Confessions by Augustine – a new translation by Sarah Ruden
I will spare the reader Freudian or other speculative interpretations of Augustine’s state of mind and note only that he found it difficult to reconcile the influence of his very pious mother, Monica, and her church with his strong sex drive and his deep attachment to the woman (to us, nameless) who was the mother of his adored son…
Intro:
It may seem odd to many modern readers that he considered marriage incompatible with the highest kind of Christian life, but this makes more sense in light of contemporary facts. The church did not preside over marriages to the extent it now does: the essential legal, financial, and social arrangements were all holdovers from pagan culture. This left a spiritual and psychic gap in which a rather extravagant cult of virginity and celibacy could flourish…
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(While visiting the U.S. Naval Academy recently, I found that his writings on the ethics of warfare were part of the curriculum.)
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I will spare the reader Freudian or other speculative interpretations of Augustine’s state of mind and note only that he found it difficult to reconcile the influence of his very pious mother, Monica, and her church with his strong sex drive and his deep attachment to the woman (to us, nameless) who was the mother of his adored son…
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like himself, whose inheritance of a small estate (that would, as usual, have included slaves)
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Augustine really does talk about the embarrassment of nocturnal emissions for a man called to celibacy
(book 10, chapter 41).
“But there still live in my memory (about which I’ve said so much) images of the kinds of things that my habits of the past nailed in there. When I’m awake, these images keep making attacks on me—though they don’t have any strength then. In my sleep, though, they push me not only into enjoyment, but all the way to an accord with them, and into what’s very much like the act. This illusory image in my soul has so much power over my body that the deceptive sights can convince me, while I sleep, to do what the real ones can’t while I’m awake.”
(book 10 chapter 42).
Isn’t your hand, all-powerful God, powerful enough*56 to heal all the diseases*57 of my soul, and through your grace as it flows more plentifully, can’t your hand even quell the lewd movements of my sleep? Master, you will increase more and more your gifts in me, so that my soul follows me to you, its feet free of the glue trap of lust. Then my soul won’t rebel against itself. Even in sleep it will not only stop committing those shameful acts, sources of corruption, because of brute images that succeed in making the body flow dissolutely out of itself;
Book 5
15. You knew why I needed to leave Carthage and go to Rome, but you didn’t reveal the reason to me or my mother, who beat her breast quite brutally over my
departure, and who trailed me all the way to the sea. But I tricked her, as she was hanging onto me coercively, trying to either stop my journey or come along with me on it. I made up a story that I didn’t want to walk out on a friend before the wind picked up and he set sail; I lied to my mother, a mother such as I’ve
described.
I got away, and got away with it—because in your mercy you remitted even this sin, and saved me from the seawater, though I was full of abominable filth, and
kept me safe until I reached the baptizing water of your grace. When I was washed in that, the rivers would dry up that flowed from my mother’s eyes, rivers she addressed to you daily for my sake, irrigating the ground under her face.
Anyway, she refused to return home without me, and I barely persuaded her to stay that night at a spot right near our ship, a shrine commemorating the blessed Cyprian;*32 and during that night I slunk off and began my journey, which she didn’t share. She stayed behind, praying and weeping.
What was she seeking from you, my God, with all those tears, but for you to keep me from setting sail? But your deliberations were profound, and you could
hear what the hinge of her longing actually turned on. You didn’t attend to what she was seeking then, and your purpose was to make me into what she was
always seeking. The wind blew and filled our sails, and from our sight the shore withdrew, the shore on which in the morning she lost her mind with grief and
filled your ears with groaning, querulous laments.
But you disregarded all that, since you were snatching me away through my desires in order to put an end to those very desires; and her longing, which was
physical, was taking a beating from the justified whip of sorrows. She had a passion for my presence, which is the way mothers are, but with her it was far
more the case than with most, and she didn’t know the kind of joy you were going to create for her out of my absence; but she didn’t know, and therefore she
wept and howled, and these tortures revealed the vestiges of Eve she had within her, as with groans she searched for what she had given birth to with groans.*33
However, after indicting me for trickery and cruelty, she turned back to praying to you for me and returned to the home she was used to, while I went to Rome.
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