CHAPTER XXXIII

　　49.  The delights of the ear drew and held me much more powerfully, but thou didst unbind and liberate me.  In those melodies which thy words inspire when sung with a sweet and trained voice, I still find repose; yet not so as to cling to them, but always so as to be able to free myself as I wish.  But it is because of the words which are their life that they gain entry into me and strive for a place of proper honor in my heart;

　　and I can hardly assign them a fitting one.  Sometimes, I seem to myself to give them more respect than is fitting, when I see that our minds are more devoutly and earnestly inflamed in piety by the holy words when they are sung than when they are not.  And I

　　recognize that all the diverse affections of our spirits have their appropriate measures in the voice and song, to which they are stimulated by I know not what secret correlation.  But the pleasures of my flesh -- to which the mind ought never to be surrendered nor by them enervated -- often beguile me while physical sense does not attend on reason, to follow her patiently, but having once gained entry to help the reason, it strives to run on before her and be her leader.  Thus in these things I sin unknowingly, but I come to know it afterward.

　　50.  On the other hand, when I avoid very earnestly this kind of deception, I err out of too great austerity.  Sometimes I go to the point of wishing that all the melodies of the pleasant songs to which David's Psalter is adapted should be banished both from my ears and from those of the Church itself.  In this mood, the safer way seemed to me the one I remember was once related to me concerning Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, who required the readers of the psalm to use so slight an inflection of the voice that it was more like speaking than singing.

　　However, when I call to mind the tears I shed at the songs of thy Church at the outset of my recovered faith, and how even now I

　　am moved, not by the singing but by what is sung (when they are sung with a clear and skillfully modulated voice), I then come to acknowledge the great utility of this custom.  Thus I vacillate between dangerous pleasure and healthful exercise.  I am inclined -- though I pronounce no irrevocable opinion on the subject -- to approve of the use of singing in the church, so that by the delights of the ear the weaker minds may be stimulated to a devotional mood.[371]  Yet when it happens that I am more moved by the singing than by what is sung, I confess myself to have sinned wickedly, and then I would rather not have heard the singing.  See now what a condition I am in!  Weep with me, and weep for me, those of you who can so control your inward feelings that good results always come forth.  As for you who do not act this way at all, such things do not concern you.  But do thou, O Lord, my God, give ear; look and see, and have mercy upon me; and heal me --

　　thou, in whose sight I am become an enigma to myself; this itself is my weakness.

　　CHAPTER XXXIV

　　51.  There remain the delights of these eyes of my flesh, about which I must make my confession in the hearing of the ears of thy temple, brotherly and pious ears.  Thus I will finish the list of the temptations of carnal appetite which still assail me -- groaning and desiring as I am to be clothed upon with my house from heaven.[372]

　　The eyes delight in fair and varied forms, and bright and pleasing colors.  Let these not take possession of my soul!

　　Rather let God possess it, he who didst make all these things very good indeed.  He is still my good, and not these.  The pleasures of sight affect me all the time I am awake.  There is no rest from them given me, as there is from the voices of melody, which I can occasionally find in silence.  For daylight, that queen of the colors, floods all that we look upon everywhere I go during the day.  It flits about me in manifold forms and soothes me even when I am busy about other things, not noticing it.  And it presents itself so forcibly that if it is suddenly withdrawn it is looked for with longing, and if it is long absent the mind is saddened.

　　52.  O Light, which Tobit saw even with his eyes closed in blindness, when he taught his son the way of life -- and went before him himself in the steps of love and never went astray[373]; or that Light which Isaac saw when his fleshly "eyes were dim, so that he could not see"[374] because of old age, and it was permitted him unknowingly to bless his sons, but in the blessing of them to know them; or that Light which Jacob saw, when he too, blind in old age yet with an enlightened heart, threw light on the nation of men yet to come -- presignified in the persons of his own sons -- and laid his hands mystically crossed upon his grandchildren by Joseph (not as their father, who saw them from without, but as though he were within them), and distinguished them aright[375]: this is the true Light; it is one, and all are one who see and love it.

　　But that corporeal light, of which I was speaking, seasons the life of the world for her blind lovers with a tempting and fatal sweetness.  Those who know how to praise thee for it, "O

　　God, Creator of Us All," take it up in thy hymn,[376] and are not taken over by it in their sleep.  Such a man I desire to be.  I

　　resist the seductions of my eyes, lest my feet be entangled as I

　　go forward in thy way; and I raise my invisible eyes to thee, that thou wouldst be pleased to "pluck my feet out of the net."[377]

　　Thou dost continually pluck them out, for they are easily ensnared.  Thou ceasest not to pluck them out, but I constantly remain fast in the snares set all around me.  However, thou who "keepest Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep."[378]

　　53.  What numberless things there are: products of the various arts and manufactures in our clothes, shoes, vessels, and all such things; besides such things as pictures and statuary --

　　and all these far beyond the necessary and moderate use of them or their significance for the life of piety -- which men have added for the delight of the eye, copying the outward forms of the things they make; but inwardly forsaking Him by whom they were made and destroying what they themselves have been made to be!

　　And I, O my God and my Joy, I also raise a hymn to thee for all these things, and offer a sacrifice of praise to my Sanctifier, because those beautiful forms which pass through the medium of the human soul into the artist's hands come from that beauty which is above our minds, which my soul sighs for day and night.  But the craftsmen and devotees of these outward beauties discover the norm by which they judge them from that higher beauty, but not the measure of their use.  Still, even if they do not see it, it is there nevertheless, to guard them from wandering astray, and to keep their strength for thee, and not dissipate it in delights that pass into boredom.  And for myself, though I can see and understand this, I am still entangled in my own course with such beauty, but thou wilt rescue me, O Lord, thou wilt rescue me, "for thy loving-kindness is before my eyes."[379]  For I am captivated in my weakness but thou in thy mercy dost rescue me: sometimes without my knowing it, because I had only lightly fallen; at other times, the rescue is painful because I was stuck fast.

　　CHAPTER XXXV

　　54.  Besides this there is yet another form of temptation still more complex in its peril.  For in addition to the fleshly appetite which strives for the gratification of all senses and pleasures -- in which its slaves perish because they separate themselves from thee -- there is also a certain vain and curious longing in the soul, rooted in the same bodily senses, which is cloaked under the name of knowledge and learning; not having pleasure in the flesh, but striving for new experiences through the flesh.  This longing -- since its origin is our appetite for learning, and since the sight is the chief of our senses in the acquisition of knowledge -- is called in the divine language "the lust of the eyes."[380]  For seeing is a function of the eyes; yet we also use this word for the other senses as well, when we exercise them in the search for knowledge.  We do not say, "Listen how it glows," "Smell how it glistens," "Taste how it shines," or "Feel how it flashes," since all of these are said to be _seen_.

　　And we do not simply say, "See how it shines," which only the eyes can perceive; but we also say, "See how it sounds, see how it smells, see how it tastes, see how hard it is." Thus, as we said before, the whole round of sensory experience is called "the lust of the eyes" because the function of seeing, in which the eyes have the principal role, is applied by analogy to the other senses when they are seeking after any kind of knowledge.

　　55.  From this, then, one can the more clearly distinguish whether it is pleasure or curiosity that is being pursued by the senses.  For pleasure pursues objects that are beautiful, melodious, fragrant, savory, soft.  But curiosity, seeking new experiences, will even seek out the contrary of these, not with the purpose of experiencing the discomfort that often accompanies them, but out of a passion for experimenting and knowledge.

　　For what pleasure is there in the sight of a lacerated corpse, which makes you shudder?  And yet if there is one lying close by we flock to it, as if to be made sad and pale.  People fear lest they should see such a thing even in sleep, just as they would if, when awake, someone compelled them to go and see it or if some rumor of its beauty had attracted them.

　　This is also the case with the other senses; it would be tedious to pursue a complete analysis of it.  This malady of curiosity is the reason for all those strange sights exhibited in the theater.  It is also the reason why we proceed to search out the secret powers of nature -- those which have nothing to do with our destiny -- which do not profit us to know about, and concerning which men desire to know only for the sake of knowing.

　　And it is with this same motive of perverted curiosity for knowledge that we consult the magical arts.  Even in religion itself, this prompting drives us to make trial of God when signs and wonders are eagerly asked of him -- not desired for any saving end, but only to make trial of him.

　　56.  In such a wilderness so vast, crammed with snares and dangers, behold how many of them I have lopped off and cast from my heart, as thou, O God of my salvation, hast enabled me to do.

　　And yet, when would I dare to say, since so many things of this sort still buzz around our daily lives -- when would I dare to say that no such motive prompts my seeing or creates a vain curiosity in me?  It is true that now the theaters never attract me, nor do I now care to inquire about the courses of the stars, and my soul has never sought answers from the departed spirits.  All sacrilegious oaths I abhor.  And yet, O Lord my God, to whom I owe all humble and singlehearted service, with what subtle suggestion the enemy still influences me to require some sign from thee!  But by our King, and by Jerusalem, our pure and chaste homeland, I

　　beseech thee that where any consenting to such thoughts is now far from me, so may it always be farther and farther.  And when I

　　entreat thee for the salvation of any man, the end I aim at is something more than the entreating: let it be that as thou dost what thou wilt, thou dost also give me the grace willingly to follow thy lead.

　　57.  Now, really, in how many of the most minute and trivial things my curiosity is still daily tempted, and who can keep the tally on how often I succumb?  How often, when people are telling idle tales, we begin by tolerating them lest we should give offense to the sensitive; and then gradually we come to listen willingly!  I do not nowadays go to the circus to see a dog chase a rabbit, but if by chance I pass such a race in the fields, it quite easily distracts me even from some serious thought and draws me after it -- not that I turn aside with my horse, but with the inclination of my mind.  And unless, by showing me my weakness, thou dost speedily warn me to rise above such a sight to thee by a deliberate act of thought -- or else to despise the whole thing and pass it by -- then I become absorbed in the sight, vain creature that I am.

　　How is it that when I am sitting at home a lizard catching flies, or a spider entangling them as they fly into her webs, oftentimes arrests me?  Is the feeling of curiosity not the same just because these are such tiny creatures?  From them I proceed to praise thee, the wonderful Creator and Disposer of all things;

　　but it is not this that first attracts my attention.  It is one thing to get up quickly and another thing not to fall -- and of both such things my life is full and my only hope is in thy exceeding great mercy.  For when this heart of ours is made the depot of such things and is overrun by the throng of these abounding vanities, then our prayers are often interrupted and disturbed by them.  Even while we are in thy presence and direct the voice of our hearts to thy ears, such a great business as this is broken off by the inroads of I know not what idle thoughts.

　　CHAPTER XXXVI

　　58.  Shall we, then, also reckon this vain curiosity among the things that are to be but lightly esteemed?  Shall anything restore us to hope except thy complete mercy since thou hast begun to change us?  Thou knowest to what extent thou hast already changed me, for first of all thou didst heal me of the lust for vindicating myself, so that thou mightest then forgive all my remaining iniquities and heal all my diseases, and "redeem my life from corruption and crown me with loving-kindness and tender mercies, and satisfy my desires with good things."[381]  It was thou who didst restrain my pride with thy fear, and bowed my neck to thy "yoke."[382]  And now I bear the yoke and it is "light" to me, because thou didst promise it to be so, and hast made it to be so.  And so in truth it was, though I knew it not when I feared to take it up.

　　59.  But, O Lord -- thou who alone reignest without pride, because thou alone art the true Lord, who hast no Lord -- has this third kind of temptation left me, or can it leave me during this life: the desire to be feared and loved of men, with no other view than that I may find in it a joy that is no joy?  It is, rather, a wretched life and an unseemly ostentation.  It is a special reason why we do not love thee, nor devotedly fear thee.  Therefore "thou resistest the proud but givest grace to the humble."[383]  Thou thunderest down on the ambitious designs of the world, and "the foundations of the hills" tremble.[384]

　　And yet certain offices in human society require the officeholder to be loved and feared of men, and through this the adversary of our true blessedness presses hard upon us, scattering everywhere his snares of "well done, well done"; so that while we are eagerly picking them up, we may be caught unawares and split off our joy from thy truth and fix it on the deceits of men.  In this way we come to take pleasure in being loved and feared, not for thy sake but in thy stead.  By such means as this, the adversary makes men like himself, that he may have them as his own, not in the harmony of love, but in the fellowship of punishment -- the one who aspired to exalt his throne in the north,[385] that in the darkness and the cold men might have to serve him, mimicking thee in perverse and distorted ways.

　　But see, O Lord, we are thy little flock.  Possess us, stretch thy wings above us, and let us take refuge under them.  Be thou our glory; let us be loved for thy sake, and let thy word be feared in us.  Those who desire to be commended by the men whom thou condemnest will not be defended by men when thou judgest, nor will they be delivered when thou dost condemn them.  But when --

　　not as a sinner is praised in the wicked desires of his soul nor when the unrighteous man is blessed in his unrighteousness -- a man is praised for some gift that thou hast given him, and he is more gratified at the praise for himself than because he possesses the gift for which he is praised, such a one is praised while thou dost condemn him.  In such a case the one who praised is truly better than the one who was praised.  For the gift of God in man was pleasing to the one, while the other was better pleased with the gift of man than with the gift of God.

　　CHAPTER XXXVII

　　60.  By these temptations we are daily tried, O Lord; we are tried unceasingly.  Our daily "furnace" is the human tongue.[386]

　　And also in this respect thou commandest us to be continent.  Give what thou commandest and command what thou wilt.  In this matter, thou knowest the groans of my heart and the rivers of my eyes, for I am not able to know for certain how far I am clean of this plague; and I stand in great fear of my "secret faults,"[387]

　　which thy eyes perceive, though mine do not.  For in respect of the pleasures of my flesh and of idle curiosity, I see how far I

　　have been able to hold my mind in check when I abstain from them either by voluntary act of the will or because they simply are not at hand; for then I can inquire of myself how much more or less frustrating it is to me not to have them.  This is also true about riches, which are sought for in order that they may minister to one of these three "lusts," or two, or the whole complex of them.

　　The mind is able to see clearly if, when it has them, it despises them so that they may be cast aside and it may prove itself.

　　But if we desire to test our power of doing without praise, must we then live wickedly or lead a life so atrocious and abandoned that everyone who knows us will detest us?  What greater madness than this can be either said or conceived?  And yet if praise, both by custom and right, is the companion of a good life and of good works, we should as little forgo its companionship as the good life itself.  But unless a thing is absent I do not know whether I should be contented or troubled at having to do without it.

　　61.  What is it, then, that I am confessing to thee, O Lord, concerning this sort of temptation?  What else, than that I am delighted with praise, but more with the truth itself than with praise.  For if I were to have any choice whether, if I were mad or utterly in the wrong, I would prefer to be praised by all men or, if I were steadily and fully confident in the truth, would prefer to be blamed by all, I see which I should choose.  Yet I

　　wish I were unwilling that the approval of others should add anything to my joy for any good I have.  Yet I admit that it does increase it; and, more than that, dispraise diminishes it.  Then, when I am disturbed over this wretchedness of mine, an excuse presents itself to me, the value of which thou knowest, O God, for it renders me uncertain.  For since it is not only continence that thou hast enjoined on us -- that is, what things to hold back our love from -- but righteousness as well -- that is, what to bestow our love upon -- and hast wished us to love not only thee, but also our neighbor, it often turns out that when I am gratified by intelligent praise I seem to myself to be gratified by the competence or insight of my neighbor; or, on the other hand, I am sorry for the defect in him when I hear him dispraise either what he does not understand or what is good.  For I am sometimes grieved at the praise I get, either when those things that displease me in myself are praised in me, or when lesser and trifling goods are valued more highly than they should be.  But, again, how do I know whether I feel this way because I am unwilling that he who praises me should differ from me concerning myself not because I am moved with any consideration for him, but because the good things that please me in myself are more pleasing to me when they also please another?  For in a way, I am not praised when my judgment of myself is not praised, since either those things which are displeasing to me are praised, or those things which are less pleasing to me are more praised.  Am I not, then, quite uncertain of myself in this respect?

　　62.  Behold, O Truth, it is in thee that I see that I ought not to be moved at my own praises for my own sake, but for the sake of my neighbor's good.  And whether this is actually my way, I truly do not know.  On this score I know less of myself than thou dost.  I beseech thee now, O my God, to reveal myself to me also, that I may confess to my brethren, who are to pray for me in those matters where I find myself weak.

　　Let me once again examine myself the more diligently.  If, in my own praise, I am moved with concern for my neighbor, why am I

　　less moved if some other man is unjustly dispraised than when it happens to me?  Why am I more irritated at that reproach which is cast on me than at one which is, with equal injustice, cast upon another in my presence?  Am I ignorant of this also?  Or is it still true that I am deceiving myself, and do not keep the truth before thee in my heart and tongue?  Put such madness far from me, O Lord, lest my mouth be to me "the oil of sinners, to anoint my head."[388]

　　CHAPTER XXXVIII

　　63.  "I am needy and poor."[389]  Still, I am better when in secret groanings I displease myself and seek thy mercy until what is lacking in me is renewed and made complete for that peace which the eye of the proud does not know.  The reports that come from the mouth and from actions known to men have in them a most perilous temptation to the love of praise.  This love builds up a certain complacency in one's own excellency, and then goes around collecting solicited compliments.  It tempts me, even when I

　　inwardly reprove myself for it, and this precisely because it is reproved.  For a man may often glory vainly in the very scorn of vainglory -- and in this case it is not any longer the scorn of vainglory in which he glories, for he does not truly despise it when he inwardly glories in it.

　　CHAPTER XXXIX

　　64.  Within us there is yet another evil arising from the same sort of temptation.  By it they become empty who please themselves in themselves, although they do not please or displease or aim at pleasing others.  But in pleasing themselves they displease thee very much, not merely taking pleasure in things that are not good as if they were good, but taking pleasure in thy good things as if they were their own; or even as if they were thine but still as if they had received them through their own merit; or even as if they had them through thy grace, still without this grace with their friends, but as if they envied that grace to others.  In all these and similar perils and labors, thou perceivest the agitation of my heart, and I would rather feel my wounds being cured by thee than not inflicted by me on myself.

