Wanting God
A Guide to Reading Augustine's Confessions
Gentle reader,
Are you reading Augustine’s Confessions this semester? Teaching it? Picking it up because it’s one of the best possible books Christians can read?
There’s no more tried and true guide to the good life than Augustine of Hippo, whose life story has guided generations of Christians in thinking about what it means to live with God.
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I wrote this guide to help students (or anyone who wants to learn with Augustine) get a sense of Augustine’s great work and sort through some of the key themes and questions of the book. This guide is neither comprehensive nor scholarly. It’s simply offered as a help to readers of the Confessions. The guide focuses on Sarah Ruden’s recent English translation (I’ll talk a little more about this translation, below), but readers of any translation should still find it helpful.
My personal favorite translation, for its beauty, is Maria Boulding’s.
Most students are not assigned books 10-13 of the Confessions, and so those receive very, very little coverage here, in a guide which is already very short (in relation to the book it’s about, that is. It is rather a long email).
I love the Confessions and find it an ongoing spiritual resource in my life. I hope this guide might help you to love it too.
AIM AND GENRE
The genre of Confessions is disputed.
Is it the first autobiography?
A spiritual memoir?
Was autobiography even possible in the ancient world, or does the category depend on modern and individualistic conceptions of the self? (After all, Augustine’s story is also Monica’s and Alypius’s and the church’s….)
Perhaps it’s a sermon pretending to be a memoir but really trying to convert the reader?
Is it a conversion story? (And what is a conversion story? And if Confessions is one, where, exactly, is the conversion?)
Maybe it’s mostly philosophy? Or theology?
There is truth in all these, but I think it’s best to think of Confessions as a confession, which also makes it a prayer.
But it is a public prayer, a testimony, and so the addressee is not only God but also us. Augustine confesses to God and also to his fellow believers. The term confession comes from the Latin confiteri: to acknowledge, proclaim, or praise. The book bears witness.
Augustine confesses who he is and what he has done, but more than that, he confesses who God is and what God has done. Here, a prominent and respected Christian leader pulls back the curtain on his life and exposes his weakness and God’s mercy. Imagine Billy Graham or Ann Voskamp writing such a revealing and vulnerable account.
Augustine’s life becomes a stand in for every human life, and the book may serve as a model for the Christian life. Despite the text’s ancient strangeness, it also has resonated with Christians through the centuries and continues to resonate with us. We can see our lives in Augustine’s life and so see what God can do in our lives.
Augustine recounts deep concerns and experiences which are common to many of us: wrestling with the faith of his parents in a process in which that faith becomes his own, being formed by an aspirational education, career ambitions, intense focus on sexual desire, reveling in communities of friends, and many other experiences should not be foreign to us. Augustine’s testimony to God’s transformative power to change lives has the potential to set us on fire for transformation.
In Confessions Augustine finds the good life in God, despite having sought it in so many other places;
“how do I seek you, Master? When I seek you, my God, I seek a happy life” (10.29).
Augustine recommends, to us as his readers, that we too seek the good life in the only One in whom it can truly be found.
AUGUSTINE’S THEOLOGY AND INFLUENCE
Even if we have have never heard his name, Augustine is in our heads and, likely, in our hearts. His influence is immense and cannot be overstated. He’s placed his stamp on Christian thought throughout the centuries, from his own time through the middle ages and the Protestant Reformation, up to today.
Augustine is, after Paul, the great theologian of grace. He sees grace as the very center and heart of Scripture, and his way of reading Scripture has been decisive for the church. When Martin Luther had his insight into salvation by grace alone, that experience was connected to Augustine’s similar insight about a thousand years earlier. We could even read the Reformation’s return to grace as a reclaiming of Augustine’s heritage.
Augustine’s central reading of Paul is that 1) we are sinners, who are powerless to save ourselves and 2) we are saved by the free gift of grace made available in Jesus Christ.
This reading of Paul remains the core reading of the Western church from Augustine through (the best of ) medieval Catholicism through the Protestant Reformation all the way through to contemporary Evangelicalism (though complicated in various conversations through the centuries, including contemporary conversation about the new perspective, but Augustine is fundamentally right here [which does not, by the way, discount the usefulness of that new perspective.]).
Augustine served as pastor and bishop in the North African Hippo Regis. There, he worked out his theology in and with the church and in response to the needs of God’s people.
He’s definitely a pastor-theologian. His theology was shaped in response to a series of controversies or heresies which he saw as threats to the church in his day. In Confessions, the major heretical pressure comes from the Manicheans, who attracted Augustine in his youth (more below) and against whom he upholds the goodness of God’s creation.
When he was faced with people struggling with something Protestants would later call “works righteousness” (the Pelagian controversy), he turned to Scripture to speak about the brokenness of human nature and to remind us that we cannot save ourselves but stand in desperate need of the healing grace of Christ our savior.
Grace, then, is the basis of one of the most famous teachings of Augustine: original sin. When some wanted to separate from the accommodated, sinful church in order to start a pure community (the Donatist controversy), Augustine turned to Scripture to speak of the brokenness of anything humans can do in the church and to remind us that the church is a place for sinners. When we speak of the church as a “hospital for sinners” and not a “museum for saints,” we’re claiming Augustine’s insight about the church as a church of grace.
In Confessions, we see Augustine searching for and laying claim to that grace in his own life.
Augustine’s theology won’t always feel familiar to us, and, like every human theology, it isn’t always right, but it is full of wisdom. It’s a theology born of deep love for God’s Word and God’s people and a theology which reminds us of the depths of God’s grace.
TIMELINE
(adapted with special reference to Confessions from a timeline at Christianity Today and from Peter Brown’s biography of Augustine)
337 death of Constantine and division of Roman Empire
354 on Nov. 13, Augustine born to Patricius and Monica at Thagaste (present day Algeria in North Africa)
365 goes to school in Madaura
370 spends a year at home while his father saves for his education. His year of too much adolescent freedom is recounted in Book 2.
