Confessions Essay, Research Paper

AugustineNoverim te, noverim me: “I would know you [God], I would know myself.” Augustine wrote these words in one of his earliest works, but they retained their force throughout his lifetime.[2] The irrefutable solipsism of self confronted with the absolute reality of God, the wholly other: all of Augustine’s thought moves between those two poles.But those poles were not far distant from one another, with vast uncharted territory between. Rather, they were elements of an intimate personal relationship destined for permanent and indissoluble union. To treat God and self as two different things is to introduce the fatal distinction that the serpent taught to Eve. The relation between creator and creature is totally different from that which obtains between any two created things in the material world. Each created object participates in a complex world of material objects from which God seems far away. But the creator is equidistant from all creatures–equally close to all.Theologians write about God dispassionately and objectively, in serene detachment, but in doing so avail themselves of a compendious device that runs the risk of negating the truth of all they say. Christian theology only succeeds when the believer sees that the story of all creation (”macrotheology”) and the private history of the soul (”microtheology”) are identical. Differences between the two are flaws of perception, not defects inherent in things.Saints do not have to be taught this identity, for theology realized is holiness. But even saints, when they are theologians, often find it hard to embody their intuition in their works. For Augustine, the crisis came early in life. Despite his reputation as a self-revelatory writer, he left behind little direct testimony about the condition of his soul at different times, but we can see that the first years of his episcopacy were a time of trial. He had managed the transformation from virtual pagan to devout Christian with reasonable equanimity. The map for that conversion was clear enough and commonly followed. Even his elevation to the priesthood in the church of Hippo had brought with it few fresh anxieties.But the final elevation to the bishopric seems to have unsteadied Augustine a bit. The transition was accompanied by some jibing from outside–suspicions of his Manichean past, rumor of an illicit connection with a married woman, jealousy from some less-educated African churchmen toward this well-educated outsider rising too rapidly to the top. Those things, however, must have been only the surface disturbances. Augustine was more deeply troubled by the implications of his new office.Who was he to stand in such a place of eminence, with so many people depending on him? He was still a sinner, but somehow he was also the conduit of divine grace bringing redemption to other sinners. Now a preacher, he needed to be preached to himself, but there was no one to do that. He had to stand alone before the people of Hippo each week and proclaim God’s word. How could the expectations of these people not drive him to despair?Two literary answers came out of this personal crisis. The first was perfectly theological, detached, and serious: Christian Doctrine was begun, and carried out through most of the third book, in the year or so after his elevation to the bishopric. In it, as we have seen, Augustine sketched dispassionately the nature of the Christian message and the mechanism of its proclamation to the world. It was a handbook for others who would preach, but it was a personal statement of intent as well. How do I preach, he asked himself? Christian Doctrine was the answer. But it was an incomplete answer, in more ways than one. At about this time, he turned instead to writing the Confessions.Detachment and objectivity are not to be found in the Confessions. Analysis of divine affairs is not only not kept apart from self-analysis, but the two streams are run together in what often appears to first readers to be an uncontrolled and illogical melange. This book’s fascination for modern readers stems in large part from its vivid portrayal of a man in the presence of his God, of God and the self intimately related but still separated by sin, and of a struggle for mastery within the self longing for final peace. It is an extraordinary book, no matter how studied.The rest of Augustine’s life was spent writing books of a more conventional sort. He would analyze in painstaking detail the inner workings of the trinity, the whole course of salvation history, and the delicate commerce between God and man in the workings of grace and the will, all in an objective, detached, and impersonal style.[3] What is different about them is that they were written by a man who had already written the Confessions, made his peace with God insofar as that was possible, and drawn from that peace (the forerunner of heavenly rest) the confidence he needed to stand at the altar and preach or to sit in his study dictating works of polemic and instruction for the world to read.The reading of the Confessions given in this chapter, then, may seem somewhat strange. The Confessions are not to be read merely as a look back at Augustine’s spiritual development; rather the text itself is an essential stage in that development, and a work aware both of what had already passed into history and of what lay ahead. No other work of Christian literature that does what Augustine accomplishes in this volume; only Dante’s Commedia even rivals it.Prayer–so all the authoritative writers state–is no simple matter. It is not easy to pray. In view of that, we should direct our first attention to the form of Augustine’s masterwork and portion out at least some of our admiration for his accomplishment of a very difficult task: praying on paper. The literary form of the work is a continuous address to God. No human audience is directly addressed, although in Book 10 Augustine will wonder what such an audience might make of the work. But at all times the direction of the work is towards God.Such a work would seem doomed to failure. Prayer is private, but literature is unfailingly public; prayer is humble, but literature is always a form of self-assertion; prayer is intimate, but literature is voyeuristic. One might be able to depict another’s prayer successfully (for then the voyeurism and the self-assertion are the responsibility of the author, not of the individual at prayer), except that no third party can ever enter into the privacy of another’s relation with God.But somehow or other Augustine succeeds. The Confessions are marked by an unfailing consistency of tone and authenticity of style. The believer and the writer function as one, with no awkwardness or embarrassment. There is never a false note, no false modesty, no posing for an audience. We come away convinced that, whatever else we have