Reflections on some "spontaneous" prayers in the Confessions of St. Augustine

One of the more immediately striking features of the Confessions of St. Augustine to the modern reader is the fact that they are addressed to God and not to him or her. You see it in Augustine’s constant use of the word “you”, “tu”, “tibi” referring to God and not to us.

There are a few exceptions where the reader is addressed, if only indirectly, for example, when Augustine requests prayers for his deceased parents (IX,13,37) or when he tells us not to scorn him as he relates to us his errors, saying that the same physician who  healed him then could be applying preventive medicine to us now (II,7,15). However,  even these statements go through God before arriving at us.

 This is the reason God seems so close when you read the Confessions. Something is happening on those pages. God and Augustine are in conversation. It’s not like someone telling us interesting things about self and God. It is prayer going on right before our very eyes, and we are let in on it.

We can sense two directions in the conversation. First, Augustine is speaking to God. He speaks about many things: his childhood, his young manhood; his joys, his sorrows, his failures and sins, his discoveries, his liberation. In the second God is speaking to Augustine. In particular, God is moving Augustine to prayer. This is readily discernible in moments of what seem like spontaneous outbursts in scattered places of the book. In these passages Augustine changes tense: from the past, where he tells us of what once happened, to the present where he breaks into prayer then and there as if stirred directly by God. A good example is found in Book VII. In the midst of telling us about  his first inner experience of God after being enlightened by the neoplatonists, he comes out with the prayer:

O eternal truth and true love and beloved eternity! You are  my God. I sigh to you by day and by night. (VII, 10, 16)

Were the prayers really spontaneous? At first glance it seems so. Some come at heightened moments in the story as if they were sudden responses to something vividly remembered. For the Confessions were just that: a return to the past to see where God had been all along the path to conversion. Augustine found God acting in the most surprising of places: in a book, in  a person, in a sorrow, in a joy, in a mistake, in a quandary, in the things of creation. At certain  moments during these reminiscences he goes beyond his usual pattern of narration and explodes into prayer. He overflows the brim, so to speak. These are some of the best  moments of the Confessions.

On the other hand, when you go to the original Latin, you see signs of skilled craftsmanship at work: rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, balanced contrast, play of words and numerous other clever devices. It is frequently thought that the Confessions were written more to be listened to than to be read. Augustine’s “spontaneous” prayers are exceptional for their sonority and pleasing quality.

 In addition, the prayers are placed quite strategically, often at the beginning or end of a book, for instance Book Four where Augustine closes a stressful chapter of his life with a beautiful invocation that begins: “O Lord, our God, grant us to trust in your overshadowing wings; protect us beneath them and bear us up …” (IV,16,31). He begins Book Eight, the one that tells of his conversion in the garden of Milan, with these words: “Let me, o my God, remember with thanks to you and confess your mercies upon me. Let my bones be pierced through with your love, and let them say: Who is like unto you, O Lord? You have broken my bonds” (VIII,1,1). Sometimes the prayers are placed near certain events as if to give special force to them, as in Book Two after anguishing over his theft of the pears he says, “I do not want to look at it or see it. O justice and innocence, fair and lovely, it is on you that I want to gaze” (II,10,18). There is no doubt that these prayers are a genuine “cry of the heart”, as he was wont to describe his prayer, but they were put down on paper with studied attention.

    What I would like to do in this article is to open the book of the Confessions, stop briefly at some of those spontaneous prayers amid the text, and see what we can draw from them for our own prayer. The tense changes will be our cue. My hope is that the book of the Confessions can become more of a friend than ever, to return to over and over again, and that we will come to know better the God Augustine was speaking with.

BOOK ONE

The first five chapters of Book One are an extended meditation by the author as he begins the task of writing the Confessions. He reflects on his wish to praise God throughout the whole work, on his deep desire to receive God within him, on the nature and qualities of the God he is addressing, and on his own human weakness and limits. The story line doesn’t begin until chapter 6. Verbs in the past tense do not appear yet. All is prayer.  Here are a few selections

I, 1, 1
Great are you, o Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise; your power is immense, and your wisdom beyond reckoning. And so we humans, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you – we who carry our mortality about with us, carry the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you thwart the proud. Yet these humans, due part of your creation as they are, still do long to praise you. You stir us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.

