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You gathered me together from the state of disintegration in which I had been fruitlessly divided. I turned from unity in you to be lost in multiplicity.
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The bubbling impulses of puberty befogged and obscured my heart so that it could not see the difference between love’s serenity and lust’s darkness.
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Confusion of the two things boiled within me. It seized hold of my youthful weakness sweeping me through the precipitous rocks of desire to submerge me in a whirlpool of vice.
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had become deafened by the clanking chain of my mortal condition
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travelled very far from you, and you did not stop me
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only someone could have imposed restraint on my disorder
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omnipotence is never far from us, even when we are far from you
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‘He who has no wife thinks on the things of God, how he can please God. But he who is joined in marriage thinks on the affairs of the world, how he can please his wife’
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who has no wife thinks on the things of God, how he can please God. But he who is joined in marriage thinks on the affairs of the world, how he can please his wife
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who has no wife thinks on the things of God, how he can please God. But he who is joined in marriage thinks on the affairs of the world, how he can please his wife’
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Had I paid careful attention to these sayings and ‘become a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt. 19: 12), I would have been happier finding fulfilment in your embraces.
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But I in my misery seethed and followed the driving force of my impulses, abandoning you. I exceeded all the bounds set by your law, and did not escape your chastisement—indeed no mortal can do so. For you were always with me, mercifully punishing me, touching with a bitter taste all my illicit pleasures. Your intention was that I should seek delights unspoilt by disgust and that, in my quest where I could achieve this, I should discover it to be in nothing except you Lord, nothing but you. You ‘fashion pain to be a lesson’ (Ps. 93: 20 LXX), you ‘strike to heal’, you bring death upon us so that we should not die apart from you (Deut. 32: 39).6
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Nothing is nearer to your ears than a confessing heart and a life grounded in faith
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this same father did not care what character before you I was developing, or how chaste I was so long as I possessed a cultured tongue—though my culture really meant a desert uncultivated by you, God. You are the one true and good lord of your land, which is my heart.
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His delight was that of the intoxication which makes the world oblivious of you, its Creator,
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and to love your creation instead of you.
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was drunk with the invisible wine of his perverse will directed downwards to inferior things
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believed you were silent, and that it was only she who was speaking, when you were speaking to me through her
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they derived pleasure not merely from the lust of the act but also from the admiration it evoked.
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What is more worthy of censure than vice?
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With them I rolled in its dung as if rolling in spices and precious ointments
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our pleasure lay in doing what was not allowed.
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had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin.12 I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake
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Yet in the acquisition of all these sources of social status, one must not depart from you, Lord, nor deviate from your law.
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Human friendship is also a nest of love and gentleness because of the unity it brings about between many souls.
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Pride imitates what is lofty;
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but you alone are God most high above all things. What does ambition seek but honour and glory? Yet you alone are worthy of honour and are glorious for eternity.
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The cruelty of powerful people aims to arouse fear. Who is to be feared but God alone? What can be seized or stolen from his power? When or where or how or by whom?
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Who is to be feared but God alone?
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Curiosity appears to be a zeal for knowledge; yet you supremely know all.
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Ignorance and stupidity are given the names of simplicity and innocence; but there is
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Idleness appears as desire for a quiet life; yet can rest be assured apart from the Lord?
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Luxury wants to be called abundance and satiety; but you are fullness and the inexhaustible treasure of incorruptible pleasure.
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Prodigality presents itself under the shadow of generosity; but you are the rich bestower of all good things. Avarice wishes to have large possessions; you possess everything. Envy contends about excellence; but what is more excellent than you? Anger seeks revenge; who avenges with greater justice than you? Fear quails before sudden and unexpected events attacking things which are loved, and takes precautions for their safety; to you is anything unexpected or sudden? Or who can take away from you what you love?
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their perverted way all humanity imitates you
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Yet they put themselves at a distance from you and exalt themselves against you.
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for he sees that the one who delivered me from the great sicknesses of my sins is also he through whom he may see that he himself has not been a victim of the same great sicknesses.
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Friendship can be a dangerous enemy, a seduction of the mind lying beyond the reach of investigation.
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an adolescent I went astray from you (Ps. 118: 76), my God, far from your unmoved stability. I became to myself a region of destitution
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Mercy cannot exist apart from suffering. Is that the sole reason why agonies are an object of love?