learned, in it we have seen Augustine at prayer, as he was.We need not insist that Augustine prayed in the privacy of his cell with just such words, just such cadences, just such nuanced and orderly allusions to scripture, just such unfailing intensity. The text is not the private prayer of a man on his knees in a chapel. In fact, in the Confessions Augustine succeeded at something even more difficult than transcribing his private devotions accurately. He has instead devised an idiom by which it is possible to pray in a literary medium that is, to pray as one would have to pray with pen in hand. This text does not represent Augustine’s prayer life as signifier represents signified; the text is itself the thing signified, the very prayer itself, the act of communication between Augustine and God. Its relation to the rest of Augustine’s prayer life is not as snapshot to subject but as one subject to another.The implications of this literary form come to be the subject of the Confessions themselves in the tenth book. We must bear in mind that we are not reading a book of any ordinary kind. This is emphatically not the “first modern autobiography,” for the autobiographical narrative that takes up part of the work is incidental content while prayer is the significant form. The work is sui generis.SinThe Confessions begin as prayer. The first few pages are dense and abstract, but they are of deep significance to the whole work and to Augustine’s life, and they repay study. The beginning is abrupt–and not Augustine’s.”Great art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised;great is Thy power, and Thy wisdom infinite.” These lines juxtapose and combine two Psalm texts (144[145].3 and 146[147].5). With them, Augustine embodies his own principle from Christian Doctrine, that he who speaks of religion should rely on the language of scripture itself. Though necessity often compels the believer to use his own words, constant recourse to the very words of scripture provides a safety net over which the speculative theologian and confused penitent may work.The content of these lines is praise: a humble mortal enunciates the greatness of God, greatness of action and contemplation, of power and wisdom, embracing all that is. That greatness is in fact “greatly to be praised.” Much of the Confessions will sound the same laudatory note, and not by accident. We ordinarily interpret “confession” as a single-valued term, acknowledgment of wrongdoing by a miscreant. But the etymology has simply to do with emphatic agreement or acknowledgment. Confession of sin is the negative form of confession. Confession of praise, on the other hand, is the acknowledgment by the creature of the greatness and goodness of God. Confession of faith is then emphatic assent to a set of facts about God and God’s relation to mankind.All three confessions occur in the Confessions.[4] If God and the soul are all Augustine wants to know, and if they are to be known best in relation to each other, then acknowledgement of the weakness of the individual and of the power and greatness of God are two sides of the same coin. Sinful man sets himself in God’s place; confession of sin demolishes that preposterousness. Sinful man belittles God’s power at the expense of his own; confession of praise restores God’s place in the sinner’s eyes. Confession of faith declares what has transpired to the community of believers. Seen this way, confession is the working out of redemption itself in the life of the sinner. It is prayer itself. The literary text, prayer on paper, becomes in this way again not a picture of the working out of Augustine’s salvation, but the instrument of salvation itself.”And Thee would a man praise;a man, but a particle of Thy creation;a man, that bears about him his mortality,the witness of sin,the witness, that Thou resistest the proud:yet would a man praise Thee;he, but a particle of Thy creation.”God is great, but man is tiny, yet man, full of sin and death and rejection, somehow or another reaches up, as improbable as it may seem, to praise summary of its contents. The natural motion of the spirit is from the restlessness of alienation from God to the repose of peace and union with God. The Confessions, among many other things, follow this path from restlessness to peace itself. (A glance ahead at the last words on the last page of the Confessions [13.35-38] will confirm this.) In the beginning, confusion and division; in the end, peace.”Grant me, Lord, to know and understand which is first,to call on Thee or to praise Thee?and, again, to know Thee or to call on Thee?For who can call on Thee, not knowing Thee?For he that knoweth Thee not,may call on Thee as other than Thou art.Or is it rather,that we call on Thee that we may know Thee?”How does praise come about? Is it man’s doing? But if it is his doing, how is it not inevitable–for if all can know God, all would praise him, would they not? The precise sequence of Augustine’s question is this: In what order do the apparently separate acts occur of knowing God, appealing to God, and praising God? Does not knowledge have to come first? (For without knowledge, we would not know on whom we were to call or whom to praise.) Or is perhaps that we pray first, in order to gain knowledge? (Augustine himself began by calling on the name of God, but now he seeks knowledge (the word he uses is one he uses elsewhere in similar contexts as a name for faith) and understanding. The answer to the question comes from the source of all answers.”But how shall they call on Himin whom they have not believed?or how shall they believe without a preacher?And they that seek the Lord shall praise Him.For they that seek shall find Him,and they that find shall praise Him.”Scripture provides in this conflation of several passages, answers to all the questions.[5] Invocation requires belief (faith) first; belief requires a preacher; praise comes after seeking and is indeed part of a sequence that runs seeking-finding-praising. Given these data, Augustine can answer his questions in rational order.”I will seek Thee, Lord, by calling on Thee;and will call on Thee, believing in Thee;for to us hast Thou been preached.My faith, Lord, shall call on Thee,which Thou hast given me,wherewith Thou hast inspired me,through the incarnation of Thy Son,through the ministry of the preacher.”Here is the essence: faith calls on God (seeking-finding-praising: that sequence follows necessarily on calling on God, we are left to deduce), but faith comes from outside the individual, through the second person of the trinity.Thus God is great, mankind (though outwardly insignificant) is capable of praising God, but this capacity is no accomplishment of man himself. God preaches his Word to man, which results in faith, which results in invocation, which results in seeking, which results in finding, which results in praise. So the