Augustine in His Own Words
Confessions 5
Into what can I invoke You since I am in You? Or from where can You come into me? Where may I go beyond heaven and earth in order that my God may then come into me, He who has said, "I fill heaven and earth" (Jer 23:24)?5
Innocent Infants?
Augustine was a shrewd watcher of babies. He noted how they sleep and nurse, how they cry and smile. At one point, he seems to dabble with the idea that infants are capable of sin, telling the story of two infant brothers, one jealous of the other. This observation foreshadows—but in the end differs from—his eventual teaching on original sin. From Confessions, Book 1:
(6.7) And so the consolations of human milk supported me, for neither my mother nor my nurses filled their own breasts, but You gave me the food of infancy through them, according to Your planning, and riches which are arranged even for the lowest order of things. . . . At that time, I knew only to suckle and to be satisfied with enjoyable things and to cry at injuries to my flesh—nothing more. (6.8) Later, I began to smile: first, while sleeping; then, while waking. This was told me about myself, and I believe it since we so observe it in other babies. Of course, I do not remember those things about myself. . . .
(7.11) The weakness of infant limbs is innocent, but not the mind of infants. I myself have seen and have had experience with a jealous child: he could not yet speak but, growing pale, would stare with a bitter look at his brother who was nursing as well. Who does not know this? Mothers and nurses claim that they exorcise those things by all sorts of devices. Indeed, is this innocence not to permit another child, who is in greatest need and depends for his life on this one sort of food, to share in a source of milk which is flowing freely and abundantly? These things are borne with equanimity, not that they are nothing or are slight, but because they will disappear with increasing age. And it is right to suffer them, though such things cannot be borne with equanimity when they are observed in a person of more advanced years.6
5. Conf. 1.1.1–2.2 (CCL 27:1–2); my trans., based on Bourke, FOTC 21:4–5. 6. Conf. 1.6.7–7.11 (CCL 27:4–6); trans. Bourke, FOTC 21:8–9, 12–13. Augustine would later argue that "infants . . . have committed nothing evil by means of their own will" (pecc. mer. 1.35.65; CSEL 60:65); see pecc. mer. 1.19.24, 3.4.7; Enchiridion 13.42–43. On this issue, see Chapter 10.