Sunday/"Tolle, Lege"

"Tolle, Lege" comes from the conversion scene in St. Augustine's masterpiece of literature, philosophy and theology, Confessions, written around 397. The phrase is Latin for “take up and read.” Augustine took up Paul's letter to the Romans and read a passage which changed his life.

The Confessions turns upon the 'born again' moment at the end of Book Eight, a passage during which a child helps Augustine give up his promising career as a pagan scholar-politician in Italy, and his weeping over his weakness for earthly delights:

I flung myself down under a fig tree-how I know not-and gave free course to my tears. The streams of my eyes gushed out an acceptable sacrifice to thee. And, not indeed in these words, but to this effect, I cried to thee: "And thou, O Lord, how long? How long, O Lord? Wilt thou be angry forever? Oh, remember not against us our former iniquities."

... I was saying these things and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when suddenly I heard the voice of a boy or a girl I know not which -- coming from the neighboring house, chanting over and over again, "Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it." [Tolle, lege.] Immediately I ceased weeping and began most earnestly to think whether it was usual for children in some kind of game to sing such a song, but I could not remember ever having heard the like. So, damming the torrent of my tears, I got to my feet, for I could not but think that this was a divine command to open the Bible and read the first passage I should light upon....

So I quickly returned to the bench where Alypius was sitting, for there I had put down the apostle's book when I had left there. I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof."