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Book Two

He concentrates here on his sixteenth year, a year of idleness, lust, and adolescent mischief. The memory of stealing some pears prompts a deep probing of the motives and aims of sinful acts. “I became to myself a wasteland.”

Chapter I

1. I wish now to review in memory my past wickedness and the carnal corruptions of my soul — not because I still love them, but that I may love you, O my God. For love of your love I do this, recalling in the bitterness of self-examination my wicked ways, that you may grow sweet to me, you sweetness without deception! You sweetness happy and assured! Thus you may gather me up out of those fragments in which I was torn to pieces, while I turned away from you, O Unity, and lost myself among “the many.”¹ For as I became a youth, I longed to be satisfied with worldly things, and I dared to grow wild in a succession of various and shadowy loves. My form wasted away, and I became corrupt in your eyes, yet I was still pleasing to my own eyes — and eager to please the eyes of men.

Chapter II

2. But what was it that delighted me except to love and to be loved? Still I did not keep the moderate way of the love of mind to mind — the bright path of friendship. Instead, the mists of passion steamed up out of the puddly concupiscence of the flesh, and the hot imagination of puberty, and they so obscured and overcast my heart that I was unable to distinguish pure affection from unholy desire. Both boiled confusedly within me and dragged my unstable youth down over the cliffs of unchaste desires, plunging me into a gulf of infamy. Your anger had come upon me, and I did not know it. I had been deafened by the clanking of the chains of my mortality, the punishment for my soul’s pride, and I wandered farther from you, which you permitted me to do. I was tossed to and fro, and wasted, and poured out, and I boiled over in my fornications — and yet you held your peace, O my tardy Joy! You still held your peace, and I wandered still farther from you into more upon more barren fields of sorrow, in proud dejection and restless lassitude.

3. If only there had been someone to regulate my disorder and turn to my profit the fleeting beauties of the things around me, and to fix a bound to their sweetness, so that the tides of my youth might have spent themselves upon the shore of marriage! Then they might have been tranquilized and satisfied with having children, as your law prescribes, O Lord — O you who form the offspring of our death and are able also with a tender hand to blunt the thorns that were excluded from your paradise!² For your omnipotence is not far from us even when we are far from you. Now, on the other hand, I might have given more vigilant heed to the voice from the clouds: “Yet those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you” (1 Cor 7:28), and “It is well for a man not to touch a woman” (1 Cor 7:1), and “The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife” (1 Cor 7:32–33). I should have listened more attentively to these words, and, thus having been made a eunuch “for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 19:12), I would have with greater happiness expected your embraces.

4. But, fool that I was, I foamed in my wickedness as the sea and, forsaking you, followed the rushing of my own tide, and burst out of all your bounds. But I did not escape your scourges. For what mortal can do so? You were always by me, mercifully angry and flavoring all my unlawful pleasures with bitter discontent, in order that I might seek pleasures free from discontent. But where could I find such pleasure except in you, O Lord — except in you, who teach us by sorrow, who wound us to heal us, and who kill us that we may not die apart from you. Where was I, and how far was I exiled from the delights of your house, in that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when the madness of lust held full sway in me — the madness that grants indulgence to human shamelessness, even though it is forbidden by your laws — and I gave myself entirely to it? Meanwhile, my family took no care to save me from ruin by marriage, for their sole care was that I should learn how to make a powerful speech and become a persuasive orator.

Chapter III

5. Now, in that year my studies were interrupted. I had come back from Madaura, a neighboring city³ where I had gone to study grammar and rhetoric; and the money for a further term in Carthage was being pulled together for me. This project was more a matter of my father’s ambition than of his means, for he was only a poor citizen of Tagaste.

To whom am I narrating all this? Not to you, O my God, but to my own kind in your presence — to that small part of the human race who may chance to come upon these writings. And to what end? That I and all who read them may understand what depths there are from which we are to cry unto you.⁴ For what is more surely heard in your ear than a confessing heart and a faithful life?

Who did not extol and praise my father, because he went quite beyond his means to supply his son with the necessary expenses for a far journey in the interest of his education? For many far richer citizens did not do so much for their children. Still, this same father troubled himself not at all as to how I was progressing toward you nor how chaste I was, just so long as I was skillful in speaking — no matter how barren I was to your tillage, O God, who are the one true and good Lord of my heart, which is your field (cf. 1 Cor 3:9).

6. During that sixteenth year of my age, I lived with my parents, having a holiday from school for a time — this idleness imposed upon me by my parents’ deficient finances. The thornbushes of lust grew rank about my head, and there was no hand to root them out. Indeed, when my father saw me one day at the baths and perceived that I was becoming a man, and was showing the signs of adolescence, he joyfully told my mother about it as if already looking forward to grandchildren, rejoicing in that sort of inebriation in which the world so often forgets you, its Creator, and falls in love with your creature instead of you — the inebriation of that invisible wine of a perverted will that turns and bows down to infamy. But in my mother’s breast you had already begun to build your temple and the foundation of your holy habitation — while my father was only a catechumen, and that but recently. She was, therefore, startled with a holy fear and trembling: for though I had not yet been baptized, she feared those crooked ways in which they walk who turn their backs to you and not their faces.

7. Woe is me! Do I dare affirm that you held your peace, O my God, while I wandered further away from you? Did you really then hold your peace? Then whose words were they but yours that by my mother, your faithful handmaid, you poured into my ears? None of them, however, sank into my heart to make me do anything. She deplored and, as I remember, warned me privately with great solicitude, “not to commit fornication; but above all things never to defile another man’s wife.” These appeared to me but womanish counsels, which I would have blushed to obey. Yet they were from you, and I knew it not. I thought that you were silent and that it was only she who spoke. Yet it was through her that you did not keep silence toward me; and in rejecting her counsel I was rejecting you — I, her son, “your servant, the son of your handmaid” (Ps 116:16). But I did not realize this, and rushed on headlong with such blindness that, among my friends, I was ashamed to be less shameless than they, when I heard them boasting of their disgraceful exploits — yes, and glorying all the more the worse their baseness was. What is worse, I took pleasure in such exploits, not for the pleasure’s sake only but mostly for praise. What is worthy of condemnation except vice itself? Yet I made myself out worse than I was, in order that I might not go lacking for praise. And when in anything I had not sinned as the worst ones in the group, I would still say that I had done what I had not done, in order not to appear contemptible because I was more innocent than they; and not to drop in their esteem because I was more chaste.

8. Behold with what companions I walked the streets of Babylon! I rolled in its mire and lolled about on it, as if on a bed of spices and precious ointments. And, drawing me more closely to the very center of that city, my invisible enemy trod me down and seduced me, for I was easy to seduce. My mother had already fled out of the midst of Babylon (cf. Jer 51:6; 50:8), and was progressing, albeit slowly, toward its outskirts. For in counseling me to chastity, she did not bear in mind what her husband had told her about me. And although she knew that my passions were destructive even then and dangerous for the future, she did not think they should be restrained by the bonds of conjugal affection — if, indeed, they could not be cut away to the quick. She took no heed of this, for she was afraid lest a wife should prove a hindrance and a burden to my hopes. These were not her hopes of the world to come, which my mother had in you, but the hope of learning, which both my parents were too anxious that I should acquire — my father, because he had little or no thought of you, and only vain thoughts for me; my mother, because she thought that the usual course of study would not only be no hindrance but actually a furtherance toward my eventual return to you. This much I conjecture, recalling as well as I can the temperaments of my parents. Meantime, the reins of discipline were slackened on me, so that without the restraint of due severity, I might play at whatsoever I fancied, even to the point of dissoluteness. And in all this there was a mist that shut out from my sight the brightness of your truth, O my God; and my iniquity bulged out, as it were, with fatness (cf. Ps 73:7)!

Chapter IV

9. Theft is punished by your law, O Lord, and by the law written in men’s hearts, which not even ingrained wickedness can erase. For what thief will tolerate another thief stealing from him? Even a rich thief will not tolerate a poor thief who is driven to theft by want. Yet I had a desire to commit robbery, and did so, compelled to it by neither hunger nor poverty, but through a contempt for well-doing and a strong impulse to iniquity. For I pilfered something that I already had in sufficient measure, and of much better quality. I did not desire to enjoy what I stole, but only the theft and the sin itself.

There was a pear tree close to our own vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was not tempting either for its color or for its flavor. Late one night — having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was — a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat, but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden. Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart — which you pitied even in that bottomless pit. Behold, now let my heart confess to you what it was seeking there, when I was being gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error — not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in you to destruction, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself.

