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Book Five

Augustine faces a year of decision. Faustus comes to Carthage, and Augustine is disenchanted in his hope for solid demonstration of the truth of Manichean doctrine. He decides to flee from his known troubles in Carthage to troubles yet unknown in Rome. His experiences in Rome prove disappointing, and he applies for a teaching post in Milan. Here he meets Ambrose, who confronts him as an impressive witness for Catholic Christianity and uncovers the possibilities of the allegorical interpretation of Scripture. Augustine decides to become a Christian catechumen.

Chapter I

1. Accept this sacrifice of my confessions from the hand of my tongue. You formed it and prompted it to praise your name. Heal all my bones and let them say, “O Lord, who is like you?” (Ps 35:10). It is not that one who confesses to you instructs you as to what goes on within him. For the closed heart does not bar your sight into it, nor does the hardness of heart hold back your hands, for you can soften it at will, either by mercy or in vengeance, “and there is no one who can hide himself from your heat” (cf. Ps 19:6). But let my soul praise you, that it may love you, and let it confess your mercies to you, that it may praise you. Your whole creation praises you without ceasing: the spirit of man, by his own lips, by his own voice, lifted up to you; animals and lifeless matter by the mouths of those who meditate upon them. Thus our souls may climb out of their weariness toward you and lean on those things you have created and pass through them to you, who created them in a marvelous way. With you, there is refreshment and true strength.

Chapter II

2. Let the restless and the unrighteous depart and flee away from you. Even so, you see them and your eye pierces through the shadows in which they run. For lo, they live in a world of beauty and yet are themselves most foul. And how have they harmed you? Or in what way have they discredited your power, which is just and perfect in its rule even to the last item in creation? Indeed, where would they fly when they fled from your presence? Wouldst you be unable to find them? But they fled that they might not see you, who saw them; that they might be blinded and stumble into you. But you forsake nothing that you have made. The unrighteous stumble against you that they may be justly plagued, fleeing from your gentleness and colliding with your justice, and falling on their own rough paths. For in truth they do not know that you are everywhere; that no place contains you, and that only you are near even to those who go farthest from you. Let them, therefore, turn back and seek you, because even if they have abandoned you, their Creator, you have not abandoned your creatures. Let them turn back and seek you — and lo, you are there in their hearts, there in the hearts of those who confess to you. Let them cast themselves upon you, and weep on your bosom, after all their weary wanderings; and you will gently wipe away their tears (cf. Rev 21:4). And they weep the more and rejoice in their weeping, since you, O Lord, are not a man of flesh and blood. You are the Lord, who can remake what you made and can comfort them. And where was I when I was seeking you? There you were, before me; but I had gone away, even from myself, and I could not find myself, much less you.

Chapter III

3. Let me now lay bare in the sight of God the twenty-ninth year of my age. There had just come to Carthage a certain bishop of the Manicheans, Faustus by name, a great snare of the devil; and many were entangled by him through the charm of his eloquence. Now, even though I found this eloquence admirable, I was beginning to distinguish the charm of words from the truth of things, which I was eager to learn. Nor did I consider the dish as much as I did the kind of meat that their famous Faustus served up to me in it. His fame had run before him, as one very skilled in an honorable learning and preeminently skilled in the liberal arts.

And as I had already read and stored up in memory many of the injunctions of the philosophers, I began to compare some of their doctrines with the tedious fables of the Manicheans; and it struck me that the probability was on the side of the philosophers, whose power reached far enough to enable them to form a fair judgment of the world, even though they had not discovered the sovereign Lord of it all. For you are great, O Lord, and you have respect for the lowly, but the proud you know from far off (cf. Ps 138:6). You draw near to none but the contrite in heart and cannot be found by the proud, even if in their inquisitive skill they may number the stars and the sands, and map out the constellations, and trace the courses of the planets.

4. For you gave them the minds and the intelligence to investigate these things. They have discovered much; and have foretold — many years in advance — the day, the hour, and the extent of the eclipses of those luminaries, the sun and the moon. Their calculations did not fail; it came to pass as they predicted. And they wrote down the rules they had discovered, so that to this day others may read them and from them may calculate in what year and month and day and hour of the day, and at what quarter of its light, either the moon or the sun will be eclipsed, and it will come to pass just as predicted. And men who are ignorant in these matters marvel and are amazed; and those who understand them exult and are exalted. Both, by an impious pride, withdraw from you and forsake your light. They foretell an eclipse of the sun before it happens, but they do not see their own eclipse, which is even now occurring. For they do not ask, as religious men should, what is the source of the intelligence by which they investigate these matters. Moreover, when they discover that you made them, they do not give themselves up to you that you might preserve what you have made. Nor do they offer, as sacrifice to you, what they have made of themselves. For they do not slaughter their own pride — as they do the sacrificial fowls — nor their own curiosities by which, like the fishes of the sea, they wander through the unknown paths of the deep. Nor do they curb their own extravagances as they do those of “the beasts of the field” (Ps 8:7), so that you, O Lord, “a consuming fire” (Heb 12:29), may burn up their mortal cares and renew them unto immortality.

5. They do not know the way that is your word, by which you created all the things that are and also the men who measure them, and the senses by which they perceive what they measure, and the intelligence whereby they discern the patterns of measure. Thus they know not that your wisdom is not a matter of measure.¹ But the Only Begotten has been “made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification” (cf. 1 Cor 1:3) and has been numbered among us and paid tribute to Caesar (cf. Mt 22:21). And they do not know this “Way” by which they could descend from themselves to him in order to ascend through him to him. They did not know this “Way,” and so they fancied themselves exalted to the stars and the shining heavens. And lo, they fell upon the earth, and “their foolish heart was darkened” (cf. Rom 1:21ff). They saw many true things about the creature, but even still they do not seek with true piety for the Truth, the Architect of Creation, and hence they do not find him. Or, if they do find him, and know that he is God, they do not glorify him as God; neither are they thankful but become vain in their imagination, and say that they themselves are wise, and attribute to themselves what is yours. At the same time, with the most perverse blindness, they wish to attribute to you their own quality — so that they load their lies on you who are the Truth, “changing the glory of the incorruptible God for an image of corruptible man, and birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things” (cf. Rom 1:23). “They exchanged your truth for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (cf. Rom 1:25).