Book IV

Augustine confesses to living for nine years (ages 19-28) in a state of mutual deception with friends, pursuing worldly fame through rhetoric and liberal sciences while outwardly practicing Manichaeism, a false religion promising spiritual cleansing.

Augustine appeals to God for grace to review his past mistakes in memory and offer thanksgiving, emphasizing human dependence on God and his rejection of worldly pride.

Augustine describes his years teaching rhetoric, driven by greed for money, though he claims to have preferred honest students and showed some signs of faithfulness amid his worldly pursuits.

Augustine recounts refusing to employ magical sacrifices for theatrical success, though his rejection was motivated by concern for the creatures killed rather than genuine love of God, revealing his false understanding of God.

Augustine consulted astrologers and mathematicians without scruple, and he critiques how divination undermines moral responsibility by falsely attributing sin to celestial necessity rather than human will.

A respected physician, experienced in divination himself, advises Augustine to abandon astrology, explaining that it is false and baseless, as evidenced by the role of mere chance in alleged predictions.

Though the physician and Augustine's friend Nebridius attempted to dissuade him from astrology, Augustine remained unconvinced, seeking definitive proof that predictions resulted from chance rather than astrological art.

Augustine describes forming an exceptionally close friendship with a youth of his own age in his native town, initially connected through shared pursuits but deepened into spiritual codependence, with Augustine leading his friend into Manichaeism.

The friend falls gravely ill with fever, is baptized while unconscious, recovers, but then rejects Augustine's mocking attempt to jest about the baptism, creating a sudden rupture in their intimacy.

After recovering, the friend is seized by fever again and dies while Augustine is absent, leaving Augustine unprepared and intensifying his anguish.

Augustine's grief is all-consuming: his native country becomes a torment, he becomes a riddle to himself, and he finds that faith in God provides no comfort because his lost friend, being human, seemed more real and trustworthy.

Augustine, now in retrospect, contemplates the strange paradox that tears and grief bring comfort to the miserable, wondering whether this sweetness comes from hope that God hears our sorrow.

Augustine confesses that his wretchedness stemmed from being bound by friendship with a perishable thing; upon losing it, he felt the misery he had carried all along, yet paradoxically loved that wretched life more than his friend.

Augustine explains the self-contradictory nature of his grief: he loathed life yet feared death, imagining death as a cruel enemy because it had taken his friend, and this fear extended to worry that death would soon take everyone.

Augustine conceives of his soul and his friend's soul as a single entity divided into two bodies, using the phrase "thou half of my soul," making his continued life without his friend feel like an intolerable half-existence.

Augustine condemns his inability to love human beings appropriately, enduring the human condition with impatience; he describes his wounded soul finding no rest in any earthly solace or distraction.

Augustine recognizes he should have raised his burden to God for relief, but could not because his conception of God was merely material and phantom-like, offering no substance to support him.

Unable to bear the memory of his friend in his native town, Augustine attempts to escape by fleeing to Carthage, hoping that distance will reduce his painful recollections.

Time introduces new imaginations and memories that gradually replace Augustine's sorrow with old delights, though the loss of friends continues to cause new griefs as the pattern repeats.

Augustine catalogs the elements that make friendship sweet: mutual talk, service, shared reading and entertainment, gentle disagreement, and the thousand loving gestures that unite souls into one affection.

The comfort of human friendship, while genuinely sweet, contains the seed of future sorrow because it binds the soul to perishable beings; one loses nothing only if all is loved in God alone, the imperishable Creator.

Augustine states that those who turn from God inevitably find His law written in their own punishment; God's law is identified with truth, and truth with God Himself.

Augustine argues that whatever the soul turns to, unless it is God, will be fixed upon sorrows, even if the objects themselves are beautiful; true wholeness requires turning toward God.

Augustine explains that all created things, including the soul's desires, are perishable because they have parts that do not exist simultaneously; they exist only through a constant process of coming and passing away.

Augustine compares speech and all perishable things: just as speech is only complete when syllables pass away so others may come, created things must pass away for the universe to be whole.

Augustine exhorts that the soul should not bind itself through sensual love to perishable things, which cause pestilent longings and cannot provide lasting rest.

Augustine addresses his soul, urging it to listen to God's Word calling it to return to Him as the place of imperturbable rest where love is not forsaken.

Augustine urges his soul to stop following the flesh and instead be converted to follow God, noting that sensual perception grasps only parts and cannot comprehend the whole.