The last line of this prayer is the most famous line Augustine ever wrote. It has been said that, after Scripture, it describes the religious nature of the human person better than anything  written since. The entire passage is basically a prayer of desire, the desire to be able to praise God while writing this book, giving birth to the book’s title Confessions, the confession, or better, the profession of praise and thanks as Augustine looks back at his life. The prayer betrays also a sense of yearning that will pervade the rest of the work.

Here we can find some of the essential characteristics of the classic Augustinian prayer of desire:
    1.) humility – Augustine speaks of himself as a mere “part of your creation”. He mentions his mortality and points out his sinfulness and pride as always present even when praying. This prayer of desire is offered by a man who is small and unworthy in the face of One so great and holy. Nonetheless, stirred by God, he still longs to praise.
    2.) restlessness,  - Augustine’s desire is often symbolized by a flame moving steadily upward. Throughout the Confessions he goes back and forth between expressions of movement and repose (“unquiet” – “rests in you”). Restlessness is presupposed in everything he says and everything he does. The desire for repose in God is present in every prayer he utters.
    3.) an essential part of his human nature – “you have made us and drawn us to yourself”. For Augustine, the desire for God, and thus our prayer of desire, is a fundamental reality within us because that is the way God made us. You may call it the first grace, in that because of it we begin and carry on our search. The prayer of desire is the prayer that is closest to the human core.

I, 4, 4
What are you, then, my God? What are you, I ask, but the Lord God? For who else is Lord except the Lord or who is god if not our God? You are most high, excellent, most powerful, omnipotent, supremely merciful and supremely just, most hidden yet intimately present, infinitely beautiful and infinitely strong, steadfast yet elusive, unchanging yourself though you control the change in all things, never new, never old, renewing all things yet wearing down the proud though they know it not; ever active, ever at rest, gathering while knowing no need, supporting and filling and guarding, creating and nurturing and perfecting, seeking although you lack nothing. You love without frenzy, you are jealous yet secure, you regret without sadness, you grow angry yet remain tranquil, you alter your works but never your plan; you take back what you find although you never lost it; you are never in need yet you rejoice in your gains, never avaricious yet you demand profits. You allow us to pay you more than you demand, and so you become our debtor, yet which of us possesses anything that does not already belong to you? You owe us nothing, yet you pay your debts; you write off our debts to you yet you lose nothing thereby.
After saying all that, what have we said, o my God, my life, my holy sweetness? What does anyone who speaks of you really say? Yet woe betide those who fail to speak, while the chatterboxes go on saying nothing.

    This is a sublime prayer of praise. It begins with the intriguing question, “What are you, then, my God?” To give an answer, he puts to use several superlatives and paradoxes, taking a stab at the inexpressible. A superlative is the highest possible degree one can imagine. A paradox is a statement containing two truths seemingly incompatible. Augustine’s verbal ingenuity draws us to reflect on each of the components of this prayer. A few examples worth meditating:

“most high, excellent, most powerful, omnipotent”
“most hidden yet intimately  present”
“infinitely beautiful and infinitely strong”
 “unchanging yourself though you control the change in all things”
 “never new, never old, renewing all things”
“ever active, ever at rest”
“you love without frenzy”
“jealous yet secure”
“you alter your works but never your plan”
“you write off our debts to you yet you lose nothing thereby”       

This prayer too reflects the characteristics we saw in the previous prayer:
1.)     humility – “After saying all that, what have we said …? What does anyone who speaks of you really say?” (not a bad attitude to adopt when trying to speak of God).
2.)     restlessness – “What are you, then, my God?” (only restless people ask such questions).
3.)    an essential part of his human nature – “woe betide those who fail to speak” (how much we cheat ourselves if we find no interest in God)

This prayer is a good example of how our prayer is never quite enough and never will be. It knocks at the door of a mystery that is always beyond us. Limits are our most common experience when trying to laud God. But we must go ahead with it.

I, 5, 6
Who will grant me to find peace in you? Who will grant me this grace that you would come into my heart and inebriate it, enabling me to forget the evils that beset me and embrace you, my only good? … The house of my soul is too small for you to enter: make it more spacious by your coming. It lies in ruins: rebuild it. Some things are to be found there which will offend your gaze; I confess this to be so and know it well. But who will clean my house? To whom but yourself can I cry: “Cleans me of my hidden sins, o Lord”?