economy of the Christian experience is defined: faith is the beginning, unceasing praise (in heaven) is the end, and human life is a journey from faith to praise, from restlessness to repose. God is the guiding force, drawing men to himself despite their unworthiness.Faith is thus the ground whence invocation rises. The next paragraphs deal with the problem of invocation. What can it possibly mean to “call on God?” This puzzle becomes the means by which Augustine expresses awe and reverence at the majesty of God in a vivid, overtowering depiction of God, full of paradox:”What art Thou then, my God?What, but the Lord God?For who is Lord but the Lord?or who is God save our God?Most highest, most good, most potent, most omnipotent;most merciful, yet most just;most hidden, yet most present;most beautiful, yet most strong;stable, yet incomprehensible;unchangeable, yet all-changing;never new, never old;all-renewing,and bringing age upon the proud and they know it not;ever working, ever at rest;still gathering, yet lacking nothing;supporting, filling, and overspreading;creating, nourishing, and maturing;seeking, yet having all things.Thou lovest, without passion;art jealous, without anxiety;repentest, yet grievest not;art angry, yet serene;changest Thy works, Thy purpose unchanged;receivest again what Thou findest,yet didst never lose ….” (1.4.4)Intellectually speaking, then, this book is a search for understanding. On this point a little clarification is perhaps useful. Augustine, and the early Latin middle ages in general, recognized a dual epistemology–an ideal theory of knowledge, and a practical one. In the ideal world, God is known from the glory of creation itself. Human reason suffices to deduce his existence, and full understanding of the deepest truths is accessible to all. But for fallen man, sin intervenes. Revelation supplements creation as a source of knowledge, and the authority of the church supplements faltering human reason. What revelation and authority give is faith, simple faith, and the restlessness with which Augustine begins. As the spirit of grace works, the strength comes to move from the epistemology of the fallen world (and the faith it provides) to the epistemology of unfallen man (of the Garden of Eden–almost of heaven) and the direct understanding–mystical contemplation is perhaps a better term–that comes with it.The Confessions open in faith and restless confusion. This work will show something of how Augustine proceeded a little way from faith to understanding and will itself, as literary text, be one of those steps. Perfect understanding (perfect repose) is impossible this side of the grave, but every step of the journey is an image of the whole journey (salvation history is the same story at all times in every place), and the text that begins with faith in Book 1 and ends with rest in Book 13 can itself be part of the process described (a part of the whole whose every part is the whole–paradox on paradox).A work that begins at the beginning of personal salvation aptly begins with the beginning of life. Augustine is justly famous for the insight he brings in these pages of the Confessions to the dilemmas of infancy, even if his sober conclusions seem harsh to us now. The justice of much of what he says cannot be denied, and when once we realize where he begins, it is hard to deny him his conclusions.To Augustine sin is always unprincipled self-assertion. What seems mere instinct for survival in the beats of the wild is in human beings a turning away from love of God and neighbor towards pride and emptiness. The innocence of small children, Augustine says, is chiefly inability in their selfishness to wield effective power over other people’s lives. But the first attempts to communicate and the first faltering steps are taken with nothing but self-interest in mind. The infant’s love for its parents is not caritas at all, for it is all demanding and no giving.But the speechless days of infancy are only prologue to Augustine’s recollections. In the first book of the Confessions he paints a picture of himself that highlights the contradictions of his youth. It is a society no longer faithful to the old traditions but insufficiently sure of its own mind to devote itself fully to the new religion that we see reflected in Augustine’s religious history. Throughout his early life, Augustine had a powerful yen to believe. Through wanderings and confusions, he was constantly on the brink of committing himself to some lofty ideal. Sometimes he even made the gesture. Already as a child, when illness seemed life-threatening, he cried out for baptism (1.1.17) and almost got his wish, except that his unexpected recovery seemed to render the saving bath unnecessary for the time.But at times religious affiliation could mean less to Augustine than the “natural” inclinations of fallen man. He is not minutely revelatory of his indiscretions and transgressions, but his self-analysis suggests at least the shape of his temptations and his lapses. What information he gives, though, comes almost offhandedly and gives us little idea of the quality of feeling and emotion that made his liaisons plausible.Instead, when he wants to penetrate the depths of his own iniquity, he chose to describe the theft of a few pears from a neighbor’s tree (2.4-9). This narrative is placed in his sixteenth year, an idle time spent at home, his education interrupted by penury, his energies at the disposal of his fancies. An unflattering portrayal of his father’s reaction to his new maturity shows that it was a time when the powers of the flesh were beginning to flourish. Then suddenly we have him and a few friends snatching pears. To ask whether the theft is meant to represent symbolically the sexual indiscretions of youth is literal-minded, but some broad analogy at least is probably implied. Although the moral consciousness begins to function in childhood, it is with adolescence and adulthood that the trivial indiscretions of childhood begin to harden into ugly excrescences of moral insensitivity. The adolescent is father to the man. Of that much at least Augustine meant to speak when he chose the pear theft for his meditation on sin.In speaking of the pears, he strips away irrelevancies and focuses on the sinfulness of the sin. Most immoral acts are undertaken with a purpose–or at least a rationalization –that is at least in part expressly moral. Some innate, positive attraction of the act draws the individual. Even so morally austere an author as Dante could portray the love of Paolo and Francesca with sympathy for a fall that had come through excess of love and enthusiasm; Augustine could well have recounted his own amours at least as deftly. But there was nothing at all redeeming about the theft of the pears. The pears themselves were paltry and unattractive, and the thieves did not even keep them; the comrades