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Today I have more pity for a person who rejoices in wickedness than for a person who has the feeling of having suffered hard knocks by being deprived of a pernicious pleasure or having lost a source of miserable felicity. This is surely a more authentic compassion; for the sorrow contains no element of pleasure.
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My stiff neck took me further and further away from you. I loved my own ways, not yours. The liberty I loved was merely that of a runaway.7
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The blindness of humanity is so great that people are actually proud of their blindness.
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following the elements of this world and not following Christ; in him dwells all the fullness of divinity in bodily form’
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love and seek and pursue and hold fast and strongly embrace wisdom itself, wherever found’
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One thing alone put a brake on my intense enthusiasm—that the name of Christ was not contained in the book.
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That explains why I fell in with men proud of their slick talk, very earthly-minded and loquacious. In their mouths were the devil’s traps and a birdlime compounded of a mixture of the syllables of your name, and that of the Lord Jesus Christ, and that of the Paraclete, the Comforter, the Holy Spirit.15 These names were never absent from their lips; but it was no more than sound and noise with their tongue. Otherwise their heart was empty of truth. They used to say ‘Truth, truth’, and they had a lot to tell me about it; but there was never any truth in them. They uttered false statements not only about you who really are the Truth, but also about the elements of the world, your creation. On that subject the philosophers have said things which are true, but even them I would think to be no final authority for love of you, my supremely good Father,
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You were not those empty fictions, and I derived no nourishment from them but was left more exhausted than before.
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But you, my love, for whom I faint that I may receive strength (2 Cor. 11: 10), you are not the bodies which we see, though they be up in heaven, nor even any object up there lying beyond our sight. For you have made these bodies, and you do not even hold them to be among the greatest of your creatures. How far removed you are from those fantasies of mine, fantasies of physical entities which have no existence! We have more reliable knowledge in our images of bodies which really exist, and the bodies are more certain than the images. But you are no body. Nor are you soul, which is the life of bodies; for the life of bodies is superior to bodies themselves, and a more certain object of knowledge.19 But you are the life of souls, the life of lives. You live in dependence only on yourself, and you never change, life of my soul.
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She seduced me; for she found me living outside myself, seeing only with the eye of the flesh, and chewing over in myself such food as I had devoured by means of that eye.
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was unaware of the existence of another reality, that which truly is
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I did not know that evil has no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being. How could I see this when for me ‘to see’ meant a physical act of looking with the eyes and of forming an image in the mind?
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was wholly ignorant of what it is in ourselves which gives us being, and how scripture is correct in saying that we are ‘in God’s image’ (Gen. 1: 27
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On all sides they hit me in the eye, and I failed to see them.
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Indeed the social bond which should exist between God and us is violated when the nature of which he is the author is polluted by a perversion of sexual desire.
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But when God commands something contrary to the customs or laws of a people, even if that has never been previously done, it has to be done.
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even when they are sinning against you, their wicked actions are against their own souls.
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just human society is one which submits to you
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How could this vision come to her unless ‘your ears were close to her heart’ (Ps. 9B: 38/10A: 17)? You are good and all-powerful, caring for each one of us as though the only one in your care, and yet for all as for each individual.
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confess to you Lord that to the best of my memory (and it is a matter which I have frequendy discussed) I was more moved by your answer through my vigilant mother than by the dream itself
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During this same period of nine years, from my nineteenth to my twenty-eighth year, our life was one of being seduced and seducing, being deceived and deceiving (2 Tim. 3: 13), in a variety of desires. Publicly I was a teacher of the arts which they call liberal;1 privately I professed a false religion—in the former role arrogant, in the latter superstitious, in everything vain.
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these were the activities of myself and my friends who had been deceived through me and with me.
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people may laugh at me. As yet they have not themselves been prostrated and brought low for their soul’s health by you, my God
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Without you, what am I to myself but a guide to my own self-destruction?
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What is a human being (name anyone you may please) when he is merely a man?
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you alone are the healer of the disease that afflicted me, you who resist the proud but give grace to the humble
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under my influence this man’s mind was wandering astray, and my soul could not endure to be without him. But you were present, immediately at the back of those who flee from you, at once both ‘God of vengeances’ (Ps. 93: 1) and fount of mercies: you turn us to yourself in wonderful ways. You took the man from this life when our friendship had scarcely completed a year. It had been sweet to me beyond all the sweetnesses of life that I had experienced.
