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Confessions. Augustine of Hippo
Читать онлайн.Название Confessions
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isbn 9781681922850
Автор произведения Augustine of Hippo
Жанр Словари
Издательство Ingram
Chapter XIII
20. These things I did not understand at that time, and I loved those inferior beauties, and I was sinking down to the very depths. And I said to my friends: “Do we love anything but the beautiful? What then is the beautiful? And what is beauty? What is it that allures and unites us to the things we love; for unless there were a grace and beauty in them, they could not possibly attract us to them?” And I reflected on this and saw that in the objects themselves there is a kind of beauty that comes from their forming a whole and another kind of beauty that comes from mutual fitness — as the harmony of one part of the body with its whole, or a shoe with a foot, and so on. And this idea sprang up in my mind out of my inmost heart, and I wrote some books — two or three, I think — On the Beautiful and the Fitting.6 You know them, O Lord; they have escaped my memory. I no longer have them; somehow, they have been mislaid.
Chapter XIV
21. What was it, O Lord my God, that prompted me to dedicate these books to Hierius, an orator of Rome, a man I did not know by sight but whom I loved for his reputation of learning, for which he was famous — and also for some words of his that I had heard that had pleased me? But he pleased me more because he pleased others, who gave him high praise and expressed amazement that a Syrian, who had first studied Greek eloquence, should thereafter become so wonderful a Latin orator and also so well versed in philosophy. Thus a man we have never seen is commended and loved. Does a love like this come into the heart of the hearer from the mouth of him who sings the other’s praise? Not so. Instead, one catches the spark of love from one who loves. This is why we love one who is praised when the eulogist is believed to give his praise from an unfeigned heart; that is, when he who loves him praises him.
22. Thus it was that I loved men on the basis of other men’s judgment, and not yours, O my God, in whom no man is deceived. But why is it that the feeling I had for such men was not like my feeling toward the renowned charioteer, or the great gladiatorial hunter, famed far and wide and popular with the mob? Actually, I admired the orator in a different and more serious fashion, as I would myself desire to be admired. For I did not want them to praise and love me as actors were praised and loved — although I myself praise and love them too. I would prefer being unknown than known in that way, or even being hated than loved that way. How are these various influences and diverse sorts of loves distributed within one soul? What is it that I am in love with in another which, if I did not hate, I should neither detest nor repel from myself, seeing that we are equally men? For it does not follow that because the good horse is admired by a man who would not be that horse — even if he could — the same kind of admiration should be given to an actor, who shares our nature. Do I then love that in a man, which I, also a man, would hate to be? Man is himself a great deep. You number his very hairs, O Lord, and they do not fall to the ground without you, and yet the hairs of his head are more readily numbered than are his affections and the movements of his heart.
23. But that orator whom I admired so much was the kind of man I wished myself to be. Thus I erred through a swelling pride and was “carried about with every wind” (Eph 4:14), but through it all I was being piloted by you, though most secretly. And how is it that I know — whence comes my confident confession to you — that I loved him more because of the love of those who praised him than for the things they praised in him? Because if he had gone unpraised, and these same people had criticized him and had spoken the same things of him in a tone of scorn and disapproval, I should never have been kindled and provoked to love him. And yet his qualities would not have been different, nor would he have been different himself; only the appraisals of the spectators. See where the helpless soul lies prostrate that is not yet sustained by the stability of truth! Just as the breezes of speech blow from the breast of the opinionated, so also the soul is tossed this way and that, driven forward and backward, and the light is obscured to it and the truth not seen. And yet, there it is in front of us. And to me it was a great matter that both my literary work and my zest for learning should be known by that man. For if he approved them, I would be even more fond of him; but if he disapproved, this vain heart of mine, devoid of your steadfastness, would have been offended. And so I meditated on the problem “of the beautiful and the fitting” and dedicated my work on it to him. I regarded it admiringly, though no one else joined me in doing so.
Chapter XV
24. But I had not seen how the main point in these great issues [concerning the nature of beauty] lay really in your craftsmanship, O Omnipotent One, “who alone does wondrous things” (Ps 72:18). And so my mind ranged through the corporeal forms, and I defined and distinguished as “beautiful” that which is so in itself and as “fit” that which is beautiful in relation to some other thing. This argument I supported by corporeal examples. And I turned my attention to the nature of the mind, but the false opinions that I held concerning spiritual things prevented me from seeing the truth. Still, the very power of truth forced itself on my gaze, and I turned my throbbing soul away from incorporeal substance to qualities of line and color and shape, and, because I could not perceive these with my mind, I concluded that I could not perceive my mind. And since I loved the peace that is in virtue, and hated the discord that is in vice, I distinguished between the unity there is in virtue and the discord there is in vice. I conceived that unity consisted of the rational soul and the nature of truth and the highest good. But I imagined that in the disunity there was some kind of substance of irrational life and some kind of entity in the supreme evil. This evil I thought was not only a substance but real life as well, and yet I believed that it did not come from you, O my God, from whom are all things. And the first I called a Monad, as if it were a soul without sex. The other I called a Dyad, which showed itself in anger in deeds of violence, in deeds of passion and lust — but I did not know what I was talking about. For I had not understood nor had I been taught that evil is not a substance at all and that our soul is not that supreme and unchangeable good.
25. For just as in violent acts, if the emotion of the soul from whence the violent impulse springs is depraved and asserts itself insolently and mutinously — and just as in the acts of passion, if the affection of the soul that gives rise to carnal desires is unrestrained — so also, in the same way, errors and false opinions contaminate life if the rational soul itself is depraved. Thus it was then with me, for I was ignorant that my soul had to be enlightened by another light, if it was to be partaker of the truth, since it is not itself the essence of truth. “Yes, you light my lamp; the LORD my God lightens my darkness”(Ps 18:28); and “from his fullness have we all received” (Jn 1:16), for that was “the true light that enlightens every man [who comes] into the world” (Jn 1:9); for in you “there is no variation or shadow due to change” (cf. Jas 1:17).
26. But I pushed on toward you, and was pressed back by you that I might know the taste of death, for “you oppose the proud” (cf. Jas 4:6, 1 Pet 5:5). And what greater pride could there be for me than, with a marvelous madness, to assert myself to be that nature that you are? I was mutable — this much was clear enough to me because my very longing to become wise arose out of a wish to change from worse to better — yet I chose rather to think you mutable than to think that I was not as you are. For this reason I was thrust back; you resisted my fickle pride. Thus I went on imagining corporeal forms, and, since I was flesh I accused the flesh, and, since I was “a wind that passes” (Ps 78:39), I did not return to you but went wandering and wandering on toward those things that have no being — neither in you nor in me, nor in the body. These fancies were not created for me by your truth but conceived by my own vain conceit out of sensory notions. And I used to ask your faithful children — my own fellow citizens, from whom I stood unconsciously exiled — I used flippantly and foolishly to ask them, “Why, then, does the soul, which God created, err?” But I would not allow anyone to ask me, “Why, then, does God err?” I preferred to contend that your immutable substance was involved in error through necessity rather than admit that my own mutable substance had gone astray of its own free will and had fallen into error as its punishment.
27. I was about twenty-six or twenty-seven when I wrote those