with whom he made the theft were not particularly his friends, nor did he want their approval; what attracted him was simply the thrill of the theft itself: forbidden fruit.Surely Augustine never expected to be cast down to hell for a few pears. But at the same time he felt with awe and horror that the obscure craving that had led him to the pears was the sort of desire by which hell is chosen. To delight in evil for its own sake, to assert one’s own primacy in the world by arrogating other’s goods to oneself for whatever purpose–there is the embodiment of all evil. The second book of the Confessions ends with Augustine facing with his own adolescent act in all its trivial magnitude:”Who can disentangle that twisted and intricate knottiness? Foul is it: I hate to think on it, to look on it …. I sank away from Thee, and I wandered, my God, too much astray from Thee my stay, in these days of my youth, and I became to myself a barren land.” (2.10.18)The sins of manhood follow upon those of adolescence with drear inevitability. Despite his preoccupation with himself (perhaps because of it) the world did not reject Augustine, and his career began to offer hint of future glories. As he began to make his way in the world, the tensions that had marked his childhood took on new forms and created new anxieties. He was beginning a life as teacher and student of ancient literature, committed to the propagation of the ancient ideas about man, nature, and the divine that were rooted in the literary tradition. Cicero was his favorite guide in these years, and it was the Hortensius of Cicero’s that was the spur to all his searches for truth.But the life of philosophy that this devotee of the classics actually found for himself would not have been highly regarded by Cicero. Augustine took up with the Manichees and pursued the life of perfection it offered. Manicheism was a self-absorbed movement on the periphery of Christianity that crossed the line separating church from cult. It seemed to offer a more rational, scientific picture of the world than did the simple–Augustine may have thought superstitious–orthodox teachings. Augustine had many reasons to find this sect attractive, for in it he found surcease from the plagues of an obviously troubled conscience. Bad conscience can easily turn to neurotic obsession, but Augustine did not remain a convinced Manichee long enough. Rationalism can not substitute for reason, and the intellectual shoddiness of Manicheism soon turned him away.Augustine was left leading a curious double life. In public, he was a teacher and a defender of the established order. In private, he was a half-hearted member of an illegal cult whose promises he did not quite credit. For the time being, the headlong rush of his career carried him unthinkingly along. The only qualms he had were instilled (he later thought) buy his mother, Monica.We cannot tell, with the evidence we have, what Monica meant for Augustine before his conversion. He could not have said for certain himself. In the Confessions he attributed much to her early influence. His narratives indicate equally that her influence was much ignored and resisted at this period. She wanted to see him a Christian, but he never responded directly to her wish. Christianity itself he scorned, for being too familiar and pedestrian. Only when he had taken a long journey through the exotic underside of late Roman religious life could he return to Christianity and find in it something adequately unfamiliar to carry promise of a happy future. He may well have thought, in early manhood, no more than that Christianity was a good religion for women of little education, like his mother; clever young men could do better for themselves.The successes of his career mounted and mounted, but what Augustine remembered was not so much the success itself as the ambivalences of that success. But a close friend, perhaps the closest he ever had, was taken from him in a most disturbing way. (This friend, like the mother of his son, is left nameless.) The friend fell ill, and his family had the sacrament of baptism administered while he lay unconscious. The patient rallied, and Augustine, full of the optimistic ebullience of the moment, spoke slightingly of the ritual performed on the passive invalid. He was surprised to find that his friend took the sacrament seriously and brushed away Augustine’s jibes. To make matters worse, the friend soon relapsed and died, in the peace of the church Augustine disdained. He had lost his friend to death, and to the church as well.Episodes such as this make up the fragments of autobiography that occur in the second through fifth books of the Confessions. The tale of lapse and descent is not overdrawn, except that to those who do not share Augustine’s harsh judgment on his younger self, it may seem excessive to have assigned any moral significance at all to the ordinary anxieties and strains of life. The insistent pull of fleshly concupiscence, the inanities of philosophical speculation, and the impatience of ambition all conspired to make Augustine successful and dissatisfied; so far, Augustine is no different from many others before and since. The young Augustine, much as we seek to know him, eludes our grasp, as he escaped even the Augustine who wrote these pages.This represented decline ends with the depiction Augustine gives of himself as he turned an uncertain corner to his thirtieth year. His Manicheism had left him, with his philosophical allegiance tentatively placed in the moribund school of academic skepticism, which still offered rationalism but was not embarrassed–as Manicheism was–by a body of idiosyncratic doctrines. Outwardly, the good of his career demanded that he make no break with the ruling orthodoxy. The dismal fifth book of the Confessions ends with the young Augustine betwixt and between, on the doorstep of the church, confused and doubting whether to enter:”So then after the manner of the Academics (as they are supposed) doubting of every thing, and wavering between all, I settled so far, that the Manichees were to be abandoned;– judging that, even while doubting, I might not continue in that sect, to which I already preferred some of the philosophers;–to which philosophers notwithstanding, for that they were without the saving name of Christ, I utterly refused to commit the cure of my sick soul.