That's what we love about friends, and we love in such a way that a person feels guilty if he doesn't return love for love. Only an expression of benevolence is required of a friend. Hence this sorrow on the occasion of death; the darkness of sorrow; a heart intoxicated with bitterness, into which sweetness has turned; the death of the living, because the dead have lost their lives.

Blessed is he who loves Thee, a friend in Thee, and an enemy for Thy sake. Only he does not lose anything dear to Him who cannot be lost. And who is this if not our God? God, who "created heaven and earth" and "fills them," for in filling them He also created them. No one loses You, except those who leave You, and those who have left You, where will they go and where will they flee? Only from Thee, the merciful, to Thee, the wrathful. Where will he not find Thy law in the punishment that has attained it? And "Thy law is truth," and "Truth is Thee."

As I reflected on it, I saw that each body is a kind of whole, and therefore beautiful, but at the same time it is pleasant because it is in harmony with the other. Thus the individual member agrees with the whole body, the shoe fits the foot, etc. These considerations poured in from the very depths of my heart, and I wrote a work "On the Beautiful and Appropriate," I think, in two or three books. You know this, Lord: I have lost my memory. I don't have the books themselves; They got lost, I don't know how.

What prompted me, O Lord my God, to dedicate these books to Hyerius, a Roman orator whom I did not know personally, but whom I admired for his resounding reputation as a scholar. I was told some of his sayings, and I liked them. I liked him all the more because others liked him very much, and they praised him with praise, wondering how the Syrian, who at first knew how to speak Greek perfectly, later became a master of Latin speech and an outstanding expert in all matters relating to philosophy.

He was the type of speaker I liked so much that I wanted to be one of them. I erred in my pride, "I was carried by every wind," and Thy guidance was completely hidden from me. And how can I know, and how can I confidently confess to Thee, that I loved him more for his love and praise than for the occupations for which he was praised? If the same people had not praised him, but scolded him and told the same things about him, but with abuse and contempt, I would not have been inflamed with love for him, although neither his occupations nor he himself would have been different: only the feelings of the narrators would have been different.

This is where the feeble soul is thrown, which has not yet clung to the strong truth. It is carried and whirled, thrown here and there, depending on the direction of the whirlwind of words and opinions. They block the light for her, and she does not see the truth. It is here – in front of us.

It was very important for me then that my book and my writings became known to this man. His approval would have made me burn with even greater zeal; his disapproval would have wounded my vain heart, which had no support in Thee. And yet, with love, I willingly turned before my mind's eye the question of the beautiful and the proper, about which I wrote to him, and was delighted with my work, without needing anyone's praise.

I did not see, however, the core in Thy great work, in Thy art, O Almighty, "Who alone workest miracles." My soul wandered among corporeal images: the "beautiful," which is such in itself, and the "corresponding," which agrees well with another object, I defined and distinguished, using proofs and examples from the physical world.

Then I turned to the nature of the soul, but the false concepts I had about the spiritual world prevented me from seeing the truth. Truth stood before my eyes in all its power, and I turned my tormented mind away from the incorporeal to lines, colors, and large sizes. And since I couldn't see it in my soul, I thought I couldn't see my soul either. I loved the concord engendered by virtue, and hated the strife engendered by depravity. In the first I saw unity, in the second – separation. This unity appeared to me as the co-ordination of reason, truth, and the highest good; separation is like a kind of irrational life and the highest evil. I, the wretched one, thought that it was not only a substance, but that it was a kind of life in general, only not coming from You, Lord, from Whom all things are. Unity I have called a monad, as a kind of mind that has no sex, and separation is a dyad: it is anger in crimes and lust in vices. I didn't understand what I was saying. I did not know and did not assimilate to myself that evil is not a substance at all, and that our reason is not the highest and unchanging good.

I was perhaps twenty-six, twenty-seven years old when I finished these scrolls, unfolding my fictions before me, these material images that deafened the ears of my heart. I alerted them, sweet Truth, to hear Thy melody resounding deep within me. I thought of "the beautiful and the appropriate," I wanted to stand on my feet and hear You, "to rejoice with joy when I heard the voice of the bridegroom," but I could not: my delusion called me loudly and carried me out; Under the weight of my pride I fell down. "Thou didst not give my ears joy and gladness," neither did "my bones rejoice," because "they were not broken."

And what good was it to me that, when I was twenty years old, when I came into my hands a work by Aristotle entitled "The Ten Categories" (the Carthaginian rhetorician, my teacher, and other people who were supposed to be scholars, puffed up with pride, chattered about it, and when I heard this title, I only dreamed of this book as something great and divine), Was I the only one who read and understood it? When I talked about these categories with people who said that they had difficulty understanding them, and then only with the help of learned teachers who explained them not only verbally, but also with the help of numerous drawings in the sand, it turned out that they could tell me about them only what I had learned from myself in my solitary reading. In my opinion, this book was quite clear about substances and their attributes: for example, man is a quality; how many feet tall he is is a quantity; his attitude towards others: for example, whose brother he is; the place where it is located; the time when he was born; his position: standing or sitting; what he has: shoes or weapons; what he does or endures. Under these ten categories for which I have given examples, and under the category of substance itself, there are an infinite number of phenomena.

What was the use of this for me? And there was harm. Considering that everything that exists in general is embraced by these ten categories, I tried to consider You, O Lord, wonderfully simple and unchangeable, as the subject of Your greatness or beauty, as if they were associated with You as a subject, i.e. as with a body, while Your greatness and Your beauty are You yourself. A body is not great or beautiful because it is a body: smaller or less beautiful, it is still a body.

My thoughts about Thee were a lie, and not the truth: my miserable fiction, not Thy blessed fortress. For Thou hast commanded, and so it has been with me: the earth "began to bear me thorns and thistles," and with difficulty I received my bread.

Book Five