    This prayer of petition is Augustine’s first request for grace among many in the Confessions. To express his need he uses the image of a house. What is his house like? Too small. In ruins. Displeasing. What is the solution?  “Make it more spacious”.  “Rebuild it”.  “Cleans me of my hidden sins”.
    
Here too we find the three characteristics of  Augustine’s prayer:
1.) humility – “who will grant me …?”
    2.) restlessness,  - “to find peace in you?”
3.) an essential part of his human nature – “my only good”.

In the opening five chapters of Book One of the Confessions we have already found three of the spontaneous prayers we were looking for: one of desire, one of praise, one of petition. Together they form a fitting beginning for the book. Prayers like these will appear again and again in the Confessions, usually just at the right  moment.


Proceeding ahead from the opening meditation, Book One takes up the story line of Augustine’s life: a child at the breast (I,6,7), learning to speak (I,8,13), harsh days at school (I,9,14), his baptism put off (I,11,17), his dislike of what he was made to study and his day dreaming (I,13, 20-21), kids’ tricks (I,19,30).

He ends this charming narrative of his boyhood with a beautiful prayer of thanksgiving:

I, 20, 31
In spite of all this, O Lord our God, I give thanks to you, the most perfect, most good creator and ruler of the universe, and I would still thank you even if you had not willed me to live beyond boyhood. Even then I existed, I lived and I experienced, I took good care to keep myself whole and sound and so preserve the trace in me of your profoundly mysterious unity from which I came. By means of my interior sense I coordinated my sensible impressions, and in my little thoughts about little things delighted in the truth. I was unwilling to be deceived, I had a lively memory, I was being trained in the use of words, I was comforted by friendship, and I shrank from pain, grovelling and ignorance. In a living creature such as this everything is wonderful and worthy of praise, but all things are gifts from my God. I did not endow myself with them, but they are good, and together they make me what I am. He who made me is good, and he is my good too; rejoicing, I thank him for all those gifts which made me what I was, even as a boy. In this lay my sin, that not in him was I seeking pleasures, distinctions and truth, but in myself and the rest of his creatures, and so I fell headlong into pains, confusions and errors. But I give thanks  to you, my sweetness, my honor, my confidence; to you, my God, I give thanks for your gifts. Do you preserve them for me. So will you preserve me too, and what you have given me will grow and reach perfection, and I will be with you; because this too is your gift to me – that I exist.

This is a true canticle to the creator. While relating his past, Augustine pauses and thanks God in the present. Much like the canticle of St. Francis, it rejoices in the God who made all things, but takes a more Augustinian and psychological approach. Note the interior motives for his gratitude: “then I existed, I lived and I experienced, I took good care to keep myself whole and sound”. Note also how he connects these inner qualities of his to God – “the trace in me of your profoundly mysterious unity from which I came”. We meet the person of Augustine as he presents himself: his exceptional intelligence, his vigor and love of life, his capacity for friendship, his passion for truth. Yet he repeatedly employs the word, “gift”:  “All things are gifts from my God. I did not endow myself with them”. “They are good”, he says, “and together they make me what I am”.

He ends by turning the canticle into a prayer of petition, that the gifts he mentioned not be lost but develop further as he goes through life: “Preserve them for me. So will you preserve me too, and what you have given me will grow and reach perfection, and I will be with you”.

BOOK TWO

    BOOK TWO is a dark and anguished segment of the Confessions. It lays out much of what Augustine disliked about himself at the age of 16 and describes a web of evil that was already holding him fast. First of all he speaks of  his overpowering sensual nature that led him so far astray: “There was a time in adolescence when I was afire to take my fill of hell. I boldly thrust out rank, luxuriant growth in various furtive love affairs; my beauty wasted away and I rotted in your sight, intent on pleasing myself and winning favor in the eyes of men” ( II,1,1).

