Confessions - Book 4
Book IV.
Chapter I.-Concerning that Most Unhappy Time in Which He, Being Deceived, Deceived Others; And Concerning the Mockers of His Confession.
Chapter II.-He Teaches Rhetoric, the Only Thing He Loved, and Scorns the Soothsayer, Who Promised Him Victory.
Chapter III.-Not Even the Most Experienced Men Could Persuade Him of the Vanity of Astrology to Which He Was Devoted.
Chapter IV.-Sorely Distressed by Weeping at the Death of His Friend, He Provides Consolation for Himself.
Chapter V.-Why Weeping is Pleasant to the Wretched.
Chapter VI.-His Friend Being Snatched Away by Death, He Imagines that He Remains Only as Half.
Chapter VII.-Troubled by Restlessness and Grief, He Leaves His Country a Second Time for Carthage.
Chapter VIII.-That His Grief Ceased by Time, and the Consolation of Friends.
Chapter IX.-That the Love of a Human Being, However Constant in Loving and Returning Love, Perishes; While He Who Loves God Never Loses a Friend.
Chapter X.-That All Things Exist that They May Perish, and that We are Not Safe Unless God Watches Over Us.
Chapter XI.-That Portions of the World are Not to Be Loved; But that God, Their Author, is Immutable, and His Word Eternal.
Chapter XII.-Love is Not Condemned, But Love in God, in Whom There is Rest Through Jesus Christ, is to Be Preferred.
Chapter XIII.-Love Originates from Grace and Beauty Enticing Us.
Chapter XIV.-Concerning the Books Which He Wrote "On the Fair and Fit," Dedicated to Hierius.
Chapter XV.-While Writing, Being Blinded by Corporeal Images, He Failed to Recognise the Spiritual Nature of God.
Chapter XVI.-He Very Easily Understood the Liberal Arts and the Categories of Aristotle, But Without True Fruit.
Book IV.
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Then follows a period of nine years from the nineteenth year of his age, during which having lost a friend, he followed the Manichaeans-and wrote books on the fair and fit, and published a work on the liberal arts, and the categories of Aristotle.
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Chapter I.-Concerning that Most Unhappy Time in Which He, Being Deceived, Deceived Others; And Concerning the Mockers of His Confession.
1. During this space of nine years, then, from my nineteenth to my eight and twen