371 goes to study rhetoric in Carthage (book 3)
c. 371–373 his father dies, son Adeodatus is born
373 Ambrose becomes bishop of Milan
375 returns to Thagaste to teach rhetoric
376 begins teaching rhetoric in Carthage
376 unnamed friend, who was baptized, dies (recounted in book 4)
383 sails to Rome with son and son’s unnamed mother (book 5)
384 becomes professor of rhetoric in Milan
386 is converted (book 8), retreats to Cassiciacum (book 9)
387 returns to Milan, is baptized by Ambrose; at Ostia, he and Monica have vision, Monica dies there (book 9)
388 goes to Rome
390 returns to Carthage, then Thagaste; his son dies
391 is ordained priest at Hippo
396 becomes bishop of Hippo
c. 400 writes his Confessions
c. 403–412 the Donatist controversy (about church unity and brokenness)
410 sack of Rome
412–421 the Pelagian controversy (about original sin)
413–426 writes The City of God, On the Trinity, and The Enchiridion
430 Aug. 28, dies at Hippo. North Africa ravaged by Vandals
STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
Part I: Sinful Nature
Book 1 Infancy and childhood
Book 2 Adolescence (including the famous pears)
Part II: Searching
Book 3 Seeking wisdom
Book 4 Friends, loves, and lovers
Book 5 From Faustus to Ambrose, from Carthage to Rome to Milan
Book 6 Convinced in theory but not in practice?
Book 7 Neoplatonists and Paul
Part III: New Life in Christ
Book 8 Take up and read (Augustine’s conversion in the garden of Milan)
Book 9 Baptism and new life
Books 10-13 Memory, time, creation, and interpretation of Scripture, especially the creation narrative in Genesis
Augustine encourages us to read our stories into his story, identifying with him in our own sinful nature, our restless hearts which have sought or are seeking God, and our potential for new life in Christ.
Above, I’ve divided Confessions into a three part story, but there are a variety of ways to think about the overall structure. Confessions can be read as fairly straightforward narrative autobiography (as noted above, this is contested). It also tends to be divided into two large sections where A) Books 1-8 tell of Augustine’s unredeemed past and B) Books 9-13 tell of his present and future as a child of God. If we divide the work this way, book 8 becomes the hinge, Augustine’s conversion, on which the story turns. If this basic division corresponds to all humans, then books 1-8 are all of us, “in Adam” and books 9-13 are all of us “in Christ.”
On this division, it’s interesting that most readers stop at book 9. Are we more fascinated by sin than by redemption? Maybe, but there’s also little doubt that books 10-13 are not the page turners 1-9 are. It’s worth noting that the end of the book, even if you aren’t reading it, testifies to Augustine’s experience of God’s healing in his life and his continued wrestling with questions that plagued him before his conversion.
RUDEN AS TRANSLATOR
Ursula K. LeGuin called Ruden's translation of the The Aeneid
“The best translation yet, certainly the best of our time.”
LeGuin appreciates language, and Ruden seems to live for little else.
Ruden’s translation is striking in its liveliness.
She tells us that her,
“main justification for this new translation…is the previously hidden degree to which Augustine makes his life and ideas vivid in the style of his Latin” (xxiii).
Ruden succeeds in making Augustine’s prose more vibrant and vital than other English translations have done (though I still have a soft spot for the poetic beauty of Maria Boulding’s translation). For example, from 1.21,
“I didn’t love you, and I cheated on you like a true slut…”
That’s vivid.
On that note, Ruden highlights Augustine’s use of erotic language in describing his journey. She notes how Augustine uses feminine gendered nouns to depict,
“himself as erotically repelled by or attracted to an abstract quality or a general situation, as if it were a woman” (xxiv).
The category of desire is central to Augustine’s understanding of both sin and salvation. As sinners we desire wrongly, lusting after all that is not God. God heals our desire, directing our love to Him. For Augustine,
“My love is my weight. I’m carried by it wherever I’m carried” (13.10).
Love for God carries us to God, and disordered love carries us away from God. This erotic language is found throughout the work, and Ruden helps us to see it. As you read, pay attention to language about love, longing, desire, and wanting.
It’s worth looking at the glossary of specific terms Ruden provides in her introduction (xxxi).
For the Latin term Dominus, Ruden uses “Master” instead of the usual “Lord.” She’s seeking to highlight the household imagery of Scripture over and against the political images we tend to attach to “Lord,” but I’m not nuts about “Master’s” resonances with slavery and the often unjust authority of the Roman paterfamilias.
Augustine does make much of slave resonances for thinking about the Christian life, but the God he comes to know in his maturity is far more Lover than Roman Master. (See the Peter Brown review in the resources below for more). I’d like to think the biblical “Father” gets at household imagery while pointing us to the biblical rejection of the hierarchical violence of Rome.
For convertere and conversio, Ruden chooses “to turn around” over “conversion.” I love that she wants us to move out of the strictly religious sense we tend to attach to “conversion” and see Augustine playing with the physicality of the image.
Ruden chooses to name the “universal” rather than “Catholic” or “catholic” faith, a translation choice I affirm, as the early church at this point in history is not yet the medieval Roman Catholic church, though most Roman Catholics would, of course, disagree. Thinking of Augustine as a representative of the “universal” faith is certainly more Protestant-friendly than the translation “Catholic” would be.
BOOK 1: INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD
1.1-1.6 Confessions begins with prayer, and Augustine’s prayers will continue throughout the work.
Notice where the voice shifts into direct address to God. Try praying some of Augustine’s prayers or writing your own prayers inspired by Confessions.
In 1.1, We find the famous line,
“our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
Augustine’s story will be the story of his restless heart and the restless hearts of his readers. It’s a story of longing.
1.7-1.12, Reflections on his infancy and on sinful human nature.
Augustine’s comments on babies are often considered remarkable. He observes other infants and draws conclusions about himself (and, presumably, about all humans). His observations about infants jealous of their nursing partners are an interesting window into breastfeeding in the ancient world. We do not have to conclude that certain behaviors (e.g. crying babies, a behavior I think we’re right to deem developmentally appropriate rather than sinful) are sinful in order to appreciate Augustine’s insight into the sinfulness of human nature from the very beginning of human life.
1.13-1.31, Childhood and critique of his education.
It is possible to seize on Augustine’s critique of his education to advance a kind of anti-intellectualism. It may be helpful to remember Augustine’s concurrent conviction that we should use our intellect for God;
“I used the mind you gave me, my God” (1.13).
His critiques of his education are tempered by his sense that he sinned by slacking off in school.
Original sin and sinful human nature
Books 1 and 2 contain many observations on the sinfulness of human nature.
“Original sin” refers to the belief that all humans share in the first sin of Adam and Eve.
“Sinful nature” is a description of fallen human beings. It highlights our brokenness and inability to save ourselves.
Many Christians have misconceptions about original sin and sinful nature. These doctrines do not mean that human beings are trash, that there is nothing good in us, or that we are as bad as we could possibly be. They do mean, for Augustine and Christians after him, that we are completely unable to save ourselves. Augustine highlights his own inability to love God as he tells the story of his sinful nature.
Augustine is usually considered the author of the doctrine of original sin, though it certainly has roots in both Scripture and theology before him. This doctrine became increasingly important to him later in his life, as he wrote against the Pelagian heresy. Pelagius taught that human nature is capable of choosing God and of living in right relationship with God. Augustine thought this was a cruel lie, and he emphasized our incapability and thus the necessity of supernatural intervention—salvation by grace.