–I determined therefore so long to be a catechumen of the Catholic Church, to which I had been commended by my parents, till something certain should dawn upon me, whither I might steer my course.” (5.14.25)GraceNothing so astonished Augustine as the change that came over him during his short years in Milan. For that divine gift–such he had to believe it–he reserved the central books of his Confessions of praise. To admire the majesty of the heavens or the workings of divine providence through human history is one thing. That detached, objective contemplation can be cheap and inconsequential. But when Augustine looked back on his own life, he was amazed at the evidences of growth and change. Seeing God at work in his own life, he would not deny the call that had made him a bishop.No subject in the life of Augustine has excited so much discussion as the conversion he recounts in the Confessions. The reader facing those pages for the first time should be advised of some of the controversies and the importance that attaches to them.[6]The bluntest question is the historian’s: Is Augustine telling the truth? Does the highly selective, theological narrative of the Confessions faithfully represent his life at that period, or has he taken liberties with the facts? He would later (in Book 10) expatiate at length on the peculiarities of memory: was he not perhaps himself the victim of memory’s selective powers in this case? The first works written after the crucial events (mainly the Cassiciacum dialogues) do not support the narrative of the Confessions in abundant detail. If the garden scene of the Book 8 was so crucial to his whole life, why does no trace of it appear in any of the early works, some written as little as three months after the event?Broader questions deal not with the events themselves but with their significance. Augustine’s reading of the writings of certain Platonists were instrumental in effecting his conversion to Christianity. How important a part did they play? Perhaps the events of 386 amounted not to a conversion to Christianity at all, but to a conversion to Neoplatonism. On that view, only Augustine’s conscription into church affairs pulled him the distance further that made him a real Christian.Scholars still divide over the questions of historicity and have clustered around an ambivalent answer on the influence of Neoplatonism. It is generally accepted that Augustine converted to Christianity in 386, but then it is also generally accepted that the Christianity of his early period was heavily laden with Neoplatonic ideas and expectations.The disparities between the Confessions narrative and the Cassiciacum dialogues need not be significant, first of all, and can be explained by attending to the differences of literary style and purpose between those works. The dialogues were philosophical works in a Ciceronian mold, in which personal passions fit uncomfortably. The very proximity of the dialogues to the events of the conversion explains their reticence. (The dialogues were dedicated to some of his Milan friends; but it was just those friends to whom Augustine regrets having given a disingenuous explanation for his retirement: 9.2.2-4.) Having converted to a religion of humility and self-effacement, Augustine would not have trumpeted his inmost feelings so soon and in so self-serving a way. A full decade had to pass before he could devise the literary means, in the Confessions, to speak of his most private experiences without pose or brag.The philosophical quality of the dialogues illuminates Augustine’s relation to Neoplatonism. In 386 and immediately after Augustine was a Christian convert but not yet a Christian theologian. Inexperience and the lack of relevant training held him back. Instead, he was a professor of Latin letters with come competence in philosophical analysis. He could write of the problems that Christianity raised within the strict technical competence of his professional experience. The context of these dialogues is more Ciceronian than Neoplatonic, and there is no lack at all of explicit references to Christianity; but the characteristic Augustinian method of argument, in widening exegetical circles starting from particular texts of scripture, is not yet there and only comes to full maturity about the time of Augustine’s consecration as bishop.Furthermore, no religious conversion is complete and instantaneous. The one who comes to a new creed always brings confused expectations and misunderstandings bred in another environment. From earliest manhood, Augustine had been looking for an answer to all life’s questions, expecting a decisive turning by which everything would be changed for the better. When he did finally turn to Christianity, he seems to have had expectations the new religion could not fulfill. (He seems, for example, to have been conditioned to seek and expect what we could roughly call mystical visions; the expectation is encouraged by Neoplatonism, but fades as Augustine learns the Christian way of life.[7]) Perfect peace, serenity, and tranquility of spirit did not come automatically and permanently. In the ten years between the conversion and the writing of the Confessions, Augustine modified his expectations and in doing so discovered more accurately than he could have done before what was essential about his new religion. Neoplatonic influences were at work in the years after 386, but these influences were constantly on the wane, for Augustine had taken Christianity as the new norm according to which all other religious and philosophical notions were to be judged.[8]

In the central books of the Confessions (Books 6-9), Augustine contemplates the events that led him to his new life. Much has been selected, edited, and rearranged to make this picture. The description Augustine gives of these crucial events in his life is meant to be theologically and spiritually accurate, arranged according to principles other than those of strict chronology. With that caution in mind, the pattern and truth of these books becomes evident.The patron of Augustine’s turn to Christianity would seem to have been Ambrose, whose sermons demolished intellectual barriers Augustine had not been able to surmount for himself and whose hands administered the baptism that made Augustine a member of Christ’s church. But Ambrose was always a little too high up and far away for Augustine. The high affairs of the imperial court preoccupied Ambrose, and another ambitious courtier working his way up into the fringes of that court cannot long have detained his attention. He had seen many like Augustine before.But Augustine may have emphasized Ambrose’s remoteness to contrast him with the Manichean leader Faustus in Book 5. He did manage a private audience on at least one occasion (Letter 54.2.3). He had sought Faustus’s advice as of a guru, but found only some oratorical skill, and Faustus wound up studying classical literature under Augustine. He went to hear Ambrose, to observe his oratorical style, was inspired to seek him out as a guru, but was rebuffed by various difficulties. The Christian religion, we are meant to infer, is not transmitted as secret doctrine by gurus, but proclaimed publicly from the pulpit for all. Augustine could never reach Ambrose the guru, but Ambrose the bishop reached him with his words and baptised him with his hands.Before that baptism, there