Confessions

Summary

The Confessions is a prayer in thirteen books addressed to God, in which Augustine recounts his life up to his mother's death and then turns to philosophical reflection on memory, time and the creation narrative of Genesis. Books I to IX are autobiographical. Augustine reflects on infancy, already marked in his view by greed and jealousy, and on his schooling in Thagaste and Madauros, where he loved Latin literature, wept for Dido and hated Greek. In adolescence he describes the stirrings of lust and a famous episode in which he and friends stole pears they did not want, for the pleasure of doing wrong together. At Carthage he studies rhetoric, takes a concubine with whom he has a son, Adeodatus, and is inspired by Cicero's Hortensius to love wisdom; but finding the Bible's style crude, he joins the Manichaeans, whose dualism seems to explain evil. He describes his grief at the death of a close friend, which made everything he looked at seem like death. Gradually disillusioned with Manichaean teachings, he goes to Rome and then to Milan as professor of rhetoric, where the sermons of Bishop Ambrose show him how to read Scripture allegorically. Monica follows him and arranges a respectable marriage; his concubine is sent back to Africa, leaving him heartbroken. Neoplatonist books help him conceive of God as immaterial and of evil as a privation of good, but his will remains divided, bound by habit and sexual desire. Stories of conversions, including that of the rhetorician Victorinus and of men inspired by the life of Antony of Egypt, intensify his inner struggle. In a garden in Milan in 386, in anguish, he hears a child's voice chanting 'take up and read', opens Paul's Epistle to the Romans and reads a passage against revelling and lust; his doubt dissolves. He resigns his post, citing chest trouble, retires to Cassiciacum, and is baptised by Ambrose at Easter 387. Book IX ends with the vision he and Monica share at a window in Ostia, and her death soon after. Book X examines memory and the senses, and his present temptations. Book XI investigates the nature of time, concluding that past and future exist only in the present mind as memory and expectation. Books XII and XIII interpret the opening of Genesis, culminating in a meditation on the Sabbath rest of God.

Plot or Argument

• Book I: Infancy and childhood

  Opening praise of God, infancy as already sinful, schooling, love of fiction and hatred of Greek; a childhood illness and deferred baptism.

• Books II–III: Adolescence and Carthage

  Sexual awakening, the theft of the pears, student life in Carthage, Cicero's Hortensius and the turn to Manichaeism.

• Book IV: Teaching and grief

  Augustine teaches rhetoric, consults astrologers, and is devastated by the death of a friend; reflections on the transience of loved things.

• Books V–VI: Rome and Milan

  Disillusion with the Manichee Faustus, move to Rome and Milan, Ambrose's preaching, Alypius's passion for the games, and the dismissal of Augustine's concubine.

• Book VII: Neoplatonism

  Platonist books lead him to see God as immaterial and evil as absence of good; Christ as mediator remains to be accepted.

• Book VIII: The divided will and conversion

  Stories of Victorinus and Antony; Augustine's inner conflict and the garden scene of 'take up and read'.

• Book IX: Baptism and Monica's death

  Retirement from teaching, baptism, the vision at Ostia and Monica's death and burial.

• Book X: Memory

  An exploration of memory's vast 'fields and palaces', the search for God within memory, and his continuing temptations.

• Book XI: Time

  What is time? Augustine argues that time is a 'distension' of the mind in memory, attention and expectation.

• Books XII–XIII: Genesis

  Interpretation of the creation narrative, the multiplicity of true readings of Scripture, and an allegory of the Church.

Characters

• Augustine, author and subject

  Rhetorician turned Christian convert narrating his own restless search for God.

• Monica, Augustine's mother

  Devout Christian who prays and weeps for his conversion and dies at Ostia.

• Patricius, Augustine's father

  Pagan town councillor of Thagaste, baptised before his death.

• Alypius, Augustine's friend

  Student and companion with a compulsive passion for gladiatorial shows; converted with Augustine.

