Confessions Of Saint Augustine

Confessions of

Saint Augustine

based on the translation

by E. B. Pusey

WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

OF WORLD LITERATURE

This edition of Confessions of Saint Augustine first published by Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2016

Published as an ePublication 2016

ISBN 978 1 84870 620 0

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For my husband

ANTHONY JOHN RANSON

with love from your wife, the publisher

Eternally grateful for your

unconditional love

Contents

Book 1

1. He admires God’s Majesty, and is inflamed with a deep desire of praising Him

2. Man has his being from God; and that God is in man, and man is in God

3. God is wholly everywhere, and is not by parts contained by the creation

4. An admirable description of God’s attributes

5. He prays for forgiveness of sins, and the Love of God

6. That he has received all blessings from God: and how he has been preserved by him

7. That even his infancy was subject to sin

8. A description of his childhood

9. The hatred children bear to learning, and their love to playing

10. How for his play he neglected his parents’ commandments

11. How he fell sick, and how, recovering, his baptism was deferred

12. He is forced to his book: which God turned to good purpose

13. With what studies he was chiefly delighted

14. Of the Greek and Latin tongues

15. His prayer to God

16. Against lascivious fables

17. The way of exercising youth in repeating and varying of verses

18. That men care more to observe the rules of grammar than the laws of God

19. How he was more careful to avoid barbarisms of speech, than corruption of manners

20. He thanks God for his benefits

Book 2

1. He enters upon the years and sins of his youth

2. He accuses his youth spent in the heat of lustfulness

3. Of his travels for his studies’ sake, and his parents’ purpose in it

4. How he robbed a pear-tree

5. No man sins, but provoked by some cause

6. All those things which under the show of good invite us to sin, are in God alone to be found true and perfect

7. He returns thanks to God for remitting these sins, and for keeping him from many others

8. What he loved in that his theft

9. Bad company is infectious

10. Whatsoever is good, is in God

Book 3

1. He is caught with love, which he hunted after

2. Of stage plays

3. His conversation with young lawyers

4. How Tully’s Hortensius provoked him to study philosophy

5. He undervalues the holy scriptures because of the simplicity of their style

6. How he was ensnared by the Manichees

7. The absurd doctrine of the Manichees

8. Heinous offences, and how punished

9. The difference that is between sins, and between the judgment of God and men

10. He speaks again of the fig-tree, and derides the Manichees’ foolish conceits about it

11. His mother’s dream

12. The answer his mother received from a bishop, concerning his conversion

Book 4

1. How long, and what ways, he seduced others

2. He teaches rhetoric, and despises a wizard who promised him the victory

3. Giving himself to astrology, he is reclaimed by an ancient physician

4. He relates the sickness and baptism of his friend, whom himself had affected with heresy; he grievously laments his death

