The Confessions
Published:
Book 1
- ”Since nothing that exists would exist without you, does it follow that whatever exists does in some way contain you? … Not yet am I in hell, after all, but even if I were, you would be there too; for if I descend to the underworld, you are there.”
“7, 11. O God, hear me. Alas for the sins of humankind! A human it is who here bewails them, and you treat him mercifully because you made him, though the sin that is in him is not of your making.”
Then of whose making is it? Is it just a partial expression of Him, the freedom to choose only a part of Him? Do we thus make it? Does the as-yet-realized God-in-us make it? Is it Satan? But isn’t Satan a relative, explanatory concept that divides the essential Unity of God?
- “…it was simply that we loved to play, and we were punished by adults who nonetheless did the same themselves. But whereas the frivolous pursuits of grown-up people are called “business,” children are punished for behaving in the same fashion, and no one is sorry for either the children or the adults; so are we to assume that any sound judge of the matter would think it right for me to be beaten because I played ball as a boy, and was hindered by my game from more rapid progress in studies which would only equip me to play an uglier game later? Moreover, was the master who flogged me any better himself? If he had been worsted by a fellow-scholar in some pedantic dispute, would he not have been racked by even more bitter jealousy than I was when my opponent in a game of ball got the better of me?”
“10, 16. O Lord God, you are the disposer and creator of everything in nature, but of our sins the disposer only…”
What if he disposes nothing? What if just the realization, the addition of more creation? Purely generative?
“If I then go further and ask which would be a graver handicap in this life, to forget how to read and write, or to forget those poetic fantasies, can one doubt what answer would be given by anyone in his right mind?”
- Disagree with this. It is the stories that gave rise to the collections of symbols, not the other way around. Let it be madness to privilege the poetic spirit, the narrative, rather than the imminent symbols and skills associated with their organization.
- And how else do we learn to read and write than through story? Through their reading, and our subsequent explication of them?
He later says the Latin/Greek stories (Aeneas, Homer) are morally bereft (very Platonic in this way). Presumably with healthier stories he might feel differently.
“Knowledge of letters lies less deep in us than the law written in our conscience which forbids us to do o another what we would not have done to ourselves.”
- There we go.
Book 2
- “Sadness pines at the loss of the good things with which greed took its pleasure, because it wants to be like you, from whom nothing can be taken away.”
- “Is there anyone who can take stock of his own weakness and still dare to credit his chastity and innocence to his own efforts?“
Book 3
Book 4
- “Blessed is he who loves you, and loves his friend in you and his enemy for your sake. He alone loses no one dear to him, to whom all are dear in the One who is never lost.“
- “The good which you love derives from him, and insofar as it is referred to him it is truly good and sweet, but anything that comes from him will justly turn bitter if it is unjustly loved by people who forsake him. Why persist in walking difficult and toilsome paths? There is no repose where you are seeking it. Search as you like, it is not where you are looking. You are seeking a happy life in the realm of death, and it will not be found there. How could life be happy, where there is no life at all?”
Book 5
- “Someone who knows enough to become the owner of a tree, and gives thanks to you for the benefits it brings him, is in a better state, even if ignorant of its height in feet and the extent of its spread, than another who measures and counts all its branches but neither owns it nor knows its creator nor loves him.”