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had become to myself a vast problem,10 and I questioned my soul ‘Why are you sad, and why are you very distressed?’ But my soul did not know what reply to give. If I had said to my soul ‘Put your trust in God’ (Ps. 41:6, 12), it would have had good reason not to obey
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But in me there had emerged a very strange feeling which was the opposite of theirs. I found myself heavily weighed down by a sense of being tired of living and scared of dying.
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cleanse me from these flawed emotions
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What madness not to understand how to love human beings with awareness of the human condition!
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How stupid man is to be unable to restrain feelings in suffering the human lot! That was my state at that time. So I boiled with anger, sighed, wept, and was at my wits’ end. I found no calmness, no capacity for deliberation. I carried my lacerated and bloody soul when it was unwilling to be carried by me. I found no place where I could put it down. There was no rest in pleasant groves, nor in games or songs, nor in sweet-scented places, nor in exquisite feasts, nor in the pleasures of the bedroom and bed, nor, finally, in books and poetry. Everything was an object of horror, even light itself;
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Not everything grows old, but everything dies.
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Let these transient things be the ground on which my soul praises you (Ps. 145: 2), ‘God creator of all’.20 But let it not become stuck in them and glued to them with love through the physical senses. For these things pass along the path of things that move towards non-existence.
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Why then are you perversely following the leading of your flesh?
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All that you experience through it is only partial; you are ignorant of the whole to which the parts belong.
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‘Him we love; he made these things and is not far distant.’
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He is very close to the heart; but the heart has wandered from him.
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He who for us is life itself descended here and endured our death and slew it by the abundance of his life.23 In a thunderous voice he called us to return to him, at that secret place where he came forth to us. First he came into the Virgin’s womb where the human creation was married to him, so that mortal flesh should not for ever be mortal. Coming forth from thence ‘as a bridegroom from his marriage bed, he bounded like a giant to run his course’ (Ps. 18: 6). He did not delay, but ran crying out loud by his words, deeds, death, life, descent, and ascent—calling us to return to him. And he has gone from our sight that we should ‘return to our heart’ (Isa. 46: 8) and find him there. He went away and behold, here he is. He did not wish to remain long with us, yet he did not abandon us. He has gone to that place which he never left, ‘for the world was made by him’ (John 1: 10); and he was in this world, and ‘came into this world to save sinners’ (1 Tim. 1: 15). To him my soul is making confession, and ‘he is healing it, because it was against him that it sinned’ (Ps. 40: 5). ‘Sons of men, how long will you be heavy at heart?’ (Ps. 4: 3). Surely after the descent of life, you cannot fail to wish to ascend and live? But where will you ascend when you are ‘set on high and have put your mouth in heaven’? (Ps. 72: 9). Come down so that you can ascend, and make your ascent to God. For it is by climbing up against God that you have fallen. Tell souls that they should ‘weep in the valley of tears’ (Ps. 83: 7). So take them with you to God, for by his Spirit you declare these things to them if you say it burning with the fire of love.
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loved beautiful things of a lower order
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it is easier to count his hairs than the passions and emotions of his heart.
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See how the human soul lies weak and prostrate when it is not yet attached to the solid rock of truth.
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did not know nor had I learnt that evil is not a substance, nor is our mind the supreme and unchangeable good
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I did not know that the soul needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth
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You are the true light who illuminates every man coming into this world (John 1: 9), because in you there is no change nor shadow caused by turning
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for you resist the proud
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‘wandering spirit’ (Ps. 77: 39), I was not yet on my way back to you, but meandered on and on into things which have no being either in you or in me or in the body
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Moreover, what advantage came to me from the fact that I had by myself read and understood all the books I could get hold of on the arts which they call liberal, at a time when I was the most wicked slave of evil lusts?
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What advantage did it bring me to have a good thing and not to use it well?
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But what good did this do for me? I thought that you, Lord God and Truth, were like a luminous body of immense size and myself a bit of that body. What extraordinary perversity!
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Our good is life with you for ever, and because we turned away from that, we became twisted.
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for you yourself are that good. We have no fear that there is no home to which we may return because we fell from it. During our absence our house suffers no ruin; it is your eternity.
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The closed heart does not shut out your eye, and your hand is not kept away by the hardness of humanity, but you melt that when you wish, either in mercy or in punishment, and there is ‘none who can hide from your heat’
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With you is restored strength and true courage.
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evidendy do not know that you are everywhere
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You alone are always present even to those who have taken themselves far from you.
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Where was I when I was seeking for you? You were there before me, but I had departed from myself. I could not even find myself, much less you.