How does my understanding of humanness and identity shape my vision of the good life? How does sin create false conceptions about the good life? For Augustine, we can’t achieve the good life on our own. Humanness without Jesus is fallen humanness, and human nature requires healing grace before we can come to God as our true Good. In our sinful nature, we seek the good life in all kinds of things that are not God;
“My sin was that I sought not in God himself, but in things he had created” (1.31).
How Does Education Contribute to Our Pursuit of the Good Life? Augustine is very critical of his education. What are his critiques? How does he see education as directing him away from God as the true Good? How does his education compare with the kind of educations we have received?
BOOK 2: ADOLESCENCE
2.1-2.4, Prayer and reflection on dissolute love.
Here, we get a striking image that recurs throughout the work; the sinful human is disintegrating, being torn apart, as sinful desire pulls her in a thousand different directions. God’s work in our lives is integrative. It makes us whole as it directs us and our love toward the One Love Who made us;
“I recollect the paths of my depravity in the bitterness of my inspection of myself, so that you grow sweet to me, with a sweetness, a charm that’s not deceitful but blessed and safe, binding me together against the scattering force that ripped me to pieces as long as I turned my back on your singularity and disappeared into multiplicity” (2.1).
For Augustine, lust is never just sexual. It’s spiritual. And lust is not just for sex. It’s for anything that is not God.
2.5-2.8, A year a home without supervision.
Augustine is having a ball with his friends, and he is looking at all the beautiful people, and he is doing a lot of lustful wanting.
2.9-2.18, Stealing pears and reflection on sin.
Ah, the famous pears! People often ask, “what’s the big deal?” Some boys make off with some worthless fruit; can it really matter?
Some suggest the pears are there as a symbolic stand-in for some more obviously heinous sin (sleeping with a married woman?), but I’m in the majority camp which takes Augustine’s face value explanation as a much better fit with his theology.
He’s already told us of his sexual sin, but it’s the pears that get the most words of any incident. Things we might see as small-scale sin continue to occupy Augustine’s thoughts even after his conversion and after he has received a certain kind of freedom from sexual sin (book 10).
The big deal of the pears is sin for sin’s sake. The pears weren’t even attractive; the attraction lay in the sheer pleasure of sinning. Augustine doesn’t think it takes a dramatic sin (like adultery) to make us sinners or to cut us off from loving God aright. The point of the no-count pears is exactly their no-count-ness.
We don’t need a juicy sin to see that we are sinners. Dry, shriveled pears will do. The point is that Augustine’s sinful heart wanted sin. This incident shows us Augustine’s diagnosis of human beings defined by desire. We are what we want, and sinners want sin.
We also shouldn’t miss the socially-implicated nature of sin in this incident. Augustine’s desire for sin is socially amplified. His is caught up in sin together with his friends, and he wonders if he even would have stolen the pears had his friends been absent.
What is the good life? As long as our desires are unredeemed, can we even know what the good life is? Are we likely to mistake it for some puny pears? Augustine certainly thinks that we can’t want that good life without God transforming our wanting. Are we, like Augustine, “looking for love [or satisfaction or happiness or the good life] in all the wrong places?”
Does the good life depend on what kind of person you are? How does sociality, especially friendship, shape what we want? Can we think of concrete examples of this in our lives or experience? What do our friends want? How do we know what they and we want? How are we shaped and directed by our deepest level wantings, longings, desires?
BOOK 3: SEEKING WISDOM
3.1-3.6, Move to Carthage, temptations of the city.
Ah, the temptations of the big city, that,
“center of a skillet where outrageous love affairs hissed” (3.1).
Augustine is a
“lover of loving,” (3.1)
and he continues to try to find love in created things instead of in God. Desire remains a primary category.
3.7-3.9, Reads Cicero’s Hortensius, an appeal to live a philosophical life.
It’s a professor’s dream. What can compete with the temptations of the city but a truly amazing book?
Later in Augustine’s life, other books will be important to him, but it is in reading Cicero that he becomes someone determined to seek wisdom. He thrills at the excitement of what he is learning.
The searcher will one day find what he seeks, but he’ll chase wisdom down many false trails before he finds it in God.
Because of his mother’s faith, he looks to Scripture now that he is a wisdom-seeker, but at this point in his journey he despises Scripture as,
“not even worth comparing to the excellence of Cicero” (3.9).
This problem will stick with Augustine for years, and finding better ways of interpreting Scripture will be prerequisite to his conversion. We’ll see this thread of Augustine’s changing understanding of Scripture throughout Confessions.
3.10-3.18, Attraction to Manicheanism.
Augustine turned to the group as a possible source for the wisdom he was seeking. They asked questions he couldn’t answer.
3.19-3.21, Monica’s tears and hope.
Monica weeps over her son Augustine’s association with the Manicheans, and she prays for him. She is reassured through a vision and through a priest’s statement,
“It’s impossible that the son of these tears of yours will perish” (3.21).
Manichean life and thought, the problem of hierarchical dualism, and explanations of evil
Augustine’s rejection of Manicheanism is one of the most important driving forces in his story. The Manicheans were a Gnostic group (teaching salvation comes from elite, in-group knowledge or gnosis) which borrowed some language and categories from Christianity.
Hierarchical dualism was the most central tenet of Manichean thought and practice: all of reality was understood as divided into two (dualism between material and spiritual), and the material was understood to be problematic, disgusting, evil (this is the hierarchical aspect of this dualism. Matter/material/the bodily/stuff is evil and can have nothing to do with God).
This dualism came with a cosmology, which underpinned the Manichean explanation of evil Augustine found compelling for a period. The Manichean god (lower case g, because a false god as understood by Christian faith) created spiritual reality or light. Physical reality was not this god’s creation but a problem, created by Satan or an evil force. When evil materiality came into being, bits of light/spirit were trapped in this physical world, and the Manichean understanding of salvation was to free the light from enmeshment in gross materiality. Manicheans had two levels: the elite elect lived a strict ascetic life and chewed vegetables intending to release the light trapped therein. The outer circle of auditors served the elect. Augustine was one of these auditors for about a decade.
Now, this sounds pretty crazy. Why would the sharp Augustine be attracted to skinny folk chewing turnips to release light? He mocks them in similar terms later on, but he was attracted by the Manicheans’ clear explanation for the existence of evil. He knew that God cannot be the author of evil, and so he was drawn to the Manichean explanation of evil as a result of materiality, which was created by one-other-than-God.
I read the young Augustine’s gut reactions as deeply sympathetic to hierarchical dualism, a kind of unbiblical dualism which would have to be trained out of him later through a long process of reading and living with Scripture. This dualism allowed Augustine (and us?) to shift the blame for sin off of ourselves and onto materiality, and that probably fit with Augustine’s sense that sex—an obviously material reality—was a primary temptation for him.
Hierarchical dualism allows a kind of scapegoating; Who is a sinner? Not me, surely? Not the real me. It’s just my body that’s the problem. My real self, my spirit, is pure. This Manichean scapegoating of sin misses the necessity and reality of grace. It’s an attempt at self-justification, and grates against the main point of Augustine’s mature theology, that we cannot save ourselves.
We stand in utter need of the grace of Christ. Young Augustine’s disdain for Scripture also fits this pattern of hierarchical dualism. His distaste for Scripture was precisely because it was too material, too fleshy, too focused on physical stuff.
Augustine learns the goodness of creation from Scripture, and he does not hate bodies or creation. Augustine’s later Christian Platonism will have to become a Platonism corrected by Scripture on just this count (and I believe it is so transformed. Augustine takes a lot of hits in popular Christian discourse for being an unredeemed Platonist, but this reading seriously lacks nuance. See below, when he reflects on the books of the Platonists).
Against hierarchical dualism, Scripture gives us a Christian holism. There is a difference between matter and spirit, body and soul, but both are God’s good creation, both are integral to the human person, and both are used by God in the world.
Augustine moves further and further from the hierarchical dualism of Mani and Plato the older he gets, the more deeply he is enmeshed in Scripture. His more allegorical interpretation of the creation narratives in Genesis (books 12-13) will be replaced by an increasingly fleshy interpretation in his older age.
Many contemporary Christians are unknowingly hierarchical dualists. This distortion is deep in American Christianity, deep in Western Christianity, and deep in bad interpretations of Scripture. We aren’t attracted by the Manicheans chewing veggies, but we do tend to blame evil on materiality instead of on sin.
Augustine’s mature Christian explanation of evil will retain his early conviction that God cannot be the source of evil. God is good, after all, and looks at all creation and calls it “good.” Augustine the Christian philosopher will explain evil as an absence, a privation of the good. God is the creator of all things, heaven and earth, material and spiritual. Evil is a no-thing, a naught (for fans of Madeleine L’Engle, she plays with this idea in A Wind in the Door).
This is not the only Christian explanation for evil (big candidates include free will explanations and explanations which see God using evil for greater or mysterious purposes), but it is important to see, with Augustine and against the Manicheans, that God is the creator of all things: matter and spirit, body and soul. We are sinners, body and soul, and in need of redemption as wholes, body and soul.
A side note: Augustine’s rejection of birth control (this is not in Confessions) is part of his rejection of Manichean dualism. The Manicheans were not opposed to all sex, but they were against procreation, as they didn’t want more light to be trapped in the gross materiality of more babies. The Manicheans practiced birth control, probably some version of what we call natural family planning, and Augustine and his common law wife probably did the same during his Manichean years. (They only have the one son, born against their wishes. See 4.2).
Augustine rejects the Manichean rejection of procreation because he is pro-creation, because he is pro-babies, body and soul, and believes they are good gifts from God, including in their materiality. I’d like to think we can appreciate his insight here without requiring his total rejection of contraception. It’s interesting that the one form of birth control Augustine probably knew when he wrote against contraception becomes the one form the Roman Catholic Church permits, even as it argues against other forms on Augustinian grounds.
How does my understanding of humanness and identity shape my vision of the good life? Think more about Augustine’s understanding of human beings as lovers, creatures defined by what we love. What false loves threaten to rip us apart and pull us away from the true good? Think more, too, about sinful human nature. Augustine prays,
“What was my self to my self without you, if not a guide over the edge of the chasm? Or what am I, doing well, but a suckling of your milk, enjoying you, the food that doesn’t go bad? And who is a human being, anyone at all, as long as he’s just a human being as such” (4.1)?
Can we even be human without God? What does it mean to be a sinner, body and soul? Are we, like the Manicheans, tempted to scapegoat sin onto our bodies, as if our souls were innocent? How do we see sin encouraged socially, as was Augustine’s with the pears? Are there analogies to the pears in our lives?
BOOK 4: FRIENDS, LOVES, AND LOVERS
4.1-4.3, Augustine is moving up in the world, teaching rhetoric in Carthage.
He remains a Manichean auditor, enters into a long term relationship with one woman, and his son, Adeodatus, is born.
He continues to reflect on the formative power of community, friendship, and relationship. Or, in this case, its deformative power, wherein
“we were led and leading astray in turn, our various passions serving as so many confidence tricks played on us and by us.”
4.4-4.6, Augustine toys with astrology.
Maybe it can serve as another “excuse” for sin. The stars made me do it! No need to admit to being a sinner in need of grace!
4.7-4.19, The bulk of book 4 focuses on the death of Augustine’s friend and the deep grief he experienced.
He uses that grief to talk more about how humans are shaped by our loves.
4.20-4.31, He writes about beauty and dedicates the book to an orator he admires.
He is smart, thriving in academic work but still misunderstanding God. He wants to put God into his own, material, categories instead of embracing God’s otherness.
Kinds of love, disordered loves, and how to love humans rightly
In his work, On Christian Doctrine, Augustine advances a theory about two kinds of love, which can help us better understand his reflection on the death of his friend.
There are, Augustine says, two kinds of love:
uti, the love of use, where we love something for its purpose, for what it does. I uti my car because it gets me around.
and
frui, the love of enjoyment, where we love something for its own sake, because it is, in its very self, lovely and lovable.
It’s supposed to work like this:
frui for God because God and God alone is, in God’s own self, truly lovely and lovable.
and
uti for everything that is not God, all created things.
BUT,
sin disorders our love, and the way it’s supposed to be gets reversed so that we sinners go about trying to
uti God, as though God’s point were what God can do for us. We try to use God.
and, then, we go and try to
frui created stuff, as though it were the point, as though it were truly lovely and lovable, as though our hearts could find rest in other people or riches or pleasures or cars…
This disordered love rips us apart, as bits of us are thrown hither and yon towards all the things we’re hopelessly trying to frui when they’re not inherently frui-able. I’m torn between my false love for my car and my husband and pizza and prestige and various shiny things.
I should be made whole in loving God and in letting all my loves for created things be poured into one channel in which my loving flows towards God. (All of which would be possible only by grace. I can’t get my own loves right. I need the healing of Jesus for that).
I should love God for God’s own sake and love my car and pizza and even other people for God’s sake, because their point, like my point and everything’s point, is finally God.