        Book Two also contains the famous incident of the midnight pear theft, another memory Augustine didn’t care to look at: “Close to our vineyard there was a pear tree laden with fruit. This fruit was not enticing, either in appearance or in flavor. We nasty lads went there to shake down the fruit and carry it off at dead of night.” (II,4,9). He is at pains to know why he committed this useless theft and asks: “Was I, in truth, a prisoner, trying to simulate a crippled sort of freedom, attempting a shady parody of omnipotence by getting away with something forbidden?”  He comments: “What rottenness, what a misshapen life! Rather a hideous pit of death! To do what was wrong simply because it was wrong – could I have found pleasure in that?” (II, 6, l4). Then again he says: “I most certainly would not have done it alone. It  follows, then, that I also loved the camaraderie with my fellow thieves”. He finds himself sunk in a swamp.

    It is worthy of note that Augustine chose to begin and end Book Two, sandwich it in if you like, with two spontaneous prayers that express a yearning for the contrary of the ugliness and waste he was to describe so vividly. He opens Book Two:

Now I want to call to mind the foul deeds I committed, those sins of the flesh that corrupted my soul, not in order to love them, but to love you, my God. Out of love for loving you I do this, recalling my most wicked ways and thinking over the past with bitterness so that you may grow ever sweeter to me; for you are a sweetness that deceives not, a sweetness blissful and serene. I will try now to give a coherent account of my disintegrated self, for when I turned away from you, the one God, and pursued a multitude of things, I went to pieces. (II,1, 1)

Note the juxtaposition of contrasting attractions and repulsions. He recalls the foul deeds of his youth “not in order to love them, but to love you”. He thinks over his past “with bitterness so that you may grow ever sweeter to me”. He speaks of the effect on his own integrity from the scatterdness of what he sought after: “When I turned away from you, the one God, and pursued a multitude of things, I went to pieces”.

In this prayer you get the impression of Augustine gritting himself to look again at something he had come to loathe with a fervent desire for its opposite: a loveliness that does not deceive, the unity of his own person that comes from loving God.  He goes back to the grim past with daunting courage, wishing for and indeed intending a different future.

He closes Book Two with another prayer:

Who can unravel this most snarled, knotty tangle? It is disgusting, and I do not want to look at it or see it. O justice and innocence, fair and lovely, it is on you that I want to gaze with eyes that see purely and find satiety in never being sated. With you is rest and tranquil life. Whoever enters into you enters the joy of his Lord; there he will fear nothing and find his own supreme good in God who is supreme goodness. I slid away from you and wandered away, my God; far from your steadfastness I strayed in adolescence, and I became to myself a land of famine. (II, 10,18)

This prayer of desire plays off opposites as well and with the same purpose as the previous prayer, namely to express his yearning for what is beautiful in the face of what is ugly: “Who can unravel this most snarled, knotty tangle …  disgusting … O justice and innocence, fair and lovely”.  “I do not want to look at it … it is on you that I want to gaze”. This may be the best way to handle the sordid things of our lives, not merely by rejection and loathing, but even more so by a holy desire for what is better, turning away in prayer from squalor to beauty, reaching for God, bringing to expression our deepest desire for what is beyond

BOOK FOUR

In Book Four, covering about ten years of Augustine’s life until about the age of twenty-eight, we can detect a sense of weariness. “I and others like me were seduced and seducers”, he said, “deceived ourselves and deceivers of others” (IV,1,1). He is disappointed by people and disillusioned with ideas. It is in this part of the Confessions that he suffers the death of his closest friend: “My heart was black with grief. Whatever I looked upon had the air of death. My native place was a prison house and my home a strange unhappiness.” (IV,4,9). While writing about this incident he provides us with more of his prayers.

IV, 9, 14
Blessed is he who loves you and his friend in you, and his enemy for your sake. He alone loses no one dear to him, to whom all are dear in the One who is never lost.

In this prayer of hope Augustine breaks out of the sorrow and confusion of the narrative he is telling and turns to God. He seems to be repeating the wisdom he learned since his painful experience of long ago and letting his heart rise anew. The prayer comes about because he has indeed learned that delicate detachment which is possible only when all are loved in God and now wishes to affirm it once again.

 IV, 11, 16
Be not vain, my soul, and take care that the ear of your heart be not deafened by the din of your vanity. You too must listen to the selfsame Word who calls you back, and there find a place of imperturbable quiet, where love is never forsaken unless it chooses to forsake.

