 231]

You are not irritated by the burning zeal with which I study your scriptures. Grant what I love. For I love, and this love was your gift. Grant it, Father. You truly know how to give good gifts to your children (Matt. 7: 11). Grant it, since I have undertaken to acquire understanding and ‘the labour is too much for me’ (Ps. 72: 16) until you open the way. Through Christ I beg you, in the name of him who is the holy of holy ones, let no one obstruct my inquiry. ‘I also have believed, and therefore speak’ (Ps. 115: 1; 2 Cor. 4:13) [Augustine forestalls Christian critics who may think his abstruse inquiries remote from his proper task of biblical exegesis, and invokes the meditation of Christ the high-priest who gives access to the Father’s mysteries.] (XI. 28. 236)

I have heard a leaned person say that the movements of sun, moon, and stars in themselves constitute time. [Plotinus (3.7.8. 8-19) likewise rejects this view. The opinion is to be found in St. Basil. But Augustine may have in mind Plato’s Timaeus (39 cd) which was available in Cicero’s Latin version. Numerous ancient writers, from the author of Genesis 1:14 onwards, observed that our years, months, and days are based on the cycle of heavenly bodies. But Augustine’s argument is that no clue about the nature of time can be derived from this, or from the movement of any physical body. Time is not identical with the units by which we ordinarily measure it.] But I could not agree. Why should not time consist rather of the movement of all physical objects? If the heavenly bodies were to cease and a potter’s wheel were revolving, would there be no time by which we could measure its gyrations, and say that its revolutions were equal; or if at one time it moved more slowly and at another time faster, that some rotation took longer, others less? And when we utter these words do not we also speak in time? In our words some syllables are long, others short,… (XI. 29. 237)

I confess to you, Lord, that I still do not know what time is, and I further confess to you, Lord, that as I say this I know myself to be conditioned by time. For a long period already I have been speaking about time, and that long period can only be an interval time. So how do I know this, when I do not know what time is? Perhaps what I do not know is how to articulate what I do know. (XI. 32. 239)

Nevertheless, even so we have not reached a reliable measure of time. It may happen that a short line, if pronounced slowly, takes longer to read aloud than a longer line taken faster. The same principle applies to a poem or a foot or a syllable. That is why I have come to think that time is simply a distension. [Plotinus 3.7.11.41 (tr. Armstrong) speaks of time as ‘a spreading out (diastasis) of life…the life of the soul in a movement of passage from one way of life to another’. This text may have influenced Augustine’s coining of the term distention. But in Augustine this psychological experience of the spreading out of the soul in successiveness and in diverse directions in a painful and anxious experience, so that he can speak of salvation as deliverance from time (cf. above, IX. iv (10)). The theme is developed below, especially in XI. Xxix (39) where St Paul’s language about ‘being stretched’ (Phil. 3:13) becomes linked with the thought of Plotinus (6.6.1.5) that multiplicity is a falling from the One and is ‘extended in a scattering’.] But of what is it a distension? I do not know, but it would be surprising if it is not that of the mind itself. What do I measure, I beg you, my God, when I say without precision ‘This period is longer than that’, or with precision ‘This is twice as long as that’? That I am measuring time I know. But I am not measuring the future which does not yet exist, nor the present which has no extension, nor the past which is no longer in being. What then am I measuring? Time as it passes but not time past? That is what I affirmed earlier. (XI. 33. 240)

So it is in you, my mind, that I measure periods of time. [Plotinus (3.7.11): Time is the soul’s passing from one state of life to another, and is not outside the soul.] (XI. 36. 242)

…I am scattered in times whose order I do not understand. The storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my thoughts, the inmost entrails of my soul, until that day when, purified and molten by the fire of your love, I flow together [Augustine’s image of the historical process is that of a flowing river or rivers, with many stormy cataracts. Underlying this passage is the language of Plotinus (6.6.1.5.) about the fall away from the One as a scattering and an extending. Temporal successiveness is an experience of disintegration; the ascent to divine eternity is a recovery of unity.] (XI. 39. 244)