　　CHAPTER XL

　　65.  Where hast thou not accompanied me, O Truth, teaching me both what to avoid and what to desire, when I have submitted to thee what I could understand about matters here below, and have sought thy counsel about them?

　　With my external senses I have viewed the world as I was able and have noticed the life which my body derives from me and from these senses of mine.  From that stage I advanced inwardly into the recesses of my memory -- the manifold chambers of my mind, marvelously full of unmeasured wealth.  And I reflected on this and was afraid, and could understand none of these things without thee and found thee to be none of them.  Nor did I myself discover these things -- I who went over them all and labored to distinguish and to value everything according to its dignity, accepting some things upon the report of my senses and questioning about others which I thought to be related to my inner self, distinguishing and numbering the reporters themselves; and in that vast storehouse of my memory, investigating some things, depositing other things, taking out still others.  Neither was I

　　myself when I did this -- that is, that ability of mine by which I

　　did it -- nor was it thou, for thou art that never-failing light from which I took counsel about them all; whether they were what they were, and what was their real value.  In all this I heard thee teaching and commanding me.  And this I often do -- and this is a delight to me -- and as far as I can get relief from my necessary duties, I resort to this kind of pleasure.  But in all these things which I review when I consult thee, I still do not find a secure place for my soul save in thee, in whom my scattered members may be gathered together and nothing of me escape from thee.  And sometimes thou introducest me to a most rare and inward feeling, an inexplicable sweetness.  If this were to come to perfection in me I do not know to what point life might not then arrive.  But still, by these wretched weights of mine, I relapse into these common things, and am sucked in by my old customs and am held.  I sorrow much, yet I am still closely held.  To this extent, then, the burden of habit presses us down.  I can exist in this fashion but I do not wish to do so.  In that other way I wish I were, but cannot be -- in both ways I am wretched.

　　CHAPTER XLI

　　66.  And now I have thus considered the infirmities of my sins, under the headings of the three major "lusts," and I have called thy right hand to my aid.  For with a wounded heart I have seen thy brightness, and having been beaten back I cried: "Who can attain to it?  I am cut off from before thy eyes."[390]  Thou art the Truth, who presidest over all things, but I, because of my greed, did not wish to lose thee.  But still, along with thee, I

　　wished also to possess a lie -- just as no one wishes to lie in such a way as to be ignorant of what is true.  By this I lost thee, for thou wilt not condescend to be enjoyed along with a lie.

　　CHAPTER XLII

　　67.  Whom could I find to reconcile me to thee?  Should I

　　have approached the angels?  What kind of prayer?  What kind of rites?  Many who were striving to return to thee and were not able of themselves have, I am told, tried this and have fallen into a longing for curious visions and deserved to be deceived.  Being exalted, they sought thee in their pride of learning, and they thrust themselves forward rather than beating their breasts.[391]

　　And so by a likeness of heart, they drew to themselves the princes of the air,[392] their conspirators and companions in pride, by whom they were deceived by the power of magic.  Thus they sought a mediator by whom they might be cleansed, but there was none.  For the mediator they sought was the devil, disguising himself as an angel of light.[393]  And he allured their proud flesh the more because he had no fleshly body.

　　They were mortal and sinful, but thou, O Lord, to whom they arrogantly sought to be reconciled, art immortal and sinless.  But a mediator between God and man ought to have something in him like God and something in him like man, lest in being like man he should be far from God, or if only like God he should be far from man, and so should not be a mediator.  That deceitful mediator, then, by whom, by thy secret judgment, human pride deserves to be deceived, had one thing in common with man, that is, his sin.  In another respect, he would seem to have something in common with God, for not being clothed with the mortality of the flesh, he could boast that he was immortal.  But since "the wages of sin is death,"[394] what he really has in common with men is that, together with them, he is condemned to death.

　　CHAPTER XLIII

　　68.  But the true Mediator, whom thou in thy secret mercy hast revealed to the humble, and hast sent to them so that through his example they also might learn the same humility -- that "Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus,"[395]

　　appeared between mortal sinners and the immortal Just One.  He was mortal as men are mortal; he was righteous as God is righteous;

　　and because the reward of righteousness is life and peace, he could, through his righteousness united with God, cancel the death of justified sinners, which he was willing to have in common with them.  Hence he was manifested to holy men of old, to the end that they might be saved through faith in his Passion to come, even as we through faith in his Passion which is past.  As man he was Mediator, but as the Word he was not something in between the two;

　　because he was equal to God, and God with God, and, with the Holy Spirit, one God.

　　69.  How hast thou loved us, O good Father, who didst not spare thy only Son, but didst deliver him up for us wicked ones![396]  How hast thou loved us, for whom he who did not count it robbery to be equal with thee "became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross"[397]!  He alone was "free among the dead."[398]  He alone had power to lay down his life and power to take it up again, and for us he became to thee both Victor and Victim; and Victor because he was the Victim.  For us, he was to thee both Priest and Sacrifice, and Priest because he was the Sacrifice.  Out of slaves, he maketh us thy sons, because he was born of thee and did serve us.  Rightly, then, is my hope fixed strongly on him, that thou wilt "heal all my diseases"[399]

　　through him, who sitteth at thy right hand and maketh intercession for us.[400]  Otherwise I should utterly despair.  For my infirmities are many and great; indeed, they are very many and very great.  But thy medicine is still greater.  Otherwise, we might think that thy word was removed from union with man, and despair of ourselves, if it had not been that he was "made flesh and dwelt among us."[401]

　　70.  Terrified by my sins and the load of my misery, I had resolved in my heart and considered flight into the wilderness.

　　But thou didst forbid me, and thou didst strengthen me, saying that "since Christ died for all, they who live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him who died for them."[402]  Behold, O Lord, I cast all my care on thee, that I

　　may live and "behold wondrous things out of thy law."[403]  Thou knowest my incompetence and my infirmities; teach me and heal me.

　　Thy only Son -- he "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge"[404] -- hath redeemed me with his blood.  Let not the proud speak evil of me, because I keep my ransom before my mind, and eat and drink and share my food and drink.  For, being poor, I desire to be satisfied from him, together with those who eat and are satisfied: "and they shall praise the Lord that seek Him."[405]

　　BOOK ELEVEN

　　The eternal Creator and the Creation in time.  Augustine ties together his memory of his past life, his present experience, and his ardent desire to comprehend the mystery of creation.  This leads him to the questions of the mode and time of creation.  He ponders the mode of creation and shows that it was  de nihilo and involved no alteration in the being of God.  He then considers the question of the beginning of the world and time and shows that time and creation are cotemporal.  But what is time?  To this Augustine devotes a brilliant analysis of the subjectivity of time and the relation of all temporal process to the abiding eternity of God.  From this, he prepares to turn to a detailed interpretation of Gen. 1:1, 2.

　　CHAPTER I

　　1.  Is it possible, O Lord, that, since thou art in eternity, thou art ignorant of what I am saying to thee?  Or, dost thou see in time an event at the time it occurs?  If not, then why am I

　　recounting such a tale of things to thee?  Certainly not in order to acquaint thee with them through me; but, instead, that through them I may stir up my own love and the love of my readers toward thee, so that all may say, "Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised." I have said this before[406] and will say it again: "For love of thy love I do it." So also we pray -- and yet Truth tells us, "Your Father knoweth what things you need before you ask him."[407]  Consequently, we lay bare our feelings before thee, that, through our confessing to thee our plight and thy mercies toward us, thou mayest go on to free us altogether, as thou hast already begun; and that we may cease to be wretched in ourselves and blessed in thee -- since thou hast called us to be poor in spirit, meek, mourners, hungering and athirst for righteousness, merciful and pure in heart.[408]  Thus I have told thee many things, as I could find ability and will to do so, since it was thy will in the first place that I should confess to thee, O Lord my God -- for "Thou art good and thy mercy endureth forever."[409]

　　CHAPTER II

　　2.  But how long would it take for the voice of my pen to tell enough of thy exhortations and of all thy terrors and comforts and leadings by which thou didst bring me to preach thy Word and to administer thy sacraments to thy people?  And even if I could do this sufficiently, the drops of time[410] are very precious to me and I have for a long time been burning with the desire to meditate on thy law, and to confess in thy presence my knowledge and ignorance of it -- from the first streaks of thy light in my mind and the remaining darkness, until my weakness shall be swallowed up in thy strength.  And I do not wish to see those hours drained into anything else which I can find free from the necessary care of the body, the exercise of the mind, and the service we owe to our fellow men -- and what we give even if we do not owe it.

　　3.  O Lord my God, hear my prayer and let thy mercy attend my longing.  It does not burn for itself alone but longs as well to serve the cause of fraternal love.  Thou seest in my heart that this is so.  Let me offer the service of my mind and my tongue --

　　and give me what I may in turn offer back to thee.  For "I am needy and poor"; thou art rich to all who call upon thee -- thou who, in thy freedom from care, carest for us.  Trim away from my lips, inwardly and outwardly, all rashness and lying.  Let thy Scriptures be my chaste delight.  Let me not be deceived in them, nor deceive others from them.  O Lord, hear and pity!  O Lord my God, light of the blind, strength of the weak -- and also the light of those who see and the strength of the strong -- hearken to my soul and hear it crying from the depths.[411]  Unless thy ears attend us even in the depths, where should we go?  To whom should we cry?

　　"Thine is the day and the night is thine as well."[412]  At thy bidding the moments fly by.  Grant me in them, then, an interval for my meditations on the hidden things of thy law, nor close the door of thy law against us who knock.  Thou hast not willed that the deep secrets of all those pages should have been written in vain.  Those forests are not without their stags which keep retired within them, ranging and walking and feeding, lying down and ruminating.[413]  Perfect me, O Lord, and reveal their secrets to me.  Behold, thy voice is my joy; thy voice surpasses in abundance of delights.  Give me what I love, for I do love it.

　　And this too is thy gift.  Abandon not thy gifts and despise not thy "grass" which thirsts for thee.[414]  Let me confess to thee everything that I shall have found in thy books and "let me hear the voice of thy praise."[415]  Let me drink from thee and "consider the wondrous things out of thy law"[416] -- from the very beginning, when thou madest heaven and earth, and thenceforward to the everlasting reign of thy Holy City with thee.

　　4.  O Lord, have mercy on me and hear my petition.  For my prayer is not for earthly things, neither gold nor silver and precious stones, nor gorgeous apparel, nor honors and power, nor fleshly pleasures, nor of bodily necessities in this life of our pilgrimage: all of these things are "added" to those who seek thy Kingdom and thy righteousness.[417]

　　Observe, O God, from whence comes my desire.  The unrighteous have told me of delights but not such as those in thy law, O Lord.

　　Behold, this is the spring of my desire.  See, O Father, look and see -- and approve!  Let it be pleasing in thy mercy's sight that I should find favor with thee -- that the secret things of thy Word may be opened to me when I knock.  I beg this of thee by our Lord Jesus Christ, thy Son, the Man of thy right hand, the Son of Man; whom thou madest strong for thy purpose as Mediator between thee and us; through whom thou didst seek us when we were not seeking thee, but didst seek us so that we might seek thee; thy Word, through whom thou madest all things, and me among them; thy only Son, through whom thou hast called thy faithful people to adoption, and me among them.  I beseech it of thee through him who sitteth at thy right hand and maketh intercession for us, "in whom are hid all treasures of wisdom and knowledge."[418]  It is he I

　　seek in thy books.  Moses wrote of him.  He tells us so himself;

　　the Truth tells us so.

　　CHAPTER III

　　5.  Let me hear and understand how in the beginning thou madest heaven and earth.[419]  Moses wrote of this; he wrote and passed on -- moving from thee to thee -- and he is now no longer before me.  If he were, I would lay hold on him and ask him and entreat him solemnly that in thy name he would open out these things to me, and I would lend my bodily ears to the sounds that came forth out of his mouth.  If, however, he spoke in the Hebrew language, the sounds would beat on my senses in vain, and nothing would touch my mind; but if he spoke in Latin, I would understand what he said.  But how should I then know whether what he said was true?  If I knew even this much, would it be that I knew it from him?  Indeed, within me, deep inside the chambers of my thought, Truth itself -- neither Hebrew, nor Greek, nor Latin, nor barbarian, without any organs of voice and tongue, without the sound of syllables -- would say, "He speaks the truth," and I

　　should be assured by this.  Then I would confidently say to that man of thine, "You speak the truth."[420]  However, since I cannot inquire of Moses, I beseech thee, O Truth, from whose fullness he spoke truth; I beseech thee, my God, forgive my sins, and as thou gavest thy servant the gift to speak these things, grant me also the gift to understand them.

　　CHAPTER IV

　　6.  Look around; there are the heaven and the earth.  They cry aloud that they were made, for they change and vary.  Whatever there is that has not been made, and yet has being, has nothing in it that was not there before.  This having something not already existent is what it means to be changed and varied.  Heaven and earth thus speak plainly that they did not make themselves: "We are, because we have been made; we did not exist before we came to be so that we could have made ourselves!"  And the voice with which they speak is simply their visible presence.  It was thou, O

　　Lord, who madest these things.  Thou art beautiful; thus they are beautiful.  Thou art good, thus they are good.  Thou art; thus they are.  But they are not as beautiful, nor as good, nor as truly real as thou their Creator art.  Compared with thee, they are neither beautiful nor good, nor do they even exist.  These things we know, thanks be to thee.  Yet our knowledge is ignorance when it is compared with thy knowledge.

　　CHAPTER V

　　7.  But _how_ didst thou make the heaven and the earth, and what was the tool of such a mighty work as thine?  For it was not like a human worker fashioning body from body, according to the fancy of his mind, able somehow or other to impose on it a form which the mind perceived in itself by its inner eye (yet how should even he be able to do this, if thou hadst not made that mind?).  He imposes the form on something already existing and having some sort of being, such as clay, or stone or wood or gold or such like (and where would these things come from if thou hadst not furnished them?).  For thou madest his body for the artisan, and thou madest the mind which directs the limbs; thou madest the matter from which he makes anything; thou didst create the capacity by which he understands his art and sees within his mind what he may do with the things before him; thou gavest him his bodily sense by which, as if he had an interpreter, he may communicate from mind to matter what he proposes to do and report back to his mind what has been done, that the mind may consult with the Truth which presideth over it as to whether what is done is well done.

　　All these things praise thee, the Creator of them all.  But how didst thou make them?  How, O God, didst thou make the heaven and earth?  For truly, neither in heaven nor on earth didst thou make heaven and earth -- nor in the air nor in the waters, since all of these also belong to the heaven and the earth.  Nowhere in the whole world didst thou make the whole world, because there was no place where it could be made before it was made.  And thou didst not hold anything in thy hand from which to fashion the heaven and the earth,[421] for where couldst thou have gotten what thou hadst not made in order to make something with it?  Is there, indeed, anything at all except because thou art?  Thus thou didst speak and they were made,[422] and by thy Word thou didst make them all.

　　CHAPTER VI

　　8.  But how didst thou speak?  Was it in the same manner in which the voice came from the cloud saying, "This is my beloved Son"[423]?  For that voice sounded forth and died away; it began and ended.  The syllables sounded and passed away, the second after the first, the third after the second, and thence in order, till the very last after all the rest; and silence after the last.

　　From this it is clear and plain that it was the action of a creature, itself in time, which sounded that voice, obeying thy eternal will.  And what these words were which were formed at that time the outer ear conveyed to the conscious mind, whose inner ear lay attentively open to thy eternal Word.  But it compared those words which sounded in time with thy eternal word sounding in silence and said: "This is different; quite different!  These words are far below me; they are not even real, for they fly away and pass, but the Word of my God remains above me forever." If, then, in words that sound and fade away thou didst say that heaven and earth should be made, and thus _madest_ heaven and earth, then there was already some kind of corporeal creature _before_ heaven and earth by whose motions in time that voice might have had its occurrence in time.  But there was nothing corporeal before the heaven and the earth; or if there was, then it is certain that already, without a time-bound voice, thou hadst created whatever it was out of which thou didst make the time-bound voice by which thou didst say, "Let the heaven and the earth be made!"  For whatever it was out of which such a voice was made simply did not exist at all until it was made by thee.  Was it decreed by thy Word that a body might be made from which such words might come?

　　CHAPTER VII

　　9.  Thou dost call us, then, to understand the Word -- the God who is God with thee -- which is spoken eternally and by which all things are spoken eternally.  For what was first spoken was not finished, and then something else spoken until the whole series was spoken; but all things, at the same time and forever.

　　For, otherwise, we should have time and change and not a true eternity, nor a true immortality.

　　This I know, O my God, and I give thanks.  I know, I confess to thee, O Lord, and whoever is not ungrateful for certain truths knows and blesses thee along with me.  We know, O Lord, this much we know: that in the same proportion as anything is not what it was, and is what it was not, in that very same proportion it passes away or comes to be.  But there is nothing in thy Word that passes away or returns to its place; for it is truly immortal and eternal.  And, therefore, unto the Word coeternal with thee, at the same time and always thou sayest all that thou sayest.  And whatever thou sayest shall be made is made, and thou makest nothing otherwise than by speaking.  Still, not all the things that thou dost make by speaking are made at the same time and always.

　　CHAPTER VIII

　　10.  Why is this, I ask of thee, O Lord my God?  I see it after a fashion, but I do not know how to express it, unless I say that everything that begins to be and then ceases to be begins and ceases when it is known in thy eternal Reason that it ought to begin or cease -- in thy eternal Reason where nothing begins or ceases.  And this is thy Word, which is also "the Beginning,"

　　because it also speaks to us.[424]  Thus, in the gospel, he spoke through the flesh; and this sounded in the outward ears of men so that it might be believed and sought for within, and so that it might be found in the eternal Truth, in which the good and only Master teacheth all his disciples.[425]  There, O Lord, I hear thy voice, the voice of one speaking to me, since he who teacheth us speaketh to us.  But he that doth not teach us doth not really speak to us even when he speaketh.  Yet who is it that teacheth us unless it be the Truth immutable?  For even when we are instructed by means of the mutable creation, we are thereby led to the Truth immutable.  There we learn truly as we stand and hear him, and we rejoice greatly "because of the bridegroom's voice,"[426]

　　restoring us to the source whence our being comes.  And therefore, unless the Beginning remained immutable, there would then not be a place to which we might return when we had wandered away.  But when we return from error, it is through our gaining knowledge that we return.  In order for us to gain knowledge he teacheth us, since he is the Beginning, and speaketh to us.

