A young man's prayer in Carthage
Augustine's restless youth
Augustine is sixteen years old and he is brilliant and he is a mess.
He has been sent to Carthage to study rhetoric — the skill that will make his career — and Carthage is, by his own later account, a cauldron of dissolute love. He throws himself into it. He takes a concubine, who bears him a son named Adeodatus — Gift of God. He joins a gang of vandals called the Wreckers who break into theaters and beat up the audiences. He steals pears from a neighbor's garden not because he is hungry but for the sheer pleasure of transgression.
He is also reading everything. The Hortensius of Cicero awakens in him a longing for wisdom that his debauchery cannot satisfy. He reads Plato. He is briefly attracted to Manichaeism — a dualistic religion that divides reality into warring principles of light and dark — and spends nine years as a Manichaean before it disappoints him too.
His mother Monica is praying for him. She has been praying for him since his birth. A bishop she consults about her son tells her: it is not possible that the son of so many tears should perish.
Augustine knows he needs to change. He will later record the prayer he prays in these years with devastating self-awareness:
Grant me chastity and continence — but not yet.
He means it both ways. He wants what God offers. He also wants to keep what he has. The divided will, not yet ready to be whole.
“Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”
— Augustine, Confessions VIII.7, c. 397 AD
“For I don't know what I am doing. For I don't practice what I desire to do; but what I hate, that I do.”
Augustine prays the most honest prayer in the history of the church: give me holiness — but not yet.
He is not mocking God. He is reporting the actual condition of his will with a precision that requires great courage to admit.
Most of us pray cleaned-up versions of this prayer. We say we want transformation while quietly hoping it arrives on a schedule that allows us to keep certain things a little longer.
Augustine's genius was that he wrote it down. His honesty about his own divided will is why sixteen centuries of readers have found themselves on every page of the Confessions — because they have prayed the same prayer and thought they were the only ones.
Augustine wrote the prayer down. That honesty — naming the gap between what we want and what we want to want — is itself a form of prayer. God already knows the not yet. Saying it out loud is the beginning of its losing power.