A person singing or listening to a song he knows well suffers a distension or stretching in feeling and in sense-perception from the expectation of future sounds and the memory of past sound. With you it is otherwise. You are unchangeably eternal, that is the truly eternal Creator of minds. Just as you knew heaven and earth in the beginning without that bringing any variation into your knowing, so you made heaven and earth in the beginning without that meaning a tension between past and future in your activity. (XI. 41. 245)

For because of their lowly position they are less beautiful than all other things which are full of light and radiance. (XII. 4. 247)

Where could this capacity come from except from you, from whom everything has being insofar as it has being? But the further away from you the things are, the more unlike you they become [Plotinus 6.9.9.12: we exist more as we turn to him, less as we turn away.] –though this distance is not spatial. (XII. 7. 249)

May I not be my own life. On my own resources I lived evilly. To myself I was death. In you I am recovering life. (XII. 10. 251)

The movement of the will away from you, who are, is movement towards that which has less being. A movement of this nature is a fault and a sin, and no one’s sin harms you or disturbs the order of your rule, either on high or down below. (XII. 11. 251)

Again you said to me, in a loud voice to my inner ear, that not even that created realm, the ‘heaven of heaven’, is coeternal with you. Its delight is exclusively in you. In an unfailing purity it satiates its thirst in you. It never at any point betrays its mutability. You are always present to it, and it concentrates all its affection on you. It has no future to expect. [(Augustine’s) ‘heaven of heaven’ is, like the world-soul in Porphyry (Sententiae 30), created but eternally contemplating the divine.] … I do not find any better [251] name for the Lord’s ‘heaven of heaven’ (Ps: 113:16) than your House. There your delight is contemplated without any failure or wandering away to something else. The pure heart enjoys absolute concord and unity in the unshakeable peace of holy spirits, the citizens of your city in the heavens above the visible heavens. (XII. 12. 251-252)

…you House, which is not wandering in alien realms, although not coeternal with you, nevertheless experiences none of the vicissitudes of time because, ceaselessly and unfailingly, it cleaves to you. (XII. 13. 252)

…I find there are two things created by you which lie outside time, though neither is coeternal with you. One of them is so given form that, although mutable, yet without any cessation of [252] its contemplation, without any interruption caused by change, it experiences unswerving enjoying of your eternity and immutability. The other is so formless that it has no means, either in movement or in a state of rest, of moving from one form to another, which is synonymous with being subject to time. But you did not leave it to its formless state since, before any day was created, in the beginning you made heaven and earth, and they are the two of which I have been speaking. ‘Now the earth was invisible and unorganized, and darkness was above the abyss.’ These words suggest the notion of formlessness to help people who cannot conceive of any kind of privation of form which falls short of utter nothingness. Out of this were made a second heaven and a visible ordered earth and beautiful waters and everything else mentioned in the creation narrative after days had come into existed. These things are such that they are subject to ordered changes of movement and form, and so are subject to the successiveness of time. (XII. 15. 252-253)

This is my provisional understanding, my God, when I hear your scripture saying. ‘In the beginning God made heaven and earth. Now the earth was invisible and unorganized and darkness was above the abyss’ (Gen. I: 1-21). It does not mention a day as the time when you did this. My provisional interpretation of that is that ‘heaven’ means the ‘heaven of heaven’, the intellectual, non-physical heaven where the intelligence’s knowing is a matter of simultaneity—… ‘Earth’ I take to mean the invisible and unorganized earth which experiences no temporal succession in which first this happens, then that. (XII. 16. 253)

What wonderful profundity there is in your utterances! The surface meaning lies open before us and charms beginners. Yet the depth is amazing, my God, the depth is amazing. To concentrate on it is to experience awe—the awe of adoration before its transcendence and the trembling of love. Scripture’s enemies I vehemently hate (Ps. 149: 6). I wish that you would slay them with a two-edged sword (Ps. 149: 6); then they would no longer be its enemies. The sense in which I wish them ‘dead’ is this: I love them that they may die to themselves and live to you (Rom. 14:7-8; 2 Cor. 5:14-15). / But see, there are others who find no fault with the book of Genesis and indeed admire it. Yet they say: ‘The Spirit of God who wrote this by Moses his servant did not intend this meaning by these words; he did not mean what you are saying, but another meaning which is our interpretation’ [Augustine now turns his critique not on Manichees but on Catholic critics (unindentifiable), dissatisfied perhaps with his exposition of Genesis I in his book De Genesi contra Manichaeos, written in 388-9] Submitting to you as arbiter, God of all us, this is my reply to them. (XII. 17. 254)