　　CHAPTER IX

　　11.  In this Beginning, O God, thou hast made heaven and earth -- through thy Word, thy Son, thy Power, thy Wisdom, thy Truth: all wondrously speaking and wondrously creating.  Who shall comprehend such things and who shall tell of it?  What is it that shineth through me and striketh my heart without injury, so that I

　　both shudder and burn?  I shudder because I am unlike it; I burn because I am like it.  It is Wisdom itself that shineth through me, clearing away my fog, which so readily overwhelms me so that I

　　faint in it, in the darkness and burden of my punishment.  For my strength is brought down in neediness, so that I cannot endure even my blessings until thou, O Lord, who hast been gracious to all my iniquities, also healest all my infirmities -- for it is thou who "shalt redeem my life from corruption, and crown me with loving-kindness and tender mercy, and shalt satisfy my desire with good things so that my youth shall be renewed like the eagle's."[427]  For by this hope we are saved, and through patience we await thy promises.  Let him that is able hear thee speaking to his inner mind.  I will cry out with confidence because of thy own oracle, "How wonderful are thy works, O Lord;

　　in wisdom thou hast made them all."[428]  And this Wisdom is the Beginning, and in that Beginning thou hast made heaven and earth.

　　CHAPTER X

　　12.  Now, are not those still full of their old carnal nature[429] who ask us: "What was God doing _before_ he made heaven and earth?  For if he was idle," they say, "and doing nothing, then why did he not continue in that state forever --

　　doing nothing, as he had always done?  If any new motion has arisen in God, and a new will to form a creature, which he had never before formed, how can that be a true eternity in which an act of will occurs that was not there before?  For the will of God is not a created thing, but comes before the creation -- and this is true because nothing could be created unless the will of the Creator came before it.  The will of God, therefore, pertains to his very Essence.  Yet if anything has arisen in the Essence of God that was not there before, then that Essence cannot truly be called eternal.  But if it was the eternal will of God that the creation should come to be, why, then, is not the creation itself also from eternity?"[430]

　　CHAPTER XI

　　13.  Those who say these things do not yet understand thee, O

　　Wisdom of God, O Light of souls.  They do not yet understand how the things are made that are made by and in thee.  They endeavor to comprehend eternal things, but their heart still flies about in the past and future motions of created things, and is still unstable.  Who shall hold it and fix it so that it may come to rest for a little; and then, by degrees, glimpse the glory of that eternity which abides forever; and then, comparing eternity with the temporal process in which nothing abides, they may see that they are incommensurable?  They would see that a long time does not become long, except from the many separate events that occur in its passage, which cannot be simultaneous.  In the Eternal, on the other hand, nothing passes away, but the whole is simultaneously present.  But no temporal process is wholly simultaneous.  Therefore, let it[431] see that all time past is forced to move on by the incoming future; that all the future follows from the past; and that all, past and future, is created and issues out of that which is forever present.  Who will hold the heart of man that it may stand still and see how the eternity which always stands still is itself neither future nor past but expresses itself in the times that are future and past?  Can my hand do this, or can the hand of my mouth bring about so difficult a thing even by persuasion?

　　CHAPTER XII

　　14.  How, then, shall I respond to him who asks, "What was God doing _before_ he made heaven and earth?"  I do not answer, as a certain one is reported to have done facetiously (shrugging off the force of the question).  "He was preparing hell," he said, "for those who pry too deep." It is one thing to see the answer;

　　it is another to laugh at the questioner -- and for myself I do not answer these things thus.  More willingly would I have answered, "I do not know what I do not know," than cause one who asked a deep question to be ridiculed -- and by such tactics gain praise for a worthless answer.

　　Rather, I say that thou, our God, art the Creator of every creature.  And if in the term "heaven and earth" every creature is included, I make bold to say further: "Before God made heaven and earth, he did not make anything at all.  For if he did, what did he make unless it were a creature?"  I do indeed wish that I knew all that I desire to know to my profit as surely as I know that no creature was made before any creature was made.

　　CHAPTER XIII

　　15.  But if the roving thought of someone should wander over the images of past time, and wonder that thou, the Almighty God, the All-creating and All-sustaining, the Architect of heaven and earth, didst for ages unnumbered abstain from so great a work before thou didst actually do it, let him awake and consider that he wonders at illusions.  For in what temporal medium could the unnumbered ages that thou didst not make pass by, since thou art the Author and Creator of all the ages?  Or what periods of time would those be that were not made by thee?  Or how could they have already passed away if they had not already been?  Since, therefore, thou art the Creator of all times, if there was any time _before_ thou madest heaven and earth, why is it said that thou wast abstaining from working?  For thou madest that very time itself, and periods could not pass by _before_ thou madest the whole temporal procession.  But if there was no time _before_

　　heaven and earth, how, then, can it be asked, "What wast thou doing then?"  For there was no "then" when there was no time.

　　16.  Nor dost thou precede any given period of time by another period of time.  Else thou wouldst not precede all periods of time.  In the eminence of thy ever-present eternity, thou precedest all times past, and extendest beyond all future times, for they are still to come -- and when they have come, they will be past.  But "Thou art always the Selfsame and thy years shall have no end."[432]  Thy years neither go nor come; but ours both go and come in order that all separate moments may come to pass.

　　All thy years stand together as one, since they are abiding.  Nor do thy years past exclude the years to come because thy years do not pass away.  All these years of ours shall be with thee, when all of them shall have ceased to be.  Thy years are but a day, and thy day is not recurrent, but always today.  Thy "today" yields not to tomorrow and does not follow yesterday.  Thy "today" is eternity.  Therefore, thou didst generate the Coeternal, to whom thou didst say, "This day I have begotten thee."[433]  Thou madest all time and before all times thou art, and there was never a time when there was no time.

　　CHAPTER XIV

　　17.  There was no time, therefore, when thou hadst not made anything, because thou hadst made time itself.  And there are no times that are coeternal with thee, because thou dost abide forever; but if times should abide, they would not be times.

　　For what is time?  Who can easily and briefly explain it?

　　Who can even comprehend it in thought or put the answer into words?  Yet is it not true that in conversation we refer to nothing more familiarly or knowingly than time?  And surely we understand it when we speak of it; we understand it also when we hear another speak of it.

　　What, then, is time?  If no one asks me, I know what it is.

　　If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know.  Yet I

　　say with confidence that I know that if nothing passed away, there would be no past time; and if nothing were still coming, there would be no future time; and if there were nothing at all, there would be no present time.

　　But, then, how is it that there are the two times, past and future, when even the past is now no longer and the future is now not yet?  But if the present were always present, and did not pass into past time, it obviously would not be time but eternity.  If, then, time present -- if it be time -- comes into existence only because it passes into time past, how can we say that even this is, since the cause of its being is that it will cease to be?

　　Thus, can we not truly say that time _is_ only as it tends toward nonbeing?

　　CHAPTER XV

　　18.  And yet we speak of a long time and a short time; but never speak this way except of time past and future.  We call a hundred years ago, for example, a long time past.  In like manner, we should call a hundred years hence a long time to come.  But we call ten days ago a short time past; and ten days hence a short time to come.  But in what sense is something long or short that is nonexistent?  For the past is not now, and the future is not yet.  Therefore, let us not say, "It _is_ long"; instead, let us say of the past, "It _was_ long," and of the future, "It _will be_

　　long." And yet, O Lord, my Light, shall not thy truth make mockery of man even here?  For that long time past: was it long when it was already past, or when it was still present?  For it might have been long when there was a period that could be long, but when it was past, it no longer was.  In that case, that which was not at all could not be long.  Let us not, therefore, say, "Time past was long," for we shall not discover what it was that was long because, since it is past, it no longer exists.  Rather, let us say that "time _present_ was long, because when it was present it _was_ long." For then it had not yet passed on so as not to be, and therefore it still was in a state that could be called long.

　　But after it passed, it ceased to be long simply because it ceased to be.

　　19.  Let us, therefore, O human soul, see whether present time can be long, for it has been given you to feel and measure the periods of time.  How, then, will you answer me?

　　Is a hundred years when present a long time?  But, first, see whether a hundred years can be present at once.  For if the first year in the century is current, then it is present time, and the other ninety and nine are still future.  Therefore, they are not yet.  But, then, if the second year is current, one year is already past, the second present, and all the rest are future.

　　And thus, if we fix on any middle year of this century as present, those before it are past, those after it are future.  Therefore, a hundred years cannot be present all at once.

　　Let us see, then, whether the year that is now current can be present.  For if its first month is current, then the rest are future; if the second, the first is already past, and the remainder are not yet.  Therefore, the current year is not present all at once.  And if it is not present as a whole, then the year is not present.  For it takes twelve months to make the year, from which each individual month which is current is itself present one at a time, but the rest are either past or future.

　　20.  Thus it comes out that time present, which we found was the only time that could be called "long," has been cut down to the space of scarcely a single day.  But let us examine even that, for one day is never present as a whole.  For it is made up of twenty-four hours, divided between night and day.  The first of these hours has the rest of them as future, and the last of them has the rest as past; but any of those between has those that preceded it as past and those that succeed it as future.  And that one hour itself passes away in fleeting fractions.  The part of it that has fled is past; what remains is still future.  If any fraction of time be conceived that cannot now be divided even into the most minute momentary point, this alone is what we may call time present.  But this flies so rapidly from future to past that it cannot be extended by any delay.  For if it is extended, it is then divided into past and future.  But the present has no extension[434] whatever.

　　Where, therefore, is that time which we may call "long"?  Is it future?  Actually we do not say of the future, "It is long,"

　　for it has not yet come to be, so as to be long.  Instead, we say, "It will be long." _When_ will it be?  For since it is future, it will not be long, for what may be long is not yet.  It will be long only when it passes from the future which is not as yet, and will have begun to be present, so that there can be something that may be long.  But in that case, time present cries aloud, in the words we have already heard, that it cannot be "long."

　　CHAPTER XVI

　　21.  And yet, O Lord, we do perceive intervals of time, and we compare them with each other, and we say that some are longer and others are shorter.  We even measure how much longer or shorter this time may be than that time.  And we say that this time is twice as long, or three times as long, while this other time is only just as long as that other.  But we measure the passage of time when we measure the intervals of perception.  But who can measure times past which now are no longer, or times future which are not yet -- unless perhaps someone will dare to say that what does not exist can be measured?  Therefore, while time is passing, it can be perceived and measured; but when it is past, it cannot, since it is not.

　　CHAPTER XVII

　　22.  I am seeking the truth, O Father; I am not affirming it.

　　O my God, direct and rule me.

　　Who is there who will tell me that there are not three times -- as we learned when boys and as we have also taught boys -- time past, time present, and time future?  Who can say that there is only time present because the other two do not exist?  Or do they also exist; but when, from the future, time becomes present, it proceeds from some secret place; and when, from times present, it becomes past, it recedes into some secret place?  For where have those men who have foretold the future seen the things foretold, if then they were not yet existing?  For what does not exist cannot be seen.  And those who tell of things past could not speak of them as if they were true, if they did not see them in their minds.  These things could in no way be discerned if they did not exist.  There are therefore times present and times past.

　　CHAPTER XVIII

　　23.  Give me leave, O Lord, to seek still further.  O my Hope, let not my purpose be confounded.  For if there are times past and future, I wish to know where they are.  But if I have not yet succeeded in this, I still know that wherever they are, they are not there as future or past, but as present.  For if they are there as future, they are there as "not yet"; if they are there as past, they are there as "no longer." Wherever they are and whatever they are they exist therefore only as present.  Although we tell of past things as true, they are drawn out of the memory -- not the things themselves, which have already passed, but words constructed from the images of the perceptions which were formed in the mind, like footprints in their passage through the senses.

　　My childhood, for instance, which is no longer, still exists in time past, which does not now exist.  But when I call to mind its image and speak of it, I see it in the present because it is still in my memory.  Whether there is a similar explanation for the foretelling of future events -- that is, of the images of things which are not yet seen as if they were already existing -- I

　　confess, O my God, I do not know.  But this I certainly do know:

　　that we generally think ahead about our future actions, and this premeditation is in time present; but that the action which we premeditate is not yet, because it is still future.  When we shall have started the action and have begun to do what we were premeditating, then that action will be in time present, because then it is no longer in time future.

　　24.  Whatever may be the manner of this secret foreseeing of future things, nothing can be seen except what exists.  But what exists now is not future, but present.  When, therefore, they say that future events are seen, it is not the events themselves, for they do not exist as yet (that is, they are still in time future), but perhaps, instead, their causes and their signs are seen, which already do exist.  Therefore, to those already beholding these causes and signs, they are not future, but present, and from them future things are predicted because they are conceived in the mind.  These conceptions, however, exist _now_, and those who predict those things see these conceptions before them in time present.

　　Let me take an example from the vast multitude and variety of such things.  I see the dawn; I predict that the sun is about to rise.  What I see is in time present, what I predict is in time future -- not that the sun is future, for it already exists; but its rising is future, because it is not yet.  Yet I could not predict even its rising, unless I had an image of it in my mind;

　　as, indeed, I do even now as I speak.  But that dawn which I see in the sky is not the rising of the sun (though it does precede it), nor is it a conception in my mind.  These two[435] are seen in time present, in order that the event which is in time future may be predicted.

　　Future events, therefore, are not yet.  And if they are not yet, they do not exist.  And if they do not exist, they cannot be seen at all, but they can be predicted from things present, which now are and are seen.

　　CHAPTER XIX

　　25.  Now, therefore, O Ruler of thy creatures, what is the mode by which thou teachest souls those things which are still future?  For thou hast taught thy prophets.  How dost thou, to whom nothing is future, teach future things -- or rather teach things present from the signs of things future?  For what does not exist certainly cannot be taught.  This way of thine is too far from my sight; it is too great for me, I cannot attain to it.[436]

　　But I shall be enabled by thee, when thou wilt grant it, O sweet Light of my secret eyes.

　　CHAPTER XX

　　26.  But even now it is manifest and clear that there are neither times future nor times past.  Thus it is not properly said that there are three times, past, present, and future.  Perhaps it might be said rightly that there are three times: a time present of things past; a time present of things present; and a time present of things future.  For these three do coexist somehow in the soul, for otherwise I could not see them.  The time present of things past is memory; the time present of things present is direct experience; the time present of things future is expectation.[437]  If we are allowed to speak of these things so, I see three times, and I grant that there are three.  Let it still be said, then, as our misapplied custom has it: "There are three times, past, present, and future." I shall not be troubled by it, nor argue, nor object -- always provided that what is said is understood, so that neither the future nor the past is said to exist now.  There are but few things about which we speak properly -- and many more about which we speak improperly -- though we understand one another's meaning.

　　CHAPTER XXI

　　27.  I have said, then, that we measure periods of time as they pass so that we can say that this time is twice as long as that one or that this is just as long as that, and so on for the other fractions of time which we can count by measuring.

　　So, then, as I was saying, we measure periods of time as they pass.  And if anyone asks me, "How do you know this?", I can answer: "I know because we measure.  We could not measure things that do not exist, and things past and future do not exist." But how do we measure present time since it has no extension?  It is measured while it passes, but when it has passed it is not measured; for then there is nothing that could be measured.  But whence, and how, and whither does it pass while it is being measured?  Whence, but from the future?  Which way, save through the present?  Whither, but into the past?  Therefore, from what is not yet, through what has no length, it passes into what is now no longer.  But what do we measure, unless it is a time of some length?  For we cannot speak of single, and double, and triple, and equal, and all the other ways in which we speak of time, except in terms of the length of the periods of time.  But in what "length," then, do we measure passing time?  Is it in the future, from which it passes over?  But what does not yet exist cannot be measured.  Or, is it in the present, through which it passes?  But what has no length we cannot measure.  Or is it in the past into which it passes?  But what is no longer we cannot measure.

　　CHAPTER XXII

　　28.  My soul burns ardently to understand this most intricate enigma.  O Lord my God, O good Father, I beseech thee through Christ, do not close off these things, both the familiar and the obscure, from my desire.  Do not bar it from entering into them;

　　but let their light dawn by thy enlightening mercy, O Lord.  Of whom shall I inquire about these things?  And to whom shall I

　　confess my ignorance of them with greater profit than to thee, to whom these studies of mine (ardently longing to understand thy Scriptures) are not a bore?  Give me what I love, for I do love it; and this thou hast given me.  O Father, who truly knowest how to give good gifts to thy children, give this to me.  Grant it, since I have undertaken to understand it, and hard labor is my lot until thou openest it.  I beseech thee, through Christ and in his name, the Holy of Holies, let no man interrupt me.  "For I have believed, and therefore do I speak."[438]  This is my hope; for this I live: that I may contemplate the joys of my Lord.[439]

　　Behold, thou hast made my days grow old, and they pass away -- and how I do not know.

　　We speak of this time and that time, and these times and those times: "How long ago since he said this?"  "How long ago since he did this?"  "How long ago since I saw that?"  "This syllable is twice as long as that single short syllable." These words we say and hear, and we are understood and we understand.

　　They are quite commonplace and ordinary, and still the meaning of these very same things lies deeply hid and its discovery is still to come.

　　CHAPTER XXIII

　　29.  I once heard a learned man say that the motions of the sun, moon, and stars constituted time; and I did not agree.  For why should not the motions of all bodies constitute time?  What if the lights of heaven should cease, and a potter's wheel still turn round: would there be no time by which we might measure those rotations and say either that it turned at equal intervals, or, if it moved now more slowly and now more quickly, that some rotations were longer and others shorter?  And while we were saying this, would we not also be speaking in time?  Or would there not be in our words some syllables that were long and others short, because the first took a longer time to sound, and the others a shorter time?  O God, grant men to see in a small thing the notions that are common[440] to all things, both great and small.  Both the stars and the lights of heaven are "for signs and seasons, and for days and years."[441]  This is doubtless the case, but just as I

　　should not say that the circuit of that wooden wheel was a day, neither would that learned man say that there was, therefore, no time.

