Confessions

Overview

The Confessions is thirteen books long and only nine of them are autobiography. That fact confuses first-time readers more than anything else in the work, so it is worth knowing in advance. Augustine is not writing a life story for its own sake. He is exhibiting a case, his own, in order to argue about what human beings are and what has gone wrong with them, and the argument needs more than narrative to finish.

The word in the title does not mean what it means now. Confessio in Augustine’s Latin covers admission of sin, but also acknowledgement and praise. All three senses are running at once. He is telling God things God already knows, in front of witnesses, because the telling is itself an act of devotion. This explains the book’s strangest feature: the direct address. There is no narrator explaining Augustine to us. There is a man talking to someone else while we listen in.

Scripture is quoted or echoed in almost every paragraph, above all the Psalms. Augustine’s own sentences slide into biblical ones without warning, and a good edition’s notes will show you where. He does this because he thinks the Psalms already contain the interior life he is trying to describe, and borrowing their voice is more accurate than inventing one.

The argument

Books I to III set up the problem. An infant who cannot speak is already greedy and jealous; a schoolboy is beaten into learning Greek he hates and weeps freely over Dido’s death in the Aeneid while feeling nothing about his own condition; an adolescent steals fruit he does not want with friends he would not have robbed alone. Augustine keeps asking what the motive was and keeps finding none, which is the point. At Carthage he reads Cicero’s lost Hortensius, catches fire for philosophy, and joins the Manichees, who explain evil as a rival substance and so relieve him of responsibility.

Books IV to VII are intellectual: the death of a close friend and the discovery that grief can be enjoyed, the collapse of his confidence in Manichee astronomy after meeting their bishop Faustus, the move to Rome and then to the imperial court at Milan. There Ambrose’s allegorical preaching shows him that the Old Testament need not be read as crudely as the Manichees read it, and the Platonist books show him how something can be real without being made of stuff. Evil turns out to be a privation, not a thing. He now believes almost everything he will believe as a bishop, and it changes nothing about how he lives.

Book VIII is the crisis, and its subject is the will. Augustine can see what he wants to do and cannot do it, not because something external prevents him but because he wills it and does not will it at the same time. Stories of other conversions pile up on him. Then the garden, the child’s voice, the opened letter of Paul. Book IX brings his baptism, his retirement from teaching, the conversation with Monica at Ostia, and her death.

Books X to XIII change gear. Book X asks what it means to seek God by searching one’s memory, and turns into the most searching ancient account of what remembering is. Book XI asks how time can be measured if the past and future do not exist, and proposes that we measure an extension in the mind. Books XII and XIII read Genesis 1 allegorically, finding the church, the sacraments and the soul’s rest in the days of creation. These last books are where Augustine thinks the autobiography has been heading all along, since a self that cannot account for memory, time or creation has not been accounted for.

How to read it

Read Books I to IX first and straight through. They move fast and they are the reason the book is famous. Then read Book X, and at least chapters 14 to 28 of Book XI on time, which is short and worth real effort. Books XII and XIII can wait for a second pass unless your seminar is on them; do not let them defeat you on the first attempt.

Two common misreadings. First, this is not a book about sex. Lust is one of its examples, and Augustine spends more pages on theft, on grief, on stage plays, on astrology and on his own vanity as a public speaker. Second, the conversion in the garden is not the climax the structure treats as decisive. Augustine’s intellectual conversion happens in Book VII and his mother’s death in Book IX carries more emotional weight than his own baptism.

Watch for the second-person pronouns. When Augustine says “you” he means God, and noticing this keeps you from mistaking prayer for self-analysis. Watch, too, for how often he describes wanting something without knowing what he wants.

On translation: Chadwick for accuracy and notes, Ruden if you want to feel the Latin’s force and hear God addressed as a powerful patron rather than an abstraction. Avoid old versions that soften the rhetoric into Victorian piety unless you are quoting Pusey for his phrasing.

Questions it raises

• Augustine says the pear theft had no motive. Is a motiveless wrong possible, or is he refusing an explanation that is available?
• If the will is divided against itself, who is doing the dividing? Can one person have two wills without being two people?
• Does the account of memory in Book X make the self something we discover or something we assemble?
• Why does the book need Genesis at the end? What would be missing if it stopped at Monica’s death?
• Augustine weeps for Dido and not for himself. What does he think literature does to its readers, and is he fair to it?
• Can a conversion narrative be honest about the self before conversion, or does the ending always rewrite the beginning?