In this prayer Augustine turns and speaks to himself. He urges himself to listen to the “Word who calls you back” and to seek peace only where it is sure, “where love is never forsaken unless it chooses to forsake”. Such talking to oneself is not to be worried about. It is quite healthy. It is often difficult to tell when you are speaking with God or speaking with yourself. Both can be moments of prayer, even speaking with yourself if done in the presence of God, near his ear so to speak. Think of how the psalmist sometimes did it: “Bless the Lord, my soul” (Ps 104, 1), “My soul, give thanks to the Lord, all my being bless his holy name.” (Ps 103, 1)  

He procedes further speaking to himself - one wonders if he is not actually addressing us - and urges himself to find a foothold for his many  loves:

IV, 12, 18
If sensuous beauty delights you, praise God for the beauty of corporeal things, and channel the love you feel for them onto their Maker, lest the things that please you lead to displease him. If kinship with other souls appeals to you, let them be loved in God, because they too are changeable and gain stability only when fixed in him;  otherwise they would go their own way and be lost.

Then he exhorts all to look for God within themselves:

 Let them be loved in him, and carry off to God as many of them as possible with you and say to them: "Let us love him: for he made these things and he is not far off, for he did not make them and then go away; they are from him but also in him. You know where he is because you know where truth tastes sweet. He is most intimately present to the human heart, but the heart has strayed from him. Return to the heart, then, you wrongdoers, and hold fast to him who made you. Stand with him and you will stand, rest with him and you will find peace.

    This invitation to the interior journey, “return to the heart," is found in many places of Augustine’s works. Here we find it in Book Four of the Confessions and in particular after  relating to us how as a young man “I had become a great enigma to myself” (IV,4, 9).  This prayer almost seems like a plan of life that Augustine is still formulating and offering to us as well.

Book Four continues along its weary way. Augustine speaks of his having read so much in those years - liberal arts, music, mathematics, astrology, philosophy, easily understanding the difficult Ten Categories of Aristotle - and asks “what did it profit me?” (IV,16, 31). He wrote books but lacked enthusiasm for them (IV, 15, 27). His pride wore him down steadily (IV,16,31). So, he closes off Book Four with this prayer of hope and petition:

IV, 16, 31
O Lord, our God, grant us to trust in your overshadowing wings: protect us beneath them and bear us up. You will carry us as little children, and even to our grey-headed age you will carry us still. When you are our strong security, that is strength indeed, but when our security is in ourselves, that is but weakness. Our good abides ever in your keeping, but in diverting our steps from you we have grown perverse. Let us turn back to you at last, Lord, that we be not overturned. Unspoilt, our good abides with you, for you are yourself our good. We need not fear to find no home again because we have fallen away from it; while we are absent our home falls not to ruins, for our home is your eternity.

BOOK FIVE

BOOK FIVE begins with a prayer. It is a sort of pause for praise about half way along the route of conversion within the Confessions:

V, 1, 1
Accept the sacrifice of my Confessions offered to you by the power of this tongue of mine which you have fashioned and aroused to confess to your name; bring healing to all my bones and let them exclaim, Lord, who is like you? A person who confesses to you is not informing you about what goes on within him, for a closed heart does not shut you out, nor is your hand pushed away by human obduracy; you melt it when you choose, whether by showing mercy or by enforcing your claim, and from your fiery heat no one can hide.  But allow my soul to give you glory that it may love you the more, and let it confess to you your own merciful dealings, that it may give you glory.

The pause reminds us of how important it was for Augustine to stop and offer praise every now and then as he was writing his book. It steered him back to his original purpose  and energized him in the right direction. Such pauses for praise of God are helpful in any serious undertaking. They mark off a Christian life. They give it fresh air, sustain it and focus its purpose.

Augustine then connects this praise to that being constantly offered by creation. He, and all those like him who gaze on creation with awe, become its mouthpiece:

Your whole creation never wearies of praising you, never falls silent; never a breath from the mouth of one who turns to you but gives you glory, never is praise lacking from the universe of living creatures and corporeal beings as they laud you through the mouths of those who contemplate them. Supported by these things you have made let the human soul rise above its weariness and pass through these creatures to you, who have made them so wonderfully. There it will find refreshment, there is the true strength.