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Their irreligious pride makes them withdraw from you and eclipse your great light from reaching themselves.
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become lost in their own ideas and claim to be. wise, attributing to themselves things which belong to you
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In an analogous way the believer has the whole world of wealth (Prov. 17: 6 LXX) and ‘possesses all things as if he had nothing’ (2 Cor. 6: 10) by virtue of his attachment to you whom all things serve; yet he may know nothing about the circuits of the Great Bear. It is stupid to doubt that he is better than the person who measures the heaven and counts the stars and weighs the elements, but neglects you who have disposed everything ‘by measure and number and weight’ (Wisd. 11: 21).
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‘See, piety is wisdom’ (Job 28: 28).
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is vanity to profess to know these scientific matters, even if one understands them; but it is piety to make confession to you
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Fine style does not make something true, nor has a man a wise soul because he has a handsome face and well-chosen eloquence.
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Already I had learnt from you that nothing is true merely because it is eloquently said, nor false because the signs coming from the lips make sounds deficient in a sense of style.
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At that time you were dealing with me in your hidden secret providence, and you were putting my shameful errors before my face (Ps. 49: 21) so that I would see and hate them.
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who attempted to instruct me and had nothing to say.
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You, my God, brought that about. ‘For the steps of man are directed by the Lord, and he chooses his way’ (Ps. 36: 23). How can salvation be obtained except through your hand remaking what you once made?
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Even this you forgave me, mercifully saving me from the waters of the sea, when I was full of abominable filth, so as to bring me to the water of your grace [in baptism].
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You were using my ambitious desires as a means towards putting an end to those desires,
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Adam we die’ (1 Cor. 15: 22). You had not yet forgiven me in Christ for any of them, nor had he by his cross delivered me from the hostile disposition towards you which I had contracted by my sins
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Insofar as the death of his flesh was in my opinion unreal, the death of my soul was real
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But you are present everywhere.
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She suffered greater pains in my spiritual pregnancy than when she bore me in the flesh.
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For your mercy is for ever (Ps. 117: 1; 137: 8), and you deign to make yourself a debtor obliged by your promises to those to whom you forgive all debts.
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That was a sin the more incurable for the fact that I did not think myself a sinner.
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You had not yet ‘put a guard on my mouth and a gate of continence about my lips’ (Ps. 140: 2) to prevent my heart slipping into evil words to find excuses for sinning with ‘people who do iniquity’ (Ps. 140: 3).
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thought had come into my mind that the philosophers whom they call Academics were shrewder than others. They taught that everything is a matter of doubt, and that an understanding of the truth lies beyond human capacity
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In particular I had no hope that truth could be found in your Church, Lord of heaven and earth (Gen. 24: 3), maker of all things visible and invisible (Col. 1: 16).
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The Manichees had turned me away from that. I thought it shameful to believe you to have the shape of the human figure, and to be limited by the bodily lines of our limbs.18 When I wanted to think of my God, I knew of no way of doing so except as a physical mass. Nor did I think anything existed which is not material. That was the principal and almost sole cause of my inevitable error.
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since piety (however bizarre some of my beliefs were) forbade me to believe that the good God had created an evil nature, I concluded that there are two opposed masses, both infinite, but the evil rather smaller, the good larger
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When my mind attempted to return to the Catholic faith, it was rebuffed because the Catholic faith is not what I thought.
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My God, to whom your mercies make it possible for me to make confession, I felt it more reverent to believe you infinite in all respects but one, namely the mass of evil opposed
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to you, than to think you in all parts limited to the shape of the human body. I thought it better to believe that you had created no evil—which in my ignorance I thought not merely some sort of substance but even corporeal, since I did not know how to think of mind except as a subtle physical entity diffused through space—rather than to believe that the nature of evil, as I understood it, came from you. Our Saviour himself, your only Son, I imagined emerging from the mass of your dazzling body of light for our salvation. I could believe of him only what my vain imagination could picture. I thought a nature such as his could not be born of the Virgin Mary without being mingled with flesh. That he could be mixed with us and not polluted I did not see, because my mental picture was what it was. I was afraid to believe him incarnate lest I had to believe him to be defiled by the flesh. Today your spiritual believers will kindly and lovingly laugh at me when they read these my confessions. Nevertheless that was the state of my mind
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Certainly such people are a disgrace and ‘commit for-nication against you’ (Ps. 72: 27). They love the passing, transient amusements and the filthy lucre which dirties the hand when it is touched. They embrace a world which is fleeing away. They despise you, though you abide and call the prodigal back and pardon the human soul for its harlotry when it returns to you.