Chapter V

10. Now there is a comeliness in all beautiful bodies, and in gold and silver and all things. The sense of touch has its own power to please, and the other senses find their proper objects in physical sensation. Worldly honor also has its own glory, and so do the powers to command and to overcome: and from these there springs up the desire for revenge. Yet, in seeking these pleasures, we must not depart from you, O Lord, nor deviate from your law. The life we live here has its own peculiar attractiveness because it has a certain measure of comeliness of its own and a harmony with all these inferior values. The bond of human friendship has a sweetness of its own, binding many souls together as one. Yet because of these values, sin is committed, because we have an inordinate preference for these goods of a lower order and neglect the better and the higher good — neglecting you, O our Lord God, and your truth and your law. For these inferior values have their delights, but not at all equal to my God, who has made them all. For in him do the righteous delight, and he is the sweetness of the upright in heart.

11. When, therefore, we inquire why a crime was committed, we do not accept the explanation unless it appears that there was the desire to obtain some of those values that we designate inferior, or else a fear of losing them. For truly they are beautiful and comely, though in comparison with the superior and celestial goods they are abject and contemptible. A man has murdered another man — what was his motive? Either he desired the man’s wife or property or else he would steal to support himself; or else he was afraid of losing something to that man; or else, having been injured, he was burning to be revenged. Would a man commit murder without a motive, taking delight simply in the act of murder? Who would believe such a thing? Even for that savage and brutal man [Catiline], of whom it was said that he was gratuitously wicked and cruel, there is still a motive assigned to his deeds. “Lest through idleness,” he says, “hand or heart should grow inactive.”⁵ And to what purpose? Why, even this: that, having once aquired possession of the city through the practice of his wicked ways, he might gain honors, empire, and wealth, and thus be exempt from the fear of the laws and from financial difficulties in supplying the needs of his family — and from the consciousness of his own wickedness. So it seems that even Catiline himself loved not his own villainies, but something else, and it was this that gave him the motive for his crimes.

Chapter VI

12. What was it in you, O theft of mine, that I, poor wretch, doted on — you deed of darkness — in that sixteenth year of my age? Beautiful you were not, for you were a theft. But are you anything at all, so that I could analyze the case with you? Those pears that we stole were fair to the sight because they were your creation, O Beauty beyond compare, O Creator of all, O you good God — God the highest good and my true good.⁶ Those pears were truly pleasant to the sight, but it was not for them that my miserable soul lusted, for I had an abundance of better pears. I stole those simply that I might steal, for, having stolen them, I threw them away. My sole gratification in them was my own sin, which I was pleased to enjoy; for, if any one of these pears entered my mouth, the only good flavor it had was my sin in eating it. And now, O Lord my God, I ask what it was in that theft of mine that caused me such delight; for behold it had no beauty of its own — certainly not the sort of beauty that exists in justice and wisdom, nor such as is in the mind, memory senses, and the animal life of man; nor yet the kind that is the glory and beauty of the stars in their courses; nor the beauty of the earth, or the sea — teeming with spawning life, replacing in birth that which dies and decays. Indeed, it did not have that false and shadowy beauty that attends the deceptions of vice.

13. For thus we see pride wearing the mask of high-spiritedness, although only you, O God, are high above all. Ambition seeks honor and glory, while only you should be honored above all, and glorified forever. The powerful man seeks to be feared, because of his cruelty; but who ought really to be feared but God only? What can be forced away or withdrawn out of his power — when or where or whither or by whom? The enticements of the wanton claim the name of love; and yet nothing is more enticing than your love, nor is anything loved more healthfully than your truth, bright and beautiful above all. Curiosity prompts a desire for knowledge, whereas it is only you who knows all things supremely. Indeed, ignorance and foolishness themselves go masked under the names of simplicity and innocence; yet there is no being that has true simplicity like yours, and none is innocent, as you are. Thus it is that by a sinner’s own deeds he is himself harmed. Human sloth pretends to long for rest, but what sure rest is there except in the Lord? Luxury would gladly be called plenty and abundance; but you are the fullness and unfailing abundance of unfading joy. Prodigality presents a show of liberality; but you are the most lavish giver of all good things. Covetousness desires to possess much; but you are already the possessor of all things. Envy contends that its aim is for excellence; but what is so excellent as you? Anger seeks revenge; but who avenges more justly than you? Fear recoils at the unfamiliar and the sudden changes that threaten things beloved, and is wary for its own security; but what can happen that is unfamiliar or sudden to you? Or who can deprive you of what you love? Where, really, is there unshaken security except with you? Grief languishes for things lost in which desire had taken delight, because it wills to have nothing taken from it, just as nothing can be taken from you.

