Augustine in His Own Words
(9.17) O most unfriendly friendship, inscrutable seduction of the mind, this craving to do harm as a game and a joke, this taste to deprive others of things spurred not for personal gain or revenge. Someone just says: "Let's go; let's do it!" and one is ashamed not to be unashamed.9
Carthage
Book 3 opens with a portrait of the 18-year-old Augustine arriving in Carthage, the college town of North Africa. The opening line has a famous wordplay, "Carthage" (Cartago) punning with "cauldron" (sartago). From Confessions, Book 3:
(1.1) To Carthage I came, and a hissing cauldron of shameful loves seethed around me on all sides. I was not in love, yet I loved to love and, in the hidden depths of unsated desire, I hated myself for my partial lack of desire. I sought some object that I might love, loving the very act of love. I hated peace of mind and a "path unbeset by pitfalls" (Wis 14:11). For though I was hungry within me, lacking that inner food which You are, my God, I experienced the desire for incorruptible nourishment not because I was filled with it, but the more empty I was, the greater my loathing became. And that is why my soul was unhealthy and, in its ulcerated condition, projected itself into the open, wretchedly desirous of being scraped in rubbing up against sensible things. Yet if they had no soul, they would certainly not have been loved. To love and to be loved was far sweeter to me if I also succeeded in enjoying my beloved in the flesh. Thus I muddied the waters of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, and I clouded its brightness with the scum of lust. Yet, though filthy and unsightly, I strove in excessive vanity to appear refined and polished. So I plunged headlong into love and desired to be taken over by it, O my God, my Mercy (Ps 58:18), though with how much bitterness You in Your goodness sprinkled that which was sweet to me! For I was loved and I both achieved in secret the bond of enjoyment and was joyfully tied down by the entwinements of calamity to be beaten with iron rods, burning with jealousy, suspicions, and fears, with fits of anger and quarrels.10
9. Conf. 2.4.9–9.17 (CCL 27:22–26); trans. Bourke, FOTC 21:40–41, 46–47 (modified). On this, see John C. Cavadini, "Book Two: Augustine's Book of Shadows," in A Reader's Companion to Augustine's Confessions, ed. Kim Paffenroth and Robert P. Kennedy (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 25–34.
10. Conf. 3.1.1 (CCL 27:27); trans. Bourke, FOTC 21:49. "Beaten with iron rods": This was part of the standard practice of torture used in the Roman justice system to obtain information on criminal activity. For an analysis of Augustine's wordplay in this paragraph, see Gillian Clark, Saint Augustine: The Confessions, Landmarks of World Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 83–91.