Augustin's Confessions

St. Augustine writing Confessions

Augustine taught grammar and rhetoric in North Africa from 373 to 383 when he moved to Rome.  There he abandoned the Manichees and became a skeptic.  Moving to Milan in 384, he came under the influence of Bishop Ambrose, the first Christian whose mind and intellect he respected, whose majestic sermons made up for the crudity and vulgarity of the Bible he detested.  Attracted to the idea of a transcendent God, he joined a catechumenate , was converted in Milan, and baptized by Ambrose in 387.  In 398 he wrote Confessions, in which he tells his own conversion story.

From Augustine’s Confessions to God Chapter VIII:

I had no answer to make to you when you said to me “Arise, you who are asleep, rise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light (Eph 5:14).”

Lord, my helper and redeemer, I will now tell the story, and confess to your name, of the way in which you delivered me from the chain of sexual desire, by which I was tightly bound, and from the slavery of worldly affairs.

Lord, you turned by attention back to myself.  You took me up from behind my own back where I had placed myself because I did not wish to observe myself, and you set me before my face so that I should see how vile I was, how twisted and filthy, covered in sores and ulcers. . . . you thrust me before my own eyes so that I should discover my iniquity and hate it.  I had known it, but deceived myself, refused to admit it, and pushed it out of my mind.

I was an unhappy young man, wretched as a t the beginning of my adolescence when I prayed you for chastity and said: “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”  I was afraid you might hear my prayer quickly, and that you might too rapidly heal me of the disease of lust which I preferred to satisfy rather than suppress.

The tumult of my heart took me out into the garden where no one could interfere with the burning struggle with myself in which I was engaged, until the matter could be settled.  You knew, but I did not, what the outcome would be.

I deliberated about serving my Lord . . . I was in conflict with myself . . . it was “not I” that brought this about “but sin which dwelt in me” (Rom 7:17, 20), sin resulting from the punishment of a more freely chosen sin, because I was a son of Adam.