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During the space of those nine years, from the nineteenth to the twenty-eighth year of my life, I was led astray myself and led others astray in my turn. We were alike deceivers and deceived in all our different aims and ambitions, both publicly when we expounded our so-called liberal ideas, and in private through our service to what we called religion. In public we were cocksure, in private superstitious, and everywhere void and empty. On the one hand we would hunt for worthless popular distinctions, the applause of an audience, prizes for poetry, or quickly fading wreaths won in competition. We loved the idle pastimes of the stage and in selfindulgence we were unrestrained. On the other hand we aspired to be purged of these lowly pleasures by taking food to the holy elect, as they were called, so that in their paunches it might pass through the process of being made into angels and gods who would set us free. These were the objects I pursued and the tasks I performed together with friends who, like myself and through my fault, were under the same delusion.
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During those years I was a teacher of the art of public speaking. Love of money had gained the better of me and for it I sold to others the means of coming off the better in debate. But you know, Lord, that I preferred to have honest pupils, in so far as honesty has any meaning nowadays, and I had no evil intent when I taught the tricks of pleading, for I never meant them to be used to get the innocent condemned but, if the occasion arose, to save the lives of the guilty. From a distance, my God, you saw me losing my foothold on this treacherous ground, but through clouds of smoke you also saw a spark of good faith in me; for though, as I schooled my pupils, I was merely abetting their futile designs and their schemes of duplicity, nevertheless I did my best to teach them honestly.
In those days I lived with a woman, not my lawful wedded wife but a mistress whom I had chosen for no special reason but that my restless passions had alighted on her. But she was the only one and I was faithful to her. Living with her I found out by my own experience the difference between the restraint of the marriage alliance, contracted for the purpose of having children, and a bargain struck for lust, in which the birth of children is begrudged, though, if they come, we cannot help but love them.
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If the things of this world delight you, praise God for them but turn your love away from them and give it to their Maker, so that in the things that please you you may not displease him. If your delight is in souls, love them in God, because they too are frail and stand firm only when they cling to him. If they do not, they go their own way and are lost. Love them, then, in him and draw as many with you to him as you can. Tell them 'He is the one we should love. He made the world and he stays close to it.' For when he made the world he did not go away and leave it. By him it was created and in him it exists. Wherever we taste the truth, God is there. He is in our very inmost hearts, but our hearts have strayed from him. Think well on it, unbelieving hearts and cling to him who made you. Stand with him and you shall not fall; rest in him and peace shall be yours. What snags and pitfalls lie before you? Where do your steps lead you? The good things which you love are all from God, but they are good and sweet only as long as they are used to do his will. They will rightly turn bitter if God is spurned and the things that come from him are wrongly loved. Why do you still choose to travel by this hard and arduous path? There is no rest to be found where you seek it. In the land of death you try to find a happy life: it is not there. How can life be happy where there is no life at all?
Our Life himself came down into this world and took away our death. He slew it with his own abounding life, and with thunder in his voice he called us from this world to return to him in heaven. From heaven he came down to us, entering first the Virgin's womb, where humanity, our mortal flesh, was wedded to him so that it might not be for ever mortal. Then as a bridegroom coming from his bed, he exulted like some great runner who sees the track before him. He did not linger on his way but ran, calling us to return to him, calling us by his words and deeds, by his life and death, by his descent into hell and his ascension into heaven. He departed from our sight, so that we should turn to our hearts and find him there. He departed, but he is here with us. He would not stay long with us, but he did not leave us. He went back to the place which he had never left, because he, through whom the world was made, was in the world and he came into the world to save sinners. To him my soul confesses and he is its Healer, because the wrong it did was against him. Great ones of the world, will your hearts always be hardened? Your Life has come down from heaven: will you not now at last rise with him and live? But how can you rise if you are in high places and your clamour reaches heaven? Come down from those heights, for then you may climb and, this time, climb to God. To climb against him was your fall.
[...]
I did not know this then. I was in love with beauty of a lower order and it was dragging me down. I used to ask my friends 'Do we love anything unless it is beautiful? What, then, is beauty and in what does it consist? What is it that attracts us and wins us over to the things we love? Unless there were beauty and grace in them, they would be powerless to win our hearts.' When I looked at things, it struck me that there was a difference between the beauty of an object considered by itself as one whole and the beauty to be found in a proper proportion between separate things, such as the due balance between the whole of the body and any of its limbs, or between the foot and the shoe with which it is shod, and so on. This idea burst from my heart like water from a spring. My mind was full of it and I wrote a book called Beauty and Proportion, in two or three volumes as far as I remember. You know how many there were, O Lord. I have forgotten, because by some chance the book was lost and I no longer have it.
O Lord, my God, what induced me to dedicate my book to Hierius, the great public speaker at Rome? I had never even seen him, but I admired his brilliant reputation for learning and had been greatly struck by what I had heard of his speeches. Even more than this I was impressed by the admiration which other people had for him. They overwhelmed him with praise, because it seemed extraordinary that a man born in Syria and originally trained to speak in Greek had later become so remarkable a speaker in Latin, and had also such a wealth of knowledge of the subjects studied by philosophers.
We can admire persons whom we have never seen, if we hear them praised, though this does not mean that simply to hear their praises will make us admire them. But enthusiasm in one man will kindle the same fire in another, for we admire the person whose praises we hear only if we believe that they are sincerely uttered - in other words that the person who utters them genuinely admires the man whom he praises.
