From Confessions 10.1-2 (400)
Lord, you know me. Let me know you. Let me come to know you even as I am known. You are the strength of my soul; enter it and make a place suitable for your dwelling, a possession “without spot or blemish.” This is my hope and the reason I speak. In this hope I rejoice, when I rejoice rightly. As for the other things of this life, the less they deserve tears, the more likely will they be lamented; and the more they deserve tears, the less likely will people sorrow for them. “For behold, you have loved the truth, because the one who does what is true enters into the light.” I wish to do this truth before you alone by praising you, and before a multitude of witnesses by writing of you.
O Lord, the depths of my conscience lie exposed before your eyes. Could anything remain hidden in me, even though I did not want to confess it to you? In that case I would only be hiding from myself, not myself from you. But now my sighs are sufficient evidence that I am displeased with myself; that you are my light and the source of my joy; that you are loved and desired. I am thoroughly ashamed of myself; I have renounced myself and chosen you, recognizing that I can please neither you nor myself unless you enable me to do so.
Whoever I may be, Lord, I lie exposed to your scrutiny. I have already told of the profit I gain when I confess to you. And I do not make my confession with bodily words, bodily speech, but with the words of my soul and the cry of my mind which you hear and understand. When I am wicked, my confession to you is an expression of displeasure with myself. But when I do good, it consists in not attributing this goodness to myself. But when I do good, it consists in not attributing this goodness to myself. “For you, O Lord, bless the just,” but first “you justify the wicked.” And so I make my confession before you in silence. My voice is silent, but my heart cries out.
You, O Lord, are my judge. “For though no one knows a person’s innermost self except the spirit within,” yet there is something within which even one’s own spirit does not know. But you know all of a person, for you have made all of us. As for me, I despise myself in your sight, knowing that I am but dust and ashes; yet I know something of you that I do not know of myself.
True, “we see now indistinctly as in a mirror, but not yet face to face.” Therefore, so long as I am in exile from you, I am more present to myself than to you. Yet I do know that you cannot be overcome, while I am uncertain which temptations I can resist and which I cannot. Nevertheless, I have hope, because “you are faithful and do not allow us to be tempted beyond our endurance, but along with the temptation you give us the means to withstand it.”
I will confess, therefore, what I know of myself, and also what I do not know. The knowledge that I have of myself, I possess because you have enlightened me; while the knowledge of myself that I do not yet possess will not be mine until my darkness shall be made as the noonday sun before your face.
St. Augustine (354-430) was a theologian and philosopher who served as Bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa. He was a voluminous author, whose writings about God’s grace, the Sacraments, and the Church have been profoundly influential in the development of Western Christianity. The Confessions are a meditation on his conversion, widely considered the first Western autobiography. His feast day is August 26.
