Book Four
This is the story of Augustine’s years among the Manicheans. It includes the account of his teaching at Tagaste, his taking a mistress, the attractions of astrology, and the poignant loss of a friend, which leads to a searching analysis of grief and transience. He reports on his first book, On the Beautiful and the Fitting, and his introduction to Aristotle’s Categories and other books of philosophy and theology, which he mastered with great ease and little profit.
Chapter I
1. During this period of nine years, from my nineteenth year to my twenty-eighth, I went astray and led others astray. I was deceived and deceived others, in varied lustful projects — sometimes publicly, by the teaching of what men style “the liberal arts”; sometimes secretly, under the false guise of religion. In the one, I was proud of myself; in the other, superstitious; in all, vain! In my public life I was striving after the emptiness of popular fame, going so far as to seek theatrical applause, entering poetic contests, striving for the straw garlands and the vanity of theatricals and intemperate desires. In my private life I was seeking to be purged from these corruptions of ours by carrying food to those who were called “elect” and “holy,” which, in the laboratory of their stomachs, they should make into angels and gods for us, and by them we might be set free. These projects I followed out and practiced with my friends, who were both deceived with me and by me. Let the proud laugh at me, and those who have not yet been savingly cast down and stricken by you, O my God. Nevertheless, I would confess my shame to your glory. Bear with me, I beseech you, and give me the grace to retrace in my present memory the devious ways of my past errors and thus be able to “offer to [you] a sacrifice of thanksgiving” (Ps 50:14). For what am I to myself without you but a guide to my own downfall? Or what am I, even at the best, but one suckled on your milk and feeding on you, O Food that never perishes (cf. Jn 6:27)? What indeed is any man, seeing that he is but a man? Therefore, let the strong and the mighty laugh at us, but let us who are “poor and needy” confess to you.
Chapter II
2. During those years I taught the art of rhetoric. Conquered by the desire for gain, I offered for sale speaking skills with which to conquer others. And yet, O Lord, you know that I really preferred to have honest scholars (or what were esteemed as such) and, without tricks of speech, I taught these scholars the tricks of speech — not to be used against the life of the innocent, but sometimes to save the life of a guilty man. And you, O God, saw me from afar, stumbling on that slippery path and sending out some flashes of fidelity amid much smoke — guiding those who loved vanity and sought after lying (cf. Jn 6:27), being myself their companion.
In those years I had a mistress, to whom I was not joined in lawful marriage. She was a woman I had discovered in my wayward passion, void as it was of understanding, yet she was the only one; and I remained faithful to her. With her I discovered, by my own experience, what a great difference there is between the restraint of the marriage bond contracted with a view to having children and the compact of a lustful love, where children are born against the parents’ will — although once they are born they compel our love.
3. I remember too that, when I decided to compete for a theatrical prize, some magician — I do not remember him now — asked me what I would give him to be certain to win. But I detested and abominated such filthy mysteries1 and answered “that, even if the garland was of imperishable gold, I would still not permit a fly to be killed to win it for me.” For he would have slain certain living creatures in his sacrifices, and by those honors would have invited the devils to help me. This evil thing I refused, but not out of a pure love of you, O God of my heart, for I knew not how to love you because I knew not how to conceive of anything beyond corporeal splendors. And does not a soul, sighing after such idle fictions, commit fornication against you, trust in false things, and “feed on the wind” (cf. Hos 12:1)? But still I would not have sacrifices offered to devils on my behalf, though I was myself still offering them sacrifices of a sort by my own [Manichean] superstition. For what else is it “to feed on the winds” but to feed on the devils, that is, in our wanderings to become their sport and mockery?
Chapter III
4. And yet, without scruple, I consulted those other impostors, whom they call “astrologers” [mathematicos], because they used no sacrifices and invoked the aid of no spirit for their divinations. Still, true Christian piety must necessarily reject and condemn their art.
It is good to confess to you and to say, “O, LORD, be gracious to me; heal me, for I have sinned against you!” (Ps 41:4) — not to abuse your goodness as a license to sin, but to remember the words of the Lord, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse befall you” (Jn 5:14). All this wholesome advice [the astrologers] labor to destroy when they say, “The cause of your sin is inevitably fixed in the heavens,” and “This is the doing of Venus, or of Saturn, or of Mars” — all this in order that a man, who is only flesh and blood and proud corruption, may regard himself as blameless, while the Creator and Ordainer of heaven and the stars must bear the blame of our ills and misfortunes. But who is this Creator but you, our God, the sweetness and wellspring of righteousness, who renders to every man according to his works and despises not “a broken and contrite heart” (Ps 51:17)?
5. There was at that time a wise man, very skillful and quite famous in medicine.2 He was proconsul then, and with his own hand he placed on my distempered head the crown I had won in a rhetorical contest. He did not do this as a physician, however; and for this distemper only you are the one who “opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (Jas 4:6, 1 Pet 5:5). But did you fail me in that old man, or forbear from healing my soul? Actually when I became better acquainted with him, I used to listen, rapt and eager, to his words; for, though he spoke in simple language, his conversation was replete with vivacity, life, and earnestness. He recognized from my own talk that I was given to books of the horoscope-casters, but he, in a kind and fatherly way, advised me to throw them away and not to spend idly on these vanities care and labor that might otherwise go into useful things. He said that he himself in his earlier years had studied the astrologers’ art with a view to gaining his living by it as a profession. Since he had already understood Hippocrates, he was fully qualified to understand this too. Yet, he had given it up and followed medicine for the simple reason that he had discovered astrology to be utterly false and, as a man of honest character, he was unwilling to gain his living by beguiling people. “But you,” he said, “have the profession of rhetoric to support yourself by, so that you are following this delusion in free will and not necessity. All the more, therefore, you ought to believe me, since I worked at it to learn the art perfectly because I wished to gain my living by it.” When I asked him to account for the fact that many true things are foretold by astrology, he answered me, reasonably enough, that the force of chance, diffused through the whole order of nature, brought these things about. For when a man, by accident, opens the leaves of some poet (who sang and intended something far different) a verse oftentimes turns out to be wondrously apposite to the reader’s present business. “It is not to be wondered at,” he continued, “if out of the human mind, by some higher instinct that does not know what goes on within itself, an answer should be arrived at, by chance and not art, which would fit both the business and the action of the inquirer.”
6. And thus truly, either by him or through him, you were looking after me. And you fixed all this in my memory so that afterward I might search it out for myself.
But at that time, neither the proconsul nor my most dear Nebridius — a splendid youth and most circumspect, who scoffed at the