Now, in that year my studies were interrupted. I had come back from Madaura, a neighboring city where I had gone to study grammar and rhetoric; and the money for a further term at Carthage was being raised for me. This project was more a matter of my father's ambition than of his means, for he was only a poor citizen of Tagaste. To whom am I narrating all this? Not to you, my God, but to my own kind in your presence—to that small part of the human race who may chance to come upon these writings. And to what end? That I and all who read them may understand what depths there are from which we are to cry to you.⁠a For what is more surely heard in your ear than a confessing heart and a faithful life? Who did not extol and praise my father, because he went quite beyond his means to supply his son with the necessary expenses for a long journey in the interest of his education? For many far richer citizens did not do so much for their children. Still, this same father did not trouble himself at all about how I was progressing toward you nor how chaste I was, just so long as I was skillful in speaking—no matter how barren I was to your cultivation, God, you who are the one true and good Lord of my heart, which is your field.
During my sixteenth year, I lived with my parents, having a holiday from school for a time—this idleness imposed upon me by my parents' straitened finances. The thornbushes of lust grew rank around my head, and there was no hand to root them out. Indeed, when my father saw me one day at the baths and perceived that I was becoming a man, and was showing the signs of adolescence, he joyfully told my mother about it as if already looking forward to grandchildren, rejoicing in that sort of inebriation in which the world so often forgets you, its Creator, and falls in love with your creature instead of you—the inebriation of that invisible wine of a perverted will which turns and bows down to infamy. But in my mother's breast you had already begun to build your temple and the foundation of your holy habitation—whereas my father was only a catechumen, and only recently. She was, therefore, startled with a holy fear and trembling: for though I had not yet been baptized, she feared the crooked ways walked by those who turn their backs to you and not their faces.
Woe is me! Do I dare claim that you kept silent, my God, while I wandered farther away from you? Did you really keep silent then? Then whose words were they but yours, which you poured into my ears through my mother, your faithful handmaid? None of them, however, sank into my heart to make me do anything. She lamented and, as I remember, warned me privately with great concern, "not to commit fornication; but above all things never to defile another man's wife." These seemed to me only womanish counsels, which I would have blushed to obey. Yet they were from you, and I did not know it. I thought that you were silent and that it was only she who spoke. Yet it was through her that you did not keep silent toward me; and in rejecting her counsel I was rejecting you—I, her son, "the son of your handmaid, your servant." But I did not realize this, and rushed on headlong with such blindness that, among my friends, I was ashamed to be less shameless than they, when I heard them boasting of their disgraceful exploits—yes, and glorying all the more the worse their baseness was. What is worse, I took pleasure in such exploits, not for the pleasure's sake only but mostly for praise. What deserves condemnation except vice itself? Yet I made myself out worse than I was, so that I would not go without praise. And when I had not sinned in something as badly as the worst ones in the group, I would still say that I had done what I had not done, in order not to appear contemptible because I was more innocent than they; and not to drop in their esteem because I was more chaste.
Behold with what companions I walked the streets of Babylon! I rolled in its mire and lolled about on it, as if on a bed of spices and precious ointments. And, drawing me more closely to the very center of that city, my invisible enemy trod me down and seduced me, for I was easy to seduce. My mother had already fled out of the midst of Babylon and was progressing, although slowly, toward its outskirts. For in counseling me to chastity, she did not bear in mind what her husband had told her about me. And although she knew that my passions were destructive even then and dangerous for the future, she did not think they should be restrained by the bonds of conjugal affection—if, indeed, they could not be cut away to the quick. She paid no attention to this, for she was afraid that a wife would prove a hindrance and a burden to my hopes. These were not her hopes of the world to come, which my mother had in you, but the hope of learning, which both my parents were too anxious that I should acquire—my father, because he had little or no thought of you, and only vain thoughts for me; my mother, because she thought that the usual course of study would not only be no hindrance but actually a furtherance toward my eventual return to you. This much I conjecture, recalling as well as I can the temperaments of my parents. Meanwhile, the reins of discipline were slackened on me, so that without the restraint of due severity, I might play at whatever I fancied, even to the point of dissoluteness. And in all this there was that mist which shut out from my sight the brightness of your truth, my God; and my iniquity bulged out, as it were, with fatness!