Confessions

This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, and to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mark Barnes. www.414.org.uk Confessions by St. Augustine. Translated by Albert C. Outler. Book 3. Chapter 8. Can it ever, at any time or place, be unrighteous for a man to love God with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his mind, and his neighbor as himself? Similarly, offences against nature are everywhere, and at all times to be held in detestation, and should be punished. Such offences, for example, were those of the Sodomites, and, even if all nations should commit them, they would all be judged guilty of the same crime by the divine law, which has not made man so that they should ever abuse one another in that way. For the fellowship that should be between God and us is violated whenever that nature of which he is the author is polluted by perverted lust. But these offences against customary morality are to be avoided according to the variety of such customs. Thus, what is agreed upon by convention, and confirmed by custom or the law of any city or nation, may not be violated at the lawless pleasure of any, whether citizen or stranger. For any part that is not consistent with its whole is unseemly. Nevertheless, when God commands anything contrary to the customs or compacts of any nation, even though it were never done by them before, it is to be done, and if it has been interrupted, it is to be restored, and if it has never been established, it is to be established. For it is lawful for a king, in the state over which he reigns, to command that which neither he himself nor anyone before him had commanded. And if it cannot be held to be inimicable to the public interest to obey him, and, in truth, it would be inimicable if he were not obeyed, since obedience to princes is a general compact of human society, how much more, then, ought we unhesitatingly to obey God, the governor of all his creatures? For, just as among the authorities in human society the greater authority is obeyed before the lesser, so also must God be above all. This applies as well to deeds of violence where there is a real desire to harm another, either by humiliating treatment or by injury. Either of these may be done for reasons of revenge, as one enemy against another, or in order to obtain some advantage over another, as in the case of the highwayman and the traveller, else they may be done in order to avoid some other evil, as in the case of one who fears another, or through envy, as, for example, an unfortunate man harming a happy one, just because he is happy, or they may be done by a prosperous man against someone whom he fears will become equal to himself or whose equality he resents. There may even be done for the mere pleasure in another man's pain, as the spectators of gladiatorial shows, or the people who deride and mock at others. These are the major forms of iniquity that spring out of the lust of the flesh and of the eye and of power. Sometimes there is just one, sometimes two together, sometimes all of them at once. Thus we live, offending against the three and the seven, that harp of ten strings, thy decalogue, O God most high and most sweet. But now, how can offences of vileness harm thee, who canst not be defiled? Or how can deeds of violence harm thee, who canst not be harmed? Still thou dost punish these sins which men commit against themselves, because, even when they sin against thee, they are also committing impiety against their own souls. Iniquity gives itself the lie, either by corrupting or by perverting that nature which thou hast made and ordained. And they do this by an immoderate use of lawful things, or by lustful desire for things forbidden as against nature, or when they are guilty of sin by raging with heart and voice against thee, rebelling against thee, kicking against the pricks, or when they cast aside respect for human society and take audacious delight in conspiracies and feuds according to their private likes and dislikes. This is what happens whenever thou art forsaken, O fountain of life, who art the one and true Creator and Ruler of the universe. This is what happens when through self-willed pride a part is loved under the false assumption that it is the whole. Therefore, we must return to thee in humble piety and let thee purge us from our evil ways, and be merciful to those who confess their sins to thee, and hear the groanings of the prisoners, and loosen us from those fetters which we have forged for ourselves. This thou wilt do, provided we do not raise up against thee the arrogance of a false freedom. For thus we lose all through craving more, by loving our own good more than thee, the common good of all. Chapter 9. But among all these vices and crimes and manifold iniquities, there are also the sins that are committed by men who are, on the whole, making progress toward the good. When these are judged rightly and after the rule of perfection, the sins are censored, but the men are to be commended because they show the hope of bearing fruit, like the green shoot of the growing corn. And there are some deeds that resemble vice and crime, and yet are not sin, because they neither offend thee, our Lord God, nor social custom. For example, when suitable reserves for hard times are provided, we cannot judge that this is done merely from a hoarding impulse. Or again, when acts are punished by constituted authority for the sake of correction, we cannot judge that they are done merely out of a desire to inflict pain. Thus many a deed which is disapproved in man's sight may be approved by thy testimony. And many a man who is praised by men is condemned, as thou art witness, because frequently the deed itself, the mind of the doer, and the hidden exigency of the situation all vary among themselves. But when, contrary to human expectation, thou commandest something unusual or unthought of, indeed something thou mayst formerly have forbidden, about which thou mayst conceal the reason for thy command at that particular time, and even though it may be contrary to