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Today too I hate such wicked and perverted people, though I love them as people in need of correction, so that instead of money they may prefer the doctrine which they learn and, above the doctrine, may prefer you, God, the truth, the abundant source of assured goodness and most chaste peace. But at that time I was determined not to put up with badly behaved people more out of my own interest than because I wanted them to become good for your sake.
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‘man of God’ (2 Kgs. 1: 9) received me like a father and expressed pleasure at my coming with a kindness most fitting in a bishop. I began to like him, at first indeed not as a teacher of the truth, for I had absolutely no confidence in your Church, but as a human being who was kind to me
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From sinners such as I was at that time, salvation is far distant. Nevertheless, gradually, though I did not realize it, I was drawing closer.
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to me the Catholic faith appeared not to have been defeated but also not yet to be the conqueror
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However, in regard to the physical world and all the natural order accessible to the bodily senses, consideration and comparison more and more convinced me that numerous philosophers held opinions much more probable than theirs.
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But to these philosophers, who were without Christ’s saving name, I altogether refused to entrust the healing of my soul’s sickness.
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‘God is outside none, is present unperceived to all; men flee to get away from him, but really flee from themselves.’
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Sober intoxication’, describing the ecstasy of a knowledge of God lying beyond reason, occurs in Ambrose and, before him, in the Jewish theologian Philo of Alexandria. Also Plotinus 6. 7.
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hope from my youth’ (Ps. 70: 5), where were you, and where did you ‘withdraw’ from me (Ps. 10:1)? Did you not make me, and ‘make me superior to the animals, and make me wiser than the birds of heaven’ (Job 35: 10–11)? I was walking through darkness and ‘a slippery place’ (Ps. 34: 6). I was seeking for you outside myself,1 and I failed to find ‘the God of my heart’ (Ps. 72: 26). I had come into the depth of the sea (Ps. 67: 23). I had no confidence, and had lost hope that truth could be found.
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She found me in a dangerous state of depression. I had lost all hope of discovering the truth.
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had not yet attained the truth, but I was rescued from falsehood
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quest was for devotion, not pleasure
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Instead of a basket full of the fruits of the earth, she learned to bring a heart full of purer vows to the memorials of the martyrs.
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When he was not with them, which was a very brief period of time, he restored either his body with necessary food or his mind by reading
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You who are most high and most near, most secret and most present, have no bodily members, some larger, others smaller, but are everywhere a whole and never limited in space.7 You are certainly not our physical shape. Yet you made humanity in your image, and man from head to foot is contained in space.
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in that state of suspended judgement I was suffering a worse death. I wanted to be as certain about things I could not see as I am certain that seven and three are ten
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just as it commonly happens that a person who has experienced a bad physician is afraid of entrusting himself to a good one, so it was with the health of my soul
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I now began to believe that you would never have conferred such pre-eminent authority on the scripture, now diffused through all lands, unless you had willed that it would be a means of coming to faith in you and a means of seeking to know you.
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I aspired to honours, money, marriage, and you laughed at me.
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In those ambitions I suffered the bitterest difficulties; that was by your mercy—so much the greater in that you gave me the less occasion to find sweet pleasure in what was not you. Look into my heart, Lord. In obedience to your will I recall this and confess to you. May my soul now adhere to you.
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In the course of it I would tell numerous lies and for my mendacity would win the good opinion of people who knew it to be untrue. The anxiety of the occasion was making my heart palpitate and perspire with the destructive fever of the worry, when I passed through a Milan street and noticed a destitute beggar. Already drunk, I think, he was joking and laughing. I groaned and spoke with the friends accompanying me about the many sufferings that result from our follies. In all our strivings such as those efforts that were then worrying me, the goads of ambition impelled me to drag the burden of my unhappiness with me, and in dragging it to make it even worse; yet we had no goal other than to reach a carefree cheerfulness. That beggar was already there before us, and perhaps we would never achieve it. For what he had gained with a few coins, obtained by begging, that is the cheerfulness of temporal felicity, I was going about to reach by painfully twisted and roundabout ways. True joy he had not. But my quest to fulfil my ambitions was much falser. There was no question that he was happy and I racked with anxiety. He had no worries; I was frenetic, and if anyone had asked me if I would prefer to be merry or to be racked with fear, I would have answered ‘to be merry’. Yet if he asked whether I would prefer to be a beggar like that man or the kind of person I then was, I would have chosen to be myself, a bundle of anxieties and fears. What an absurd choice! Surely it could not be the right one. For I ought not to have put myself above him on the ground of being better educated, a matter from which I was deriving no pleasure. My education enabled me to seek to please men, not to impart to them any instruction, but merely to purvey pleasure. For that reason you ‘broke my bones’ (Ps. 41: 11; 50: 10) with the rod of your discipline (Ps. 22: 4).