5. Of tears in our prayers for, and bewailing of, the thing beloved

6. He tells with what great affection he loved his friend

7. The impatientness of grief constrains us to shift our dwellings

8. Time cures sorrow

9. The comparing of human friendship with divine

10. All beauty is from God, who is to be prayed for all

11. All things are created mutable in themselves, and immutable in God

12. Love of the creatures is not forbidden, provided that, in those which please us, God be loved

13. Love, whence it comes

14. Of his book, Fair and Fit

15. How his understanding being overshadowed with corporeal images, he could not discern the spiritual

16. The admirable aptness to learning, and the great understanding Saint Augustine had

Book 5

1. He stirs his own soul to praise God

2. God’s presence can no man avoid, seeing he is everywhere

3. Of Faustus the Manichee: and of astrologies

4. Only the knowledge of God makes happy

5. The rashness of Faustus, in teaching what he knew not

6. Faustus was eloquent by nature, rather than by art

7. He falls off from the Manichees

8. He takes a voyage to Rome, against the will of his mother

9. Of a shrewd fever that he fell into

10. His errors before receiving the doctrine of the gospel

11. How he compared the Manichees’ tenets with the Catholics’

12. The cunning tricks put at Rome by scholars upon their masters

13. He goes to Milan to teach rhetoric, and how Saint Ambrose there entertains him

14. Upon his hearing of Saint Ambrose, he by little and little falls off from his errors

Book 6

1. How Saint Augustine was neither Manichee, nor good Catholic

2. His mother is turned from her country superstitions

3. The employments and studies of Saint Ambrose

4. Of the letter and the spirit

5. Of the authority and necessary use of the Holy Bible

6. The misery of the ambitious, shown by the example of a beggar

7. He dissuades Alypius from his excessive delight in the games at the Circus

8. Alypius is taken with a delight of the sword-plays, which before he hated

9. Alypius apprehended on suspicion of thievery

10. Of the great integrity of Alypius, and of Nebridius’ coming

11. He deliberates what course of life he were best to take

12. A contention between Alypius and Saint Augustine, about marriage and single life

13. Augustine lays out for a wife

14. A new plot is laid and broken

15. How his old concubine goes away from him, and he gets another

16. Of the immortality of the soul

Book 7

1. How rejecting corporeal images, he began to know God to be incorporeal

2. Nebridius confutes the Manichees

3. Free will is the cause of sin

4. God cannot be compelled

5. He pursues his enquiries

6. Divinations made by the mathematicians are vain

7. He is miserably tortured in his enquiry after the root of evil

8. How the mercy of God at length relieved him

9. What he found in the books of the Platonists, agreeable to Christian doctrine

10. Divine things are more clearly discovered unto him

11. How creatures are, and yet are not

12. All that is, is good

13. All created things praise God

14. To a sober mind, some of God’s creatures are displeasing

15. How there is truth and falsehood in the creatures

16. All things are good, though to some things not fit

17. What things hinder us of God’s knowledge

18. Christ alone is the way to salvation

19. What he thought of Christ’s incarnation

20. Of divers books of the Platonists

21. What he found in the holy scriptures, which was not in the Platonists

Book 8

1. How being inflamed with the love of heavenly things, he goes to Simplicianus

2. How Victorinus, the famous orator, was converted

3. That God and his angels do rejoice the more, at the conversion of a greater sinner

4. Why we are more to rejoice in the conversion of a great sinner

5. What hindered his conversion

6. Ponticianus relates the life of Saint Anthony

7. He was out of love with himself upon this story

8. What he did in the garden

9. Why the mind is so slow to goodness

10. The will of man is various

11. The combat in him betwixt the spirit and the flesh

12. How he was converted by a voice

Book 9

1. He praises God’s goodness; and acknowledges his own wretchedness

2. He gives over his teaching of rhetoric

3. Verecundus lends them his country house

4. What things he wrote with Nebridius

5. Ambrose directs him what books to read

6. He is baptized at Milan

7. A persecution in the Church miraculously diverted

8. The conversion of Euodius. A discourse of his mother

9. His mother Monica’s carriage towards her husband. A description of a rare wife

10. Of a conference he had with his mother about the kingdom of heaven

11. Of the ecstasy and death of his mother

12. He laments his mother’s death

13. He prays for his dead mother

Book 10

1. The confessions of the heart

2. Secret things are known unto God

3. The confessions of our ill deeds, what it helps us

4. Of the great fruit of confession

5. That man knows not himself thoroughly: and knows not God but in a glass darkly

6. What God is, and how known

7. God is not to be found by any ability in our bodies

8. The force of the memory

9. The memory of divers sciences

10. Our senses convey things into our memory

11. The forms of things are in the soul

12. The memory of mathematicians

13. The memory of memory

14. How, when we are not glad, we call to mind things that have made us glad

15. We remember absent things also

16. There is a memory of forgetfulness also

17. A threefold power of memory

18. Of the remembrance

19. What remembrance is

20. All men desire blessedness

21. We also remember what we never had

22. True joy, is this blessed life

23. A blessed life; what, and where, it is

24. That the memory contains God too