• Ambrose, bishop of Milan

  Preacher whose allegorical exegesis helps open Scripture to Augustine; baptises him.

• Adeodatus, Augustine's son

  Gifted son of Augustine's concubine, baptised with him, who died young.

• Faustus, Manichaean bishop

  Charming but shallow teacher whose failure to answer questions disillusions Augustine.

• Nebridius, friend

  Philosophical companion of Augustine's Milan years.

Lessons

• The divided will

  Augustine shows that knowing the good is not the same as wanting it wholeheartedly. His account of habit binding the will is one of the first detailed analyses of inner conflict.

  • Why does Augustine pray 'give me chastity, but not yet'?
  • How does habit become 'necessity' in Book VIII?
  • Is his account of the divided will convincing to a modern reader?

• Grief and the love of mortal things

  The death of his friend in Book IV teaches Augustine that loving mortal things as if they were permanent leads to devastation. He reframes love rather than renouncing it.

  • How does Augustine's grief for his friend differ from his grief for Monica?
  • Is his conclusion about loving creatures 'in God' a consolation or a retreat?

• Memory and time as mysteries of the mind

  Books X and XI turn autobiography into philosophy, asking how the mind holds the past and future. Augustine's insight that time is experienced in the present mind remains influential.

  • What does Augustine mean by calling memory a vast palace?
  • Why is it so hard to say what time is?

Context

Augustine wrote in the late Roman Empire, after Christianity had become the official religion under Theodosius but while pagan culture, Manichaeism and competing Christian groups such as the Donatists remained strong. The Confessions draws on classical rhetoric, Neoplatonism (Plotinus and Porphyry in Latin translation) and the Psalms.

Composition

Written c. 397–400, shortly after Augustine became bishop of Hippo, possibly in response to questions about his past. The word confessio carries three senses: confession of sin, of faith and of praise.

Reception

Widely read throughout the Middle Ages and the Reformation, the Confessions is often called the first Western autobiography. Its introspective method influenced Petrarch, Rousseau, Wittgenstein and many modern memoirists, and Book XI is a classic text in the philosophy of time.

Comparisons

• meditations

  Both are inward-turned writings by men of public responsibility; Marcus Aurelius addresses himself in Stoic discipline, Augustine addresses God in confession.

• the-bible

  The Confessions is saturated with the Psalms and Paul, and its conversion turns on reading Romans 13:13–14.

• phaedrus-and-letters-vii-and-viii

  Augustine's ascent through love and beauty to God draws on Platonic ideas of eros and the soul's ascent found in the Phaedrus.

• siddhartha

  Both narrate a seeker's passage through sensual life and intellectual systems to a spiritual awakening, though in very different religious frameworks.

• the-power-and-the-glory

  Greene's whisky priest, like Augustine, knows his sins intimately and finds grace through weakness rather than virtue.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Who Augustine is speaking to. From the opening praise in Book I to the Sabbath rest at the end of Book XIII, the whole work is a prayer addressed to God, with the reader overhearing.
• The theft of the pears in Book II. Augustine and his friends steal fruit they do not want and throw most of it to pigs, and he spends several chapters asking what he really loved in the act.
• The chain of conversion stories in Book VIII: Simplicianus tells of the rhetorician Victorinus, Ponticianus tells of two officials at Trier converted by reading the life of Antony, and then Augustine himself breaks down in the garden at Milan.
• The two great griefs: the unnamed friend in Book IV, whose death makes all Thagaste hateful to Augustine, and Monica in Book IX, after the shared vision at the window in Ostia. Compare how he weeps in each.
• The turn after Book IX from telling his past to examining memory in Book X, time in Book XI, and the first chapter of Genesis in Books XII and XIII.

Key terms and names

Confessio

The Latin word behind the title, which carries three senses in the work: confession of sin, confession of faith, and praise of God. Augustine moves among all three, often in the same paragraph.