　　30.  I thirst to know the power and the nature of time, by which we measure the motions of bodies, and say, for example, that this motion is twice as long as that.  For I ask, since the word "day" refers not only to the length of time that the sun is above the earth (which separates day from night), but also refers to the sun's entire circuit from east all the way around to east -- on account of which we can say, "So many days have passed" (the nights being included when we say, "So many days," and their lengths not counted separately) -- since, then, the day is ended by the motion of the sun and by his passage from east to east, I

　　ask whether the motion itself is the day, or whether the day is the period in which that motion is completed; or both?  For if the sun's passage is the day, then there would be a day even if the sun should finish his course in as short a period as an hour.  If the motion itself is the day, then it would not be a day if from one sunrise to another there were a period no longer than an hour.

　　But the sun would have to go round twenty-four times to make just one day.  If it is both, then that could not be called a day if the sun ran his entire course in the period of an hour; nor would it be a day if, while the sun stood still, as much time passed as the sun usually covered during his whole course, from morning to morning.  I shall, therefore, not ask any more what it is that is called a day, but rather what time is, for it is by time that we measure the circuit of the sun, and would be able to say that it was finished in half the period of time that it customarily takes if it were completed in a period of only twelve hours.  If, then, we compare these periods, we could call one of them a single and the other a double period, as if the sun might run his course from east to east sometimes in a single period and sometimes in a double period.

　　Let no man tell me, therefore, that the motions of the heavenly bodies constitute time.  For when the sun stood still at the prayer of a certain man in order that he might gain his victory in battle, the sun stood still but time went on.  For in as long a span of time as was sufficient the battle was fought and ended.[442]

　　I see, then, that time is a certain kind of extension.  But do I see it, or do I only seem to?  Thou, O Light and Truth, wilt show me.

　　CHAPTER XXIV

　　31.  Dost thou command that I should agree if anyone says that time is "the motion of a body"?  Thou dost not so command.

　　For I hear that no body is moved but in time; this thou tellest me.  But that the motion of a body itself is time I do not hear;

　　thou dost not say so.  For when a body is moved, I measure by time how long it was moving from the time when it began to be moved until it stopped.  And if I did not see when it began to be moved, and if it continued to move so that I could not see when it stopped, I could not measure the movement, except from the time when I began to see it until I stopped.  But if I look at it for a long time, I can affirm only that the time is long but not how long it may be.  This is because when we say, "How long?", we are speaking comparatively as: "This is as long as that," or, "This is twice as long as that"; or other such similar ratios.  But if we were able to observe the point in space where and from which the body, which is moved, comes and the point to which it is moved; or if we can observe its parts moving as in a wheel, we can say how long the movement of the body took or the movement of its parts from this place to that.  Since, therefore, the motion of a body is one thing, and the norm by which we measure how long it takes is another thing, we cannot see which of these two is to be called time.  For, although a body is sometimes moved and sometimes stands still, we measure not only its motion but also its rest as well; and both by time!  Thus we say, "It stood still as long as it moved," or, "It stood still twice or three times as long as it moved" -- or any other ratio which our measuring has either determined or imagined, either roughly or precisely, according to our custom.  Therefore, time is not the motion of a body.

　　CHAPTER XXV

　　32.  And I confess to thee, O Lord, that I am still ignorant as to what time is.  And again I confess to thee, O Lord, that I

　　know that I am speaking all these things in time, and that I have already spoken of time a long time, and that "very long" is not long except when measured by the duration of time.  How, then, do I know this, when I do not know what time is?  Or, is it possible that I do not know how I can express what I do know?  Alas for me!

　　I do not even know the extent of my own ignorance.  Behold, O my God, in thy presence I do not lie.  As my heart is, so I speak.

　　Thou shalt light my candle; thou, O Lord my God, wilt enlighten my darkness.[443]

　　CHAPTER XXVI

　　33.  Does not my soul most truly confess to thee that I do measure intervals of time?  But what is it that I thus measure, O

　　my God, and how is it that I do not know what I measure?  I

　　measure the motion of a body by time, but the time itself I do not measure.  But, truly, could I measure the motion of a body -- how long it takes, how long it is in motion from this place to that --

　　unless I could measure the time in which it is moving?

　　How, then, do I measure this time itself?  Do we measure a longer time by a shorter time, as we measure the length of a crossbeam in terms of cubits?[444]  Thus, we can say that the length of a long syllable is measured by the length of a short syllable and thus say that the long syllable is double.  So also we measure the length of poems by the length of the lines, and the length of the line by the length of the feet, and the length of the feet by the length of the syllable, and the length of the long syllables by the length of the short ones.  We do not measure by pages -- for in that way we would measure space rather than time -- but when we speak the words as they pass by we say: "It is a long stanza, because it is made up of so many verses; they are long verses because they consist of so many feet; they are long feet because they extend over so many syllables; this is a long syllable because it is twice the length of a short one."

　　But no certain measure of time is obtained this way; since it is possible that if a shorter verse is pronounced slowly, it may take up more time than a longer one if it is pronounced hurriedly.

　　The same would hold for a stanza, or a foot, or a syllable.  From this it appears to me that time is nothing other than extendedness;[445] but extendedness of what I do not know.  This is a marvel to me.  The extendedness may be of the mind itself.

　　For what is it I measure, I ask thee, O my God, when I say either, roughly, "This time is longer than that," or, more precisely, "This is _twice_ as long as that." I know that I am measuring time.  But I am not measuring the future, for it is not yet; and I

　　am not measuring the present because it is extended by no length;

　　and I am not measuring the past because it no longer is.  What is it, therefore, that I am measuring?  Is it time in its passage, but not time past [praetereuntia tempora, non praeterita]?  This is what I have been saying.

　　CHAPTER XXVII

　　34.  Press on, O my mind, and attend with all your power.

　　God is our Helper: "it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves."[446]  Give heed where the truth begins to dawn.[447]

　　Suppose now that a bodily voice begins to sound, and continues to sound -- on and on -- and then ceases.  Now there is silence.  The voice is past, and there is no longer a sound.  It was future before it sounded, and could not be measured because it was not yet; and now it cannot be measured because it is no longer.

　　Therefore, while it was sounding, it might have been measured because then there was something that could be measured.  But even then it did not stand still, for it was in motion and was passing away.  Could it, on that account, be any more readily measured?

　　For while it was passing away, it was being extended into some interval of time in which it might be measured, since the present has no length.  Supposing, though, that it might have been measured -- then also suppose that another voice had begun to sound and is still sounding without any interruption to break its continued flow.  We can measure it only while it is sounding, for when it has ceased to sound it will be already past and there will not be anything there that can be measured.  Let us measure it exactly; and let us say how much it is.  But while it is sounding, it cannot be measured except from the instant when it began to sound, down to the final moment when it left off.  For we measure the time interval itself from some beginning point to some end.

　　This is why a voice that has not yet ended cannot be measured, so that one could say how long or how briefly it will continue.  Nor can it be said to be equal to another voice or single or double in comparison to it or anything like this.  But when it is ended, it is no longer.  How, therefore, may it be measured?  And yet we measure times; not those which are not yet, nor those which no longer are, nor those which are stretched out by some delay, nor those which have no limit.  Therefore, we measure neither times future nor times past, nor times present, nor times passing by;

　　and yet we do measure times.

　　35.  Deus Creator omnium[448]: this verse of eight syllables alternates between short and long syllables.  The four short ones -- that is, the first, third, fifth, and seventh -- are single in relation to the four long ones -- that is, the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth.  Each of the long ones is double the length of each of the short ones.  I affirm this and report it, and common sense perceives that this indeed is the case.  By common sense, then, I measure a long syllable by a short one, and I find that it is twice as long.  But when one sounds after another, if the first be short and the latter long, how can I hold the short one and how can I apply it to the long one as a measure, so that I can discover that the long one is twice as long, when, in fact, the long one does not begin to sound until the short one leaves off sounding?  That same long syllable I do not measure as present, since I cannot measure it until it is ended; but its ending is its passing away.

　　What is it, then, that I can measure?  Where is the short syllable by which I measure?  Where is the long one that I am measuring?  Both have sounded, have flown away, have passed on, and are no longer.  And still I measure, and I confidently answer -- as far as a trained ear can be trusted -- that this syllable is single and that syllable double.  And I could not do this unless they both had passed and were ended.  Therefore I do not measure them, for they do not exist any more.  But I measure something in my memory which remains fixed.

　　36.  It is in you, O mind of mine, that I measure the periods of time.  Do not shout me down that it exists [objectively]; do not overwhelm yourself with the turbulent flood of your impressions.  In you, as I have said, I measure the periods of time.  I measure as time present the impression that things make on you as they pass by and what remains after they have passed by -- I do not measure the things themselves which have passed by and left their impression on you.  This is what I measure when I

　　measure periods of time.  Either, then, these are the periods of time or else I do not measure time at all.

　　What are we doing when we measure silence, and say that this silence has lasted as long as that voice lasts?  Do we not project our thought to the measure of a sound, as if it were then sounding, so that we can say something concerning the intervals of silence in a given span of time?  For, even when both the voice and the tongue are still, we review -- in thought -- poems and verses, and discourse of various kinds or various measures of motions, and we specify their time spans -- how long this is in relation to that -- just as if we were speaking them aloud.  If anyone wishes to utter a prolonged sound, and if, in forethought, he has decided how long it should be, that man has already in silence gone through a span of time, and committed his sound to memory.  Thus he begins to speak and his voice sounds until it reaches the predetermined end.  It has truly sounded and will go on sounding.  But what is already finished has already sounded and what remains will still sound.  Thus it passes on, until the present intention carries the future over into the past.  The past increases by the diminution of the future until by the consumption of all the future all is past.[449]

　　CHAPTER XXVIII

　　37.  But how is the future diminished or consumed when it does not yet exist?  Or how does the past, which exists no longer, increase, unless it is that in the mind in which all this happens there are three functions?  For the mind expects, it attends, and it remembers; so that what it expects passes into what it remembers by way of what it attends to.  Who denies that future things do not exist as yet?  But still there is already in the mind the expectation of things still future.  And who denies that past things now exist no longer?  Still there is in the mind the memory of things past.  Who denies that time present has no length, since it passes away in a moment?  Yet, our attention has a continuity and it is through this that what is present may proceed to become absent.  Therefore, future time, which is nonexistent, is not long; but "a long future" is "a long expectation of the future." Nor is time past, which is now no longer, long; a "long past" is "a long memory of the past."

　　38.  I am about to repeat a psalm that I know.  Before I

　　begin, my attention encompasses the whole, but once I have begun, as much of it as becomes past while I speak is still stretched out in my memory.  The span of my action is divided between my memory, which contains what I have repeated, and my expectation, which contains what I am about to repeat.  Yet my attention is continually present with me, and through it what was future is carried over so that it becomes past.  The more this is done and repeated, the more the memory is enlarged -- and expectation is shortened -- until the whole expectation is exhausted.  Then the whole action is ended and passed into memory.  And what takes place in the entire psalm takes place also in each individual part of it and in each individual syllable.  This also holds in the even longer action of which that psalm is only a portion.  The same holds in the whole life of man, of which all the actions of men are parts.  The same holds in the whole age of the sons of men, of which all the lives of men are parts.

　　CHAPTER XXIX

　　39.  But "since thy loving-kindness is better than life itself,"[450] observe how my life is but a stretching out, and how thy right hand has upheld me in my Lord, the Son of Man, the Mediator between thee, the One, and us, the many -- in so many ways and by so many means.  Thus through him I may lay hold upon him in whom I am also laid hold upon; and I may be gathered up from my old way of life to follow that One and to forget that which is behind, no longer stretched out but now pulled together again -- stretching forth not to what shall be and shall pass away but to those things that _are_ before me.  Not distractedly now, but intently, I follow on for the prize of my heavenly calling,[451] where I may hear the sound of thy praise and contemplate thy delights, which neither come to be nor pass away.

　　But now my years are spent in mourning.[452]  And thou, O

　　Lord, art my comfort, my eternal Father.  But I have been torn between the times, the order of which I do not know, and my thoughts, even the inmost and deepest places of my soul, are mangled by various commotions until I shall flow together into thee, purged and molten in the fire of thy love.

　　CHAPTER XXX

　　40.  And I will be immovable and fixed in thee, and thy truth will be my mold.  And I shall not have to endure the questions of those men who, as if in a morbid disease, thirst for more than they can hold and say, "What did God make before he made heaven and earth?"  or, "How did it come into his mind to make something when he had never before made anything?"  Grant them, O Lord, to consider well what they are saying; and grant them to see that where there is no time they cannot say "never." When, therefore, he is said "never to have made" something -- what is this but to say that it was made in no time at all?  Let them therefore see that there could be no time without a created world, and let them cease to speak vanity of this kind.  Let them also be stretched out to those things which are before them, and understand that thou, the eternal Creator of all times, art before all times and that no times are coeternal with thee; nor is any creature, even if there is a creature "above time."

　　CHAPTER XXXI

　　41.  O Lord my God, what a chasm there is in thy deep secret!

　　How far short of it have the consequences of my sins cast me?

　　Heal my eyes, that I may enjoy thy light.  Surely, if there is a mind that so greatly abounds in knowledge and foreknowledge, to which all things past and future are as well known as one psalm is well known to me, that mind would be an exceeding marvel and altogether astonishing.  For whatever is past and whatever is yet to come would be no more concealed from him than the past and future of that psalm were hidden from me when I was chanting it:

　　how much of it had been sung from the beginning and what and how much still remained till the end.  But far be it from thee, O

　　Creator of the universe, and Creator of our souls and bodies --

　　far be it from thee that thou shouldst merely know all things past and future.  Far, far more wonderfully, and far more mysteriously thou knowest them.  For it is not as the feelings of one singing familiar songs, or hearing a familiar song in which, because of his expectation of words still to come and his remembrance of those that are past, his feelings are varied and his senses are divided.  This is not the way that anything happens to thee, who art unchangeably eternal, that is, the truly eternal Creator of minds.  As in the beginning thou knewest both the heaven and the earth without any change in thy knowledge, so thou didst make heaven and earth in their beginnings without any division in thy action.[453]  Let him who understands this confess to thee; and let him who does not understand also confess to thee!  Oh, exalted as thou art, still the humble in heart are thy dwelling place!

　　For thou liftest them who are cast down and they fall not for whom thou art the Most High.[454]

　　BOOK TWELVE

　　The mode of creation and the truth of Scripture.  Augustine explores the relation of the visible and formed matter of heaven and earth to the prior matrix from which it was formed.  This leads to an intricate analysis of "unformed matter" and the primal "possibility" from which God created, itself created  de nihilo.

　　He finds a reference to this in the misconstrued Scriptural phrase "the heaven of heavens." Realizing that his interpretation of Gen.

　　1:1, 2, is not self-evidently the only possibility, Augustine turns to an elaborate discussion of the multiplicity of perspectives in hermeneutics and, in the course of this, reviews the various possibilities of true interpretation of his Scripture text.  He emphasizes the importance of tolerance where there are plural options, and confidence where basic Christian faith is concerned.

　　CHAPTER I

　　1.  My heart is deeply stirred, O Lord, when in this poor life of mine the words of thy Holy Scripture strike upon it.  This is why the poverty of the human intellect expresses itself in an abundance of language.  Inquiry is more loquacious than discovery.

　　Demanding takes longer than obtaining; and the hand that knocks is more active than the hand that receives.  But we have the promise, and who shall break it?  "If God be for us, who can be against us?"[455]  "Ask, and you shall receive; seek, and you shall find;

　　knock, and it shall be opened unto you; for everyone that asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him that knocks, it shall be opened."[456]  These are thy own promises, and who need fear to be deceived when truth promises?

　　CHAPTER II

　　2.  In lowliness my tongue confesses to thy exaltation, for thou madest heaven and earth.  This heaven which I see, and this earth on which I walk -- from which came this "earth" that I carry about me -- thou didst make.

　　But where is that heaven of heavens, O Lord, of which we hear in the words of the psalm, "The heaven of heavens is the Lord's, but the earth he hath given to the children of men"?[457]  Where is the heaven that we cannot see, in relation to which all that we can see is earth?  For this whole corporeal creation has been beautifully formed -- though not everywhere in its entirety -- and our earth is the lowest of these levels.  Still, compared with that heaven of heavens, even the heaven of our own earth is only earth.  Indeed, it is not absurd to call each of those two great bodies[458] "earth" in comparison with that ineffable heaven which is the Lord's, and not for the sons of men.

　　CHAPTER III

　　3.  And truly this earth was invisible and unformed,[459] and there was an inexpressibly profound abyss[460] above which there was no light since it had no form.  Thou didst command it written that "darkness was on the face of the deep."[461]  What else is darkness except the absence of light?  For if there had been light, where would it have been except by being over all, showing itself rising aloft and giving light?  Therefore, where there was no light as yet, why was it that darkness was present, unless it was that light was absent?  Darkness, then, was heavy upon it, because the light from above was absent; just as there is silence where there is no sound.  And what is it to have silence anywhere but simply not to have sound?  Hast thou not, O Lord, taught this soul which confesses to thee?  Hast thou not thus taught me, O

　　Lord, that before thou didst form and separate this formless matter there was _nothing_: neither color, nor figure, nor body, nor spirit?  Yet it was not absolutely nothing; it was a certain formlessness without any shape.

　　CHAPTER IV

　　4.  What, then, should that formlessness be called so that somehow it might be indicated to those of sluggish mind, unless we use some word in common speech?  But what can be found anywhere in the world nearer to a total formlessness than the earth and the abyss?  Because of their being on the lowest level, they are less beautiful than are the other and higher parts, all translucent and shining.  Therefore, why may I not consider the formlessness of matter -- which thou didst create without shapely form, from which to make this shapely world -- as fittingly indicated to men by the phrase, "The earth invisible and unformed"?

　　CHAPTER V

　　5.  When our thought seeks something for our sense to fasten to [in this concept of unformed matter], and when it says to itself, "It is not an intelligible form, such as life or justice, since it is the material for bodies; and it is not a former perception, for there is nothing in the invisible and unformed which can be seen and felt" -- while human thought says such things to itself, it may be attempting either to know by being ignorant or by knowing how not to know.