was still a world of confusion and uncertainty to face.”And lo, I was now in my thirtieth year, sticking in the same mire, greedy of enjoying things present, which passed away and wasted my soul, while I said to myself, ‘Tomorrow I shall find it. It will appear manifestly, and I shall grasp it. Lo, Faustus the Manichee will come and clear every thing! O you great men, ye Academicians, it is true then, that no certainty can be attained for the ordering of life? Nay, let us search the more diligently and despair not. Lo, things in the ecclesiastical books are not absurd to us now, which sometimes seemed absurd, and may be taken otherwise, and in a good sense. I will take my stand where as a child my parents placed me, until the clear truth be found out. But where shall it be sought or when? Ambrose has no leisure. We have no leisure to read. Where shall we find even the books? Whence, or when procure them? From whom borrow them? Let set times be appointed, and certain hours be ordered for the health of our soul. Great hope has dawned: the catholic faith teaches not what we thought, and vainly accused it of. Her instructed members hold it profane to believe God to be founded by the figure of a human body. And do we doubt to knock, that the rest may be opened? The forenoons our scholars take up: what do we do during the rest of the day? Why not this? But when shall we pay court to our great friends, whose favor we need? When shall we compose what we may sell to scholars? When shall we refresh ourselves, unbending our minds from these intense cares?’” (6.11.18)Two problems continued to plague Augustine and suspend his assent to Christianity. The first he alluded to in the passage just quoted, and was twofold. First, there was the resolute materiality of the world we perceive and the consequent difficulty imagining nay kind of existence not bound to visible, tangible forms. But then there was the gross corporeality of the Christian scriptures, particularly the Old Testament documents. Augustine was bound in a world-as-it-seemed and a view of Christianity that seemed no less bound to such a world.Here Ambrose made from the pulpit his first contribution to Augustine’s search. In his sermons, he showed Augustine for the first time Christian scriptural interpretation as Augustine would later describe it in Christian Doctrine. He elucidated the notion of spiritual being in a way that taught Augustine how to think of God without binding God into the world of matter. God as creator is only possible with such a vision. This finally undermined Augustine’s Manicheism, which had labored to find a place in the material world for both God and evil. For Augustine, God had finally been liberated from the struggle with evil, and evil itself no longer needed to be given a material form.Now the problem of evil itself could be faced in a context that gave promise of a solution. Judging by the arrangement of the Confessions, Augustine seems say that the first advance in understanding occurred in 384 and early 385, shortly after his arrival in Milan, and there is verisimilitude to this. The initial impact of Ambrose on a mind like Augustine’s should have been great. If that is true, then the second stage of Augustine’s development, the resolution of the problem of evil, ran through the rest of 385 and perhaps into 386. For this, Ambrose was again, in a roundabout way, influential.There a lively interest in Ambrose’s Milan in the writings of the late Platonists.[9] Even though one of the leading Platonic writers, Porphyry (died c. 305), had written a book directed against the Christians so vehement and effective that it was later the victim of an unusually successful book-burning campaign, many of the ideas of the Platonists were well-received. Marius Victorinus, of whom we shall hear again in closer connection with Augustine’s conversion, had translated Greek Platonic writings into Latin, and these were widely read and discussed in the circle of intellectuals around Ambrose.[10]Not unlike the scholastics of the later middle ages, these Christian Platonists used a secular philosophy to illuminate their own theological reflections. In the terms Augustine used in Christian Doctrine, they were spoiling the Egyptians of their gold. In an age when the trinitarian definitions of the Nicene creed were new-minted Platonic discussions of the three hypostases (the One, the Mind, and the Spirit) sounded eerily similar to the Christian principles.[11] The vocabulary of the Platonists offered clarification for the complex and confusing testimony of scripture. Augustine was not a leader in this movement, but he was an eager learner. Just what he read and how he interpreted it remains a matter of heated controversy, but we can sketch his development with the help of the Confessions.Augustine had been troubled all his adult life by the problem of evil. If God is all-good, the old question goes, how does evil arise? Worse, if God created all things, does this not mean that he created evil itself? Is not a Manichean solution preferable to this blasphemy?The answer to which the Platonists led Augustine find lay in the nature of being itself. Being is not, for the Platonists, something absolute, but something contingent. Material creation is not fully existent, but only participates in the being of the One, the creator (which the Christians would readily identify with God the Father). The One has perfect existence, but all other entities are only shadows of the ultimate model. Now all things are good insofar as they are created, that is, insofar as they participate in the being of God, but they are less than perfectly good insofar as they fail to resemble the all-good essence of God. The will of a rational creature is capable of turning towards God, hence participating more fully in God’s goodness, and capable of turning away, hence participating less fully. Evil lies in the absence of good, in the willful separation from God that is the act of created beings. The natural tendency of created beings is to return to unity with God, to full goodness. Evil is merely the name given to the turning away from God of those beings. Properly speaking, evil inheres only in the wills of free, rational creatures. The other things men call evil (the violent deaths of innocent people in natural catastrophes, for example) are only manifestations of a divine providence that men, with an incomplete view of reality, cannot fathom. Suffering is punishment or trial for creatures, but is intrinsically good in itself insofar as it succeeds in reforming or purifying them. If it fails the failure is that of the creatures, not of God.This is a stark and radical theodicy, by which all the evil of the world is taken on the shoulders of mankind. This principle would eventually smooth the way to Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, an awesome