BOOK SIX

          Book Six, on the other hand, ends with a prayer. This is yet another prayer of hope, following upon such experiences narrated in Book Six as Augustine’s growing wretchedness in Milan, the disillusionment from some of his former certainties and his continuing struggles with chastity:

VI,16, 26
But lo! Here you are, you rescue us from our wretched meanderings and establish us on your way; you console us and bid us, “Run, I will carry you, I will lead you and I will bring you home.”

 “Lo! Here you are”, he says to God. The trust expressed in this prayer referred to his future more than his past, as he needed encouragement at the time of writing to face new challenges in his life. “Run, I will carry you, I will lead you and I will bring you home”  is the call he wanted hear.

BOOK EIGHT

Book Eight is the one that tells of his final conversion in the garden of Milan. It too begins with a prayer, an invocation to God to help Augustine remember those crucial moments that he is about  to narrate so that he can feel an even greater gratitude and convey this to his readers:

VIII, 1, 1
In a spirit of thankfulness let me recall the mercies you lavished on me, o my God; to you let me confess them. May I be flooded with love for you until my very bones cry out, “Who is like you O Lord?” Let me offer you a sacrifice of praise, for you have snapped my bonds. How you broke them I will relate, so that all your worshippers who hear my tale may exclaim, “Blessed be the Lord, blessed in heaven and on earth, for great and wonderful is his name”..

“Let me recall”. He is beginning to describe the great act of grace in his life and wants to leave nothing out. It is important now to be as complete as possible so that we readers may understand. So he simply asks for help.

There is another reason to imitate this prayer. We often tend to lose sight of God’s mercies, or perhaps do not ever perceive them, a spiritual blindness to divine gift. Augustine said he had done this for most of his life. He later prayed that God make him more sensitive to the many proofs of his loving kindness.

“In a spirit of thankfulness”. He says this with the help of Psalm 116: “Let me offer you a sacrifice of praise, for you have snapped my bonds”. Whenever we pray this psalm, the figure of Augustine looms on the horizon as he was on the verge of liberation.

    Book Eight contains two episodes that prepare the famous scene in the garden of Milan with the fig tree, the voice of the child, etc. Both are conversations in which Augustine heard of the conversions of other people, Marius Victorinus earlier in the century and two Roman officials more recently. In the midst of telling about these conversations Augustine bursts into prayer:

VIII, 4, 9
Come, Lord, arouse us and call us back, kindle us and seize us,  prove to us how sweet you are in your burning tenderness; let us love you and run to you.

This brief prayer contains several important verbs for an Augustinian prayer of desire: “come!”,  “arouse“, “call back”, “kindle”, “seize”, “prove how sweet you are”, “let us run to you”. Here he is expressing his deepest wishes and asking God to do what he does best. This desire existed in him at that very threshold of conversion. It is still alive in him ten years or so later as he writes the Confessions, and draws him to prayer then and there. It is often difficult to distinguish Augustine’s prayer of desire from his prayer of petition and perhaps not even necessary.

BOOK NINE

BOOK NINE begins with a prayer which reflects the calm and the light of the morning after the dark and stormy night of his conversion:

IX,1
O Lord, I am your servant: I am your servant and your handmaid’s son. You burst my bonds asunder and to you I will offer a sacrifice of praise. May my heart and tongue give praise to you, and all my bones cry out their question: “Who is like  you, O Lord?”. Yes, let them ask and then do you respond and say to my soul, “I am your salvation”.

This is a song of gratitude that had to be. He sings of his liberation (“You burst my bonds asunder”), his new relationship with God (“I am your servant”), and his trust (“Say to my soul ‘I am your salvation’”). Isn’t this what you would expect of the Augustine we have come to know? He couldn’t let this memory of the event pass in his Confessions without again expressing his thanks.

BOOK TEN

In Book Ten Augustine is finished with the past. It’s all about the now of the writer. People want to hear how he is at the present time, and he intends to tell them.  First he prays:

X, 1, 1
Let me know you, O you who know me; then shall I know even as I am known. You are the strength of my soul; make your way in and shape it to yourself, that it may be yours to have and to hold, free from stain or wrinkle.

