51. Conf. 9.5.13–6.14 (CCL 27:140–41); trans. Bourke, FOTC 21:239–41.
Confessions 29 lieve, Isaiah is more plainly a foreteller of the Gospel and of the calling of the Gentiles than are the others. But since I did not understand the opening passage of this book and thought it all as difficult, I put it aside in order to take it up later, after I became more practiced in the Lord's way of speaking.
(6.14) Then when the time came at which it was required that I turn in my name, we left the countryside and returned to Milan.49 Alypius also decided to be reborn in You, along with me, for he had already taken on the humility appropriate to Your sacraments and had even gone so far in his very forceful mastery of his body to tread the ice-covered soil of Italy with bare feet, a daring and unusual venture. We also included with us the boy, Adeodatus, born of me in the flesh as a result of my sin. You had fashioned him well. He was almost fifteen years old and surpassed many serious and learned men in his intellectual endowments. I am but confessing to You Your gifts, O Lord my God, Creator of all, who has great power to reform our deformities, for I was responsible for nothing but the sin in that boy. You, and no other, had inspired us to have us nourish him in Your teaching. To You I confess Your gifts. There is a book of mine written under the title, On the Teacher.50 In it, he converses with me. You know that all the views included in it as coming from my dialogue partner are his, when he was sixteen years old. I found many other more amazing qualities in him. His talent was a matter of awe. Who but You is the doer of such wonders? You took his life quickly from this earth, and my memory of him is free of concern, since I have nothing to fear for his boyhood or adolescence or anything for him as a man. We associated him with us as our contemporary in Your grace to be trained in Your studies.
So we were baptized, and the anxiety for our past life fled from us. Nor was I sated during those days with the wonderful sweetness in considering the depth of Your counsels concerning the salvation of humankind. How many tears did I shed, as I was deeply stirred by the voices of Your Church sweetly swelling in the singing of Your hymns and canticles (Eph 5:19)! Those voices flowed into my ears, and truth was distilled into my heart, and a feeling of piety welled up from it. The tears poured forth, and I was happy with them.51
49. "Turn in my name": That is, applying for baptism. See note 34 above. 50. "On the Teacher" (De magistro): One of Augustine's early philosophic dialogues, portraying a discussion between him and his son Adeodatus on epistemology. On this, see Goulven Madec, "Augustine et son fils: Le Christ Maître intérieur," Lectures Augustiniennes, CEASA 168 (Paris: Institut d'Études Augustiniennes, 2001), 43–58. For excerpts see Chapter 2. 51. Conf. 9.5.13–6.14 (CCL 27:140–41); trans. Bourke, FOTC 21:239–41.
Vision at Ostia
After baptism, Augustine, his family, and friends decided to return to Africa. They planned to set sail from the Roman seaport of Ostia. There his mother Monnica died. Here Augustine tells the story of a shared mystical moment he and she experienced a few days before her death. It both parallels and differs from the earlier ascent account in Book 7. Again Augustine draws on Neoplatonic turns-of-phrases, but this was no Platonic ascent of "the alone to the Alone." It was shared, not solitary; it was not the rediscovery and recovery of some unfallen self, but the experience of two Christians on the far side of baptism tasting the "first fruits of the Spirit," an ever-so-fleeting glimpse and foretaste of resurrected life. From Confessions, Book 9:
(10.23) When the day on which she was to depart from this life was near at hand—a day You knew but we did not—it happened, I believe, by Your arrangement, in Your hidden ways, that she and I were standing alone, leaning out a window from which the garden inside the house we occupied could be viewed. It was at Ostia on the Tiber where, far removed from the crowds after the hardship of a long journey, we were resting in preparation for the sea voyage. We were talking to each other alone very sweetly, "forgetting what is behind, straining forward to what is before" (Phil 3:13). Between us, in the presence of the Truth, which You are, we tried to find what the eternal life of the saints would be, what "eye has not seen nor ear heard nor has it entered into the human heart" (1 Cor 2:9). But with the mouth of our heart open we also yearned for the flood on high from "Your fountain, the fountain of life which is with You" (Ps 35:10) so that, having been sprinkled from it as much as our capacity would permit, we might meditate in some way about so great a matter.
(10.24) When our conversation had reached its endpoint, recognizing that the greatest delight of the bodily senses in the brightest corporeal light is not capable of comparison with the joy of that life and did not even seem worthy of mention, then rising up, feelings all aflame, toward the Selfsame,52 we advanced step by step through all visible things up to the sky itself, from which the sun, moon, and stars shine out over the earth, and we ascended still farther in our interior meditation, conversation, and marveling at Your works, came to our own minds. Then we transcended them so that we might touch that region of unending overflowing richness with which You fed Israel (Ps 79:2) eternally on the food of truth. There life is wisdom, through which all these things
52. "Selfsame" (Idipsum). Kenny, Mysticism of Saint Augustine, 77: " 'Idipsum' or the 'self-same' is a term that recalls both 'ego sum qui sum' ('I am who am') of Exodus 3:14 and auto kath'auto, 'self-sameness,' the classical epithet for the Platonic forms. The Augustinian soul seeks the complete stability of the intelligible and eternal world. This is what the soul had tasted before, in the Book Seven ascension: the 'simplicity of eternity' and freedom from multiplicity, change, and time. And this is God—immediately present and intensely close within the inner recesses of the soul."