This can sound horrible. Augustine thinks I should uti my husband? Use him rather than enjoy him?
Well, yes, he does. Mostly. But it only makes sense if we understand that my husband’s proper use—his point, his telos, his raison d’etre—isn’t FOR me. It’s FOR God. He’s not there to make me happy or bring home bacon or take the trash out. He’s there for Jesus. If I love him for that, in a way that points him and me both toward Jesus, I’m getting uti right (again, possible only through grace).
It takes Augustine years to come around, but eventually he admits we can even frui people, as long as we frui them in and for and through God.
All this helps us understand Augustine’s harshness about his grief when his friend dies. I think it’s theologically important to temper that harshness. The death of a loved one is a grievous thing, for death is an enemy, even though an enemy ultimately defeated in Christ. Augustine’s description of his turmoil is something we might rightly name as depression and something we should support someone through rather than encouraging the self-flagellation Augustine throws himself into.
Still, we can learn something from Augustine’s insights here about the destructiveness of disordered loves and the need to love other human beings in and through and for God and not as though other human beings could fulfill us.
Augustine cries,
“What an insanity of ignorance, the inability to keep human affections on a human scale” (4.12),
and we can react with both a yes and a no. Yes, true friendship should be ordered to God, but no, to love another human deeply and to grieve a loss need not be interpreted as disordered in the strong sense Augustine does.
But I very much think we have much to learn from Augustine when he says,
“it’s a happy person who loves you God, and in you loves his friend, and loves his enemy because of you” (4.14)
and when he advises,
“If souls meet with your approval, let them be loved in God, because in themselves they’re changeable, whereas in him they’re attached to a firm foundation...So let them be loved in him, and however many you can, carry them off—along with yourself—for God” (4.18).
What is the good life? For Augustine, our understanding of the good life is distorted as long as we think we can find it in created things. God is the Good life, and the Good life is found in life in God. Reflect on Augustine’s understanding of disordered love and the way it can lead us toward false visions of the good life.
BOOK 5: FROM FAUSTUS TO AMBROSE, FROM CARTHAGE TO ROME AND MILAN
5.1-5.2, Prayer, praising God and prayer for the conversion of others.
5.3-5.13, Doubting Manicheans, disappointment with their teacher, Faustus.
Augustine has increasing doubts about the logic of Manichean teaching, and others promise him that the Manichean teacher Faustus is a brilliant man who will be able to answer his questions, but when Augustine meets Faustus, he finds no answers and is deeply unimpressed with Faustus’s learning and intellect. This disappointing encounter starts to
“loosen the snare” (5.13)
of Manicheanism for Augustine.
5.14-5.22, Move to Rome, Monica’s continued prayers for her son, Augustine is sick.
He toys with the skepticism of Academics. He still does not believe that he is a sinner (5.18).
5.23-5.25, Move to Milan, where he encounters the bishop Ambrose and Christian Neo-Platonism.
In Milan, Augustine is persuaded that Christian belief is reasonable, and many of his previous misconceptions about Christianity are corrected.
Interpersonal relationship, the social nature of conversion and the Christian life
One of the key ways Confessions is not a modern autobiography or memoir is that it is deeply social. It is Augustine’s story but it is also our story, and the church’s story, and the story of key people in Augustine’s life. We could have an interesting conversation about whether Augustine avoids the narcissism that is the pitfall of first person narrative, but his story is not of one man’s journey, and he is not a self-made man.
Ambrose is one of many examples in Confessions of persons, personal stories, and personal relationships having a central role in conversion (I think also of Monica, Augustine’s friends, and of the stories of Anthony and others). Ambrose’s intellect impresses Augustine in sharp contrast to Faustus, and Ambrose took Augustine
“up as a father takes a newborn baby in his arms” (5.23).
The fact that Ambrose is able to interpret Scripture in ways Augustine finds intellectually persuasive will pave the way for Augustine’s submission to Christ. Augustine tells us
“I fell in love with him, as it were, not at first as a teacher of the truth…but simply as a person who was kind to me” (5.23).
The language of desire plays in here, just as it does throughout the work.
Augustine’s attraction to Ambrose is not sexual, but desire is the right category for it. Contemporary (ours, not Augustine’s) theologian Sarah Coakley writes about the church’s deep need for what she calls “erotic saints” (The New Ascetism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God, Bloomsbury, 2016). She’s not talking about sex any more than is Augustine when he falls in love with Ambrose; she’s talking about people who are so attractive in their persons, their stories, and their embodied lives that others are drawn to them and want to be like them in their own embodied lives.
She sees our culture of celebrity and images as one in which we’re constantly attracted to people who are the very opposite of saints, and she worries that the body of Christ is failing to be the kind of attractive body which compels as a real alternative to this false desire. Healthy Christian community, at its best, functions as a place of such mutual attraction, where true friends draw each other to God.
Does the good life depend on what kind of person you are? And does it depend on what kind of people your friends are? Are there persons who have so compelled you that they’ve drawn you to Christ?
BOOK 6: CONVINCED IN THEORY BUT NOT IN PRACTICE?
6.1-6.2, Monica’s example.
Monica’s story is one of deep trust in Christ along with persistent faithfulness.
Many have found her a hen-pecking, annoying mother (misogyny, perhaps?), but Augustine always represents her as a model of faith. Augustine recounts how, in Milan, she was willing to change her practice of bringing offerings to the shrines of martyrs, because the bishop, Ambrose, had forbidden it, so as
“not to give drunkards an occasion for guzzling, and also that these virtual ancestor offerings looked a great deal like pagan superstition” 6.2).
Augustine is impressed by her flexibility for the sake of the gospel. The idea of bringing food and drink to shrines of martyrs looks completely foreign to us, but it was normal Christian practice in the areas where Monica had previously lived. The early church had only just left persecution behind, and the faith of the martyrs was very attractive to many.
6.3-6.8, Anselm helps him to understand Scripture.
Augustine had previously found Scripture simplistic and unbelievable. Anselm explains it as a unity and explains God as wholly other from creation in a way that allows Augustine to leave behind his idea of a material God.
Ambrose preaches beyond the literal sense to disclose the “spiritual sense” of the text. Allegorical or spiritual interpretation of Scripture, as practiced among church Fathers and medieval theologians, is a contested subject among contemporary Christians, because of fears that it allows us to untether interpretation from the text. (In my opinion there’s both good and bad “spiritual” exegesis, just as there’s both good and bad “literal” exegesis.)
Augustine himself would move back towards more literal interpretations as he got older, though his “literal” interpretation of Genesis would not look remotely like contemporary seven day creationism’s “literalism.” Here, we see that how we interpret Scripture matters.