14. Thus the soul commits fornication when she is turned from you,⁷ and seeks apart from you what she cannot find pure and untainted until she returns to you. All things thus imitate you — but in a perverted way — when they separate themselves far from you and raise themselves up against you. But, even in this act of perverse imitation, they acknowledge you to be the Creator of all nature and recognize that there is no place where they can altogether separate themselves from you. What was it, then, that I loved in that theft? And wherein was I imitating my Lord, even in a corrupted and perverted way? Did I wish, if only by gesture, to rebel against your law, even though I had no power to do so actually — so that, even as a captive, I might produce a sort of counterfeit liberty, by doing with impunity deeds that were forbidden, in a deluded sense of omnipotence? Behold this servant of yours, fleeing from his Lord and following a shadow! O rottenness! O monstrousness of life and abyss of death! Could I find pleasure only in what was unlawful, and only because it was unlawful?

Chapter VII

15. “What shall I render to the LORD” (Ps 116:12) for the fact that while my memory recalls these things my soul no longer fears them? I will love you, O Lord, and thank you, and confess to your name, because you have put away from me such wicked and evil deeds. To your grace I attribute it and to your mercy, that you have melted away my sin as if it were ice. To your grace also I attribute whatever evil I did not commit — for what might I not have done, loving sin as I did, just for the sake of sinning? Yea, all the sins that I confess now to have been forgiven me, both those that I committed willfully and those that, by your providence, I did not commit. What man is there who, when reflecting upon his own infirmity, dares to ascribe his chastity and innocence to his own powers, so that he should love you less — as if he were in less need of your mercy in which you forgive the transgressions of those who return to you? As for that man who, when called by you, obeyed your voice and shunned those things that he here reads of me as I recall and confess them of myself, let him not despise me — for I, who was sick, have been healed by the same Physician by whose aid it was that he did not fall sick, or rather was less sick than I. And for this let him love you just as much — indeed, all the more — since he sees me restored from such a great weakness of sin by the same Savior by whom he sees himself preserved from such a weakness.

Chapter VIII

16. What profit did I, a wretched one, receive from those things which, when I remember them now, cause me shame — above all, from that theft, which I loved only for the theft’s sake? And, as the theft itself was nothing, I was all the more wretched in that I loved it so. Yet by myself alone I would not have done it — I still recall how I felt about this then — I could not have done it alone. I loved it then because of the companionship of my accomplices with whom I did it. I did not, therefore, love the theft alone — yet, indeed, it was only the theft that I loved, for the companionship was nothing. What is this paradox? Who is it that can explain it to me but God, who illumines my heart and searches out the dark corners thereof? What is it that has prompted my mind to inquire about it, to discuss and to reflect upon all this? For had I at that time loved the pears that I stole and wished to enjoy them, I might have done so alone, if I could have been satisfied with the mere act of theft by which my pleasure was served. Nor did I need to have that itching of my own passions inflamed by the encouragement of my accomplices. But since the pleasure I got was not from the pears, it was in the crime itself, enhanced by the companionship of my fellow sinners.

Chapter IX

17. By what passion, then, was I animated? It was undoubtedly depraved and a great misfortune for me to feel it. But still, what was it? “Who can discern his errors?” (Ps 19:12).

We laughed because our hearts were tickled at the thought of deceiving the owners, who had no idea of what we were doing and would have strenuously objected. Yet, again, why did I find such delight in doing this that I would not have done alone? Is it that no one readily laughs alone? No one does so readily; but still sometimes, when men are by themselves and no one else is about, a fit of laughter will overcome them when something very droll presents itself to their senses or minds. Yet alone I would not have done it — alone I could not have done it at all.

Behold, my God, the lively review of my soul’s career is laid bare before you. I would not have committed that theft alone. My pleasure in it was not what I stole but, rather, the act of stealing. Nor would I have enjoyed doing it alone — indeed I would not have done it! O friendship all unfriendly! You strange seducer of the soul, who hungers for mischief from impulses of mirth and wantonness, who craves another’s loss without any desire for one’s own profit or revenge — so that, when they say, “Let’s go, let’s do it,” we are ashamed not to be shameless.

Chapter X

18. Who can unravel such a twisted and tangled knottiness? It is unclean. I hate to reflect upon it. I hate to look on it. But I do long for you, O Righteousness and Innocence, so beautiful and comely to all virtuous eyes — I long for you with an insatiable satiety. With you is perfect rest, and life unchanging. He who enters into you enters into the joy of his Lord (cf. Mt 25:21), and shall have no fear and shall achieve excellence in the Excellent. I fell away from you, O my God, and in my youth I wandered too far from you, my true support. And I became to myself a wasteland.