But what was it that delighted me but to love and to be loved? Still I did not keep the moderate way of the love of mind to mind—the bright path of friendship. Instead, the mists of passion steamed up out of the puddly concupiscence of the flesh, and the hot imagination of puberty, and they so obscured and overcast my heart that I was unable to distinguish pure affection from unholy desire. Both boiled confusedly within me, and dragged my unstable youth down over the cliffs of unchaste desires and plunged me into a gulf of infamy. Your anger had come upon me, and I did not know it. I had been deafened by the clanking of the chains of my mortality, the punishment for my soul's pride, and I wandered farther from you, and you permitted me to do so. I was tossed to and fro, and wasted, and poured out, and I boiled over in my fornications—and yet you kept silent, my tardy Joy! You still kept silent, and I wandered still farther from you into more and yet more barren fields of sorrow, in proud dejection and restless lassitude.
If only there had been someone to regulate my disorder and turn to my profit the fleeting beauties of the things around me, and to set a limit to their sweetness, so that the tides of my youth might have spent themselves upon the shore of marriage! Then they might have been tranquilized and satisfied with having children, as your law prescribes, Lord—you who form the offspring of our death and are able also with a tender hand to blunt the thorns which were excluded from your paradise! For your omnipotence is not far from us even when we are far from you. Or, on the other hand, I might have paid more vigilant attention to the voice from the clouds: "Nevertheless, such shall have trouble in the flesh, but I spare you," and, "It is good for a man not to touch a woman," and, "He who is unmarried cares for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but he who is married cares for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife." I should have listened more attentively to these words, and, having thus been "made a eunuch for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake," I would have awaited your embraces with greater happiness.
But, fool that I was, I foamed in my wickedness as the sea and, forsaking you, followed the rushing of my own tide, and burst out of all your bounds. But I did not escape your scourges. For what mortal can do so? You were always with me, mercifully angry and flavoring all my unlawful pleasures with bitter discontent,⁠a in order that I might seek pleasures free from discontent. But where could I find such pleasure except in you, Lord—except in you, who teach us by sorrow, who wound us to heal us, and kill us so that we may not die apart from you. Where was I, and how far was I exiled from the delights of your house, in that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when the madness of lust held full sway in me—that madness which grants indulgence to human shamelessness, even though it is forbidden by your laws—and I gave myself entirely to it? Meanwhile, my family took no care to save me from ruin by marriage, for their sole care was that I should learn how to make a powerful speech and become a persuasive orator.