　　CHAPTER VI

　　6.  But if, O Lord, I am to confess to thee, by my mouth and my pen, the whole of what thou hast taught me concerning this unformed matter, I must say first of all that when I first heard of such matter and did not understand it -- and those who told me of it could not understand it either -- I conceived of it as having countless and varied forms.  Thus, I did not think about it rightly.  My mind in its agitation used to turn up all sorts of foul and horrible "forms"; but still they were "forms." And still I called it formless, not because it was unformed, but because it had what seemed to me a kind of form that my mind turned away from, as bizarre and incongruous, before which my human weakness was confused.  And even what I did conceive of as unformed was so, not because it was deprived of all form, but only as it compared with more beautiful forms.  Right reason, then, persuaded me that I ought to remove altogether all vestiges of form whatever if I

　　wished to conceive matter that was wholly unformed; and this I

　　could not do.  For I could more readily imagine that what was deprived of all form simply did not exist than I could conceive of anything between form and nothing -- something which was neither formed nor nothing, something that was unformed and nearly nothing.

　　Thus my mind ceased to question my spirit -- filled as it was with the images of formed bodies, changing and varying them according to its will.  And so I applied myself to the bodies themselves and looked more deeply into their mutability, by which they cease to be what they had been and begin to be what they were not.  This transition from form to form I had regarded as involving something like a formless condition, though not actual nothingness.[462]

　　But I desired to know, not to guess.  And, if my voice and my pen were to confess to thee all the various knots thou hast untied for me about this question, who among my readers could endure to grasp the whole of the account?  Still, despite this, my heart will not cease to give honor to thee or to sing thy praises concerning those things which it is not able to express.[463]

　　For the mutability of mutable things carries with it the possibility of all those forms into which mutable things can be changed.  But this mutability -- what is it?  Is it soul?  Is it body?  Is it the external appearance of soul or body?  Could it be said, "Nothing was something," and "That which is, is not"?  If this were possible, I would say that this was it, and in some such manner it must have been in order to receive these visible and composite forms.[464]

　　CHAPTER VII

　　7.  Whence and how was this, unless it came from thee, from whom all things are, in so far as they are?  But the farther something is from thee, the more unlike thee it is -- and this is not a matter of distance or place.

　　Thus it was that thou, O Lord, who art not one thing in one place and another thing in another place but the Selfsame, and the Selfsame, and the Selfsame -- "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty"[465] -- thus it was that in the beginning, and through thy Wisdom which is from thee and born of thy substance, thou didst create something and that out of nothing.[466]  For thou didst create the heaven and the earth -- not out of thyself, for then they would be equal to thy only Son and thereby to thee.  And there is no sense in which it would be right that anything should be equal to thee that was not of thee.  But what else besides thee was there out of which thou mightest create these things, O God, one Trinity, and trine Unity?[467]  And, therefore, it was out of nothing at all that thou didst create the heaven and earth --

　　something great and something small -- for thou art Almighty and Good, and able to make all things good: even the great heaven and the small earth.  Thou wast, and there was nothing else from which thou didst create heaven and earth: these two things, one near thee, the other near to nothing; the one to which only thou art superior, the other to which nothing else is inferior.

　　CHAPTER VIII

　　8.  That heaven of heavens was thine, O Lord, but the earth which thou didst give to the sons of men to be seen and touched was not then in the same form as that in which we now see it and touch it.  For then it was invisible and unformed and there was an abyss over which there was no light.  The darkness was truly _over_ the abyss, that is, more than just _in_ the abyss.  For this abyss of waters which now is visible has even in its depths a certain light appropriate to its nature, perceptible in some fashion to fishes and the things that creep about on the bottom of it.  But then the entire abyss was almost nothing, since it was still altogether unformed.  Yet even there, there was something that had the possibility of being formed.  For thou, O Lord, hadst made the world out of unformed matter, and this thou didst make out of nothing and didst make it into almost nothing.  From it thou hast then made these great things which we, the sons of men, marvel at.  For this corporeal heaven is truly marvelous, this firmament between the water and the waters which thou didst make on the second day after the creation of light, saying, "Let it be done," and it was done.[468]  This firmament thou didst call heaven, that is, the heaven of this earth and sea which thou madest on the third day, giving a visible shape to the unformed matter which thou hadst made before all the days.  For even before any day thou hadst already made a heaven, but that was the heaven of this heaven: for in the beginning thou hadst made heaven and earth.

　　But this earth itself which thou hadst made was unformed matter; it was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss.  Out of this invisible and unformed earth, out of this formlessness which is almost nothing, thou didst then make all these things of which the changeable world consists -- and yet does not fully consist in itself[469] -- for its very changeableness appears in this, that its times and seasons can be observed and numbered.  The periods of time are measured by the changes of things, while the forms, whose matter is the invisible earth of which we have spoken, are varied and altered.

　　CHAPTER IX

　　9.  And therefore the Spirit, the Teacher of thy servant,[470] when he mentions that "in the beginning thou madest heaven and earth," says nothing about times and is silent as to the days.  For, clearly, that heaven of heavens which thou didst create in the beginning is in some way an intellectual creature, although in no way coeternal with thee, O Trinity.  Yet it is nonetheless a partaker in thy eternity.  Because of the sweetness of its most happy contemplation of thee, it is greatly restrained in its own mutability and cleaves to thee without any lapse from the time in which it was created, surpassing all the rolling change of time.  But this shapelessness -- this earth invisible and unformed -- was not numbered among the days itself.  For where there is no shape or order there is nothing that either comes or goes, and where this does not occur there certainly are no days, nor any vicissitude of duration.

　　CHAPTER X

　　10.  O Truth, O Light of my heart, let not my own darkness speak to me!  I had fallen into that darkness and was darkened thereby.  But in it, even in its depths, I came to love thee.  I

　　went astray and still I remembered thee.  I heard thy voice behind me, bidding me return, though I could scarcely hear it for the tumults of my boisterous passions.  And now, behold, I am returning, burning and thirsting after thy fountain.  Let no one hinder me; here will I drink and so have life.  Let me not be my own life; for of myself I have lived badly.  I was death to myself; in thee I have revived.  Speak to me; converse with me.  I

　　have believed thy books, and their words are very deep.

　　CHAPTER XI

　　11.  Thou hast told me already, O Lord, with a strong voice in my inner ear, that thou art eternal and alone hast immortality.

　　Thou art not changed by any shape or motion, and thy will is not altered by temporal process, because no will that changes is immortal.  This is clear to me, in thy sight; let it become clearer and clearer, I beseech thee.  In that light let me abide soberly under thy wings.

　　Thou hast also told me, O Lord, with a strong voice in my inner ear, that thou hast created all natures and all substances, which are not what thou art thyself; and yet they do exist.  Only that which is nothing at all is not from thee, and that motion of the will away from thee, who art, toward something that exists only in a lesser degree -- such a motion is an offense and a sin.

　　No one's sin either hurts thee or disturbs the order of thy rule, either first or last.  All this, in thy sight, is clear to me.

　　Let it become clearer and clearer, I beseech thee, and in that light let me abide soberly under thy wings.

　　12.  Likewise, thou hast told me, with a strong voice in my inner ear, that this creation -- whose delight thou alone art --

　　is not coeternal with thee.  With a most persevering purity it draws its support from thee and nowhere and never betrays its own mutability, for thou art ever present with it; and it cleaves to thee with its entire affection, having no future to expect and no past that it remembers; it is varied by no change and is extended by no time.

　　O blessed one -- if such there be -- clinging to thy blessedness!  It is blest in thee, its everlasting Inhabitant and its Light.  I cannot find a term that I would judge more fitting for "the heaven of the heavens of the Lord" than "Thy house" --

　　which contemplates thy delights without any declination toward anything else and which, with a pure mind in most harmonious stability, joins all together in the peace of those saintly spirits who are citizens of thy city in those heavens that are above this visible heaven.

　　13.  From this let the soul that has wandered far away from thee understand -- if now it thirsts for thee; if now its tears have become its bread, while daily they say to it, "Where is your God?"[471]; if now it requests of thee just one thing and seeks after this: that it may dwell in thy house all the days of its life (and what is its life but thee?  And what are thy days but thy eternity, like thy years which do not fail, since thou art the Selfsame?) -- from this, I say, let the soul understand (as far as it can) how far above all times thou art in thy eternity; and how thy house has never wandered away from thee; and, although it is not coeternal with thee, it continually and unfailingly clings to thee and suffers no vicissitudes of time.  This, in thy sight, is clear to me; may it become clearer and clearer to me, I beseech thee, and in this light may I abide soberly under thy wings.

　　14.  Now I do not know what kind of formlessness there is in these mutations of these last and lowest creatures.  Yet who will tell me, unless it is someone who, in the emptiness of his own heart, wanders about and begins to be dizzy in his own fancies?

　　Who except such a one would tell me whether, if all form were diminished and consumed, formlessness alone would remain, through which a thing was changed and turned from one species into another, so that sheer formlessness would then be characterized by temporal change?  And surely this could not be, because without motion there is no time, and where there is no form there is no change.

　　CHAPTER XII

　　15.  These things I have considered as thou hast given me ability, O my God, as thou hast excited me to knock, and as thou hast opened to me when I knock.  Two things I find which thou hast made, not within intervals of time, although neither is coeternal with thee.  One of them is so formed that, without any wavering in its contemplation, without any interval of change -- mutable but not changed -- it may fully enjoy thy eternity and immutability.

　　The other is so formless that it could not change from one form to another (either of motion or of rest), and so time has no hold upon it.  But thou didst not leave this formless, for, before any "day" in the beginning, thou didst create heaven and earth --

　　these are the two things of which I spoke.

　　But "the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss." By these words its formlessness is indicated to us -- so that by degrees they may be led forward who cannot wholly conceive of the privation of all form without arriving at nothing.

　　From this formlessness a second heaven might be created and a second earth -- visible and well formed, with the ordered beauty of the waters, and whatever else is recorded as created (though not without days) in the formation of this world.  And all this because such things are so ordered that in them the changes of time may take place through the ordered processes of motion and form.

　　CHAPTER XIII

　　16.  Meanwhile this is what I understand, O my God, when I

　　hear thy Scripture saying, "In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth, but the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss." It does not say on what day thou didst create these things.  Thus, for the time being I understand that "heaven of heavens" to mean the intelligible heaven, where to understand is to know all at once -- not "in part," not "darkly,"

　　not "through a glass" -- but as a simultaneous whole, in full sight, "face to face."[472]  It is not this thing now and then another thing, but (as we said) knowledge all at once without any temporal change.  And by the invisible and unformed earth, I

　　understand that which suffers no temporal vicissitude.  Temporal change customarily means having one thing now and another later;

　　but where there is no form there can be no distinction between this or that.  It is, then, by means of these two -- one thing well formed in the beginning and another thing wholly unformed, the one heaven (that is, the heaven of heavens) and the other one earth (but the earth invisible and unformed) -- it is by means of these two notions that I am able to understand why thy Scripture said, without mention of days, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." For it immediately indicated which earth it was speaking about.  When, on the second day, the firmament is recorded as having been created and called heaven, this suggests to us which heaven it was that he was speaking about earlier, without specifying a day.

　　CHAPTER XIV

　　17.  Marvelous is the depth of thy oracles.  Their surface is before us, inviting the little ones; and yet wonderful is their depth, O my God, marvelous is their depth!  It is a fearful thing to look into them: an awe of honor and a tremor of love.  Their enemies I hate vehemently.  Oh, if thou wouldst slay them with thy two-edged sword, so that they should not be enemies!  For I would prefer that they should be slain to themselves, that they might live to thee.  But see, there are others who are not critics but praisers of the book of Genesis; they say: "The Spirit of God who wrote these things by his servant Moses did not wish these words to be understood like this.  He did not wish to have it understood as you say, but as we say." To them, O God of us all, thyself being the judge, I give answer.

　　CHAPTER XV

　　18.  "Will you say that these things are false which Truth tells me, with a loud voice in my inner ear, about the very eternity of the Creator: that his essence is changed in no respect by time and that his will is not distinct from his essence?  Thus, he doth not will one thing now and another thing later, but he willeth once and for all everything that he willeth -- not again and again; and not now this and now that.  Nor does he will afterward what he did not will before, nor does he cease to will what he had willed before.  Such a will would be mutable and no mutable thing is eternal.  But our God is eternal.

　　"Again, he tells me in my inner ear that the expectation of future things is turned to sight when they have come to pass.  And this same sight is turned into memory when they have passed.

　　Moreover, all thought that varies thus is mutable, and nothing mutable is eternal.  But our God is eternal." These things I sum up and put together, and I conclude that my God, the eternal God, hath not made any creature by any new will, and his knowledge does not admit anything transitory.

　　19.  "What, then, will you say to this, you objectors?  Are these things false?"  "No," they say.  "What then?  Is it false that every entity already formed and all matter capable of receiving form is from him alone who is supremely good, because he is supreme?"  "We do not deny this, either," they say.  "What then?  Do you deny this: that there is a certain sublime created order which cleaves with such a chaste love to the true and truly eternal God that, although it is not coeternal with him, yet it does not separate itself from him, and does not flow away into any mutation of change or process but abides in true contemplation of him alone?"  If thou, O God, dost show thyself to him who loves thee as thou hast commanded -- and art sufficient for him -- then, such a one will neither turn himself away from thee nor turn away toward himself.  This is "the house of God." It is not an earthly house and it is not made from any celestial matter; but it is a spiritual house, and it partakes in thy eternity because it is without blemish forever.  For thou hast made it steadfast forever and ever; thou hast given it a law which will not be removed.

　　Still, it is not coeternal with thee, O God, since it is not without beginning -- it was created.

　　20.  For, although we can find no time before it (for wisdom was created before all things),[473] this is certainly not that Wisdom which is absolutely coeternal and equal with thee, our God, its Father, the Wisdom through whom all things were created and in whom, in the beginning, thou didst create the heaven and earth.

　　This is truly the created Wisdom, namely, the intelligible nature which, in its contemplation of light, is light.  For this is also called wisdom, even if it is a created wisdom.  But the difference between the Light that lightens and that which is enlightened is as great as is the difference between the Wisdom that creates and that which is created.  So also is the difference between the Righteousness that justifies and the righteousness that is made by justification.  For we also are called thy righteousness, for a certain servant of thine says, "That we might be made the righteousness of God in him."[474]  Therefore, there is a certain created wisdom that was created before all things: the rational and intelligible mind of that chaste city of thine.  It is our mother which is above and is free[475] and "eternal in the heavens"[476] -- but in what heavens except those which praise thee, the "heaven of heavens"?  This also is the "heaven of heavens" which is the Lord's -- although we find no time before it, since what has been created before all things also precedes the creation of time.  Still, the eternity of the Creator himself is before it, from whom it took its beginning as created, though not in time (since time as yet was not), even though time belongs to its created nature.

　　21.  Thus it is that the intelligible heaven came to be from thee, our God, but in such a way that it is quite another being than thou art; it is not the Selfsame.  Yet we find that time is not only not _before_ it, but not even _in_ it, thus making it able to behold thy face forever and not ever be turned aside.

　　Thus, it is varied by no change at all.  But there is still in it that mutability in virtue of which it could become dark and cold, if it did not, by cleaving to thee with a supernal love, shine and glow from thee like a perpetual noon.  O house full of light and splendor!  "I have loved your beauty and the place of the habitation of the glory of my Lord,"[477] your builder and possessor.  In my wandering let me sigh for you; this I ask of him who made you, that he should also possess me in you, seeing that he hath also made me.  "I have gone astray like a lost sheep[478];

　　yet upon the shoulders of my Shepherd, who is your builder, I have hoped that I may be brought back to you."[479]

　　22.  "What will you say to me now, you objectors to whom I

　　spoke, who still believe that Moses was the holy servant of God, and that his books were the oracles of the Holy Spirit?  Is it not in this 'house of God' -- not coeternal with God, yet in its own mode 'eternal in the heavens' -- that you vainly seek for temporal change?  You will not find it there.  It rises above all extension and every revolving temporal period, and it rises to what is forever good and cleaves fast to God."

　　"It is so," they reply.  "What, then, about those things which my heart cried out to my God, when it heard, within, the voice of his praise?  What, then, do you contend is false in them?

　　Is it because matter was unformed, and since there was no form there was no order?  But where there was no order there could have been no temporal change.  Yet even this 'almost nothing,' since it was not altogether nothing, was truly from him from whom everything that exists is in whatever state it is." "This also,"

　　they say, "we do not deny."

　　CHAPTER XVI

　　23.  Now, I would like to discuss a little further, in thy presence, O my God, with those who admit that all these things are true that thy Truth has indicated to my mind.  Let those who deny these things bark and drown their own voices with as much clamor as they please.  I will endeavor to persuade them to be quiet and to permit thy word to reach them.  But if they are unwilling, and if they repel me, I ask of thee, O my God, that thou shouldst not be silent to me.[480]  Speak truly in my heart; if only thou wouldst speak thus, I would send them away, blowing up the dust and raising it in their own eyes.  As for myself I will enter into my closet[481] and there sing to thee the songs of love, groaning with groanings that are unutterable now in my pilgrimage,[482] and remembering Jerusalem with my heart uplifted to Jerusalem my country, Jerusalem my mother[483]; and to thee thyself, the Ruler of the source of Light, its Father, Guardian, Husband; its chaste and strong delight, its solid joy and all its goods ineffable --

　　and all of this at the same time, since thou art the one supreme and true Good!  And I will not be turned away until thou hast brought back together all that I am from this dispersion and deformity to the peace of that dearest mother, where the first fruits of my spirit are to be found and from which all these things are promised me which thou dost conform and confirm forever, O my God, my Mercy.  But as for those who do not say that all these things which are true are false, who still honor thy Scripture set before us by the holy Moses, who join us in placing it on the summit of authority for us to follow, and yet who oppose us in some particulars, I say this: "Be thou, O God, the judge between my confessions and their gainsaying."

