The Confessions for Seekers

Dear reader — it's got some, but the whole thing is addressed to God, not to you. Augustine of Hippo wrote the Confessions around 397 to 400 CE, when he was a bishop in North Africa in his mid-forties. The first nine books tell the story from infancy to his conversion and his mother's death. The last four turn to memory, time, and the opening of Genesis. It's about the length of a long novel, and it reads like a guy thinking out loud to the only person he figures can handle the answer.

The Guy

Augustine was born in 354 CE in Thagaste, a small town in Roman North Africa, to a pagan father and a Christian mother, Monnica. He studied rhetoric at Carthage, taught there and in Rome, and won a post as professor of rhetoric at Milan in 384. He was baptized in 387, went back to Africa, became a priest and then a bishop. The book's first sentence is its thesis: "Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee." Everything after is a series of attempts to find rest in the wrong place and the right one.

Books I To III: A Restless Kid

The book opens not with a story but with praise. Man, a particle of creation, wants to praise God and can't say whether to call on God first or know him first. Then the famous sentence. And then the childhood.

He recalls praying not to be beaten at school and being laughed at by his parents for it. He notes he was punished for playing by grown-ups doing the same thing: "elder folks' idleness is called 'business'; that of boys, being really the same, is punished by those elders." It's an early example of a method he keeps using, which is looking at an ordinary memory and asking what it shows about desire.

The pears. At sixteen, he and some friends stole pears from a neighbor's tree in the dead of night. "Fair were those pears, but not them did my wretched soul desire; for I had store of better, and those I gathered, only that I might steal." He threw them to the pigs. He asks himself what he loved in the act and concludes it was the sin itself and the company of doing it together. "Lovely thou wert not, because thou wert theft." Honest, though readers have long wondered how much to trust the autobiography. He tells it as a convert, interpreting each episode in light of where it led, and historians note his early life may have been less dark than he suggests.

After the death of a close friend he can't bear his grief and sees how much of his heart he'd put into a mortal thing. He calls man himself "a great deep, whose very hairs Thou numberest, O Lord."

Books III To VII: The Search

The Manichees, Milan, Ambrose, and the Platonists: what he tried and what it took to get past each of them.

At Milan he goes to hear Bishop Ambrose, at first only to judge his eloquence. Ambrose's allegorical readings show that the Old Testament passages he'd mocked as a Manichee can be read more than one way. He notices how Ambrose reads: "his eye glided over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were at rest." Silent reading, in a world that read aloud. Monnica, who has followed her son to Milan, loves Ambrose as an angel of God.

Then the line I can't get over. He recalls praying in his early youth, "Give me chastity and continency, only not yet." He feared God would answer fast and cure him of a desire he wanted to satisfy, not be rid of. A short, honest summary of a divided will. It comes back in Book VIII when he can't make himself change. His account of conversion is also an account of a will at war with itself: he knew what to do and couldn't do it because he didn't fully want to. "Why not now? why not is there this hour an end to my uncleanness?"

In a garden in Milan in 386, he's overcome with weeping and self-reproach. He hears a child's voice from a neighboring house chanting "Take up and read, take up and read." He takes it as a command, goes back to the book of Paul's letters he'd left beside his friend Alypius, and reads the first chapter he finds. "So checking the torrent of my tears, I arose; interpreting it to be no other than a command from God to open the book, and read the first chapter I should find."

Book IX: Monnica

After conversion comes baptism, then the death of the woman who prayed for him for thirty years. On the way back to Africa, at the port of Ostia, Augustine and Monnica sit alone at a window over a garden talking about what the life of the saints will be like. In their talk they rise by degrees through bodily things, the heavens, and their own minds, to touch for an instant the eternal: "while we were discoursing and panting after her, we slightly touched on her with the whole effort of our heart."

Monnica had once wanted to be buried next to her husband. At Ostia she says it doesn't matter. Asked if she's afraid to leave her body so far from her city, she says: "Nothing is far to God; nor was it to be feared lest at the end of the world, He should not recognise whence He were to raise me up." She dies on the ninth day of her illness.

Books X To XIII: The Autobiography Ends And The Questions Start

Book X turns from past to present and asks what he loves when he loves God. The answer is a lyric of regret and gratitude. "Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! too late I loved Thee!" God was within, and he was outside searching, chasing the beautiful things God had made.

To find God he rises above the senses and comes to memory: "the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images." He wonders at its size, and at how he can find what he wants in it. He can't grasp himself entirely, since the mind is too narrow to contain itself. He asks the earth, the sea, and the sky where God is, and they answer: "We are not thy God, seek above us." The self becomes a place to look.

Book XI asks about creation and lands on time. "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not." The past is no more, the future isn't yet, the present has no length. He concludes there are three times, all existing in the soul: "present of things past, memory; present of things present, sight; present of things future, expectation."

And near the end, his image for love: bodies seek their places. Oil rises above water. Things out of order are restless and at rest when put right. "My weight, is my love; thereby am I borne, whithersoever I am borne."

The Other People

One thing about this book: it's full of people. The pear theft needed company. The Manichaean years were spent with friends. Alypius shares the garden. Monnica prays for him and shares the vision at Ostia. The book shows both that company can draw someone into wrongdoing and that it carries him toward the good.

What It Did

Augustine's thought, of which the Confessions is the most personal expression, became the basis of Western Christian theology for a thousand years. His account of sin and grace shaped Catholic doctrine, and Luther and Calvin, who both drew heavily on him, made his teaching on grace central to the Reformation. Philosophers keep returning to Book XI for time and Book X for memory and the self; Wittgenstein opens the Philosophical Investigations with a quotation from the Confessions about learning language, and Husserl and Heidegger both discuss Augustine on time.

If you're going to read it: the passages quoted here are from E. B. Pusey's 1838 translation, public domain, stately and archaic, addressing God as "Thou." Modern translations read more naturally and are better for a first go. Most readers get the most out of Books I to IX, the story. A route: Book I for the opening and childhood, Book II for the pears, Book VIII for the conversion, Book IX for Ostia and Monnica. Then the second half of Book X for memory, and Book XI for time.