Augustine argues that the complete perception of all parts of a thing together would please more than perceiving them separately, as demonstrated by the analogy of speech and sensory experience.

Augustine instructs that if bodies please us, we should praise God through them and redirect love to their Creator; if souls please us, they should be loved in God, where they remain stable.

Augustine issues a universal call to sinners to return to their hearts where they will find God, warning that there is no blessed life apart from God and no true rest elsewhere.

Augustine proclaims that Christ came down to earth, bore human death, conquered it through His abundant life, and continually calls all people to return to Him through His words, deeds, death, resurrection, and ascension.

Augustine explains the paradox that Christ departed yet remains present, having withdrawn from sight so that believers might return to their own hearts to find Him.

Augustine exhorts humans who are high but set themselves against heaven to descend in humility so they may truly ascend to God, having fallen through ascending against Him.

During his Manichee years, Augustine engaged his friends in philosophical discussion about beauty and what attracts us to things, writing two or three books on "the fair and fit" without understanding their true source.

Augustine dedicated his books to an unknown Roman orator, Hierius, whom he loved based on others' praise rather than direct knowledge, revealing how easily he was swayed by the opinions of others.

Augustine observes that love for an unseen person is not directly transmitted through the commender's mouth but is rather kindled when the commender is believed to praise with genuine affection.

Augustine identifies a contradiction in his desires: he loved Hierius as someone he wished to be like, yet he would not love or want to be an actor or other figures of vulgar fame, revealing the inconsistency of his loves.

Augustine confesses that he erred through swelling pride regarding the orator Hierius, being tossed about by every wind of opinion while unknowingly being guided by God.

Augustine observes that his soul, not yet sustained by the solidity of truth, was carried about by the winds of others' opinions, unable to see truth even when it was evident.

Augustine's sense of self-worth depended entirely on whether Hierius would approve of his works; disapproval would wound his empty heart devoid of God's solidity.

Augustine defined beauty corporally as either intrinsic or relational, using physical examples, because his false understanding of spiritual things prevented him from seeing immaterial truth.

Though truth flashed in Augustine's eyes, he turned away his soul from incorporeal substance to seek understanding through lineaments, colors, and magnitudes, unable to see with the mind.

Based on his false corporeal understanding, Augustine conceived of good as a Monad (unity without sex) and evil as a Duad (divisive substance), but failed to understand that evil is not a substance and that the soul is not the chief good.

Augustine explains how violence arises from corrupted emotions, lust from ungoverned affections, and errors from a corrupted rational soul that has not been enlightened by divine truth.

Augustine affirms that God is the unchanging true light that illuminates every person, and that the soul must be illuminated by this divine light to participate in truth.

Augustine identifies his most fundamental error: in his madness, he maintained that he was by nature what only God is, while falsely imagining God to be subject to change as he himself was.

Because Augustine imagined God corporeally and accused flesh while being flesh himself, he was repelled by God; he pursued what has no being and invented vanities from corporeal things.

Augustine confesses that he asked his fellow Christians why the soul errs when God created it, but refused to be asked why God errs; he blamed God's unchangeable substance rather than his own voluntary error.

At ages 26-27, Augustine wrote philosophical volumes on beauty while his heart was filled with corporeal fictions; he longed to hear God's truth but was driven by his own errors and weighed down by pride.

At barely twenty years old, Augustine read and understood Aristotle's Categories unaided, an achievement that impressed him, though others with trained tutors could barely comprehend it.

Augustine attempted to use the ten Predicaments to understand God's unchangeable unity as if it were subject to predicates like physical bodies, a fundamental error that prevented him from grasping divine truth.

Augustine's understanding of Aristotle hindered rather than helped him because he applied materialist categories to God; his knowledge was false understanding, not true wisdom.

Augustine mastered rhetoric, logic, geometry, music, and arithmetic without instruction, gifts from God's grace, yet he did not sacrifice to God but used them for his own advancement and worldly pursuits.

Augustine compares his spiritual condition to standing with his back to light, able to see illuminated objects but unable to see the light itself or the instruments of vision.

Augustine imagined God as an enormous bright body of which he was a fragment, a perverseness he does not blush to confess but which prevented him from understanding divine truth.

Augustine's clever intellect and mastery of difficult subjects profited him nothing because he used these gifts sacrilegiously and blasphemously against God, while simple faithful children were protected in the Church.

Augustine prays for God's protection under His wings, affirming that human firmness is infirmity without God, and that the good always lives with Him; he calls for return to God before being overturned.