At least
as far as I am concerned, this is what they did for me when they
were being written and they still do this when read. What some
people think of them is their own affair [ipse viderint]; but I
do know that they have given pleasure to many of my brethren and
still do so. The first through the tenth books were written about
myself; the other three about Holy Scripture, from what is written
there, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,[2]
even as far as the reference to the Sabbath rest.[3]
2. In Book IV, when I confessed my soul's misery over the
death of a friend and said that our soul had somehow been made one
out of two souls, "But it may have been that I was afraid to die,
lest he should then die wholly whom I had so greatly loved" (Ch.
VI, 11) -- this now seems to be more a trivial declamation than a
serious confession, although this inept expression may be tempered
somewhat by the "may have been" [forte] which I added. And in
Book XIII what I said -- "The firmament was made between the
higher waters (and superior) and the lower (and inferior) waters"
-- was said without sufficient thought.
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