latin · religious

Confessions of Augustine

c. 397–400 CE · Late Roman / Early Byzantine (4th–5th century CE) · Hippo Regius, North Africa (present-day Annaba, Algeria)

Book I — Prayer of Beginning

1Great art thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised;

2great is thy power, and thy wisdom is infinite.

3And thee would man praise; man, but a particle of thy creation;

4man, that bears about him his mortality, the witness of his sin;

5the witness that thou resistest the proud:

6yet would man praise thee; he, but a particle of thy creation.

7Thou awakest us to delight in thy praise;

8for thou madest us for thyself,

9and our heart is restless, until it repose in thee.

The Restlessness of the Heart

10But how shall I call upon my God, my God and Lord,

11since, when I call for Him, I shall be calling Him to myself?

12What room is there within me, whither my God can come into me?

13Whither should thou come to me? Or whither couldst thou depart?

14Where should I go beyond heaven and earth,

15that from thence my God should come into me,

16who hath said, I fill the heaven and the earth?

Book III — The Life of Sin

17I came to Carthage, where a caldron of unholy loves bubbled up all around me.

18I was not in love as yet, but I was in love with loving;

19and with a hidden want, I hated myself because I did not yet want more.

20To love and to be loved was sweet to me, and more so when I obtained the enjoyment of the body of the person I loved.

21I defiled, therefore, the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence,

22and I dimmed its lustre with the hell of lust.

Book VIII — The Conversion

23I was speaking these things and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart,

24when, behold, I heard a voice from a neighboring house, chanting, and oft repeating,

25as if it might be some boy or girl, I know not:

26"Take up and read; Take up and read."

27Immediately my countenance changed, and I began most earnestly to think

28whether it were usual for children in any kind of game to sing such words:

29nor could I remember ever to have heard the like.

30So checking the torrent of my tears, I rose;

31interpreting it no other way than that it was commanded me from heaven

32to open the book, and read the first chapter I should find.

33I grasped, opened, and in silence read that section on which my eyes first fell:

34"Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness,

35not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ,

36and make not provision for the flesh, in concupiscence."

37No further would I read; nor needed I:

38for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart,

39all the darkness of doubt vanished away.

Book IX — The Death of Monica

40On the ninth day of her sickness, and the fifty-sixth year of her age,

41and the three and thirtieth of mine, was that religious and holy soul freed from the body.

42I closed her eyes; and there flowed a mighty sorrow into my heart,

43which was overflowing into tears.

44What was it, then, which did grievously pain me within,

45but the fresh wound wrought through the sudden wrench of that most sweet and dear custom

46of living together?

Book X — The Search for God Within

47What do I love when I love my God?

48Not physical beauty, nor the splendor of light,

49nor the songs and melodies of every kind,

50nor the sweet-scented flowers and perfumes,

51nor manna and honey.

52Yet, when I love my God, I love a certain light,

53a certain voice, a certain fragrance,

54a certain food, a certain embrace of my inner man:

55where a light shines to my soul, which no place contains;

56where a voice sounds, which time carries not away;

57where a fragrance breathes, which no breeze disperses;

58where a food is tasted, which is not devoured by eating;

59and where there is that which sticks to me,

60which no satiety separates.

61This is what I love when I love my God.

Book XI — On Time

62What, then, is time?

63If no one asks me, I know:

64if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.

65Yet I say with confidence, that I know, that if nothing were passing away,

66there would not be past time; and if nothing were coming, there would not be future time;

67and if nothing were, there would not be present time.

68Those two times therefore, past and future, how are they, when even the past now is not,

69and the future is not as yet?

70But the present, should it always be present, and never pass into time past,

71verily it should not be time, but eternity.

72If then the present is only time, because it flieth into the past;

73how do we say that it is, whose only cause of being is not to be?

74Time can be said to be only inasmuch as it tendeth not to be.

Late Have I Loved Thee

75Late have I loved thee, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved thee!

76Thou wert within me, and I abroad, and there I searched for thee.

77Deformed, I plunged amid those fair forms which thou hadst made.

78Thou wert with me, but I was not with thee.

79Things held me far from thee, which, unless they were in thee, were not at all.

80Thou calledst, and shoutedst, and burstest my deafness.

81Thou flashedst, shonest, and scatteredst my blindness.

82Thou breathedst odours, and I drew in breath, and pant for thee.

83I tasted, and hunger and thirst.

84Thou touchedst me, and I burned for thy peace.

notes

The Confessions of Augustine (Confessiones) is the autobiographical work of Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE), Bishop of Hippo Regius in Roman North Africa, and one of the most influential theologians in the history of Christianity. Written between 397 and 400 CE, it is often called the first autobiography in Western literature — though the term autobiography is misleading; the work is more accurately a sustained prayer addressed directly to God, in which Augustine reviews his life as a testimony to divine grace. The narrative traces Augustine's youth in Thagaste and Carthage, his intellectual quest through Manichaeism and Neoplatonism, his years in Milan under the influence of Ambrose, his famous conversion in a Milanese garden (Book VIII, "tolle lege, tolle lege" — "take up and read"), and the death of his mother Monica in Ostia. The final three books turn from autobiography to philosophical meditation — on memory, on time (Book XI's famous meditation is among the most quoted passages in the history of philosophy: "What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know…"), and on the interpretation of Genesis 1. The Confessions has shaped every subsequent Christian autobiography and much of Western literature's inward turn — from Petrarch and Rousseau to Kierkegaard and modernism. The passage beginning "Late have I loved thee, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new" (Book X, presented above) is one of the most quoted in devotional literature. Translation: Edward Bouverie Pusey, "The Confessions of Saint Augustine," Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1838. Public domain.

ChristianPhilosophyMysticalContemplation

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