Augustine strongly affirms the authority of Scripture (6.8 is a good passage to look at here), and at this point in the story, he seems to give intellectual assent to Christian belief. He believes, but he is not willing to submit to living as a follower of Christ.
6.9-6.10, Ambition, the beggar analogy.
Sex gets most of the attention, but the danger and temptation of ambition plays a huge role in Augustine’s story. How many of us could report, with him,
“an openmouthed fixation on professional distinctions, moneymaking, and marriage” (6.9).
We may find Augustine quite odd in his rejection of worldly ambition. In a famous move, Augustine compares himself to a drunk beggar who thinks he’s happy even though he, in fact, has nothing. Augustine’s ambitions are the beggar’s drunken delusions;
“Just as the beggar’s joy wasn’t real joy, so the glory I was after wasn’t real—but it did more to turn my mind upside down” (6.10).
6.11-6.18, Augustine, with his friends Alypius and Nebridius, are
“three hungry beaks, gasping to each other in their helpless need, and waiting….” (6.17)
for God. Alypius is drawn in by the games.
6.19-6.26, Contemplates celibacy with dread, Monica arranges a marriage, separation from common-law wife.
Augustine believes but resists submitting to God, and it’s sex that’s holding him back;
“Day after day, I put off living in you, but I didn’t put off dying every day in myself” (6.20).
Monica arranges a bride from a Christian family, but the bride is too young for the marriage to happen yet. For class reasons, there’s no question of Augustine marrying his common-law wife. As a condition of his engagement, Augustine sends away his common-law wife, and he describes the separation in brutal terms;
“My heart, which had fused with hers, was mutilated by the wound, and I limped along trailing blood (6.25).
Still, he quickly goes back to a different sexual relationship.
Women and sexual ethics in Augustine’s world
Augustine is inescapably a man of his late ancient context. As is true for all of us, some of the characteristic sin of his context shapes his life.
One clear example of this is in his relationships with women. Augustine shares in sinful assumptions of his time about the foolishness of women. At the same time, his understanding of women is—at least partially—transformed by the gospel which names women as created in God’s image and redeemed in Jesus Christ.
He sees Manichean degradation of the body and of sex as degrading to women. He is disciplined by the truth of the goodness of creation, including the goodness of human beings as created male and female, to understand women as human and as rational (13.47). In a context where some suggested that women were such a problem that they couldn’t even be saved without becoming male, Augustine is clear that God made women and is redeeming women.
In Confessions, two women stand out: Monica and the unnamed woman Augustine lived with for many years, the mother of his son. There are as many interpretations of these two women as there are readers of Augustine. Some see Augustine as callous and derogatory toward both, others emphasize his love for them and his portrait of his mother as Christian example. We may be moved by Monica’s devotion to her son and her deep desire that he might come to Christ.
Monica’s extreme submission to her husband and the powerlessness of Augustine’s lover are characteristic of the deeply patriarchal ancient context. There’s a lot we don’t know about these women, especially about Augustine’s lover, but there are aspects of Augustine’s relationships with them in which we can see hope. Augustine is bound by class strictures in a way that makes him share at least some of the powerlessness of his common-law wife. He grieves the loss deeply. Here is a broken, sinful situation in which shreds of human love and dignity may still be glimpsed.
In many contemporary conversations, Augustine is villainized as degrading women and sex, but the story is more complicated. He was acutely aware of his own sexual sin, and this certainly made it hard for him to imagine healthy sexuality, but he also stood resolute against many who failed to see that God made and loves all humans, both women and men.
To us, the most foreign piece of Augustine is likely his conviction that, for him, the Christian life requires celibacy. It is almost impossible for us to understand the elevation of celibacy in the early church, and it’s good for us to consider how much this was related to the examples of Jesus and of Paul (don’t forget 1 Cor. 7!).
The celibate Christian life offered a new kind of freedom for some Christians, particularly women, which was previously unthinkable in the Roman empire. For Rome, procreation was a civic duty, and celibate Christians were proclaiming that their bodies were outside the politics of the state and inside the new politics of the kingdom of God, wherein reproduction happens by conversion, not childbirth. Augustine’s option for celibacy comes from his sense that sex, for him, will have such a hold on him that it will inevitably drag him away from God.
He does not impose this choice on others, and he affirms marriage (and, with it, sex) as a God-given good against the grumpier Jerome, who denigrated marriage.
Augustine’s teaching on original sin is sometimes interpreted as anti-sex, but he insisted that this is not the case, and I believe him. The problem is sinful human nature, not sex as such, and sin is not a sexually transmitted disease.
Augustine is not going to look sex-positive to our contemporary eyes, but in his context, in some ways at least, he was, and at the same time, he offers us a window into a very different way of thinking Christianly about sex. When we read outside our own context, we are challenged to imagine what it might be like to live with different assumptions, to see ways that sin operates in every time and place, and to praise a God who nonetheless works, even in the midst of that sin.
How does my understanding of the good life contribute to my sense of vocation? For Augustine, marriage and career are both given up with his conversion to Christianity. What are our ambitions? Are we ambitious for the kingdom? How much of our vocational choices are tied to hopes about marriage and prestigious careers? What would it mean to submit vocational ambition to the gospel?
BOOK 7: NEOPLATONISTS AND PAUL
7.1-7.7, Questions about God’s nature.
Augustine struggled with thinking of God as a giant, diffuse mass. He had trouble understanding God as a spiritual reality. Christian Neo-Platonism helps him to conceive God as truly other than creation, a God who is not just bigger than anything we know but who is qualitatively different from creation. Neo-Platonism helps Augustine begin to understand the radical difference between God and the world, a difference that is proclaimed throughout Scripture, which tells us of God’s holy otherness.
7.8-7.12, Released from astrology, thoughts on providence.
Augustine is convinced by Firminus’s story about two babies born at the same time (so, under the same astrological signs) who have radically different fates (freedom and slavery). Augustine moves to an understanding of a world under the care of providence (God’s loving guidance), rather than one controlled by fate.
7.13-7.22, Books of the Platonists.
Augustine’s reading of Plotinus and Porphyry is central to his intellectual journey, which is central to his faith journey. The books of the Platonists help him understand the eternity and otherness of God. It’s remarkable that Augustine chooses to summarize what he learned from these books using quotes from John 1. Only God truly exists in His own right; everything that is not God has a derived existence, dependent on God. Augustine explains evil as a deprivation or lack of existence (7.19).
7.23-7.27, Neoplatonism helps with questions, but Scripture is needed.
Augustine thinks philosophy tells us all kinds of good stuff. It even tells us,
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word” (7.13, quoting John 1),
but what it doesn’t tell us or give us is Jesus;
“yet that the Word became a body and lived among—us—this part I didn’t read in the books given to me” (7.13, again quoting John 1).
