Confessions by Saint Augustine

First transcribed:Confessiones, 397-401 c.e. (English translation, 1620)

Type of work: Autobiography

Principal personages

• Saint Augustine,
• Monica, his mother
• Adeodatus, his son
• Faustus, the bishop of the Manichaean sect
• Ambrose, the bishop of Milan
• Alypius, a friend from Tagaste

The Work

The Confessions was a new form in literature. Others, like Marcus Aurelius, had set down meditations, but this was different. Others had written biographies and autobiographies, but Saint Augustine did not follow that model exactly. True, he does tell about his life, but his method is a departure from a narrative of dates and events. He is more interested in his thievery of pears than in more important actions, and he makes the fruit as meaningful in his life as the Old Testament symbolism of the apples in the Garden of Eden. Other episodes are selected because of their revelation of the grace and provision of God. “I pass over many things, hastening on to those which more strongly compel me to confess to thee,” he tells the reader.

“My Confessions, in thirteen books,” writes Saint Augustine, looking back from the age of sixty-three at his various writings, “praise the righteous and good God as they speak either of my evil or good, and they are meant to excite men’s minds and affections toward him. . . . The first through the tenth books were written about myself, the other three about the Holy Scripture.” In the year before his death, writing to Darius, he declared: “Take the books of my Confessions and use them as a good man should. Here see me as I am and do not praise me for more than I am.” One may argue that it took the invention of the Christian faith to lead to the creation of the confession as a genre of literature.

In fact, Augustine’s life story might be looked on as a parallel to the parable of the prodigal son, with his heart “restless till it finds its rest in God”; he brings his account to an end, after his struggles to free himself from pride and sensuality, with his return to his home at Tagaste. Half his life still lay ahead of him. Although his friends, his teachers, and his mother appear in the Confessions, they lack any physical details by which one may visualize them. Two lines cover the death of his father. Neither name nor description is given to his mistress and the mother of his child, nor of the friend whose death drove him from his native city. Detail is of less importance to Saint Augustine than theological meditation and interpretation.

Taking his text from the psalmist who would “confess my transgressions unto the Lord,” this work is one long prayer beginning, “Great art thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised,” and ending with the hope that “thus shall thy door be opened.”

From the very first, the consolation of God’s mercy sustained Saint Augustine. His memories of infancy made him wonder what preceded that period, as later he theorized about what had been before the creation. His pictures of himself crying and flinging his arms about because he could not make his wants known were symbols to him of the Christian life, even as the acquisition of facts about this early period from his mother impressed on him the need for help from others to gain self-knowledge.

Though his mother Monica was a devout Christian and her son had been brought up in that faith, young Aurelius Augustinus was more interested in the hero Aeneas than in God. Once, at the point of death from a stomach ailment, he begged to be baptized, but his mother refused to have him frightened into becoming a Christian. So he went on, reading Latin and disliking Greek and taking delight in the theater. A frank but modest description of his many abilities, the gift of his God to one not yet dedicated to God, ends the first book of this revealing work.

Book 2 concentrates on the sixteenth year of lazy, lustful, and mischievous Aurelius. He and his companions robbed a pear tree, not because they wanted the fruit, since they threw it to the swine, but because it was forbidden. His confession that he loved doing wrong made him ponder his reasons for wandering from the path of good and becoming a “wasteland.” When he traveled to Carthage to study, at the age of nineteen, his chief delights were his mistress and the theater. In the course of his prescribed studies he read an essay by Cicero, Hortensius, now lost, urging the study of philosophy. Remembering his mother’s hopes that he would become a Christian, he tried to read the Scriptures; he found them inferior in style to Cicero. He did, however, become involved with a pseudo-Christian sect, founded by the Persian religious teacher Mani (ca. 216–277), because he approved of their logical approach to the problems of evil and good, represented by the dualistic concept of the universe. During the nine years that he was a Manichaean, his mother, encouraged by a dream that he would eventually see his error, kept loyally by him.

Back in Tagaste, he wrote plays, taught rhetoric, and lived with a mistress. He had no patience with a bishop, sent by his mother, to instruct him in Christianity. He was equally scornful of a magician who offered to cast spells to ensure his success in a drama competition. He thought he was sufficient to himself, and by his own efforts he won a rhetoric contest. His temporary interest in astrology ended when he was unable to prove that successful divinations were more than chance. The death of a dear friend, who during his last illness becomes a Christian and denounced the life Aurelius is leading, so profoundly affected him that he returned to Carthage. There, still following the Manichaean beliefs, he wrote several essays, now lost. He was soon to be disillusioned. Faustus, reputed to be the most learned of Manichaean bishops, came to Carthage, and Aurelius Augustinus went to him to clear his religious doubts. Augustinus found Faustus more eloquent than logical. Hoping to improve himself, Augustinus then went to Rome to teach rhetoric; students there were reported to be less rowdy than those in his classes in Carthage. In Rome, malaria, the teaching of the skeptics who upset his confidence in the certainty of knowledge, and, above all, the lack of classroom discipline induced him to accept the invitation of officials to resume his teaching career in Milan.

In Milan he enjoyed the companionship of two friends from Tagaste, Alypius and Nebridius. His mother, coming to live with him, persuaded Bishop Ambrose to try to convert her son. About the same time efforts to get him married and to regularize his life caused a break with his mistress, who on her departure left him with his young son Adeodatus. The group around the young rhetorician often discussed philosophy, and in Neoplatonism he found an answer to his greatest perplexity: If there is a God, what is the nature of his material existence? Finally, he was ready to study Christianity, especially the writings of Saint Paul. Book 7 describes this period of his life, and in it appears one of Saint Augustine’s two ecstatic visions, a momentary glimpse of the One.

Book 8 recounts his conversion. Anxious to imitate those who had gained what he sought, he listened to an account of the conversion of the orator Marius Victorinus. While returning home, still upset and uncertain, he heard a child chanting: “Pick it up and read it.” Taking these words as God’s command, he opened the Bible at random and found himself reading Romans 13:13: “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” Convinced, he called Alypius, and they found Monica and reported to her their newly acquired convictions.

Giving up his teaching, Saint Augustine prepared for baptism, along with his friend and Adeodatus. He was baptized by Bishop Ambrose during Easter Week, 387. Then the party set out to return to Tagaste. During their journey, and following another moment of Christian ecstasy, Monica died at Ostia on the Tiber. Her son’s Confessions contains touching chapters of affection and admiration for her; sure of his faith at the time of her death, however, he fell into no period of abject mourning such as that which had followed the death of his friend at an earlier time.

With book 10, Saint Augustine turns from episodes of his life to self-analysis, detailing the three steps of the soul’s approach to God, passing from an appreciation of the beauties of the outside world to an introspective study of itself, and ending with an inexplicable anticipation of the blessedness of the knowledge of God, the “truth-given Joy,” that crowns the soul’s pilgrimage.

Book 11 represents one of Saint Augustine’s great contributions to Christian thought: the analysis of time. Pondering the mysteries of creation in an “eternal world,” he saw it not as measured by “the motion of sun, moon, and stars,” but as determined by the soul, the past being its remembrance; the present, its attention; and the future, its anticipation. He wrote: “The past increases by the diminution of the future, until by the consumption of all the future, all is past.”

The last two books present speculation on the methods of creation and on the truth of the Scriptures, with most of the chapters devoted to interpretation of the opening verses of Genesis. The Old Testament account is open to many interpretations, and the final book of the Confessions deals with the material and allegorical possibilities of the story of the Creation. At the end, Saint Augustine acknowledges the goodness of creation, and meditates on verses describing the rest on the seventh day. He begs that God will bestow the rest and blessedness of that Sabbath in the life eternal that is to come.

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