25. In what degree of the memory God is found

26. Whereabouts God is to be found

27. How God draws us to himself

28. The misery of this life

29. Our hope is all in God

30. The deceitfulness of dreams

31. The temptation of eating and drinking

32. Of our delight in smelling

33. The pleasures taken in hearing

34. The enticements coming in by the eyes

35. Of our curiosity in knowing

36. The sin of pride

37. Praise and dispraise, how they move us

38. Virtue is endangered by vain-glory

39. Of self-love

40. His striving against sin

41. God and a lie cannot stand together

42. Angels cannot be our mediators

43. Christ alone is the all-sufficient intercessor

Book 11

1. Why we confess unto God who knows all

2. He asks to be delivered from his sins and errors, and to be guided unto true knowledge

3. He desires to understand the holy scriptures

4. The creatures proclaim God to be their creator

5. How the world was made of nothing

6. What manner of word the world was created by

7. The Son of God is the word co-eternal with the Father

8. The word of God is our teacher in everything

9. How the word of God speaks unto the heart

10. God’s will knows no beginning

11. God’s eternity not to be measured by the parts of time

12. What God did before the creation of the world

13. That before those times which God created, there was no time

14. Of the nature and three differences of time

15. No time can be said to be long

16. Of our measuring of times

17. Where time past, and to come, now are

18. How times past, and to come, are present now

19. He asks God, how future things are known

20. These three differences of times, how they are to be called

21. How time may be measured

22. He begs God to resolve a difficulty

23. He clears this question, what time is

24. It is time, by which we measure the movement of bodies

25. He prays again

26. Measuring the feet and syllables of a verse

27. He begins to resolve the earlier question, how we measure time

28. We measure times in our mind

29. How the mind lengthens out itself

30. He goes on in the same discourse

31. How God is known, and how the creature

Book 12

1. The difficulty of finding out the truth

2. That the heaven we see is but earth, in comparison with the heaven of heavens, which we see not

3. Of the darkness upon the face of the deep

4. Of the chaos, and what Moses called it

5. That this chaos is hard to conceive

6. Saint Augustine’s own thoughts about chaos

7. Heaven is greater than earth

8. Chaos was created out of nothing; and out of that, all things

9. What that heaven of heavens is

10. His desire to understand the scriptures

11. What he learnt of God

12. Of two creatures not within the compass of time

13. The nature of the heaven of heavens described

14. The depth of holy scripture

15. The difference between the creator and the creatures; some discourse on the heaven of heavens

16. Against those who deny divine truth, and of his own delight in it

17. What the names ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ signify

18. Different expounders may understand the same text different ways

19. Of some particular apparent truths

20. He interprets Genesis i.1 differently

21. These words,‘the earth was void etc.’ variously understood

22. That the waters are also included under the names of heaven and earth

23. In interpreting holy scripture, truth is to be sought in a charitable fashion

24. Scripture is true, even if we do not understand its full scope or depth

25. We are not to break charity over a different exposition of scripture

26. What style is fit to write the scriptures in

27. Drawing from the fountain

28. How diversely this scripture is understood

29. How many ways a thing may be said to be first

30. The scriptures are to be searched, with respect for the writer

31. Truth is so to be received, whoever speaks it

32. He prays to obtain right meaning

Book 13

1. He calls upon God

2. Of the creatures’ dependency on their creator

3. All things are by the grace of God

4. God does not need the creatures; they do need Him

5. The Holy Trinity

6. Of the Spirit moving upon the waters

7. Of the working of the Holy Ghost

8. How God helps weak souls

9. Why the Spirit moved only upon the waters

10. All is of God’s gift

11. Of some impressions or resemblances of the Holy Trinity, that be in man

12. The water in baptism takes effect through the Holy Spirit

13. His devout longing for God

14. Our misery is comforted by faith and hope

15. By ‘firmament’ is meant scripture

16. God is unchangeable

17. What is meant by dry land, and by the sea

18. He continues his allegory, on the works of the creation

19. Our hearts are to be cleaned, that they may be capable of virtue; the allegory of the creation continued

20. An allegory upon the creation of spiritual things

21. An allegory upon the creation of birds and fishes; meaning by them such as have received the Lord’s supper, who are more perfect Christians than the merely baptized

22. Of regeneration by the Spirit; an allegory upon the creation of man

23. What things a Christian may judge of; an allegory upon man’s dominion over things created

24. An allegory upon ‘increase and multiply’

25. He compares the fruits of the earth to the duties of piety

26. The pleasure and profit to us from a good turn done to our neighbour

27. An allegory upon the fishes and the whales

28. ‘Very good’, why added last of all?

29. God’s works are good for ever

30. Against those who dislike God’s works

31. The godly allow that which is pleasing to God

32. He briefly sums up the works of God

33. How every creature ought to praise the creator

34. The order and various fruit of a Christian life