Sexual Offenses

Saint Augustine's Sin
by Garry Wills

(Page 6 of 6)

1. I am determined to bring back in memory the revolting things I did, and the way my soul was contaminated by my flesh - doing this not out of love for those deeds but as a step toward loving you. I move toward you this way because I would love to love you. I bring back up to expression the bitterness of my vile wanderings so you may sweeten them, you my sweetness never deluding, sure sweetness ever delighting. You gather me from my own scatterings, after I have torn myself from your unity and fallen apart into multiplicity. At the time of my young manhood, when I burned to be engorged with vile things, I boldly foisoned into ramifying and umbrageous loves, while my inner shapeliness was withering - I was decomposing before your eyes while in men's eyes I was pleasing myself and 'trying to please them.'

2. Where did I find any satisfaction then but in loving and being loved? But I did not observe the line where mind meets mind. Instead of affection's landmarks drawn in light, earthmurks drowned in lust - and my erupting sexuality - breathed mephitic vapors over the boundary, to cloud and blind my heart in clouds and fog, erasing the difference between love's quietness and the drivenness of dark impulse. Quietness and drives were mingled chaotically within me, battering my impotent maturity on the anfractuosities of desire and dousing me in a maelstrom of offenses. Your ire impended over me, but I was unaware of it, deafened by the clattering of my mortal chains, a deafness inflicted by my soul's loftiness. I wandered farther from you, as you played out the leash - I was full of outflingings, effusions, diffusions, and ebullitions of illicit loves, as you maintained your silence. You, the joy I was so slow to hear, said nothing as I ranged farther out from you - I, loftily downfallen, actively paralyzed, sowing arid and ever more arid sadnesses.

3. Who might have brought within boundaries my misery, turned to some purpose the evanescent beauties of extreme experience, and set a clear limit to their deliciousness, that the stormy waters of my youth might have seethed up only to the shoreline of marriage? But could I have limited myself to sex used only for begetting children, Lord, as your law commands? (Yet it is you who make images of our mortality, able to soften with your gentling touch the thorns not allowed to grow in Eden, since your omnipotence is never far from us, however far from you we are.) In any case, I might have pondered more carefully your voice out of the clouds saying, 'They [the married] have all these cares of the flesh, which I would spare you.' Or 'Better for man not to lay hand to a woman,' or 'The man who has no wife expresses concern for God, and wants to please him, while the man with a wife expresses concern for worldly matters, because he wants to please his wife.' Had I listened to your words with greater attention, then with greater anticipation I might have welcomed your embrace as one 'castrated for heaven's reign.'

4. Instead, I frothed along in the wake of my driving passion, having left you to range beyond all the limits of your law, though not beyond your scourge's reach - for who is beyond that? You had not in fact left me, but showed a pitying severity. You dashed with bitter repinings my forbidden joys, making me seek joys with no repining, which I would never find apart from you, Lord, apart from the way 'you affix your pain to precept,' and 'heal with a wound,' and 'slay us that we may not die' by loss of you.

Where did that leave me? 'In distant exile from the comforts of your dwelling' during this sixteenth year of my age, when I surrendered with ready hand all rule over my self, turning it over to mad cravings condoned by our debased humanity but condemned by your law. My family did not care to divert me from my mad course toward marriage. They cared only that I might acquire rhetoric and sway others with my words.

5. It was in this sixteenth year that my studies were interrupted, when I was brought back from Madauros, the nearby town for which I had first left home in order to study grammar and rhetoric. My father was saving up funds to send me farther off, for study in Carthage, a project better suited to his aspirations than to his acquisitions, since he was a townsman of slender estate in Thagaste. Why do I bring this up? I do not bring it up to you, Lord, but in your presence I bring it up to my fellows, my fellow human beings - those, at any rate, however few, who may chance upon this book. And why to them? That we may express together, I and my readers, 'from what depths we must cry up to you' (though what could come closer to you than the testifying heart and 'a faithful life'?). An instance is this man, my father, whom all were extolling since he squandered money beyond his means to finance his son's education in a distant place. Admittedly, many wealthier men made no such arrangement for their children, but this father could not be bothered with my cultivation in your eyes, nor with my chastity, so long as I should become verbally fertile - futile, rather, without the tending you provide, God, my heart's gardener skilled and true.

6. So, in this my sixteenth year, in an idleness caused by my father's impecunious state, with no school to attend, I began again to stay with my parents, and the thorns of my own drives, with no one to weed them out from around me, shot up above my head. So much was this true that when my father saw in the baths that my childhood was gone and I was clothed with unstable young manhood, he mentioned this to my mother, overjoyed with anticipation of having grandchildren by me. It was the intoxicated joy with which the world forgets you the creator, to love in your place what you created, drunk on the invisible wine of desires deflected from you and declined toward the depths. But you had already begun to hallow 'your own temple' within my mother, laying the foundation for 'your holy habitation' there, while my father had only recently become a candidate for baptism. She was jolted 'with holy apprehension and trembling' that I, though also not baptized, would be set on the crooked paths that men tread when 'going away from you, not toward you.'

7. Can I, alas, have the nerve to claim that you were saying nothing to me as I strayed from you? Were you in fact saying nothing at that time? Then whose if not yours were the words you drummed into my ears through my mother? But they did not sink into my heart, to make me act. She wished - and I recall deep within me how urgently insistent was she - that I would refrain from all illicit sex, but especially from relations with a married woman. Her warnings seemed old wives' tales to me, too embarrassing to be taken seriously. But these warnings came, without my knowing it, from you - I thought you were saying nothing, while what she said proved that you were not silent after all. It was you I scorned in scorning her - I her son, 'the son of your servingwoman, and myself your servant.' In my ignorance I blundered on, so blinded that it shamed me to be less shameless than my fellows. I listened as they boasted of their deeds, and the more perverse the deeds, the more pride they took in them, not only orgasmic over orgies but over publicizing them. What could more deserve vilification than such villainy? Yet I actually became villainous to avoid vilification - where I could not match them in admission of foul ways, I feigned deeds never done, preferring to be thought more outrageous than conformist, more dissolute than respectable.

8. These, then, were the fellows I strolled about with on the streets of Babylon, in whose 'filth I wallowed' as if in 'cinnamon and precious ointments.' My invisible enemy was treading me down there, to agglutinate me 'to its underbelly,' taking in one who wanted the taking. The mother of my flesh, though she had 'escaped from the center of Babylon,' still lingered in its territory, and despite her advice to me on continence, in response to what she had heard from her husband, she did not try to check (if she could not repress) my pernicious and potentially fatal conduct. She did not try this because she feared that her ambitions for me would be thwarted by a wife. This had nothing to do with her ambition for my future life with you, but with the ambition she and her husband shared for my career in rhetoric, he because he thought nothing about you and nothing sensible about me, and she because she calculated that the traditional course of rhetoric would do me no harm in itself and might help me to serve you - or so I suppose, reading my parents' motives as well as I can. The reins were therefore loosed on me, to be tossed about, with no moderating discipline, by random influences. Deep fog sealed me off from the bright sun of your truth while I 'fattened as it were on my own evil.'

© 2003 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Garry Wills is one of the most respected writers on religion today. He is the author of Saint Augustine's Childhood, Saint Augustine's Memory, and Saint Augustine's Sin, the first three volumes in this series, as well as the Penguin Lives biography Saint Augustine. His other books include "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power, Why I Am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize.