"Don't you believe that there is in man a deep so profound as to be hidden even to him in whom it is?"
About this Quote
Augustine is poking at the one place human confidence always overreaches: the belief that we fully know ourselves. The line is framed as a question, but it’s really a trapdoor. If you answer yes, you admit there are depths in you that your own introspection can’t access. If you answer no, you’ve just performed the arrogance Augustine thinks is the human default. Either way, he wins the argument he cares about: self-knowledge is partial, and anyone who treats the self as transparent is already spiritually compromised.
The subtext is distinctly Augustinian: the mind is not a sealed room you can inventory with enough effort; it’s a landscape with blind spots, buried motives, and desires that disguise themselves as virtues. That “deep so profound” hints at more than psychology. Augustine is working in a world where the self is not merely an inner life but a site of theological consequence, where hiddenness isn’t quaint mystery but evidence of a creature’s dependence on God. If parts of you are “hidden even to him in whom it is,” then the final authority on your interior life can’t be your own narration. Confession, prayer, and grace become not pious add-ons but the only plausible technologies for truth.
Context matters: Augustine is a veteran of self-deception. The man who wrote about stealing pears not from hunger but from thrill is obsessed with motives that don’t match the story we tell about them. This question distills his larger project in the Confessions: to show that the most intimate facts about a person are often the least available without an external light.
The subtext is distinctly Augustinian: the mind is not a sealed room you can inventory with enough effort; it’s a landscape with blind spots, buried motives, and desires that disguise themselves as virtues. That “deep so profound” hints at more than psychology. Augustine is working in a world where the self is not merely an inner life but a site of theological consequence, where hiddenness isn’t quaint mystery but evidence of a creature’s dependence on God. If parts of you are “hidden even to him in whom it is,” then the final authority on your interior life can’t be your own narration. Confession, prayer, and grace become not pious add-ons but the only plausible technologies for truth.
Context matters: Augustine is a veteran of self-deception. The man who wrote about stealing pears not from hunger but from thrill is obsessed with motives that don’t match the story we tell about them. This question distills his larger project in the Confessions: to show that the most intimate facts about a person are often the least available without an external light.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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