Again surely you would not deny what he speaks to me in my inner ear, that the expectation of future events becomes direct apprehension when they are happening, and this same apprehension becomes memory when they have passed. (XII. 18. 254)

What then will you who contradict me say? Are these propositions untrue? ‘No’, they say. What then? (XII. 19. 255)

What do you say to me, you opponents whom I was addressing? You contradict my interpretation, though you believe Moses to be God’s devout servant and his books to be oracles of the Holy Spirit. (XII. 22. 256)

Those with whom I wish to argue in your presence, my God, are those who grant the correctness of all these things which your truth utters in my inner mind. Those who deny them may bark as much as they like and by their shouting discredit themselves. I will try to persuade them to be quiet and to allow you word to find a way to them. If they refuse and repel me, I beg you, my God, not to ‘stay away from me in silence’ (Ps. 27: 1). Speak truth in my heart; you alone speak so. I will leave my critics gasping in the dust, and blowing the soil up into their eyes. I will ‘enter my chamber’ (Matt. 6:6) and will sing you songs of love, groaning with inexpressible groanings (Rom. 8:20) on my wanderer’s path, and remembering Jerusalem with my heart lifted up towards it— …But with those who do not criticize as false all those points which are true, who honour your holy scripture written by that holy man Moses and agree with us that we should follow its supreme authority, but who on some point contradict us, my position is this: You, our God, shall be arbiter between my confessions and their contradictions. (XII. 23. 257)

After hearing and considering all these interpretations, I do not wish to ‘quarrel about words, for that is good for nothing but the subversion of the hearers’ (2 Tim. 2:14). Moreover, ‘the law is good’ for edification ‘if it is lawfully used, since its ends is love out of a pure heart and a good conscience and unfeigned faith.’ (I Tim. I: 8, 5). Our Master well knows on which two precepts he hung all the law and the prophets (matt. 22: 40). [Augustine regarded the two commandments to love God and to love one’s neighbour as the central principle of all scripture. See below XII. xxv (35).] My God, light of my eyes in that which is obscure, I ardently affirm these things in my confession to you. So what difficulty is it for me when these words [of Genesis] can be interpreted in various ways, provided only that the interpretations are true? What difficulty is it for me, I say, if I understand the text in a way different from someone else, who understands the scriptural author in another sense? In Bible study all of us are trying to find and grasp the meaning of the author we are reading, and when we believe him to be revealing truth, we do not dare to think he said anything which we either know or think to be incorrect. As long as each interpreter is endeavouring to find in the holy scriptures the meaning of the author who wrote it, what evil is it if an exegesis he gives is one shown to be true by you, light of all sincere souls, [259] even if the author whom he is reading did not have that idea and, though he ahd grasped a truth, had not discerned that seen by the interpreter? (XII. 27. 259-260)

After hearing and considering these views to the best of my weak capacity, which I confess to you, my God, who know it, I see that two areas of disagreement can arise, when something is recorded by truthful reporters using signs. [Augustine was very aware the words mean different things to different people; the ‘signs’ which are words are ambivalent. His theory of sign enable him to integrate principles of biblical interpretation with ideas about grammar, rhetoric, and logic; but biblical ‘signs’ convey sacred mysteries and therefore are particularly open to varied interpretation.] The first concerns the truth of the matter in question. The second concerns the intention of the writer. It is one thing to inquire into the truth about the origin of the creation. It is another to ask what understanding of the words on the part of a reader and hearer was intended by Moses, a distinguished servant of your faith. In the first category I will not be associated with all those who think they know things but are actually wrong. In the second category I will have nothing to do with all those who think Moses could have said anything untrue. … Together with them I would approach the words of your book to seek in the them your will through the intention of your servant, by whose pen you imparted them to us. (XII. 32. 263)

I say with utter confidence that in your immutable Word you made all tings invisible and visible. I cannot say with equal assurance that this was exactly what Moses had in mind when he wrote ‘In the beginnings God made heaven and earth’. (XII. 33. 264)

‘Let no one trouble me’ (Gal. 6:17) by telling me: ‘Moses did not have in mind what you say, but meant what I say’. …when he says ‘He did not have in mind what you say but what I say’, yet does not deny that what each of us is saying is true, then my God, …pour a softening rain into my heart that I may bear such critics with patience. They do not say this to me because they possess second sight and have seen in the heart of your servant the meaning which they assert, but because they are proud. They have no knowledge of Moses’ opinion at all, but love their own opinion not because it is true, but because it is their own. Otherwise they would equally respect another true interpretation as valid, just as I respect what they say when their affirmation is true, not because it is theirs, but because it is true. And indeed if it is true, it cannot be merely their private property. (XII. 34. 264)

This is the brotherly and conciliatory reply which I make to him. ‘If both of us see that what you say is true and that what I say is true, then where, I ask, do we see this? I do not see it in you, nor you in me, but both of us see it in the immutable truth which is higher than our minds. If then we do not quarrel about the light from the Lord our God, why should we quarrel about the ideas of our neighbour, which we cannot see as clearly as the immutable truth is seen. …See now how stupid it is, among so large a mass of entirely correct interpretations which can be elicited from those words, rashly to assert that a particular one has the best claims to be Moses’ view, and by destructive disputes to offend against charity itself, which is the principle of everything he said in the texts we are attempting to expound.’ (XII. 35. 265)

So had I been Moses—had I been what he was, and had been commissioned by you to write the book of Genesis, I would have wished…that if, in the light of the truth, another exegete saw a different meaning, that also would not be found absent form the meaning of the same words. (XII. 36. 266)

A spring confined in a small space rises with more power and distributes its flow through more channels over a wider expanse than a single stream rising from the same spring even if it flows down over many places. [Plotinus 3.8.10.5 uses the illustration of a spring, but for a different point.] So also the account given by your minister, which was to benefit many expositions, uses a small measure of words to pour out a spate of clear truth. From this each commentator, to the best of his ability in these things, may drw what is true, one this way, another that, using longer and more complex channels of discourse. (XII. 36. 266)

When they read or hear these texts, some people think of God as if he were a human being… When they hear ‘God said, Let there be that, and that is made’, they think of words [266] with beginnings and endings, making a sound in time and passing away. They suppose that after the words have ceased, at once there exists that which was commanded to exist,… In such people who are still infants without higher insight, faith is built up in a healthy way, while in their state of weakness they are carried as if at their mother’s breast by an utterly simple kind of language. …If any among them comes to scorn the humble style of biblical language and in proud weakness pushes himself outside the nest in which he was raised, he will fall, poor wretch. [Augustine has himself in mind.] … [begin 38] There are others for whom these words are no nest but a dark thicket. They see fruit concealed in them, to which they fly in delight, chirping as they seek for it and pluck it. [267] …To the limited extent that they can grasp the light of your truth in this life those who see these things rejoice. (XII. 37-38. 267-268)

…if anyone asks me which view was held by Moses your great servant, I would not be using the language of my confessions if I fail to confess to you that I do not know. (XII. 41. 270)

…may we agree in so honouring your servant, the minister of this scripture, full of your Holy Spirit, that we believe him to have written this under your revelation and to have intended that meaning which supremely corresponds both to the light of truth and to the reader’s spiritual profit. (XII. 41. 270)

So when one person has said ‘Moses thought what I say’, and another ‘No, what I say’, I think it more religious in spirit to say ‘Why not rather say both, if both are true?’ And if anyone sees a [270] third or fourth and a further truth in these words, why not believe that Moses discerned all these things? … Certainly, to make a bold declaration from my heart, if I myself were to be writing something at this supreme level of authority I would choose to write so that my words would sound out with whatever diverse truth in these matters each reader was able to grasp, rather than to give a quite explicit statement of a single true view of this question in such a way as to exclude other views—provided there was no false doctrine to offend me. (XII. 42. 270-271)