　　CHAPTER XVII

　　24.  For they say: "Even if these things are true, still Moses did not refer to these two things when he said, by divine revelation, 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.' By the term 'heaven' he did not mean that spiritual or intelligible created order which always beholds the face of God.

　　And by the term 'earth' he was not referring to unformed matter."

　　"What then do these terms mean?"

　　They reply, "That man [Moses] meant what we mean; this is what he was saying in those terms." "What is that?"

　　"By the terms of heaven and earth," they say, "he wished first to indicate universally and briefly this whole visible world; then after this, by an enumeration of the days, he could point out, one by one, all the things that it has pleased the Holy Spirit to reveal in this way.  For the people to whom he spoke were rude and carnal, so that he judged it prudent that only those works of God which were visible should be mentioned to them."

　　But they do agree that the phrases, "The earth was invisible and unformed," and "The darkened abyss," may not inappropriately be understood to refer to this unformed matter -- and that out of this, as it is subsequently related, all the visible things which are known to all were made and set in order during those specified "days."

　　25.  But now, what if another one should say, "This same formlessness and chaos of matter was first mentioned by the name of heaven and earth because, out of it, this visible world -- with all its entities which clearly appear in it and which we are accustomed to be called by the name of heaven and earth -- was created and perfected"?  And what if still another should say:

　　"The invisible and visible nature is quite fittingly called heaven and earth.  Thus, the whole creation which God has made in his wisdom -- that is, in the beginning -- was included under these two terms.  Yet, since all things have been made, not from the essence of God, but from nothing; and because they are not the same reality that God is; and because there is in them all a certain mutability, whether they abide as the eternal house of God abides or whether they are changed as the soul and body of man are changed -- then the common matter of all things invisible and visible (still formless but capable of receiving form) from which heaven and earth were to be created (that is, the creature already fashioned, invisible as well as visible) -- all this was spoken of in the same terms by which the invisible and unformed earth and the darkness over the abyss would be called.  There was this difference, however: that the invisible and unformed earth is to be understood as having corporeal matter before it had any manner of form; but the darkness over the abyss was _spiritual_ matter, before its unlimited fluidity was harnessed, and before it was enlightened by Wisdom."

　　26.  And if anyone wished, he might also say, "The entities already perfected and formed, invisible and visible, are not signified by the terms 'heaven and earth,' when it reads, 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth'; instead, the unformed beginning of things, the matter capable of receiving form and being made was called by these terms -- because the chaos was contained in it and was not yet distinguished by qualities and forms, which have now been arranged in their own orders and are called heaven and earth: the former a spiritual creation, the latter a physical creation."

　　CHAPTER XVIII

　　27.  When all these things have been said and considered, I

　　am unwilling to contend about words, for such contention is profitable for nothing but the subverting of the hearer.[484]  But the law is profitable for edification if a man use it lawfully:

　　for the end of the law "is love out of a pure heart, and a good conscience, and faith unfeigned."[485]  And our Master knew it well, for it was on these two commandments that he hung all the Law and the Prophets.  And how would it harm me, O my God, thou Light of my eyes in secret, if while I am ardently confessing these things -- since many different things may be understood from these words, all of which may be true -- what harm would be done if I should interpret the meaning of the sacred writer differently from the way some other man interprets?  Indeed, all of us who read are trying to trace out and understand what our author wished to convey; and since we believe that he speaks truly we dare not suppose that he has spoken anything that we either know or suppose to be false.  Therefore, since every person tries to understand in the Holy Scripture what the writer understood, what harm is done if a man understands what thou, the Light of all truth-speaking minds, showest him to be true, although the author he reads did not understand this aspect of the truth even though he did understand the truth in a different meaning?[486]

　　CHAPTER XIX[487]

　　28.  For it is certainly true, O Lord, that thou didst create the heaven and the earth.  It is also true that "the beginning" is thy wisdom in which thou didst create all things.  It is likewise true that this visible world has its own great division (the heaven and the earth) and these two terms include all entities that have been made and created.  It is further true that everything mutable confronts our minds with a certain lack of form, whereby it receives form, or whereby it is capable of taking form.  It is true, yet again, that what cleaves to the changeless form so closely that even though it is mutable it is not changed is not subject to temporal process.  It is true that the formlessness which is almost nothing cannot have temporal change in it.  It is true that that from which something is made can, in a manner of speaking, be called by the same name as the thing that is made from it.  Thus that formlessness of which heaven and earth were made might be called "heaven and earth." It is true that of all things having form nothing is nearer to the unformed than the earth and the abyss.  It is true that not only every created and formed thing but also everything capable of creation and of form were created by Thee, from whom all things are.[488]  It is true, finally, that everything that is formed from what is formless was formless before it was formed.

　　CHAPTER XX

　　29.  From all these truths, which are not doubted by those to whom thou hast granted insight in such things in their inner eye and who believe unshakably that thy servant Moses spoke in the spirit of truth -- from all these truths, then, one man takes the sense of "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth"

　　to mean, "In his Word, coeternal with himself, God made both the intelligible and the tangible, the spiritual and the corporeal creation." Another takes it in a different sense, that "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" means, "In his Word, coeternal with himself, God made the universal mass of this corporeal world, with all the observable and known entities that it contains." Still another finds a different meaning, that "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" means, "In his Word, coeternal with himself, God made the unformed matter of the spiritual and corporeal creation." Another can take the sense that "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" means, "In his Word, coeternal with himself, God made the unformed matter of the physical creation, in which heaven and earth were as yet indistinguished; but now that they have come to be separated and formed, we can now perceive them both in the mighty mass of this world."[489]  Another takes still a further meaning, that "In the beginning God created heaven and earth" means, "In the very beginning of creating and working, God made that unformed matter which contained, undifferentiated, heaven and earth, from which both of them were formed, and both now stand out and are observable with all the things that are in them."

　　CHAPTER XXI

　　30.  Again, regarding the interpretation of the following words, one man selects for himself, from all the various truths, the interpretation that "the earth was invisible and unformed and darkness was over the abyss" means, "That corporeal entity which God made was as yet the formless matter of physical things without order and without light." Another takes it in a different sense, that "But the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss" means, "This totality called heaven and earth was as yet unformed and lightless matter, out of which the corporeal heaven and the corporeal earth were to be made, with all the things in them that are known to our physical senses." Another takes it still differently and says that "But the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss" means, "This totality called heaven and earth was as yet an unformed and lightless matter, from which were to be made that intelligible heaven (which is also called 'the heaven of heavens') and the earth (which refers to the whole physical entity, under which term may be included this corporeal heaven) -- that is, He made the intelligible heaven from which every invisible and visible creature would be created." He takes it in yet another sense who says that "But the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss" means, "The Scripture does not refer to that formlessness by the term 'heaven and earth'; that formlessness itself already existed.  This it called the invisible 'earth' and the unformed and lightless 'abyss,' from which -- as it had said before -- God made the heaven and the earth (namely, the spiritual and the corporeal creation)." Still another says that "But the earth was invisible and formless, and darkness was over the abyss"

　　means, "There was already an unformed matter from which, as the Scripture had already said, God made heaven and earth, namely, the entire corporeal mass of the world, divided into two very great parts, one superior, the other inferior, with all those familiar and known creatures that are in them."

　　CHAPTER XXII

　　31.  Now suppose that someone tried to argue against these last two opinions as follows: "If you will not admit that this formlessness of matter appears to be called by the term 'heaven and earth,' then there was something that God had not made out of which he did make heaven and earth.  And Scripture has not told us that God made _this_ matter, unless we understand that it is implied in the term 'heaven and earth' (or the term 'earth' alone)

　　when it is said, 'In the beginning God created the heaven and earth.' Thus, in what follows -- 'the earth was invisible and unformed' -- even though it pleased Moses thus to refer to unformed matter, yet we can only understand by it that which God himself hath made, as it stands written in the previous verse, 'God made heaven and earth.'" Those who maintain either one or the other of these two opinions which we have set out above will answer to such objections: "We do not deny at all that this unformed matter was created by God, from whom all things are, and are very good -- because we hold that what is created and endowed with form is a higher good; and we also hold that what is made capable of being created and endowed with form, though it is a lesser good, is still a good.  But the Scripture has not said specifically that God made this formlessness -- any more than it has said it specifically of many other things, such as the orders of 'cherubim' and 'seraphim' and those others of which the apostle distinctly speaks: 'thrones,' 'dominions,' 'principalities,'

　　'powers'[490] -- yet it is clear that God made all of these.  If in the phrase 'He made heaven and earth' all things are included, what are we to say about the waters upon which the Spirit of God moved?  For if they are understood as included in the term 'earth,' then how can unformed matter be meant by the term 'earth'

　　when we see the waters so beautifully formed?  Or, if it be taken thus, why, then, is it written that out of the same formlessness the firmament was made and called heaven, and yet is it not specifically written that the waters were made?  For these waters, which we perceive flowing in so beautiful a fashion, are not formless and invisible.  But if they received that beauty at the time God said of them, 'Let the waters which are under the firmament be gathered together,'[491] thus indicating that their gathering together was the same thing as their reception of form, what, then, is to be said about the waters that are _above_ the firmament?  Because if they are unformed, they do not deserve to have a seat so honorable, and yet it is not written by what specific word they were formed.  If, then, Genesis is silent about anything that God hath made, which neither sound faith nor unerring understanding doubts that God hath made, let not any sober teaching dare to say that these waters were coeternal with God because we find them mentioned in the book of Genesis and do not find it mentioned when they were created.  If Truth instructs us, why may we not interpret that unformed matter which the Scripture calls the earth -- invisible and unformed -- and the lightless abyss as having been made by God from nothing; and thus understand that they are not coeternal with him, although the narrative fails to tell us precisely when they were made?"

　　CHAPTER XXIII

　　32.  I have heard and considered these theories as well as my weak apprehension allows, and I confess my weakness to Thee, O

　　Lord, though already thou knowest it.  Thus I see that two sorts of disagreements may arise when anything is related by signs, even by trustworthy reporters.  There is one disagreement about the truth of the things involved; the other concerns the meaning of the one who reports them.  It is one thing to inquire as to what is true about the formation of the Creation.  It is another thing, however, to ask what that excellent servant of thy faith, Moses, would have wished for the reader and hearer to understand from these words.  As for the first question, let all those depart from me who imagine that Moses spoke things that are false.  But let me be united with them in thee, O Lord, and delight myself in thee with those who feed on thy truth in the bond of love.  Let us approach together the words of thy book and make diligent inquiry in them for thy meaning through the meaning of thy servant by whose pen thou hast given them to us.

　　CHAPTER XXIV

　　33.  But in the midst of so many truths which occur to the interpreters of these words (understood as they can be in different ways), which one of us can discover that single interpretation which warrants our saying confidently that Moses thought _thus_ and that in this narrative he wishes _this_ to be understood, as confidently as he would say that _this_ is true, whether Moses thought the one or the other.  For see, O my God, I

　　am thy servant, and I have vowed in this book an offering of confession to thee,[492] and I beseech thee that by thy mercy I

　　may pay my vow to thee.  Now, see, could I assert that Moses meant nothing else than _this_ [i.e., my interpretation] when he wrote, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," as confidently as I can assert that thou in thy immutable Word hast created all things, invisible and visible?  No, I cannot do this because it is not as clear to me that _this_ was in his mind when he wrote these things, as I see it to be certain in thy truth.

　　For his thoughts might be set upon the very beginning of the creation when he said, "In the beginning"; and he might have wished it understood that, in this passage, "heaven and earth"

　　refers to no formed and perfect entity, whether spiritual or corporeal, but each of them only newly begun and still formless.

　　Whichever of these possibilities has been mentioned I can see that it might have been said truly.  But which of them he did actually intend to express in these words I do not clearly see.  However, whether it was one of these or some other meaning which I have not mentioned that this great man saw in his mind when he used these words I have no doubt whatever that he saw it truly and expressed it suitably.

　　CHAPTER XXV

　　34.  Let no man fret me now by saying, "Moses did not mean what _you_ say, but what _I_ say." Now if he asks me, "How do you know that Moses meant what you deduce from his words?", I ought to respond calmly and reply as I have already done, or even more fully if he happens to be untrained.  But when he says, "Moses did not mean what _you_ say, but what _I_ say," and then does not deny what either of us says but allows that _both_ are true -- then, O

　　my God, life of the poor, in whose breast there is no contradiction, pour thy soothing balm into my heart that I may patiently bear with people who talk like this!  It is not because they are godly men and have seen in the heart of thy servant what they say, but rather they are proud men and have not considered Moses' meaning, but only love their own -- not because it is true but because it is their own.  Otherwise they could equally love another true opinion, as I love what they say when what they speak is true -- not because it is theirs but because it is true, and therefore not theirs but true.  And if they love an opinion because it is true, it becomes both theirs and mine, since it is the common property of all lovers of the truth.[493]  But I

　　neither accept nor approve of it when they contend that Moses did not mean what I say but what they say -- and this because, even if it were so, such rashness is born not of knowledge, but of impudence.  It comes not from vision but from vanity.

　　And therefore, O Lord, thy judgments should be held in awe, because thy truth is neither mine nor his nor anyone else's; but it belongs to all of us whom thou hast openly called to have it in common; and thou hast warned us not to hold on to it as our own special property, for if we do we lose it.  For if anyone arrogates to himself what thou hast bestowed on all to enjoy, and if he desires something for his own that belongs to all, he is forced away from what is common to all to what is, indeed, his very own -- that is, from truth to falsehood.  For he who tells a lie speaks of his own thought.[494]

　　35.  Hear, O God, best judge of all!  O Truth itself, hear what I say to this disputant.  Hear it, because I say it in thy presence and before my brethren who use the law rightly to the end of love.  Hear and give heed to what I shall say to him, if it pleases thee.

　　For I would return this brotherly and peaceful word to him:

　　"If we both see that what you say is true, and if we both say that what I say is true, where is it, I ask you, that we see this?

　　Certainly, I do not see it in you, and you do not see it in me, but both of us see it in the unchangeable truth itself, which is above our minds."[495]  If, then, we do not disagree about the true light of the Lord our God, why do we disagree about the thoughts of our neighbor, which we cannot see as clearly as the immutable Truth is seen?  If Moses himself had appeared to us and said, "This is what I meant," it would not be in order that we should see it but that we should believe him.  Let us not, then, "go beyond what is written and be puffed up for the one against the other."[496]  Let us, instead, "love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind, and our neighbor as ourself."[497]  Unless we believe that whatever Moses meant in these books he meant to be ordered by these two precepts of love, we shall make God a liar, if we judge of the soul of his servant in any other way than as he has taught us.  See now, how foolish it is, in the face of so great an abundance of true opinions which can be elicited from these words, rashly to affirm that Moses especially intended only one of these interpretations;

　　and then, with destructive contention, to violate love itself, on behalf of which he had said all the things we are endeavoring to explain!

　　CHAPTER XXVI

　　36.  And yet, O my God, thou exaltation of my humility and rest of my toil, who hearest my confessions and forgivest my sins, since thou commandest me to love my neighbor as myself, I cannot believe that thou gavest thy most faithful servant Moses a lesser gift than I should wish and desire for myself from thee, if I had been born in his time, and if thou hadst placed me in the position where, by the use of my heart and my tongue, those books might be produced which so long after were to profit all nations throughout the whole world -- from such a great pinnacle of authority -- and were to surmount the words of all false and proud teachings.  If I

　　had been Moses -- and we all come from the same mass,[498] and what is man that thou art mindful of him?[499] -- if I had been Moses at the time that he was, and if I had been ordered by thee to write the book of Genesis, I would surely have wished for such a power of expression and such an art of arrangement to be given me, that those who cannot as yet understand _how_ God createth would still not reject my words as surpassing their powers of understanding.  And I would have wished that those who are already able to do this would find fully contained in the laconic speech of thy servant whatever truths they had arrived at in their own thought; and if, in the light of the Truth, some other man saw some further meaning, that too would be found congruent to my words.

　　CHAPTER XXVII

　　37.  For just as a spring dammed up is more plentiful and affords a larger supply of water for more streams over wider fields than any single stream led off from the same spring over a long course -- so also is the narration of thy minister: it is intended to benefit many who are likely to discourse about it and, with an economy of language, it overflows into various streams of clear truth, from which each one may draw out for himself that particular truth which he can about these topics -- this one that truth, that one another truth, by the broader survey of various interpretations.  For some people, when they read or hear these words,[500] think that God, like some sort of man or like some sort of huge body, by some new and sudden decision, produced outside himself and at a certain distance two great bodies: one above, the other below, within which all created things were to be contained.  And when they hear, "God said, 'Let such and such be done,' and it was done," they think of words begun and ended, sounding in time and then passing away, followed by the coming into being of what was commanded.  They think of other things of the same sort which their familiarity with the world suggests to them.

　　In these people, who are still little children and whose weakness is borne up by this humble language as if on a mother's breast, their faith is built up healthfully and they come to possess and to hold as certain the conviction that God made all entities that their senses perceive all around them in such marvelous variety.  And if one despises these words as if they were trivial, and with proud weakness stretches himself beyond his fostering cradle, he will, alas, fall away wretchedly.  Have pity, O Lord God, lest those who pass by trample on the unfledged bird,[501] and send thy angel who may restore it to its nest, that it may live until it can fly.

　　CHAPTER XXVIII

　　38.  But others, to whom these words are no longer a nest but, rather, a shady thicket, spy the fruits concealed in them and fly around rejoicing and search among them and pluck them with cheerful chirpings: For when they read or hear these words, O God, they see that all times past and times future are transcended by thy eternal and stable permanence, and they see also that there is no temporal creature that is not of thy making.  By thy will, since it is the same as thy being, thou hast created all things, not by any mutation of will and not by any will that previously was nonexistent -- and not out of thyself, but in thy own likeness, thou didst make from nothing the form of all things.

　　This was an unlikeness which was capable of being formed by thy likeness through its relation to thee, the One, as each thing has been given form appropriate to its kind according to its preordained capacity.  Thus, all things were made very good, whether they remain around thee or whether, removed in time and place by various degrees, they cause or undergo the beautiful changes of natural process.

　　They see these things and they rejoice in the light of thy truth to whatever degree they can.