Hortensius

A lost dialogue by Cicero urging the love of wisdom. Reading it at nineteen in Carthage, Book III, first turns Augustine toward philosophy, though he regrets that the name of Christ is not in it.

Manichaeism

A dualist religion teaching that good and evil are two warring substances. Augustine follows it for nine years because it seems to explain evil without blaming God, until the bishop Faustus fails to answer his questions in Book V.

Ambrose

Bishop of Milan whose sermons, Book V and VI, show Augustine that the Old Testament can be read spiritually and not only literally. Augustine is struck that Ambrose reads silently, without moving his lips.

Privation of good

The idea Augustine takes from the Platonist books in Book VII: evil is not a substance but an absence or corruption of a good thing. It frees him from the Manichaean picture of evil as a rival power.

Consuetudo (habit)

Augustine's word in Book VIII for the habit that chains his will. A desire indulged becomes a habit, and a habit unresisted becomes necessity, so that he wills chastity and refuses it at once.

Distension of the mind

Augustine's answer in Book XI to the question of time. Past and future exist only in the present mind as memory and expectation, so time is a stretching out of the soul itself.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What draws Augustine to the Manichaeans in Book III, and why does his meeting with Faustus in Book V begin to loosen their hold on him?
2. Comprehension In the garden at Milan in Book VIII, what does Augustine hear, what does he read when he opens Paul's epistle, and what does Alypius do immediately afterward?
3. Comprehension What happens at the window in Ostia in Book IX, and what does Monica ask of her sons about her burial?
4. Interpretation Why does Augustine treat the theft of a few pears in Book II as more revealing about sin than his years of sexual sin? What does he conclude he loved in the theft?
5. Interpretation In Book VIII Augustine knows what he should choose and still cannot choose it. How does his account of two wills differ from the Manichaean claim that two natures are fighting inside him?
6. Interpretation Augustine weeps without restraint for his friend in Book IV but holds back his tears at Monica's death in Book IX until he is alone. What has changed in how he loves?
7. Interpretation Why does a book about Augustine's life end with three books on memory, time, and Genesis? Are Books X through XIII a departure from the story or its fulfillment?
8. Big Question Augustine claims in his first chapter that the human heart is restless until it rests in God. Is every restless desire in the Confessions, from the pears to rhetorical fame, finally a desire for God in disguise?

Faith Connections

• Romans 13:13-14 (Scripture)

  This is the passage Augustine opens to in the garden in Book VIII, against rioting and drunkenness, chambering and wantonness, ending with the command to put on the Lord Jesus Christ. It answers precisely the habits he had just described as binding his will.

• Romans 7:15-25 (Scripture)

  Paul's lament that he does what he hates and cannot do what he wills is the scriptural pattern behind Augustine's divided will in Book VIII. Augustine reads his own paralysis as an instance of Paul's war between the law of the mind and the law of sin.

• Luke 15:11-32 (Scripture)

  Augustine repeatedly describes his wandering as a journey into a far country, the image of the prodigal son, beginning in Book I. The Confessions can be read as the prodigal telling the story from the road home.

• Plotinus, Enneads I.6 (On Beauty) (Great Conversation)

  Plotinus urges the soul to turn inward and ascend from bodily beauty to Beauty itself. Augustine's ascent in Book VII and his cry in Book X to a Beauty ancient and new take this path, but he insists the ascent needs Christ the mediator, which he did not find in the Platonist books.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Human beings were made for God; nothing created can satisfy a desire made for the Creator; therefore every love Augustine pursues apart from God, the pears, the cauldron of Carthage, rhetorical success, the Manichaean system, leaves his heart restless. Knowledge alone cannot cure this, because the will is bound by habit, as Book VIII shows when he sees the truth in Book VII and still cannot act on it. So rest comes only by grace, received through Scripture and the Church, and the fitting response is confession in all three senses: of sin, of faith, and of praise.