…even if it were the case that Moses, through whom this was said, had in mind perhaps only one out of the many true interpretations. If this was so, we may allow that the meaning which he had in his mind was superior to all others. Lord, we beg you show us either what that one meaning is or some other true meaning of your choice. Make clear to us either the understanding possessed by your servant or some other meaning suggested by the same texts, that we may feed on you and not be led astray by error. / My Lord God, I pray you, see how much we have written, how much indeed on only a few words! How much energy and time would at this rate be required to expound all your books! Grant me therefore to make confession to you more briefly in commenting on these words, and to select some on truth which you have inspired, certain and good, even though many meanings have occurred to me where several interpretations are possible. (XII. 43. 271)

You alone are in absolute simplicity. [Plotinus. 5.3.16. says that the higher the grade in the continuum of the hierarchy of being, the greater the ‘simplicity’, and that at the summit utter simplicity is wholly self-sufficient. Similarly 5.4.1. The concept ‘simplicity’ for Augustine and the Neoplatonists means freedom from any element of distinction between substance and accidents or attributes, and has overtones of being without need. Goodness is therefore no attribute of Plotinus’ One, but is inseperable from the One; cf. Plotinus 2.9.1] To you it is not one thing to live, another to live in blessed happiness, because you are your own blessedness. (XIII. 4. 275)

…tell me—I beg you by love, our mother [‘Mother Charity’ is a phrase liked by Augustine, also used by him elsewhere.], I beg you tell me:… (XIII. 7. 276)

Love lifts us there, and ‘your good Spirit’ (Ps. 142: 10) exalts ‘our humble estate from the gates of death’ (Ps. 9, 15). In a good will is our peace. [Echoed in Dante, Paradiso, 3.85]. (XIII. 10. 278)

By your gift we are set on fire and carried upwards: we grow red hot and ascend. We climb ‘the ascents in our heart’ (Ps. 83:6), and sing ‘the song of steps’ (Ps. 119:1). Lit by your fire, your good fire, we grow red-hot and ascend, as we move upwards ‘to the peace of Jerusalem’ (Ps. 121:6). (XIII. 10. 278)

Who can understand the omnipotent Trinity? Yet everyone speaks about the subject, if indeed it can be the matter of discourse. It is a rare soul who knows what he is talking about when he is speaking of it. … I wish that human disputants would reflect upon the triad within their own selves. These three aspects of the self are very different from the Trinity, but I many make the observation that on this triad they could well exercise their minds and examine the problem, thereby becoming aware how far distant they are from it. The three aspects I mean are being, knowing, willing. [279] … It baffles thought to inquire whether these three functions are the ground which constitutes the divine Trinity, or whether the three components are present in each Person, so that each Person has all three, or whether both these alternatives are true,… So the divine being is and knows itself and is immutably sufficient to itself, because of the overflowing greatness of the unity. Who can find a way to give expression to that? Who would venture in any way whatever to make a rash pronouncement on the subject? (XIII. 12. 279-280)

There are, I believe, other waters above this firmament, immortal and kept from earthly corruption. Let them praise your name (Ps. 148: 2-5). Let the peoples above the heavens, your angels, praise you. They have no need to look up to this firmament and to read so as to know your word. They ever ‘see your face’ (Matt. 18:10) and there, without syllables requiring time to pronounce, they read what your eternal will intends. They read, they choose, they love. They ever read, and what they read never passes away. By choosing and loving they read the immutability of your design. Their codex is never closed, nor is their book ever folded shut. (This passage inspired one of John Donne’s Devotions.) For you yourself are a book to them and you are ‘for eternity’ (Ps. 47: 15). You have set them in order above this firmament which you established to be above the weak who are on a lower level so that they could look up and know your mercy, announcing in time you who made time. For ‘in heaven, Lord, is your mercy and your truth reaches the clouds’ (Ps. 35:6). ‘The clouds pass’ (Ps. 17:13) but the heaven remains. Preachers of your word pass from this life to another life, but your scripture is ‘stretched out’ over the peoples to the end of the age. ‘Heaven and earth will pass away, but your words will not pass away’ (Matt. 24:35). [283] For ‘the skin will be folded up’, and the grass above which it was stretched out will pass away with its beauty; but your word abides for ever (Isa. 40:6-8). Now your word appears to us in the ‘enigmatic obscurity’ of clouds and through the ‘mirror’ of heaven your Son, ‘it does not yet appear what we shall be’ (I John 3:2). ‘He looked through the lattice’ of our flesh and caressed us and set us on fire; and we run after his perfume (Cant. 2:9; 1:3, 11). ‘But when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (I John 3:2). ‘As he is’ Lord will be ours to see; but it is not yet given to us. (XIII. 18. 283-284)