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Lord what glory is there which is not in you?
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You said long ago and inserted in your scriptures: ‘Rebuke a wise man and he will love you’ (Prov. 9: 8). I had not rebuked him. But you use all, both those aware of it and those unaware of it, in the order which you know—and that order is just.
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‘Let all that perish! Let us set aside these vain and empty ambitions. Let us concentrate ourselves exclusively on the investigation of the truth. Life is a misery, death is uncertain. It may suddenly carry us off. In what state shall we depart this life? Where are we to learn the things we have neglected here? And must we not rather pay for this negligence with punishments? What if death itself will cut off and end all anxiety by annihilating the mind? This too, then, is a question needing scrutiny.
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Many great men entirely worthy of imitation have combined the married state with a dedication to the study of wisdom.’
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. I was much inferior to them in greatness of soul
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Fettered by the flesh’s morbid impulse and lethal sweetness, I dragged my chain, but was afraid to be free of it.
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‘Many thoughts were in our heart, but your counsel abides for ever’
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Praise to you, glory to you, fount of mercies! As I became unhappier, you came closer. Your right hand was by me, already prepared to snatch me out of the filth (Jer. 28: 13), and to clean me up. But I did not know it. Nothing kept me from an even deeper whirlpool of erotic indulgence except fear of death and of your coming judgement which, through the various opinions I had held, never left my breast.
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If we were immortal and lived in unending bodily pleasure, with no fear of losing it, why should we not be happy? What else should we be seeking for? I did not realize that that is exactly what shows our great wretchedness.
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now my evil and wicked youth was dead. I was becoming a grown man. But the older I became, the more shameful it was that I retained so much vanity as to be unable to think any substance possible other than that which the eyes normally perceive. From the time that I began to learn something of your wisdom, I did not conceive of you
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So my heart had become gross (Matt. 13: 15), and I had no clear vision even of my own self. I thought simply non-existent anything not extended in space or diffused or concentrated or expanding, which does not possess, or is incapable of possessing, such qualities.
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eyes are accustomed to such images. My heart accepted the same structure. I did not see that the mental power by which I formed these images does not occupy any space, though it could not form them unless it were some great thing.3 I conceived even you, life of my life, as a large being, permeating infinite space on every side, penetrating the entire mass of the world, and outside this extending in all directions
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This was my conjecture, for I was incapable of thinking otherwise; but it was false. For on that hypo-thesis a larger part of the earth would possess more of you and a smaller part less, and all things would be full of you in the sense that more of you would be contained by an elephant’s body than a sparrow’s to the degree that it is larger and occupies more space; so, piece by piece, you would be making different parts of yourself present to parts of the world, much of you in large parts, little of you in small parts. And that is not the case. But you had not yet ‘lightened my darkness’
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was brought up into your light by the fact that I knew myself both to have a will and to be alive. Therefore when I willed or did not will something, I was utterly certain that none other than myself was willing or not willing
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That there lay the cause of my sin I was now coming to recognize. I saw that when I acted against my wishes, I was passive rather than active; and this condition I judged to be not guilt but a punishment.5 It was an effortless step to grant that, since I conceived you to be just, it was not unjust that I was chastised. But again I said: ‘Who made me? Is not my God not only good but the supreme Good? Why then have I the power to will evil and to reject good? Is it to provide a reason why it is just for me to undergo punishments? Who put this power in me and implanted in me this seed of bitterness (Heb. 12: 15), when all of me was created by my very kind God? If the devil was responsible, where did the devil himself come from? And if even he began as a good angel and became devil by a perversion of the will, how does the evil will by which he became devil originate in him, when an angel is wholly made by a Creator who is pure goodness?’ These reflections depressed me once more and suffocated me. But I was not brought down to that hell of error where no one confesses to you (Ps. 6: 6), because people suppose that evil is something that you suffer rather than an act by humanity. iv (6) In this way I made an effort to discover other principles. I had already established
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