"Oh Lord, give me chastity, but do not give it yet"
About this Quote
A prayer that negotiates with God like a debtor asking for one more week. Augustine’s line lands because it refuses the pious pose: he wants holiness, but he wants it on a payment plan. The audacity is the point. By addressing the Lord directly, he stages chastity not as a serene virtue but as a deadline he’s trying to push back, confessing desire in the same breath as devotion. It’s funny in a way Augustine probably wouldn’t label funny; it’s also devastatingly accurate about how moral ambition actually works.
The subtext is less “I’m weak” than “I’m split.” Augustine is articulating the divided will that becomes a centerpiece of his Confessions: the mind can endorse the good while the body and habit keep voting no. “Not yet” smuggles in the real antagonist of the book - not lust itself, but attachment to the self he has been. He isn’t simply asking for a rule; he’s asking for an identity transplant, and he knows the surgery hurts.
Context sharpens it. Augustine writes as a late convert looking back on his youth in Carthage, his long relationship with a concubine, and the intellectual detours (Manichaeism, ambition, rhetoric) that let him postpone surrender. The line functions as an X-ray of conversion: not a lightning bolt, but a bargaining phase, the last comic tremor before the serious break. He gives Christianity a psychological realism that still reads modern: virtue isn’t just chosen; it’s timed, delayed, rationalized, and finally, reluctantly, allowed to arrive.
The subtext is less “I’m weak” than “I’m split.” Augustine is articulating the divided will that becomes a centerpiece of his Confessions: the mind can endorse the good while the body and habit keep voting no. “Not yet” smuggles in the real antagonist of the book - not lust itself, but attachment to the self he has been. He isn’t simply asking for a rule; he’s asking for an identity transplant, and he knows the surgery hurts.
Context sharpens it. Augustine writes as a late convert looking back on his youth in Carthage, his long relationship with a concubine, and the intellectual detours (Manichaeism, ambition, rhetoric) that let him postpone surrender. The line functions as an X-ray of conversion: not a lightning bolt, but a bargaining phase, the last comic tremor before the serious break. He gives Christianity a psychological realism that still reads modern: virtue isn’t just chosen; it’s timed, delayed, rationalized, and finally, reluctantly, allowed to arrive.
Quote Details
| Topic | Prayer |
|---|---|
| Source | Saint Augustine, Confessions (c. 397–401), Book VIII, ch. 7 — Latin: "Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo." Common English rendering: "Give me chastity and continence, but not yet." |
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