Rhetorical device: apostrophe. The entire work is addressed to God in the second person, beginning in Book I.1 with Thou madest us for Thyself and continuing even through the philosophy of time in Book XI. Turning autobiography into direct address makes every memory an act of prayer and puts the reader in the position of a listener at someone else's confession.

Debate: Resolved: Augustine's account of the pear theft in Book II shows that human beings can choose evil for its own sake.

Memory Work

Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee

Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! too late I loved Thee

Writing Prompts

Essay: Reading changes Augustine's life four times: Cicero's Hortensius in Book III, the Platonist books in Book VII, the life of Antony in Book VIII, and Paul's letter to the Romans in the garden. Trace these encounters and argue what the Confessions claims books can and cannot do for a soul.

Comparison with Confessions: Rousseau borrows Augustine's title fourteen centuries later but addresses his readers rather than God. Compare how each author treats a childhood theft, Augustine's pears and Rousseau's stolen ribbon, and argue what the difference in audience does to the meaning of confession.

Medical Lens

A foundational text for the history of introspective psychology. Book IV's account of grief after a friend's death is one of antiquity's most detailed descriptions of bereavement, including weeping, restlessness and a loathing of familiar places. Book VIII's analysis of the divided will and the power of habit (consuetudo) has been compared to modern discussions of addiction and ambivalence; Alypius's compulsive attraction to gladiatorial games (Book VI) reads as an ancient case study of behavioural compulsion, and Monica's youthful habit of sipping wine (Book IX) is described in terms of habit escalation. Book IV mentions Vindicianus, a physician and proconsul who warns Augustine off astrology. Augustine mentions childhood fever and deferred baptism (Book I), a toothache (Book IX) and chest trouble that helped justify resigning his post (Book IX). Book X's exploration of memory anticipates questions of cognitive psychology. Readings of Augustine's experiences in modern diagnostic terms should be offered as interpretation.

• Book I.11

  As a boy Augustine falls ill with a fever and stomach pains and begs for baptism, which is postponed when he recovers.

  Fever Infection
• Book IV.3

  The physician Vindicianus, who crowned Augustine in a poetry contest, warns him against astrology.

  Physicians Doctors
• Book IV.4–9

  Grief at the death of a friend: weeping, hatred of familiar places, weariness of life and fear of death.

  GriefMelancholia DepressionDeath Dying
• Book VI.8

  Alypius, dragged to the amphitheatre, opens his eyes and becomes intoxicated by the bloodshed, returning compulsively.

  AddictionPsychology Unconscious
• Book VIII.5, 8–12

  The chain of habit, the divided will, physical agitation in the garden, and the conversion.

  AddictionPsychology UnconsciousAltered States
• Book IX.2, 4

  Chest pain and difficulty breathing support his resignation from teaching; a severe toothache relieved after prayer.

  Pain
• Book IX.8

  Monica as a girl falls into a habit of sipping wine from the cellar until rebuked by a servant.

  AlcoholAddiction
• Book IX.10–13

  Monica's fever and death at Ostia and Augustine's struggle to restrain his tears.

  GriefDeath DyingFever Infection
• Book X.8–19

  Inquiry into the structure of memory, forgetting and recollection.

  Dementia MemoryPsychology Unconscious

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Compare Augustine's grief in Book IV with his mourning for Monica in Book IX. What has changed in him, and what does that suggest about grief and meaning?

• Fiction

  Write the garden scene of Book VIII from the point of view of Alypius.

• Poetry

  Write a poem on time and memory that responds to Book XI's question 'What then is time?'

• Classroom

  Discuss the pear theft in Book II. Why does Augustine treat a trivial prank as a key to human sin?

Further Reading

• Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, Peter Brown

• The City of God, Augustine of Hippo

• The Enneads, Plotinus

  Neoplatonist source behind Book VII.

• Augustine: Conversions to Confessions, Robin Lane Fox