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