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But Hierius was the kind of man in whom I admired qualities that I would have been glad to possess. In my pride I was running adrift, at the mercy of every wind. You were guiding me as a helmsman steers a ship, but the course you steered was beyond my understanding. I know now, and confess it as the truth, that I admired Hierius more because others praised him than for the accomplishments for which they praised him. I know this because those same people, instead of praising him, might have abused him. They might have spoken of the same talents in him but found fault with them and despised them. If they had done this, my feelings would not have been aroused nor my admiration kindled. Yet his qualities would have been the same and he himself would have been no different. The only difference would have been in their attitude towards him.
We can see from this that the soul is weak and helpless unless it clings to the firm rock of truth. Men give voice to their opinions, but they are only opinions, like so many puffs of wind that waft the soul hither and thither and make it veer and turn. The light is clouded over and the truth cannot be seen, although it is there before our eyes. I thought it a matter of much importance to myself to bring my book and the work I had done to the notice of this great man. If he had approved of them, my fervour would have been all the more ardent. If he had found fault, my heart, which was empty and bereft of God's firm truth, would have suffered a cruel blow. Yet I found pleasure in giving my mind to the problem of beauty and proportion, the work which I had dedicated to him. Although I found no others to admire it, I was proud of it myself.
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I was struggling to reach you, but you thrust me back so that I knew the taste of death. For you thwart the proud. And what greater pride could there be than to assert, as I did in my strange madness, that by nature I was what you are? I was changeable, and I knew it; for if I wanted to be a learned man, it could only mean that I wanted to be better than I was. All the same I preferred to think that you too were changeable rather than suppose that I was not what you are. This was why you thrust me back and crushed my rearing pride, while my imagination continued to play on material forms. Myself a man of flesh and blood I blamed the flesh. I was as fickle as a breath of wind, unable to return to you. I drifted on, making my way towards things that had no existence in you or in myself or in the body. They were not created for me by your truth but were the inventions of my own foolish imagination working on material things. Though I did not know it, I was in exile from my place in God's city among his faithful children, my fellow citizens. But I was all words, and stupidly I used to ask them, 'If, as you say, God made the soul, why does it err?' Yet I did not like them to ask me in return, 'If what you say is true, why does God err?' So I used to argue that your unchangeable substance, my God, was forced to err, rather than admit that my own was changeable and erred of its own free will, and that its errors were my punishment.
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When I was only about twenty years of age Aristotle's book on the 'Ten Categories' came into my hands. Whenever my teacher at Carthage and others who were reputed to be scholars mentioned this book, their cheeks would swell with self-importance, so that the title alone was enough to make me stand agape, as though I were poised over some wonderful divine mystery. I managed to read it and understand it without help, though I now ask myself what advantage I gained from doing so. Other people told me that they had understood it only with difficulty, after the most learned masters had not only explained it to them but also illustrated it with a wealth of diagrams. But when I discussed it with them, I found that they could tell me no more about it than I had already discovered by reading it on my own.
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I read and understood by myself all the books that I could find on the so-called liberal arts, for in those days I was a good-for-nothing and a slave to sordid ambitions. But what advantage did I gain from them? I read them with pleasure, but I did not know the real source of such true and certain facts as they contained. I had my back to the light and my face was turned towards the things which it illumined, so that my eyes, by which I saw the things which stood in the light, were themselves in darkness. Without great difficulty and without need of a teacher I understood all that I read on the arts of rhetoric and logic, on geometry, music, and mathematics. You know this, O Lord my God, because if a man is quick to understand and his perception is keen, he has these gifts from you. But since I made no offering of them to you, it did me more harm than good to struggle to keep in my own power so large a part of what you had given to me and, instead of preserving my strength for you, to leave you and go to a far country to squander your gifts on loves that sold themselves for money. For what good to me was my ability, if I did not use it well? And ability I had, for until I tried to instruct others I did not realize that these subjects are very difficult to master, even for pupils who are studious and intelligent, and a student who could follow my instruction without faltering was reckoned a very fine scholar.
But what value did I gain from my reading as long as I thought that you, Lord God who are the Truth, were a bright, unbounded body and I a small piece broken from it? What utter distortion of the truth! Yet this was my belief; and I do not now blush to acknowledge, my God, the mercies you have shown to me, nor to call you to my aid, just as in those days I did not blush to declare my blasphemies aloud and snarl at you like a dog. What, then, was the value to me of my intelligence, which could take these subjects in its stride, and all those books, with their tangled problems, which I unravelled without the help of any human tutor, when in the doctrine of your love I was lost in the most hideous error and the vilest sacrilege? And was it so great a drawback to your faithful children that they were slower than I to understand such things? For they did not forsake you, but grew like fledglings in the safe nest of your Church, nourishing the wings of charity on the food of the faith that would save them.
O Lord our God, let the shelter of your wings give us hope. Protect us and uphold us. You will be the Support that upholds us from childhood till the hair on our heads is grey. When you are our strength we are strong, but when our strength is our own we are weak. In you our good abides for ever, and when we turn away from it we turn to evil. Let us come home at last to you, O Lord, for fear that we be lost. For in you our good abides and it has no blemish, since it is yourself. Nor do we fear that there is no home to which we can return. We fell from it; but our home is your eternity and it does not fall because we are away.