　　39.  Again, one of these men[502] directs his attention to the verse, "In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth,"

　　and he beholds Wisdom as the true "beginning," because it also speaks to us.  Another man directs his attention to the same words, and by "beginning" he understands simply the commencement of creation, and interprets it thus: "In the beginning he made,"

　　as if it were the same thing as to say, "At the first moment, God made . . ."  And among those who interpret "In the beginning" to mean that in thy wisdom thou hast created the heaven and earth, one believes that the matter out of which heaven and earth were to be created is what is referred to by the phrase "heaven and earth." But another believes that these entities were already formed and distinct.  Still another will understand it to refer to one formed entity -- a spiritual one, designated by the term "heaven" -- and to another unformed entity of corporeal matter, designated by the term "earth." But those who understand the phrase "heaven and earth" to mean the yet unformed matter from which the heaven and the earth were to be formed do not take it in a simple sense: one man regards it as that from which the intelligible and tangible creations are both produced; and another only as that from which the tangible, corporeal world is produced, containing in its vast bosom these visible and observable entities.  Nor are they in simple accord who believe that "heaven and earth" refers to the created things already set in order and arranged.  One believes that it refers to the invisible and visible world; another, only to the visible world, in which we admire the luminous heavens and the darkened earth and all the things that they contain.

　　CHAPTER XXIX

　　40.  But he who understands "In the beginning he made" as if it meant, "At first he made," can truly interpret the phrase "heaven and earth" as referring only to the "matter" of heaven and earth, namely, of the prior universal, which is the intelligible and corporeal creation.  For if he would try to interpret the phrase as applying to the universe already formed, it then might rightly be asked of him, "If God first made this, what then did he do afterward?"  And, after the universe, he will find nothing.

　　But then he must, however unwillingly, face the question, How is this the first if there is nothing afterward?  But when he said that God made matter first formless and then formed, he is not being absurd if he is able to discern what precedes by eternity, and what proceeds in time; what comes from choice, and what comes from origin.  In eternity, God is before all things; in the temporal process, the flower is before the fruit; in the act of choice, the fruit is before the flower; in the case of origin, sound is before the tune.  Of these four relations, the first and last that I have referred to are understood with much difficulty.

　　The second and third are very easily understood.  For it is an uncommon and lofty vision, O Lord, to behold thy eternity immutably making mutable things, and thereby standing always before them.  Whose mind is acute enough to be able, without great labor, to discover how the sound comes before the tune?  For a tune is a formed sound; and an unformed thing may exist, but a thing that does not exist cannot be formed.  In the same way, matter is prior to what is made from it.  It is not prior because it makes its product, for it is itself made; and its priority is not that of a time interval.  For in time we do not first utter formless sounds without singing and then adapt or fashion them into the form of a song, as wood or silver from which a chest or vessel is made.  Such materials precede in time the forms of the things which are made from them.  But in singing this is not so.

　　For when a song is sung, its sound is heard at the same time.

　　There is not first a formless sound, which afterward is formed into a song; but just as soon as it has sounded it passes away, and you cannot find anything of it which you could gather up and shape.  Therefore, the song is absorbed in its own sound and the "sound" of the song is its "matter." But the sound is formed in order that it may be a tune.  This is why, as I was saying, the matter of the sound is prior to the form of the tune.  It is not "before" in the sense that it has any power of making a sound or tune.  Nor is the sound itself the composer of the tune; rather, the sound is sent forth from the body and is ordered by the soul of the singer, so that from it he may form a tune.  Nor is the sound first in time, for it is given forth together with the tune.

　　Nor is it first in choice, because a sound is no better than a tune, since a tune is not merely a sound but a beautiful sound.

　　But it is first in origin, because the tune is not formed in order that it may become a sound, but the sound is formed in order that it may become a tune.

　　From this example, let him who is able to understand see that the matter of things was first made and was called "heaven and earth" because out of it the heaven and earth were made.  This primal formlessness was not made first in time, because the form of things gives rise to time; but now, in time, it is intuited together with its form.  And yet nothing can be related of this unformed matter unless it is regarded as if it were the first in the time series though the last in value -- because things formed are certainly superior to things unformed -- and it is preceded by the eternity of the Creator, so that from nothing there might be made that from which something might be made.

　　CHAPTER XXX

　　41.  In this discord of true opinions let Truth itself bring concord, and may our God have mercy on us all, that we may use the law rightly to the end of the commandment which is pure love.

　　Thus, if anyone asks me which of these opinions was the meaning of thy servant Moses, these would not be my confessions did I not confess to thee that I do not know.  Yet I do know that those opinions are true -- with the exception of the carnal ones --

　　about which I have said what I thought was proper.  Yet those little ones of good hope are not frightened by these words of thy Book, for they speak of high things in a lowly way and of a few basic things in many varied ways.  But let all of us, whom I

　　acknowledge to see and speak the truth in these words, love one another and also love thee, our God, O Fountain of Truth -- as we will if we thirst not after vanity but for the Fountain of Truth.

　　Indeed, let us so honor this servant of thine, the dispenser of this Scripture, full of thy Spirit, so that we will believe that when thou didst reveal thyself to him, and he wrote these things down, he intended through them what will chiefly minister both for the light of truth and to the increase of our fruitfulness.

　　CHAPTER XXXI

　　42.  Thus, when one man says, "Moses meant what I mean," and another says, "No, he meant what I do," I think that I speak more faithfully when I say, "Why could he not have meant both if both opinions are true?"  And if there should be still a third truth or a fourth one, and if anyone should seek a truth quite different in those words, why would it not be right to believe that Moses saw all these different truths, since through him the one God has tempered the Holy Scriptures to the understanding of many different people, who should see truths in it even if they are different?  Certainly -- and I say this fearlessly and from my heart -- if I were to write anything on such a supreme authority, I would prefer to write it so that, whatever of truth anyone might apprehend from the matter under discussion, my words should re-

　　echo in the several minds rather than that they should set down one true opinion so clearly on one point that I should exclude the rest, even though they contained no falsehood that offended me.

　　Therefore, I am unwilling, O my God, to be so headstrong as not to believe that this man [Moses] has received at least this much from thee.  Surely when he was writing these words, he saw fully and understood all the truth we have been able to find in them, and also much besides that we have not been able to discern, or are not yet able to find out, though it is there in them still to be found.

　　CHAPTER XXXII

　　43.  Finally, O Lord -- who art God and not flesh and blood -- if any man sees anything less, can anything lie hid from "thy good Spirit" who shall "lead me into the land of uprightness,"[503] which thou thyself, through those words, wast revealing to future readers, even though he through whom they were spoken fixed on only one among the many interpretations that might have been found?  And if this is so, let it be agreed that the meaning he saw is more exalted than the others.  But to us, O

　　Lord, either point out the same meaning or any other true one, as it pleases thee.  Thus, whether thou makest known to us what thou madest known to that man of thine, or some other meaning by the agency of the same words, still do thou feed us and let error not deceive us.  Behold, O Lord, my God, how much we have written concerning these few words -- how much, indeed!  What strength of mind, what length of time, would suffice for all thy books to be interpreted in this fashion?[504]  Allow me, therefore, in these concluding words to confess more briefly to thee and select some one, true, certain, and good sense that thou shalt inspire, although many meanings offer themselves and many indeed are possible.[505]  This is the faith of my confession, that if I

　　could say what thy servant meant, that is truest and best, and for that I must strive.  Yet if I do not succeed, may it be that I

　　shall say at least what thy Truth wished to say to me through its words, just as it said what it wished to Moses.

　　BOOK THIRTEEN

　　The mysteries and allegories of the days of creation.

　　Augustine undertakes to interpret Gen. 1:2-31 in a mystical and allegorical fashion so as to exhibit the profundities of God's power and wisdom and love.  He is also interested in developing his theories of hermeneutics on his favorite topic: creation.  He finds the Trinity in the account of creation and he ponders the work of the Spirit moving over the waters.  In the firmament he finds the allegory of Holy Scripture and in the dry land and bitter sea he finds the division between the people of God and the conspiracy of the unfaithful.  He develops the theme of man's being made in the image and likeness of God.  He brings his survey to a climax and his confessions to an end with a meditation on the goodness of all creation and the promised rest and blessedness of the eternal Sabbath, on which God, who is eternal rest, "rested."

　　CHAPTER I

　　1.  I call on thee, my God, my Mercy, who madest me and didst not forget me, though I was forgetful of thee.  I call thee into my soul, which thou didst prepare for thy reception by the desire which thou inspirest in it.  Do not forsake me when I call on thee, who didst anticipate me before I called and who didst repeatedly urge with manifold calling that I should hear thee afar off and be turned and call upon thee, who callest me.  For thou, O

　　Lord, hast blotted out all my evil deserts, not punishing me for what my hands have done; and thou hast anticipated all my good deserts so as to recompense me for what thy hands have done -- the hands which made me.  Before I was, thou wast, and I was not anything at all that thou shouldst grant me being.  Yet, see how I

　　exist by reason of thy goodness, which made provision for all that thou madest me to be and all that thou madest me from.  For thou didst not stand in need of me, nor am I the kind of good entity which could be a help to thee, my Lord and my God.  It is not that I may serve thee as if thou wert fatigued in working, or as if thy power would be the less if it lacked my assistance.  Nor is the service I pay thee like the cultivation of a field, so that thou wouldst go untended if I did not tend thee.[506]  Instead, it is that I may serve and worship thee to the end that I may have my well-being from thee, from whom comes my capacity for well-being.

　　CHAPTER II

　　2.  Indeed, it is from the fullness of thy goodness that thy creation exists at all: to the end that the created good might not fail to be, even though it can profit thee nothing, and is nothing of thee nor equal to thee -- since its created existence comes from thee.

　　For what did the heaven and earth, which thou didst make in the beginning, ever deserve from thee?  Let them declare -- these spiritual and corporeal entities, which thou madest in thy wisdom -- let them declare what they merited at thy hands, so that the inchoate and the formless, whether spiritual or corporeal, would deserve to be held in being in spite of the fact that they tend toward disorder and extreme unlikeness to thee?  An unformed spiritual entity is more excellent than a formed corporeal entity;

　　and the corporeal, even when unformed, is more excellent than if it were simply nothing at all.  Still, these formless entities are held in their state of being by thee, until they are recalled to thy unity and receive form and being from thee, the one sovereign Good.  What have they deserved of thee, since they would not even be unformed entities except from thee?

　　3.  What has corporeal matter deserved of thee -- even in its invisible and unformed state -- since it would not exist even in this state if thou hadst not made it?  And, if it did not exist, it could not merit its existence from thee.

　　Or, what has that formless spiritual creation deserved of thee -- that it should flow lightlessly like the abyss -- since it is so unlike thee and would not exist at all if it had not been turned by the Word which made it that same Word, and, illumined by that Word, had been "made light"[507] although not as thy equal but only as an image of that Form [of Light] which is equal to thee?  For, in the case of a body, its being is not the same thing as its being beautiful; else it could not then be a deformed body.

　　Likewise, in the case of a created spirit, living is not the same state as living wisely; else it could then be immutably wise.  But the true good of every created thing is always to cleave fast to thee, lest, in turning away from thee, it lose the light it had received in being turned by thee, and so relapse into a life like that of the dark abyss.

　　As for ourselves, who are a spiritual creation by virtue of our souls, when we turned away from thee, O Light, we were in that former life of darkness; and we toil amid the shadows of our darkness until -- through thy only Son -- we become thy righteousness,[508] like the mountains of God.  For we, like the great abyss,[509] have been the objects of thy judgments.

　　CHAPTER III

　　4.  Now what thou saidst in the beginning of the creation --

　　"Let there be light: and there was light" -- I interpret, not unfitly, as referring to the spiritual creation, because it already had a kind of life which thou couldst illuminate.  But, since it had not merited from thee that it should be a life capable of enlightenment, so neither, when it already began to exist, did it merit from thee that it should be enlightened.  For neither could its formlessness please thee until it became light -- and it became light, not from the bare fact of existing, but by the act of turning its face to the light which enlightened it, and by cleaving to it.  Thus it owed the fact that it lived, and lived happily, to nothing whatsoever but thy grace, since it had been turned, by a change for the better, toward that which cannot be changed for either better or worse.  Thou alone art, because thou alone art without complication.  For thee it is not one thing to live and another thing to live in blessedness; for thou art thyself thy own blessedness.

　　CHAPTER IV

　　5.  What, therefore, would there have been lacking in thy good, which thou thyself art, even if these things had never been made or had remained unformed?  Thou didst not create them out of any lack but out of the plenitude of thy goodness, ordering them and turning them toward form,[510] but not because thy joy had to be perfected by them.  For thou art perfect, and their imperfection is displeasing.  Therefore were they perfected by thee and became pleasing to thee -- but not as if thou wert before that imperfect and had to be perfected in their perfection.  For thy good Spirit which moved over the face of the waters[511] was not borne up by them as if he rested on them.  For those in whom thy good Spirit is said to rest he actually causes to rest in himself.  But thy incorruptible and immutable will -- in itself all-sufficient for itself -- moved over that life which thou hadst made: in which living is not at all the same thing as living happily, since that life still lives even as it flows in its own darkness.  But it remains to be turned to him by whom it was made and to live more and more like "the fountain of life," and in his light "to see light,"[512] and to be perfected, and enlightened, and made blessed.

　　CHAPTER V

　　6.  See now,[513] how the Trinity appears to me in an enigma.

　　And thou art the Trinity, O my God, since thou, O Father -- in the beginning of our wisdom, that is, in thy wisdom born of thee, equal and coeternal with thee, that is, thy Son -- created the heaven and the earth.  Many things we have said about the heaven of heavens, and about the earth invisible and unformed, and about the shadowy abyss -- speaking of the aimless flux of its being spiritually deformed unless it is turned to him from whom it has its life (such as it is) and by his Light comes to be a life suffused with beauty.  Thus it would be a [lower] heaven of that [higher] heaven, which afterward was made between water and water.[514]

　　And now I came to recognize, in the name of God, the Father who made all these things, and in the term "the Beginning" to recognize the Son, through whom he made all these things; and since I did believe that my God was the Trinity, I sought still further in his holy Word, and, behold, "Thy Spirit moved over the waters." Thus, see the Trinity, O my God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Creator of all creation!

　　CHAPTER VI

　　7.  But why, O truth-speaking Light?  To thee I lift up my heart -- let it not teach me vain notions.  Disperse its shadows and tell me, I beseech thee, by that Love which is our mother;

　　tell me, I beseech thee, the reason why -- after the reference to heaven and to the invisible and unformed earth, and darkness over the abyss -- thy Scripture should then at long last refer to thy Spirit?  Was it because it was appropriate that he should first be shown to us as "moving over"; and this could not have been said unless something had already been mentioned over which thy Spirit could be understood as "moving"?  For he did not "move over" the Father and the Son, and he could not properly be said to be "moving over" if he were "moving over" nothing.  Thus, what it was he was "moving over" had to be mentioned first and he whom it was not proper to mention otherwise than as "moving over" could then be mentioned.  But why was it not fitting that he should have been introduced in some other way than in this context of "moving over"?

　　CHAPTER VII

　　8.  Now let him who is able follow thy apostle with his understanding when he says, "Thy love is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who is given to us"[515] and who teacheth us about spiritual gifts[516] and showeth us a more excellent way of love; and who bows his knee unto thee for us, that we may come to the surpassing knowledge of the love of Christ.[517]  Thus, from the beginning, he who is above all was "moving over" the waters.

　　To whom shall I tell this?  How can I speak of the weight of concupiscence which drags us downward into the deep abyss, and of the love which lifts us up by thy Spirit who moved over the waters?  To whom shall I tell this?  How shall I tell it?  For concupiscence and love are not certain "places" into which we are plunged and out of which we are lifted again.  What could be more like, and yet what more unlike?  They are both feelings; they are both loves.  The uncleanness of our own spirit flows downward with the love of worldly care; and the sanctity of thy Spirit raises us upward by the love of release from anxiety -- that we may lift our hearts to thee where thy Spirit is "moving over the waters." Thus, we shall have come to that supreme rest where our souls shall have passed through the waters which give no standing ground.[518]

　　CHAPTER VIII

　　9.  The angels fell, and the soul of man fell; thus they indicate to us the deep darkness of the abyss, which would have still contained the whole spiritual creation if thou hadst not said, in the beginning, "Let there be light: and there was light"

　　-- and if every obedient mind in thy heavenly city had not adhered to thee and had not reposed in thy Spirit, which moved immutable over all things mutable.  Otherwise, even the heaven of heavens itself would have been a dark shadow, instead of being, as it is now, light in the Lord.[519]  For even in the restless misery of the fallen spirits, who exhibit their own darkness when they are stripped of the garments of thy light, thou showest clearly how noble thou didst make the rational creation, for whose rest and beatitude nothing suffices save thee thyself.  And certainly it is not itself sufficient for its beatitude.  For it is thou, O our God, who wilt enlighten our darkness; from thee shall come our garments of light; and then our darkness shall be as the noonday.

　　Give thyself to me, O my God, restore thyself to me!  See, I love thee; and if it be too little, let me love thee still more strongly.  I cannot measure my love so that I may come to know how much there is still lacking in me before my life can run to thy embrace and not be turned away until it is hidden in "the covert of thy presence."[520]  Only this I know, that my existence is my woe except in thee -- not only in my outward life, but also within my inmost self -- and all abundance I have which is not my God is poverty.

　　CHAPTER IX

　　10.  But was neither the Father nor the Son "moving over the waters"?  If we understand this as a motion in space, as a body moves, then not even the Holy Spirit "moved." But if we understand the changeless supereminence of the divine Being above every changeable thing, then Father, Son, and Holy Spirit "moved over the waters."