Augustine understands God’s eternal nature better now, but he hasn’t embraced the flesh of Christ. He
“looked for a way to obtain the reinforcement necessary for enjoying [God], but I didn’t find it until I took in my arms the mediator between God and human beings, the human Jesus Christ, who is God above all things, and blessed into eternity” (7.24).
Understanding God better cannot give him the power he needs to turn away from his old life. He needs the power—the grace—of Jesus. The humanity of Jesus was rejected in the hierarchical dualism of the Manicheans and it wasn’t thought of in the hierarchical dualism of Platonism. Augustine needs to read Paul (see 7.27 for a whole new relationship between Augustine and Scripture). Paul gives knowledge of the Word made flesh, without which Augustine is powerless.
Faith and reason
Book 7 is a great text for thinking about the relationship between faith and reason, the unity of all knowledge in God who is the Truth, and the riches that may be gained from the study of the liberal arts disciplines (philosophy, for Augustine, but by extension, all the disciplines, yes?)
Augustine uses a metaphor common to the church Fathers to describe what Christians may learn from non-Christian books and disciplines. What he takes from the Platonists is like the
“gold that [God] willed your people the Jews to carry out of Egypt, since the gold was yours, wherever it was” (7.15).
The “plunder of the Egyptians” is the learning Christians find useful from what we might call "secular" sources. Faith and reason, education and Scripture, are not opposed to one another, but without Scripture, we have incomplete knowledge, and the wisdom of the disciplines needs to be corrected, augmented, and completed by Scripture.
How does education contribute to our pursuit of the good life? Have you ever encountered knowledge that God used in your life like the books of the Platonists worked in Augustine’s life? Knowledge or books which helped you to better understand God and God’s world, that perhaps opened up new possibilities for reading Scripture? How does Christian learning fit together with learning that comes from the many disciplines of human knowledge? Does the church fear “the books of the Platonists” (or analogies to those books)? How does Augustine help us to value learning from all disciplines while making the primary place of Scripture clear?
BOOK 8: TAKE UP AND READ
8.1-8.2, Prayer of thanks to God for breaking his “chains” (8.1).
Ambition is no longer driving Augustine, but sex is still too powerful for him to give up his sexual sin. He’s in a place of intellectual conviction (he believes in the true God) without moral submission (he doesn’t want to live a Christian life).
8.3-8.9, Simplicianus tells Victorinus’s story.
Augustine is moved by and identifies with the story of Victorinus’s conversion.
8.10-8.13, Divided will.
Augustine is bound in sinful desire;
“The enemy possessed my wanting, and from it he had constructed a chain for me and constricted me in it” (8.10).
Sinful habits hold deep. Augustine begins to want God but is afraid of submitting his life. He can’t set himself free from sin.
8.14-8.16, Antony’s story.
Augustine is moved by the stories of Egyptian monks. God uses the stories to help Augustine see the thing he has so resisted seeing: his sin;
“you again confronted me with myself and forced me to look, so that I would find my sin and hate it” (8.16).
8.17-8.26, Turmoil.
Augustine is fighting change hard and prays the infamous,
“Give me chastity and self-restraint, but don’t do it just yet” (8.17).
He was
“inwardly at war and being laid waste” (8.22).
It’s a battle;
“The nearer to me that moment moved at which I was to become something different, the more it struck terror into my heart” (8.25).
8.27, Augustine has a vision of Self-Restraint personified.
In an important passage (and a good one to read closely), Augustine sees that the holy and chaste life, which has frightened him so, is possible, is beautiful, and is fruitful.
Again, the examples of other Christians are so important for Augustine’s imagining that he, too, could live life for Christ. Most important, he sees that self-restraint (sometimes translated “chastity”) is not a human achievement. It can only be lived by a gift of grace, by the power of God;
“Why are you trying to stand on your own—so that you fail to stand? Throw yourself forward onto him! Don’t be afraid. He won’t back away and let you fall” (8.27).
8.28-8.30, Conversion in the Garden of Milan.
Augustine hears a child’s voice,
“Pick it up! Read it!”
(8.29, the more famous translation is “Take and read!”). He opens the Scriptures and reads from Romans 13:13-14. The battle is over;
“my heart was virtually flooded with a light of relief and certitude, and all the darkness of my hesitation scattered away” (8.29).
Belief and practice, faith and works, and when does a conversion happen anyway?
It may seem strange that the moment we almost always name as Augustine’s conversion comes well after his cognitive affirmation of Christian truth. His conversion in the garden is so much more than mental assent to Christian teaching. It is a transformation of his whole life according to the way of Christ, along with expectation that his sinful behaviors will be left behind. There is little or no separation here between faith and works.
Protestant Christianity, as we know it, tends to identify conversion with justification by faith, that act in which God forgives our sins because of what Christ has done, granting us new status as children of God.
There are many mysteries here, but we tend to see justification as coming with our confession of faith. Protestants also tend to see a kind of pause, conceptual and/or temporal, between justification and sanctification, that process by which God changes our lives, making us godly, Christlike, and holy. We even have quasi-liturgical speech to codify this pause: “Jesus was my Savior but it was only later that he became my Lord.”
This pause between justification and sanctification serves important theological purpose; it’s there to make it clear that justification does not depend on sanctification, that salvation is from grace and not works. That’s a huge and important Protestant concept. But it comes with a potential problem: it can lead to a splitting of faith from works, attempts to “get people saved” while ignoring discipleship. Scripture (and the Protestant Reformers, and all good Christian theology) is clear that faith and works are a whole, that justification always bears fruit in sanctification.
So, what’s going on with Augustine? The short answer is that we probably can’t sort it all out. His story comes before centuries of debate about the order in which various possible steps in the Christian life happen. But, for the early church, the idea that one might “get saved” without submitting one’s life to Christ was nonsensical. Theology of baptism (below) also plays into this.
What may be more useful here is the challenge to hold faith and works together as gifts of grace. It’s not that we get saved by grace and then need to work really hard. The works must also be graced. The works are possible only by grace. The works are part and parcel of the grace.
It’s important to notice that, before the garden in Milan, Augustine still thought sexual morality would have to be achieved by his own strength; he was still seeking what we might call “works righteousness.” In 6.20, there’s a lovely reflection on God as the one who grants healing from sin.
Does the good life depend on what kind of person you are? Augustine’s conversion may lead us to reflect on our own conversion stories. It may be interesting to compare and contrast Augustine’s story with ours. In Augustine’s story, the good life can only be the life fully submitted to Christ, including in the area Augustine least wants to submit. The good life is the Christlike life, and it is not something Augustine can achieve by his own strength. It is possible only in the strength of God.