This is yet another prayer of desire and petition, now well into the Confessions. The opening line is quite familiar. Augustine asks to know God just as he himself is known by God, an echo of the still more famous prayer in the Soliloquies: “let me know myself, let me know you” (noverim  me, noverim te II, 1, 1). In the hierarchy of Augustine’s requests of God this one ranks at the top. In the same prayer he asks God, as he did so many times before, to come and transform him: “make your way in and shape it to yourself”. Note the similarity with the earlier prayer we considered (I, 5, 6) asking God to rebuild “the house of my soul”.

 X, 6, 8
I love you, Lord, with no doubtful mind but with absolute certainty. You pierced my heart with your word, and I fell in love with you.

This is one of those prayers that are often remembered in the original Latin, percussisti cor meum verbo tuo, et amavi te. It has a partner in Book Nine where he says “With the arrows of your charity you had pierced our hearts (Sagittaveras tu cor nostrum caritate tua), and we bore your words within us like a sword penetrating us to the core” (IX, 2, 3). Both of these prayers inspired the Order of St. Augustine long ago to construct its logo with the book, the heart, the arrow and the flame, with the hope that this intense Augustinian experience would reproduce itself many times over within the Order of brothers. When Augustine decided to go deep in his requests to God, he inevitably ended up speaking of the heart.

X, 6, 8-9

Then Augustine waxes eloquent with a long prayer of praise that at the end flows into a prayer of desire. First he asks “What am I loving when I love you?”  and then speaks of  the undiminished pleasure that is unlike any other pleasure:

What am I loving when I love you? Not beauty of body nor transient grace, not this fair light which is now so friendly to my eyes, not melodious song in all its lovely harmonies, not the sweet fragrance of flowers or ointments or spices, not manna or honey, not limbs that draw me to carnal embrace: none of these do I love when I love my God. And yet I do love a kind of light, a kind of voice, a certain fragrance, a food and an embrace, when I love my God: a light, voice, fragrance, food and embrace for my inmost self, where something limited to no place shines into  my mind, where something not snatched away by passing time sings for me, where something no breath blows away yields to me its scent, where there is saviour undiminished by famished eating, and where I am clasped in a union from which no satiety can tear me away. This is what I love when I love my God.

Then he turns again to creation and asks:

And what is this?
I put my question to the earth and it replied, “I am not he”;
I questioned everything it held and they confessed the same.
I questioned the sea and the great deep,
and the teeming live creatures that crawl,
and they replied,
“We are not God, seek higher”.
I questioned the gusty winds,
and every breeze with all its flying creatures told me, “Anaximenes was wrong; I am not God”.  
To the sky I put my question, to sun, moon, stars,
but they denied me: “We are not the God you seek”.
And to all things that stood around the portals of my flesh I said, “Tell me of my God.
You are not he but tell me something of him”.
Then they lifted up their mighty voices and cried,
“He made us”.
My questioning was my attentive spirit,
and their reply their beauty.

This is one of Augustine’s most beautiful prayers of praise with its upward sweep through the things of earth and heaven to the God who made them. It strikingly reveals the searching nature of its author: ”My questioning was my attentive spirit, and their reply their beauty” And so, it becomes at the same time a prayer of desire.

X, 27, 38
Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new,
late have I loved you!
Lo, you were within,
but I outside, seeking there for you,
and upon the shapely things you have made i rushed headlong, I misshapen.
You were with me but I was not with you.
They held me back from you,
those things which would have no being
were they not in you.
You called shouted, broke through my deafness;
you flared, blazed, banished my blindness;
you lavished your fragrance, I gasped, now I pant for you;
I tasted you, and I hunger and thirst;
you touched me, and I  burned for your peace.

This famous prayer, which has recently been put to music by several modern composers, could be considered a summary in poetic form of all that preceded in the Confessions. It speaks of his remorse over how long he had wandered. It repeats the wonderful ways of God’s bringing Augustine back to him. And it reflects Augustine’s constant desire for rest in God. We will soon leave Augustine, still restless, still burning for God's peace, just as at the beginning of the book.

