Confessions

A bishop looks back

Augustine was born in 354 at Thagaste in Roman North Africa, in what is now Algeria, to Monica, a Christian of deep and persistent faith, and Patricius, who became a Christian only near the end of his life. He became a teacher of rhetoric, spent nine years among the Manichees, and was converted at Milan in 386; at Easter 387 Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, baptized him. Ordained a presbyter at Hippo in 391, much against his will, he was its bishop by the mid-390s and until his death in 430. His wider story is told in Augustine, doctor of grace.

He began the Confessions around 397, a new bishop in his forties looking back on his years before baptism. He tells his story, he says, not to God but "before Thee to mine own kind," so "that whosoever reads this, may think out of what depths we are to cry unto Thee" 2.3.5. Behind his words stands a psalm:

Out of the depths I cry to You, O LORD!

Psalm 130:1

Late in life, in his Retractations, he said the thirteen books praise God, just and good, for the evil and the good in their author, and stir the reader's mind and heart toward him.

A prayer in thirteen books

The Confessions is a prayer. It opens with a psalm, "Great art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised" 1.1.1, and from there to the last page Augustine speaks to God, not about him; we overhear.

Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised; His greatness is unsearchable.

Psalm 145:3

In Latin, ‘confessio’ means more than owning up to wrong: it is also the confession of praise and of faith, and Augustine does all three at once. On the first page he names the thread that runs through the whole: "Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee" 1.1.1.

Books I to IX tell his life from infancy to his mother's death in 387. Book X turns to the present, his memory and the temptations he still meets as a bishop, and Books XI to XIII meditate on the first chapter of Genesis: time and eternity, creation and the church. Many scholars read the turn as setting one soul's return to God inside the story of all creation. Few books outside the Bible have been loved so long by Christians of every tradition.

The library holds the five books at the heart of the story: Book I, infancy and boyhood; Book II, his sixteenth year and the pears; Book VII, where evil comes from; Book VIII, the conversion; and Book IX, his baptism and Monica's death. They follow the restless heart to its rest. Books III to VI are left out (Carthage, where at nineteen Cicero's Hortensius set him on fire for wisdom; the Manichees; Rome, Milan and the preaching of Ambrose), and so are Books X to XIII, with their famous reflections on memory and time.

From the pears to the garden

The sins Augustine confesses in Books I and II can look small: the jealousy he saw in a baby glaring at his foster-brother at the breast, and knew for his own 1.7.11; a schoolboy weeping for Virgil's Dido but not for his own soul, dying "for want of love to Thee" 1.13.21; a night raid on a pear tree near his family's vineyard. He did not even want the pears; he and his friends threw them to the pigs. What he loved was the wrong itself: "I loved to perish, I loved mine own fault, not that for which I was faulty, but my fault itself" 2.4.9. Sin, he comes to see, is love out of order, lesser goods loved above the God who made them 2.5.10, even a crooked imitation of God's power, "a maimed liberty" 2.6.14. Paul says the same: they "worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator" (Romans 1:25). See Original sin and its effects.

Book VII asks the question beneath all this: "Whence is evil?" 7.5.7 What freed his mind from the Manichees' two warring substances were "certain books of the Platonists" 7.9.13, translated, he says, by the Roman rhetorician Victorinus 8.2.3. Most scholars think they were treatises of Plotinus, perhaps with some of his pupil Porphyry. They taught him to think of God as spirit, not as something spread through space, and of evil as no substance at all: "whatsoever is, is good" 7.12.18. Evil is a lack of good, and iniquity "the perversion of the will, turned aside from Thee" 7.16.22. Yet those books lacked what mattered most: "But that the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, I read not there" 7.9.14.

The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John 1:14

The philosophers could show the land of peace from a far-off peak, he says, but not the road 7.21.27. The road is the "one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5); Augustine found no strength to enjoy God "until I embraced that Mediator" 7.18.24. In Paul he found the truth of those books again "amid the praise of Thy Grace" 7.21.27: "What do you have that you did not receive?" (1 Corinthians 4:7). Shortly before the Confessions, he later recalled, that verse had persuaded him that even faith is God's gift Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints.