BOOK 9: BAPTISM
9.1, Prayer to God as the breaker of chains.
Augustine’s desire is transformed;
“I stopped wanting what I had been wanting, and instead wanted what you wanted” (9.1).
9.2-9.4, Withdraws from his career.
Augustine’s new life is going to be a NEW LIFE. His ambitions can no longer be for worldly power or prestige.
9.5-9.13, Verecundus offers Augustine his country estate at Cassiciacum in Northern Italy, where Augustine retreats with his mother, son, and close friends.
This is a sweet time where they
“rested up in [God] after the heat of worldly life” (9.5).
9.14, Augustine, Alypius, and Adeodatus baptized in Milan.
9.15-9.22, Stories of Monica.
Leading up to Monica’s death, Augustine tells stories of her life as an exemplar of faith.
Augustine assumes that many husbands abuse their wives (in keeping with the sinful violence of patriarchal Rome) and he praises Monica for submitting to her husband so that he never hit her (9.19). It is important for us to know that violence is never a woman’s fault for failing to submit. Intimate partner violence and abuse is an evil against precious persons created in the image of God.
9.23-27, Augustine and Monica experience a vision at Ostia, Monica’s death.
Augustine and Monica experience a vision of the divine presence. They talk about the glories of
“the land of abundance that never fails” (9.24).
Monica dies at peace, having seen her heart’s desire in her son’s conversion. Augustine and Adeodatus grieve.
Theology of baptism
Contemporary North American Christians may find Augustine’s theology of baptism almost as puzzling as his option for celibacy. Augustine’s church sees the new birth as coming with, in, and through baptism, and without baptismal cleansing, people were assumed to go to hell. On that account, Augustine’s understanding is that his justification does not come in the garden in Milan but at his baptism; thus, his faith
“didn’t allow me any feeling of safety in regard to my past sins, which had not yet been forgiven through my baptism” 9.12.)
Baptism was understood as the means by which God washed away and forgave sin. For this reason, baptism was often delayed, to the death bed, if possible, to assure that people died in a state of cleanliness from sin. When Augustine demanded baptism as a boy,
“my cleansing was delayed—as if it were required that I continue getting dirty if I was going to live” (1.16).
Augustine’s friend in book 4 was
“baptized without knowing it” (4.8),
and this unwilling baptism was understood to have washed away his sin.
Post-baptismal sin was a thus a problem for theology, one the medieval Roman Catholic church would try to solve in ways the Protestant Reformers would ultimately find untenable: the sacrament of penance with absolution of sin by the priest, the giving of last rites, and the doctrine of purgatory as a place for atonement for earthly sin.
Protestantism would see all these as “works,” which failed to embrace Christ as the one and full mediator between God and humans. Protestant theology will ultimately see all sin, pre- and post-baptismal, as simply washed away in the grace of Christ. While Augustine seems to assume the more mechanistic view, he also gives us a foretaste of just this Protestant solution when he thinks about Monica’s death.
The problem:
“I wouldn’t dare to say that from the time when she was born again through your baptism, no word against your commands came out of her mouth…Woe to even an exemplary human life, if you conduct its trial in the absence of your mercy” (9.34).
Even the excellent Monica probably sinned since her baptism, but Augustine points to the grace of Christ to cover this with something that looks very like…
The future Protestant solution:
“No one could tear her away from your sheltering care…She won’t plead that she owes nothing—that way, she would lose the case and be turned over to the wily plaintiff; instead, she will plead that her debts were paid by the one nobody can pay back: he wasn’t a debtor, yet he settled our debts” (9.36).
How does my understanding of the good life contribute to my sense of vocation? The good life as the Christian life radically alters Augustine’s career. He leaves it behind entirely. He might also resonate with an understanding of vocation as more-than-career, as the call to love God and neighbor with one’s whole life. Augustine will eventually do this as a priest and bishop, but we are all called to do this wherever we work and serve. How does Augustine’s vocation in Christ challenge or inspire your sense of vocation?
BOOKS 10-13: REFLECTIONS FROM CHRISTIAN LIFE ON MEMORY, SANCTIFICATION, TIME, CREATION, INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE
10.1-10.11, Prayer and thoughts on loving God.
God is the doctor, the healer, who makes Augustine new. Grace enables a new way of living. The language of love and desire peaks here in book ten;
“It isn’t with a wavering but with a sure awareness that I love you, Master. You struck my heart to the core with your Word, and I fell in love with you” (10.8).
10.12-10.28, The wonder and power of memory.
If even this one part of us is so amazing and unfathomable, how much more amazing is the God who created memory.
10.29-10.37, Happy life and truth in God.
Everyone wants happiness, but true happiness if found only in God.
10.38-10.70, Clinging to God’s mercy while still subject to temptation.
Augustine testifies to the way God is working sanctifying power in his life, and he tells the truth about the ways sin still tempts him.
“You have begun to change us. You know to what a great degree you’ve changed me, at first curing my itch to justify myself, so that you could become forgiving toward all of my other sins as well, healing all my diseases and buying back my life from rotting in the grave, and crowning me with your tender mercy and tenderheartedness…” (10.58).
But Augustine is still tempted by
“the wish to be loved by other people” (10.59).
Through all this, Augustine repeats a refrain summing up his confidence in and reliance on God’s power for sanctification:
“grant what you command, and command what you wish.”
Books 11-13, Seeking to understand Scripture, particularly the creation story.
What may seem like a baffling number of pages of obscure interpretation of Genesis point back to the ways bad interpretation of Scripture was a stumbling block for Augustine for so much of his story. Books 11-13 are exercises in his new love and respect for Scripture, his trust in its authority, and his attempts to read against the Manicheans.
His Confessions shows us a life shaped, over time, by prayer, by Scripture, and by Jesus.
A FEW RESOURCES:
Augustine, On Christian Doctrine. Here, Augustine works out the theory of opposing loves described under book 4 above. You can find the text online, or here as On Christian Teaching.
Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). This is the standard biography of Augustine. It’s historically and theologically rich.
Peter Brown, “Dialogue with God;” Brown converts a book review into a singing essay. Absolutely worth your time; click and read!
Jason Byassee, Reading Augustine: A Guide to the Confessions, (Wipf & Stock, 2006).
Margaret Miles, Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine’s Confessions, (New York: Crossroads, 1992). Deals with gender in Confessions in a nuanced manner.
Trevin Wax, “Augustine the Lover: Sarah Ruden’s New Translation of “Confessions”
Wesley Seminary Podcast, #33, Sarah Ruden on Confessions.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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