This means such kindness as rescuing a person suffering injustice from the hand of the powerful and providing the shelter of protection by the mighty force of just judgment. [Many of Augustine’s letters and sermons concern help to destitute persons and protection of people suffering oppression; these activities were a substantial part of a bishop’s duties.] (XIII. 21. 285)

Surely I do not mislead my readers? [The paragraph, among the most opaque in the Confessions, replies to criticism of his allegorical exegesis of Genesis I. For Augustine the method is justified by its edifying results, and is in principle a working out of the correspondence or analogy between the physical and ‘intelligible’ worlds. The multiplicity of symbols answers to the restlessness of the human heart and mind, continually desiring change. But these symbols, in which scripture is so rich, point to external truths. Allegorical exegesis is the sacramental principle applied to scripture.] Surely I am not confusing things and failing to distinguish between the clear knowledge of these truths in the firmament of heaven and the bodily works done below in the waves of the sea and under the firmament of heaven? There are things of which the knowledge is fixed and [288] determined without evolving with the generations, such as the lights of wisdom and knowledge. But while the truths of these things remain the same, their embodiments in the physical realm are both many and varied. One thing grows out of another, and so, by your blessing, God, things are multiplied. You have relieved the tedium for mortal sense by the fact that what is one thing for our understanding can be symbolized and expressed in many ways by physical movements. ‘The waters have produced’ (Gen. 1:20) these signs, but only through your word. [The sentence is akin to Augustine’s famous dictum about baptism: ‘The word is added to the element (water) and it becomes a sacrament, itself a sort of visible word’ (Sermon on John, 80.3.)] These physical things have been produced to meet the needs of peoples estranged from your eternal truth, but only in your gospel; for they were the product of the very waters whose morbid bitterness was the reason why, through your word, those signs emerged. [Visible signs and sacraments are a necessity because of the fallen nature of humanity. Signs are required by sinful people, but truly spiritual Christians look higher, beyond material means.] (XIII. 27. 288-289)

Therefore in your Church, our God, according to your grace which you have given to it, since we are your ‘workmanship made in good works (Eph. 2:10), spiritual judgment is exercised not only by those who spiritually preside, but also by those subject to their presiding authority. [Augustine holds that the perception of God’s will for his Church does not belong only to the ordained, but it shared by all spiritual members, including of course women (recalling his own debt to Monica).] 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 judgment (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 judgment 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. … The spiritual person does not judge the storm-tossed peoples of this world. How can he ‘judge of those outside’ (1 Cor. 5:12) when he does not know who will come out of the world in to the sweetness of your grace, and who will remain in the permanent bitterness of godlessness? [Though the full development of Augustine’s doctrine of predestination comes in the last decade of his life under the stress of the Pelagian controversy, the essentials were already established at the time of his writing the Confessions, 25 years earlier,…] / [begin 34] That is why man, though made by you in your image, has not received authority over the lights of heaven nor over the heaven beyond our sight nor over day and night, which you called into being before establishing the heaven, nor over the gathering of the waters which is the sea. But he received power over the fish of the [293] sea and the birds of heaven and all cattle and all the earth and all creeping things which creep on the earth. He judges and approves what is right and disapproves what is wrong, whether in the solemn rite of the sacraments…or when considering the verbal signs and expressions which are subject to the authority of your book [i.e. baptism, eucharist (as in XIII. Xxi. 29), and preaching], like birds flying beneath the firmament. He must assess interpretations, expositions, discourses, controversies, the forms of blessing and prayer to you. These signs come from the mouth and sound forth so that the people may respond Amen. The reason why all these utterances have to be physically spoken is the abyss of the world and the blindness of the flesh which cannot discern thoughts, so that it is necessary to make audible sounds. … He judges the ‘living soul’ in its affections made gentle by chastity, by fasting, by devout reflection on things perceived by the bodily senses. And lastly he is said to exercise judgment on questions where he possesses a power of correction. [In counseling and absolution. ‘The living soul’ is the spiritually active members of the Church, the body in which the Holy Spirit is the soul. XIII. Xxxiv.49 below, shows that that they are characterized by strong ascetic discipline.] (XIII. 33-34. 293-294)