　　Why, then, is this said of thy Spirit alone?  Why is it said of him only -- as if he had been in a "place" that is not a place -- about whom alone it is written, "He is thy gift"?  It is in thy gift that we rest.  It is there that we enjoy thee.  Our rest is our "place." Love lifts us up toward that place, and thy good Spirit lifts our lowliness from the gates of death.[521]  Our peace rests in the goodness of will.  The body tends toward its own place by its own gravity.  A weight does not tend downward only, but moves to its own place.  Fire tends upward; a stone tends downward.  They are propelled by their own mass; they seek their own places.  Oil poured under the water rises above the water; water poured on oil sinks under the oil.  They are moved by their own mass; they seek their own places.  If they are out of order, they are restless; when their order is restored, they are at rest.  My weight is my love.  By it I am carried wherever I am carried.  By thy gift,[522] we are enkindled and are carried upward.  We burn inwardly and move forward.  We ascend thy ladder which is in our heart, and we sing a canticle of degrees[523]; we glow inwardly with thy fire -- with thy good fire[524] -- and we go forward because we go up to the peace of Jerusalem[525]; for I

　　was glad when they said to me, "Let us go into the house of the Lord."[526]  There thy good pleasure will settle us so that we will desire nothing more than to dwell there forever.[527]

　　CHAPTER X

　　11.  Happy would be that creature who, though it was in itself other than thou, still had known no other state than this from the time it was made, so that it was never without thy gift which moves over everything mutable -- who had been borne up by the call in which thou saidst, "Let there be light: and there was light."[528]  For in us there is a distinction between the time when we were darkness and the time when we were made light.  But we are not told what would have been the case with that creature if the light had not been made.  It is spoken of as though there had been something of flux and darkness in it beforehand so that the cause by which it was made to be otherwise might be evident.

　　This is to say, by being turned to the unfailing Light it might become light.  Let him who is able understand this; and let him who is not ask of thee.  Why trouble me, as if I could "enlighten every man that comes into the world"[529]?

　　CHAPTER XI

　　12.  Who can understand the omnipotent Trinity?  And yet who does not speak about it, if indeed it is of it that he speaks?

　　Rare is the soul who, when he speaks of it, also knows of what he speaks.  And men contend and strive, but no man sees the vision of it without peace.

　　I could wish that men would consider three things which are within themselves.  These three things are quite different from the Trinity, but I mention them in order that men may exercise their minds and test themselves and come to realize how different from it they are.[530]

　　The three things I speak of are: to be, to know, and to will.

　　For I am, and I know, and I will.  I am a knowing and a willing being; I know that I am and that I will; and I will to be and to know.  In these three functions, therefore, let him who can see how integral a life is; for there is one life, one mind, one essence.  Finally, the distinction does not separate the things, and yet it is a distinction.  Surely a man has this distinction before his mind; let him look into himself and see, and tell me.

　　But when he discovers and can say anything about any one of these, let him not think that he has thereby discovered what is immutable above them all, which _is_ immutably and _knows_ immutably and _wills_ immutably.  But whether there is a Trinity there because these three functions exist in the one God, or whether all three are in each Person so that they are each threefold, or whether both these notions are true and, in some mysterious manner, the Infinite is in itself its own Selfsame object -- at once one and many, so that by itself it is and knows itself and suffices to itself without change, so that the Selfsame is the abundant magnitude of its Unity -- who can readily conceive?  Who can in any fashion express it plainly?  Who can in any way rashly make a pronouncement about it?

　　CHAPTER XII

　　13.  Go forward in your confession, O my faith; say to the Lord your God, "Holy, holy, holy, O Lord my God, in thy name we have been baptized, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." In thy name we baptize, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  For among us also God in his Christ made "heaven and earth," namely, the spiritual and carnal members of his Church. And true it is that before it received "the form of doctrine," our "earth"[531] was "invisible and unformed," and we were covered with the darkness of our ignorance; for thou dost correct man for his iniquity,[532] and "thy judgments are a great abyss."[533]  But because thy Spirit was moving over these waters, thy mercy did not forsake our wretchedness, and thou saidst, "Let there be light; repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."[534]  Repent, and let there be light.  Because our soul was troubled within us, we remembered thee, O Lord, from the land of Jordan, and from the mountain[535] -- and as we became displeased with our darkness we turned to thee, "and there was light." And behold, we were heretofore in darkness, but now we are light in the Lord.[536]

　　CHAPTER XIII

　　14.  But even so, we still live by faith and not by sight, for we are saved by hope; but hope that is seen is not hope.  Thus far deep calls unto deep, but now in "the noise of thy waterfalls."[537]  And thus far he who said, "I could not speak to you as if you were spiritual ones, but only as if you were carnal"[538] -- thus far even he does not count himself to have apprehended, but forgetting the things that are behind and reaching forth to the things that are before, he presses on to those things that are ahead,[539] and he groans under his burden and his soul thirsts after the living God as the stag pants for the water brooks,[540] and says, "When shall I come?"[541] --

　　"desiring to be further clothed by his house which is from heaven."[542]  And he called to this lower deep, saying, "Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."[543]  And "be not children in understanding, although in malice be children," in order that "in understanding you may become perfect."[544]  "O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?"[545]  But this is not now only in his own voice but in thy voice, who sent thy Spirit from above through Him who both "ascended up on high"[546] and opened up the floodgates of his gifts, that the force of his streams might make glad the city of God.[547]

　　For that city and for him sighs the Bridegroom's friend,[548]

　　who has now the first fruits of the Spirit laid up with him, but who is still groaning within himself and waiting for adoption, that is, the redemption of his body.[549]  To Him he sighs, for he is a member of the Bride[550]; for him he is jealous, not for himself, but because not in his own voice but in the voice of thy waterfalls he calls on that other deep, of which he is jealous and in fear; for he fears lest, as the serpent seduced Eve by his subtlety, his mind should be corrupted from the purity which is in our Bridegroom, thy only Son.  What a light of beauty that will be when "we shall see him as he is"[551]! -- and when these tears shall pass away which "have been my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, 'Where is your God?'"[552]

　　CHAPTER XIV

　　15.  And I myself say: "O my God, where art thou?  See now, where art thou?"  In thee I take my breath for a little while, when I pour out my soul beyond myself in the voice of joy and praise, in the voice of him that keeps holyday.[553]  And still it is cast down because it relapses and becomes an abyss, or rather it feels that it still is an abyss.  My faith speaks to my soul --

　　the faith that thou dost kindle to light my path in the night:

　　"Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted in me?  Hope in God."[554]  For his word is a lamp to your feet.[555]

　　Hope and persevere until the night passes -- that mother of the wicked; until the Lord's wrath subsides -- that wrath whose children once we were, of whom we were beforehand in darkness, whose residue we still bear about us in our bodies, dead because of sin.[556]  Hope and endure until the day breaks and the shadows flee away.[557]  Hope in the Lord: in the morning I shall stand in his presence and keep watch[558]; I shall forever give praise to him.  In the morning I shall stand and shall see my God, who is the health of my countenance,[559] who also will quicken our mortal bodies by the Spirit that dwells in us,[560] because in mercy he was moving over our lightless and restless inner deep.

　　From this we have received an earnest, even now in this pilgrimage, that we are now in the light, since already we are saved by hope and are children of the light and children of the day -- not children of the night, nor of the darkness,[561] which we have been hitherto.  Between those children of the night and ourselves, in this still uncertain state of human knowledge, only thou canst rightly distinguish -- thou who dost test the heart and who dost call the light day, and the darkness night.[562]  For who can see us clearly but thee?  What do we have that we have not received from thee, who madest from the same lump some vessels to noble, and others to ignoble, use[563]?

　　CHAPTER XV

　　16.  Now who but thee, our God, didst make for us that firmament of the authority of thy divine Scripture to be over us?

　　For "the heaven shall be folded up like a scroll"[564]; but now it is stretched over us like a skin.  Thy divine Scripture is of more sublime authority now that those mortal men through whom thou didst dispense it to us have departed this life.  And thou knowest, O Lord, thou knowest how thou didst clothe men with skins when they became mortal because of sin.[565]  In something of the same way, thou hast stretched out the firmament of thy Book as a skin -- that is to say, thou hast spread thy harmonious words over us through the ministry of mortal men.  For by their very death that solid firmament of authority in thy sayings, spoken forth by them, stretches high over all that now drift under it; whereas while they lived on earth their authority was not so widely extended.  Then thou hadst not yet spread out the heaven like a skin; thou hadst not yet spread abroad everywhere the fame of their death.

　　17.  Let us see, O Lord, "the heavens, the work of thy fingers,"[566] and clear away from our eyes the fog with which thou hast covered them.  In them[567] is that testimony of thine which gives wisdom even to the little ones.  O my God, out of the mouth of babes and sucklings, perfect thy praise.[568]  For we know no other books that so destroy man's pride, that so break down the adversary and the self-defender who resists thy reconciliation by an effort to justify his own sins.  I do not know, O Lord, I do not know any other such pure words that so persuade me to confession and make my neck submissive to thy yoke, and invite me to serve thee for nothing else than thy own sake.

　　Let me understand these things, O good Father.  Grant this to me, since I am placed under them; for thou hast established these things for those placed under them.

　　18.  There are other waters that are above this firmament, and I believe that they are immortal and removed from earthly corruption.  Let them praise thy name -- this super-celestial society, thy angels, who have no need to look up at this firmament or to gain a knowledge of thy Word by reading it -- let them praise thee.  For they always behold thy face and read therein, without any syllables in time, what thy eternal will intends.

　　They read, they choose, they love.[569]  They are always reading, and what they read never passes away.  For by choosing and by loving they read the very immutability of thy counsel.  Their book is never closed, nor is the scroll folded up, because thou thyself art this to them, and art this to them eternally; because thou didst range them above this firmament which thou madest firm over the infirmities of the people below the heavens, where they might look up and learn thy mercy, which proclaims in time thee who madest all times.  "For thy mercy, O Lord, is in the heavens, and thy faithfulness reaches to the clouds."[570]  The clouds pass away, but the heavens remain.  The preachers of thy Word pass away from this life into another; but thy Scripture is spread abroad over the people, even to the end of the world.  Indeed, both heaven and earth shall pass away, but thy words shall never pass away.[571]  The scroll shall be rolled together, and the "grass"

　　over which it was spread shall, with all its goodliness, pass away; but thy Word remains forever[572] -- thy Word which now appears to us in the dark image of the clouds and through the glass of heaven, and not as it really is.  And even if we are the well-beloved of thy Son, it has not yet appeared what we shall be.[573]  He hath seen us through the entanglement[574] of our flesh, and he is fair-speaking, and he hath enkindled us, and we run after his fragrance.[575]  But "when he shall appear, then we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is."[576]  As he is, O Lord, we shall see him -- although that time is not yet.

　　CHAPTER XVI

　　19.  For just as thou art the utterly Real, thou alone dost fully know, since thou art immutably, and thou knowest immutably, and thou willest immutably.  And thy Essence knows and wills immutably.  Thy Knowledge is and wills immutably.  Thy Will is and knows immutably.  And it does not seem right to thee that the immutable Light should be known by the enlightened but mutable creature in the same way as it knows itself.  Therefore, to thee my soul is as a land where no water is[577]; for, just as it cannot enlighten itself by itself, so it cannot satisfy itself by itself.  Thus the fountain of life is with thee, and "in thy light shall we see light."[578]

　　CHAPTER XVII

　　20.  Who has gathered the "embittered ones"[579] into a single society?  For they all have the same end, which is temporal and earthly happiness.  This is their motive for doing everything, although they may fluctuate within an innumerable diversity of concerns.  Who but thee, O Lord, gathered them together, thou who saidst, "Let the waters be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear" -- athirst for thee?  For the sea also is thine, and thou madest it, and thy hands formed the dry land.[580]

　　For it is not the bitterness of men's wills but the gathering together of the waters which is called "the sea"; yet thou dost curb the wicked lusts of men's souls and fix their bounds: how far they are allowed to advance, and where their waves will be broken against each other -- and thus thou makest it "a sea," by the providence of thy governance of all things.

　　21.  But as for the souls that thirst after thee and who appear before thee -- separated from "the society of the [bitter]

　　sea" by reason of their different ends -- thou waterest them by a secret and sweet spring, so that "the earth" may bring forth her fruit and -- thou, O Lord, commanding it -- our souls may bud forth in works of mercy after their kind.[581]  Thus we shall love our neighbor in ministering to his bodily needs, for in this way the soul has seed in itself after its kind when in our own infirmity our compassion reaches out to the relief of the needy, helping them even as we would desire to be helped ourselves if we were in similar need.  Thus we help, not only in easy problems (as is signified by "the herb yielding its seed") but also in the offering of our best strength in affording them the aid of protection (such as "the tree bearing its fruit").  This is to say, we seek to rescue him who is suffering injury from the hands of the powerful -- furnishing him with the sheltering protection which comes from the strong arm of a righteous judgment.[582]

　　CHAPTER XVIII

　　22.  Thus, O Lord, thus I beseech thee: let it happen as thou hast prepared it, as thou givest joy and the capacity for joy.

　　Let truth spring up out of the earth, and let righteousness look down from heaven,[583] and let there be lights in the firmament.[584]

　　Let us break our bread with the hungry, let us bring the shelterless poor to our house; let us clothe the naked, and never despise those of our own flesh.[585]  See from the fruits which spring forth from the earth how good it is.  Thus let our temporal light break forth, and let us from even this lower level of fruitful action come to the joy of contemplation and hold on high the Word of Life.  And let us at length appear like "lights in the world,"[586] cleaving to the firmament of thy Scripture.

　　For in it thou makest it plain to us how we may distinguish between things intelligible and things tangible, as if between the day and the night -- and to distinguish between souls who give themselves to things of the mind and others absorbed in things of sense.  Thus it is that now thou art not alone in the secret of thy judgment as thou wast before the firmament was made, and before thou didst divide between the light and the darkness.  But now also thy spiritual children, placed and ranked in this same firmament -- thy grace being thus manifest throughout the world --

　　may shed light upon the earth, and may divide between the day and night, and may be for the signs of the times[587]; because old things have passed away, and, lo, all things are become new[588];

　　and because our salvation is nearer than when we believed; and because "the night is far spent and the day is at hand"[589]; and because "thou crownest the year with blessing,"[590] sending the laborers into thy harvest, in which others have labored in the sowing and sending laborers also to make new sowings whose harvest shall not be until the end of time.  Thus thou dost grant the prayers of him who seeks, and thou dost bless the years of the righteous man.  But thou art always the Selfsame, and in thy years which fail not thou preparest a granary for our transient years.

　　For by an eternal design thou spreadest the heavenly blessings on the earth in their proper seasons.

　　23.  For "to one there is given by thy Spirit the word of wisdom"[591] (which resembles the greater light -- which is for those whose delight is in the clear light of truth -- as the light which is given for the ruling of the day[592]).  But to another the word of knowledge is given by the same Spirit (as it were, the "lesser light"); to another, faith; to another, the gift of healing; to another, the power of working miracles; to another, the gift of prophecy; to another, the discerning of spirits; to another, other kinds of tongues -- and all these gifts may be compared to "the stars." For in them all the one and selfsame Spirit is at work, dividing to every man his own portion, as He wills, and making stars to appear in their bright splendor for the profit of souls.  But the word of knowledge, scientia, in which is contained all the mysteries[593] which change in their seasons like the moon; and all the other promises of gifts, which when counted are like the stars -- all of these fall short of that splendor of Wisdom in which the day rejoices and are only for the ruling of the night.  Yet they are necessary for those to whom thy most prudent servant could not speak as to the spiritually mature, but only as if to carnal men -- even though he could speak wisdom among the perfect.[594]  Still the natural man -- as a babe in Christ, and a drinker of milk, until he is strong enough for solid meat, and his eye is able to look into the sun -- do not leave him in a lightless night.  Instead, let him be satisfied with the light of the moon and the stars.  In thy book thou dost discuss these things with us wisely, our God -- in thy book, which is thy "firmament" -- in order that we may be able to view all things in admiring contemplation, although thus far we must do so through signs and seasons and in days and years.

　　CHAPTER XIX

　　24.  But, first, "wash yourselves and make you clean; put away iniquity from your souls and from before my eyes"[595] -- so that "the dry land" may appear.  "Learn to do well, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow,"[596] that the earth may bring forth the green herb for food and fruit-bearing trees.  "And come, let us reason together, saith the Lord"[597] -- that there may be lights in the firmament of heaven and that they may shine upon the earth.

　　There was that rich man who asked of the good Teacher what he should do to attain eternal life.  Let the good Teacher (whom the rich man thought a man and nothing more) give him an answer -- he is good for he is God.  Let him answer him that, if he would enter into life, he must keep the commandments: let him put away from himself the bitterness of malice and wickedness; let him not kill, nor commit adultery, nor steal, nor bear false witness[598] --

　　that "the dry land" may appear and bring forth the honoring of fathers and mothers and the love of neighbor.  "All these," he replied, "I have kept." Where do so many thorns come from, if the earth is really fruitful?  uproot the brier patch of avarice;

　　"sell what you have, and be filled with fruit by giving to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and follow" the Lord if you would be perfect and joined with those in whose midst he speaketh wisdom -- who know how to give rightly to the day and to the night -- and you will also understand, so that for you also there may be lights in the firmament of heaven -- which will not be there, however, unless your heart is there also.  And your heart will not be there unless your treasure is there,[599] as you have heard from the good Teacher.  But "the barren earth"[600] was grieved, and the briers choked the word.[601]

　　25.  But you, O elect people, set in the firmament of the world,[602] who have forsaken all that you may follow the Lord:

　　follow him now, and confound the mighty!  Follow him, O beautiful feet,[603] and shine in the firmament, that the heavens may declare his glory, dividing the light of the perfect ones[604] --

　　though not yet so perfect as the angels -- from the darkness of the little ones -- who are nevertheless not utterly despised.

　　Shine over all the earth, and let the day be lighted by the sun, utter the Word of wisdom to the day ("day unto day utters speech"[605]) and let the night, lighted by the moon, display the Word of knowledge to the night.  The moon and the stars give light for the night; the night does not put them out, and they illumine in its proper mode.  For lo, it is as if God were saying, "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven": and suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as if it were a rushing mighty wind, and there appeared cloven tongues of fire, and they sat on each of them.[606]  And then they were made to be lights in the firmament of heaven, having the Word of life.  Run to and fro everywhere, you holy fires, you lovely fires, for you are the light of the world and you are not to be hid under a peck measure.[607]  He to whom you cleave is raised on high, and he hath raised you on high.  Run to and fro; make yourselves known among all the nations!