By Book VIII his mind is won: "nor did I now desire to be more certain of Thee, but more steadfast in Thee" 8.1.1. The battle is in the will, bound by a chain the enemy had made of it: "of a forward will, was a lust made; and a lust served, became custom; and custom not resisted, became necessity" 8.5.10. As a youth he had prayed, "Give me chastity and continency, only not yet" 8.7.17. Stories shamed him: of Victorinus, who in old age confessed Christ before all Rome 8.2.5, and of the monk Antony. In a garden in Milan he wept under a fig tree and heard a child's voice chanting, "Take up and read; Take up and read" 8.12.29. He opened Paul where his eye first fell:

Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. Instead, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh.

Romans 13:13-14

"No further would I read; nor needed I" 8.12.29. Book IX names what had happened: "this Thy whole gift was, to nill what I willed, and to will what Thou willedst" 9.1.1.

A few years later, Augustine heard, Pelagius bristled when a bishop quoted to him Book X's prayer that God give what he commands and command what he will. All Christians read the story as one of grace going before; they explain it differently.

Reformed readers, with Calvin, who quotes Augustine throughout the Institutes, see grace that does not merely help the will but makes it willing. Luther, once an Augustinian friar, argued with Augustine that in the things of salvation the will is bound until God frees it Luther, The Bondage of the Will. The Catholic Church, which counts him a Doctor of the Church, teaches that grace heals and frees the will, and that the freed will truly consents and cooperates. Wesleyans agree that grace comes first, and teach that this prevenient grace reaches everyone and wakes the will, so that it can answer or resist Wesley, The Scripture Way of Salvation. The Orthodox honour him as a saint while speaking of grace and freedom working together, and many describe what we inherit from Adam as mortality and a wounded nature rather than guilt. See Grace and election.

Baptism, and Monica

In Book IX he gives up his teaching post and withdraws with family and friends to Cassiciacum (Pusey's Cassiacum), a friend's country house somewhere north of Milan 9.3.5, where the Psalms set him on fire 9.4.8. At Easter 387 he is baptized with Alypius and his son Adeodatus 9.6.14. At Ostia, waiting to sail for Africa, he and Monica lean at a window over a garden and talk of the life of the saints, until for a moment they touch eternal Wisdom "with the whole effort of our heart" 9.10.24. She falls ill days later, asks only "that you would remember me at the Lord's altar, wherever you be" 9.11.27, and dies on the ninth day, in her fifty-sixth year and his thirty-third 9.11.28.

He holds back his tears at the funeral, then weeps alone, asking readers not to scorn him for weeping for the mother "who had for many years wept for me that I might live in Thine eyes" 9.12.33. Christian grief is grief with hope, so that "you will not grieve like the rest, who are without hope" (1 Thessalonians 4:13).

The book ends with Augustine asking his readers to remember Monica and Patricius at the altar 9.13.37. Catholic and Orthodox Christians see here the early church's prayer for the departed at the Eucharist, which they continue; Catholics count it among the roots of their teaching on purgatory. The Reformers, finding it nowhere taught in Scripture and holding that those who die in Christ are with him, took prayer for the dead out of public worship; most Protestants read here a son's love and a witness to the church of his day. Either way, the ground of his hope is plain: before the accuser Monica "will answer that her sins are forgiven her by Him, to Whom none can repay that price which He, Who owed nothing, paid for us" 9.13.36. See Death and the intermediate state.

Reading it well

Read it as a prayer, written for others to overhear and to join: slowly, a chapter at a time, even aloud. When a line sounds like the Bible, above all the Psalms, it usually is.

It is not a memoir that tells everything: Augustine chooses what serves his praise. Of his prayer in the garden he says, "not indeed in these words, yet to this purpose" 8.12.28. Scholars weigh how far his art shaped such scenes, but few doubt that his life changed there.

Book VII's arguments against the Manichees and astrologers may be read lightly at first; linger instead at the inward vision of 7.10.16. Some pages are painful. For more than a decade he lived with a woman he never names, the mother of Adeodatus; when a marriage was arranged for him she was sent back to Africa, vowing never to know another man (Book VI). He tells it with grief, and readers today feel the wrong done to her. His conversion also meant giving up marriage 8.12.30: Catholic and Orthodox Christians honour the celibate life he chose, while many Protestants, who prize marriage as a holy calling, judge that his suspicion of desire went further than Scripture does. The English is E. B. Pusey's of 1838: to nill is to will not, leasing is lying, and conversation is a way of life.

The story stops at a grave, but the restless heart has found its rest in the Word made flesh. In the philosophers' books, Augustine says, "No one there hears Him call, Come unto Me, all ye that labour" 7.21.27. In the Gospel we hear it:

Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

Matthew 11:28-29