doctrine, bearable only because it brings with it (for the believer) the hope the whole burden of evil does not stay with man, but has been assumed again voluntarily by God, in the redeeming sacrifice of the cross.Augustine’s debt to Platonism is made explicit in the passage where he uses the first verses of the Gospel according to John as his touchstone for assessing the Platonic achievement (7.9.13-14). He finds in their writings plenty to parallel the notion of the pre-existent Word and its function in creation, but what he finds lacking in them is anything to correspond to the fourteenth verse: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” In that gap lies the difference between the despairing forced cheerfulness of the Platonist and the hope of the Christian.Once Augustine had seen his way past the problem of evil to a recognition of his own guilt, all should have been well. Already at the end of Book 7, the Platonists and their writings have sent him to the pages of Saint Paul and he sings the praises of the divine grace (7.21.27). The intellectual obstacles to his acceptance of Christianity had fallen away. He may even at the time have thought that he had reached his goal (cf. 7.20.26: “I chattered on [about these matters] just like an expert”).But Augustine was about to discover the last secret Christianity has in store for men of intellect and curiosity who consider its claims. In the end, intellect and curiosity are not enough. The mind may be satisfied, but there is more to Christianity than the intellectual apprehension of propositions; there is more to faith than belief. This discovery led Augustine to the final surrender of heart and will that he would later recognize as conversion.The eighth book of the Confessions narrates, or seems to narrate, the last stages of Augustine’s conversion. Seems to narrate, for on examination it becomes clear that we are not given a definite account of an orderly sequence of events. Rather, a variety of episodes, with a similar theme but no indications of date, are grouped together to depict the growing pressure Augustine felt in the last weeks or months before the decisive episode.The book is a compilation of conversion stories. Augustine and Alypius appear at the end of a line that includes the desert monk Saint Anthony, two unnamed courtiers of Augustine’s own time, and the learned and renowned Marius Victorinus. The sequence begins with Victorinus, and we should not think it mere coincidence. The story is told to Augustine by Simplicianus, Ambrose’s destined successor as bishop of Milan and the closest ecclesiastical friend Augustine made in Milan. Simplicianus heard Augustine tell of his encounter with the books of the Platonists in Victorinus’ translation and saw a chance to tell Augustine a story about a man very like Augustine himself(8.2.3-5).[12]Victorinus was a distinguished student and practitioner of rhetoric and philosophy who had earned the honor of a statue erected in his honor in the Roman forum. But he had also found himself drawn to Christianity. He confided to his friend Simplicianus that he was in fact already a Christian, but Simplicianus replied, “I will not believe it, nor will I rank you among Christians, until I see you in the church of Christ.” Victorinus, like many another high-minded dabbler in religion, replied with depreciating humor, “So is it walls that make people Christian?” Simplicianus was unmoved, on that occasion and others, and insisted on public affiliation, with eventual success.Simplicianus’ tale of Victorinus was doubtless meant to nag at the professor’s spirit while he went on living in Milan, pursuing his public activities as teacher, finding his attention brought again and again to the startling tales of conversions that upset the routine of life lived in the secular world. The courtiers who abandoned their careers when they found a copy of the Life of Saint Anthony (by the great Alexandrian bishop Athanasius) even showed him, all unsuspecting, the method of his decision. Beyond the public, civil Christian life in polite society, he began to encounter the monastic life, outwardly shabby and unsocial, but increasingly attractive to many. Anthony had shown the way for a radical renunciation of the secular world that would challenge thoughtful Christians henceforth, whether they actually left the secular world or not, to examine carefully the conditions of secular life and see how far those conditions might be compatible with Christian commitment.The pressures mounted. The Confessions capture and analyze the two-mindedness Augustine found in himself, conscious of two conflicting wills working within him simultaneously. His whole intellectual search had been an effort to reach a placid and measured conclusion on the basis of which to effect a rational reorganization of his life, but faith, that essential turning of the will towards God, is finally mysterious to the very people who live with it.In later years Augustine would resist all efforts to resolve the paradoxes of grace and will. He had good intellectual and spiritual basis for that resistance, but the emotional hardihood that kept him to his position in the face of all the pressures either to abandon his definitions or to explain them in a facile way (and thus lapse either into Pelagianism or Calvinism) came from his own experience. He could not account for the turnings of his own will, much less for those of anyone else. He knew that it was his will, that his decisions were free and voluntary, but he also felt that those decisions were fundamentally impotent ones. Another power had been working at another level of his soul, and in the presence of that power the ditherings of his own paltry liberty of choice were insignificant.So the history of human salvation is the history of human will and effort leading to sin and error counterbalanced by divine will overmastering human powers and leading people back to knowledge and holiness. Because the process affects the very foundations of knowing and willing, it is impossible to represent it fairly in human language. Those who have known the experience can never fully or adequately represent it to those who have not. Augustine’s example shows us that even the most sensitive of converts finds it difficult to reconstruct the situation in which it was possible not to be a believer, and this only makes it harder for the outsider to find the picture credible. Rational argument may go on, and the hidden workings of grace may use those arguments as instruments, but the main business of Christianity is not subject to human control or management.”Thus soul-sick was I, and tormented,accusing myself much more severely than my wont,rolling and turning in my chains,till they were wholly broken,whereby I now was barely held, but still was held…. For I said within myself,’Be it done now, be it done now.’And as I spake, I all but enacted it.I all but did it, and did it not;yet I sank not back to my former state,but kept my stand hard by, and took breath…. The very toys of toys, and vanities of vanities,my ancient mistresses, still held me;they plucked my fleshly garment, and whispered softly,’Dost thou cast us off? and from that momentshall we no more be with thee for ever?’”