This is what happens whenever you are forsaken, O Fountain of Life, who are 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 you in humble piety and let you purge us from our evil ways, and be merciful to those who confess their sins to you, and hear the groanings of the prisoners and loosen us from those fetters that we have forged for ourselves. This you will do, provided we do not raise up against you the arrogance of a false freedom — for we lose all through craving more, by loving our own good more than you, the common good of all.
Chapter IX
17. 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 offend neither you, 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 your testimony. And many a man who is praised by men is condemned — as you are witness — because frequently the deed itself, the mind of the doer, and the hidden demands of the situation all vary among themselves. But when, contrary to human expectation, you command something unusual or unthought of — indeed, something you may formerly have forbidden, about which you may conceal the reason for your command at that particular time; and even though it may be contrary to the ordinance of some society of men13 — who doubts but that it should be done because only that society of men is righteous that obeys you? But blessed are they who know what you command. For all things done by those who obey you either exhibit something necessary at that particular time or they foreshow things to come.
Chapter X
18. But I was ignorant of all this, and so I mocked those holy servants and prophets of yours. Yet what did I gain by mocking them except to be mocked in turn by you? 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 the sap of the mother tree was tears. Notwithstanding this, if a fig was plucked, by not his own but another man’s wickedness, some Manichean 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”!14 And, wretch 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 Manichean — should beg for any food, the morsel that we gave to him would seem condemned, as it were, to capital punishment.
Chapter XI
19. And now you “[stretched] forth your hand from on high” (Ps 144:7) and drew up my soul out of that profound darkness [of Manicheism] because my mother, your faithful one, wept to you on my behalf more than mothers are accustomed to weep for the bodily deaths of their children. For by the light of the faith and spirit that she received from you, she saw that I was dead. And you heard her, O Lord, you heard her and despised not her tears when, pouring down, they watered the earth under her eyes in every place where she prayed. You truly heard her.
For what other source was there for that dream by which you consoled her, so that she permitted me to live with her, to have my meals in the same house at the table that 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 that your ears were inclined toward her heart? O you Omnipotent Good, you care for every one of us as if you cared for him only, and so for all as if they were but one!
20. And what was the reason for this also, that, when she told me of this vision, and I tried to put this construction on it: “that she should not despair of being someday 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 you, O Lord, as far as I can recall it — and I have often mentioned it. Your 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 you 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 you, in all the hours of her supplication. Her prayers entered your presence, and yet you allowed me still to tumble and toss around in that darkness.
Chapter XII
21. Meanwhile, you gave her yet another answer, as I remember — for I pass over many things, hastening on to those things that more strongly impel me to confess to you — and many things I have simply forgotten. But you gave her then another answer, by a priest of yours, a certain bishop reared in your Church and well versed in your books. When that woman had 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,15 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 an swered 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