the ordinance of some society of men, who doubts but that it should be done, because only that society of men is righteous which obeys thee. But blessed are they who know what thou dost command. For all things done by those who obey thee either exhibit something necessary at that particular time, or they foreshadow things to come. Chapter 10 But I was ignorant of this, and so I mocked those holy servants and prophets of thine. Yet what did I gain by mocking them, save to be mocked in turn by thee? Insensibly and little by little I was led on to such follies as to believe that a fig tree wept when it was plucked, and that sap of the mother-tree was tears. Notwithstanding this, if a fig was plucked, by not his own but another man's wickedness, some Manichaean saint might eat it, digest it in his stomach, and breathe it out again in the form of angels. Indeed, in his prayers he would assuredly groan and sigh forth particles of God, although these particles of the Most High and True God would have remained bound in that fig unless they had been set free by the teeth and belly of some elect saint. And, wretched that I was, I believed that more mercy was to be shown to the fruits of the earth than unto men, for whom these fruits were created. For if a hungry man, who was not a Manichaean, should beg for any food, the morsel that we gave to him would seem condemned, as it were, to capital punishment. Chapter 11 And now thou didst stretch forth thy hand from above, and distraught up my soul out of that profound darkness, because my mother, thy faithful one, wept to thee on my behalf more than mothers are accustomed to weep for the bodily deaths of their children. For by the light of faith and spirit which she received from thee, she saw that I was dead. And thou didst hear her, O Lord, thou didst hear her, and despise not her tears, when pouring down they watered the earth under her eyes in every place where she prayed, thou didst truly hear her. For what other source was there for that dream by which thou didst console her, so that she permitted me to live with her, to have my meals in the same house, at the same table, which she had begun to avoid, even while she hated and detested the blasphemies of my error? In her dream she saw herself standing on a sort of wooden rule, and saw a bright youth approaching her, joyous and smiling at her, while she was grieving and bowed down with sorrow. But when he inquired of her the cause of her sorrow and daily weeping, not to learn from her but to teach her as is customary in visions, and when she answered that it was my soul's doom she was lamenting, he bade her rest content, and told her to look and see that where she was there I was also. And when she looked she saw me standing near her on the same rule. Whence came this vision unless it was thy ears were inclined toward her heart? O thou omnipotent good, thou carest for every one of us as thou didst care for him only, and so for all as if they were but one. And what was the reason for this also, that when she told me of this vision I tried to put this construction on it, that she would not despair of being some day what I was? She replied immediately, without hesitation, no, for it was not told me that where he is there you shall be, but where you are there he will be. I confess my remembrance of this to thee, O Lord, as far as I can recall it, and I have often mentioned it. Thy answer, given through my watchful mother, in the fact that she was not disturbed by the plausibility of my false interpretation, but saw immediately what should have been seen, and which I certainly had not seen until she spoke, this answer moved me more deeply than the dream itself. Still, by that dream, the joy that was to come to that pious woman so long after was predicted long before as a consolation for her present anguish. Nearly nine years passed in which I wallowed in the mud of that deep pit and in the darkness of falsehood, striving often to rise, but being all the more heavily dashed down. But all that time this chaste, pious, and sober widow, such as thou dost love, was now more buoyed up with hope, though no less zealous in her weeping and mourning, and she did not cease to bewail my case before thee in all the hours of her supplication. Her prayers entered thy presence, and yet thou didst allow me still to tumble and toss around in that darkness. Chapter 12 Meanwhile thou gavest her yet another answer, as I remember, for I pass over many things, hastening on to those things which more strongly impel me to confess thee, and many things I have simply forgotten. But thou gavest her then another answer, by a priest of thine, a certain bishop reared in thy church and well versed in thy books. When that woman begged him to agree to have some discussion with me, to refute my errors, to help me to unlearn evil and to learn the good, for it was his habit to do this when he found people ready to receive it, he refused, very prudently, as I afterward realized. For he answered that I was still unteachable, being inflated with the novelty of that heresy, and that I had already perplexed diverse, inexperienced persons with vexatious questions, as she herself had told him. But let him alone for a time, he said, only pray God for him. He will, of his own accord, by reading, come to discover what an error it is, and how great its impiety is. He went on to tell her at the same time how he himself, as a boy, had been given over to the Manicheans by his misguided mother, and not only had read, but had even copied out almost all their books. Yet he had come to see, without external argument or proof from any one else, how much that sect was to be shunned, and had shunned it. When he had said this, she was not satisfied, but repeated more earnestly her entreaties, and shed copious tears, still beseeching him to see and talk with me. Finally the bishop, a little vexed at her importunity, exclaimed, Go your way! As you live, it cannot be that the son of these tears should perish. As she often told me afterward, she accepted this answer as though it were a voice from heaven.