But what is this next text about, and what kind of a mystery is it? Lord you bless human beings so that they may increase and multiply and fill the earth. By this surely you are suggesting that we should perceive some further meaning here. … I might say to you, our God, who created us in your image—I might say you intend to bestow this gift of blessing particularly on humanity, were it not that you have also in this way blessed fishes and whales to grow and multiply… (XIII. 35. 294)

What then shall I say, truth my light? That there is no special significance in this, and the text is empty of meaning? No indeed, Father of piety, be it far from a servant of your word to say this. And if I fail to understand what you intend by this utterance, let better interpreters, that is more intelligent than I, offer a better exegesis,… I will not suppress what this passage happens to suggest to me. … How simple is the love of God and one’s neighbor! At the bodily level it is expressed by numerous sacraments and in innumerable languages and in innumerable phrases of any particular language. An instance is that the offspring of the waters ‘increase and multiply’. (XIII. 26. 295)

…if we treat the text as figurative (which I prefer to think scripture intended since it cannot be pointless that it confines this blessing to aquatic creatures and human beings), then we find multitudes in the spiritual and physical creations (to which ‘heaven and earth’ refer); in both just and unjust souls (called ‘light and darkness’); in the holy authors through whom the law is ministered (called ‘the firmament’ established solidly between water and water); [295] in the association of people filled with bitterness (‘the sea’); in the zeal of devoted souls (‘the dry land’); in works of mercy during ‘this present life’ (1 Tim. 4:8) (‘the herbs bearing seed and the trees bearing fruit); in spiritual gifts which manifest themselves for edification (the heavenly lights’); in affections disciplined through self-control (‘the living soul’). / In all these things we find multitudes and abundances and increases. But only in signs given corporeal expression and in intellectual concepts do we find an increasing and a multiplying which illustrate how one thing can be expressed in several ways and how one formulation can bear many meanings. Signs given corporeal expression are the creatures generated from the waters, necessary because of our deep involvement in the flesh. But because of the fertility of reason, I interpret the generation of humanity to mean concepts in the intelligible realm. That is why we believe that you, Lord addressed both categories in the words ‘Increase and multiply’. By this blessing I understand you to grant us the capacity and ability to articulate in many ways what we hold to be a single concept, and to give a plurality of meanings to a single obscure expression in a text we have read. It is said ‘the waters of the sea are filled’, because their movement means the variety of significations. Likewise the earth is filled with human offspring: its dryness shows itself in human energy and the master of it by reason. (XIII. 37. 296)

With you inspiring me I shall be affirming true things, which by your will I draw out of those words. For I do not believe I give a true exposition if anyone other than you is inspiring me. You are the truth but every man is a liar (Ps. 115:11; Rom. 3:4). That is why ‘he who speaks a lie speaks from himself’ (John 8:44) . (XIII. 38. 296)

A body composed of its constituent parts, all of which are beautiful, is far more beautiful as a whole than those parts taken separately; the whole is made of their well-ordered harmony, though individually the constituent parts are also beautiful. [Close parallel in Plotinus 1.6.1.25 ff.] (XIII. 43. 299)

And as in his soul there is one element which deliberates and aspires to domination, and another element which is submissive and obedient, so in the bodily realm woman is made for man. In mental power she has an equal capacity of rational intelligence, but by the sex of her body she is submissive to the masculine sex. This is analogous to the way in which the impulse for action is subordinate to the rational mind’s prudent concern that the act is right. So we see that each particular point and the whole taken all together are very good. (XIII. 47. 302)