X, 28, 39
When at last I cling to you with my whole being there will be no more anguish or labour for me, and my life will be alive indeed, because filled with you.  But now it is very different. Anyone whom you fill you also uplift, but I am not full of you, and so I am a burden to myself. Joys over which I ought to weep do battle with sorrows that should be matter for joy, and I know not which will be victorious. But I also see griefs that are evil at war in me with joys that are good, and I know not which will win the day.  This is agony, Lord, have pity on me! It is agony!  See, I do not hide my wounds; you are the physician and I am sick; you are merciful, I in need of mercy. Is not life on earth a time of testing?

    This prayer may surprise us after what we read in Book Nine about the liberation from his chains, the penetration of God's light, and the peace that filled Augustine's heart  following the moment of his conversion. It is heavy and troubled. It speaks of temptations and trials, sorrows and tears, wounds and infirmities. The victory is not certain. The drama is not over.

The prayer, however, is realistic and believable, when you think about it. It gives evidence of having been written at some distance from the time of conversion, with an understanding that comes only with hard experience. His conversion seems to be still unfolding, not yet at the end. Maybe the dramatic part, yes, but not the long run.

But let us go ahead.  This painful prayer is followed by another which completes  the picture and relieves our anxiety for Augustine:

X, 29, 40
On your exceedingly great mercy rests all my hope. Give what you command, and then command whatever you will. You order us to practice continence. A certain writer tells us, I knew that no one can be continent except by God’s gift, and that it is already a mark of wisdom to recognize whose gift this is.  By continence the scattered elements of the self are collected and brought back into the unity from which we have slid away into dispersion;  for anyone who loves something else along with you, but does not love it for your sake, loves you less, O love, ever burning never extinguished. O charity, my God, set me on fire! You command continence: give what you command, and then command whatever you will.

Here we meet the counter balance to the heavy and troubled tone of the previous prayer. And we meet it in Augustine’s confident assertion that he can do what he must for his salvation, if God gives him the ability: "Give what you command, and then command whatever you will”. It is one of Augustine's most effective prayers, brief, clear, and to the point. The first half of it is historical and concrete: God’s requirements of us within our own story and the grace to meet them. The second half is broad and open to the future: the unlimited possibilities within our range.

In the pages of Book Ten this prayer is like a refrain. We have heard it twice already. Further on it will occur twice more (X, 31, 45;X, 37, 60) as Augustine tells us of his daily temptations and the uncertainty before him. In its brevity it remains one of the prayers we can lift out of the Confessions and make our own.

X, 43, 70

As a final “spontaneous” prayer we can look at the closing paragraph of the  autobiographical section of the Confessions before Augustine begins his commentary on Genesis. This prayer gives signs of intentional closure like the closings of The Trinity and The City of God.

Filled with terror by my sins and my load of misery, I had been turning over in my mind a plan to flee into solitude, but you forbade me, and strengthened me by your words. To this end Christ died for all, you reminded me, that they who are alive may live not for themselves, but for him who died for them. See, then, Lord, I cast my care upon you that I may live, and I will contemplate the wonders you have revealed. You know how stupid and weak I am: teach me and heal me. Your only Son in whom are hidden all treasures of wisdom and knowledge, has redeemed me with his blood. Let not the proud disparage me, for I am mindful of my ransom. I eat it, I drink it. I dispense it to others, and as a poor man I long to be filled with it among those who are fed and feasted. And then do those who seek him praise the Lord.

After revealing so much about himself in Book Ten, Augustine admits to a temptation to flee into solitude. But flee he does not. He turns around and in this prayer  tells God where he finds the courage to continue. First of all, he finds it in Christ who “redeemed me with his blood”. Then he finds it in the Eucharist: “I think upon the price of my redemption, I eat it and drink it and give it to others to eat and drink”. And finally he takes consolation from the community of the Church of which he is a part: “as a poor man I long to be filled with it among those who are fed and feasted”.

Augustine concludes with the same sentiment with which he began the Confessions: “And then do those who seek him praise the Lord”. Praise is at the opening of the Confessions. Praise is at its end. Praise is seeded throughout.

Such an ending is a worthy companion to other memorable endings of his great works, such as The Trinity: “And you will remain one, yet all in all, and we shall say one thing praising you in unison, even ourselves being made one in you” (XV, 51); and The City of God: “There we shall be still and see; we shall see and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise” (XXII, 30).