(8.11.25-26)The climactic scene that follows in the garden at Milan is unobtrusively surrounded with echoes of other moments. The fig tree that will appear, for example, may very well have stood in that garden, but we cannot notice it without recalling another fig tree in the gospel (Jn. 1.48-50). Once again we are drawn to consider the questions of historicity raised by this account, but if we are prudent, we will dismiss them as irrelevant. The personal authenticity of what Augustine recounts to us makes his reliability as an observer of surrounding events at the moment of secondary importance. Whether it happened this way or not (to an outside observer’s judgment), it is perfectly clear that this is the way it was lived, and that is all that matters.Augustine was sitting with Alypius in a private garden. “But when a deep consideration had from the secret bottom of my soul drawn and together and heaped up all my misery in the sight of my heart, there arose a mighty storm, bringing a mighty shower of tears.” (8.12.28) (Early Christians lived closer to the brink of tears in prayer than their modern counterparts, tears of compunction.) Augustine goes apart from Alypius: “solitude was suggested to me as fitter for the business of weeping.”"I cast myself down, I know not how, under a fig-tree, giving full vent to my tears; and the floods of mine eyes gushed out, an acceptable sacrifice to Thee.–And, not indeed in these words, yet to this end, I spake much unto Thee: ‘And Thou, O Lord, how long? How long, Lord, wilt thou be angry, for ever? Remember not our past iniquities, for I felt I was held by them.–So was I speaking, and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when, lo!, I heard from a neighboring house a voice, as of a boy or girl, I know not, chanting, and often repeating, ‘Take up, read; take up, read.’ Instantly my countenance altered and I began to think most intently, whether children were wont in any kind of play to sing such words, nor could I remember ever to have heard the like.” (8.12.29)It has been suggested that the neighboring house was a church and the words part of a liturgical ceremony; that the words were spoken by real children; and that it was all a hallucination that Augustine cheerfully read as a sign from heaven. But Augustine himself left the question open. The curious psychological verisimilitude of a situation in which his first thought was not to obey but to ask pedantic questions about the source is worth noticing.Augustine acted quickly enough, though. He remembered what he had heard of Anthony, that a chance encounter with the words of the Gospel had changed his life. So he went back to where Alypius was sitting and took the copy of Paul they had been reading. He fell upon the first words that came to his eye.”Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying: but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in concupiscence.” (Rom. 13.13-14) No further would I read, nor did I need to: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light of serenity infused into my heart, all darkness of doubt fled away.”"We have no right and we should not have the presumption to say that when he rose from his knees in the Milan garden he was not altogether a ‘new man.’”[13] Alypius, reading further on the same page of Paul, found a text for himself and joined Augustine’s resolve. Augustine is hard on himself in Book 9 for having equivocated about the step he should take next. He determined to stay out the teaching term a few weeks longer rather than break away and resign immediately, and when he handed in his resignation he alleged weakness of health–true, but incomplete as an explanation. (However strong the effect of the garden scene immediately, only time could prove that it was not a false dawn.)Shortly after began the country-house idyll at Cassiciacum. The habits of the intellect were too deeply ingrained to break suddenly, but we are also told that Augustine would lie awake half the night, praying with tears. In the Confessions Augustine offers here a reading of a Psalm text to show his new relationship with the scriptures. In the spring, the group came back to Milan and Augustine and Alypius were baptised–a further step also dismissed in a few lines. The scene in the garden was private; the baptism made the decision reached there public. Walls do not indeed make people Christian, but Augustine was only fully a Christian when he had entered those walls as a full member of the sacramental community. (In Augustine’s time, the eucharistic ritual was a matter not discussed openly before the unbaptised; hence we are frustrated at having no testimony here of the impression that ritual, and the sense of participation that came with it, made, but the importance of the sacrament should not be ignored because of ignorance.)The narrative is almost at an end at this point, but Augustine has one last debt to pay. In the short time Monica survived his baptism (less than a year), mother and son finally understood each other. Not long before death overtook her as their party waited at Ostia for a ship to Africa, an event occurred that seemed to Augustine to complete the transition he had begun.Augustine knew better than to try to have a name for what happened at Ostia. He certainly knew better than to make it out to be more than it was. A foretaste of heaven, coming as it did just before his mother’s death, had a particular symbolic force, but despite the parallels with Neoplatonic rapture, Augustine the bishop did not think the whole of the Christian life would be a succession of these dramatic moments.[14] What he was granted with his mother in those moments by another garden was just one more gift. The ecstasy of mysticism is one of the highest and greatest gifts, but it is inessential.The whole chapter should be read to appreciate the quality of the moment (9.10.23-26). The sensible world fell away and mother and son were completely at sea in their shared union with God. This is in an important sense the decisive encounter with the Word of God that had been only adumbrated in all the previous moments depicted in the Confessions, even the one in that garden at Milan. This particular narrative comes, moreover, in a literary work that is itself of a mystical kind. The special qualities Augustine brings to this particular event are those of the time of his writing of the Confessions. Memory and accurate reportage alone could not make the moment come alive.Monica’s last message to her son as they stood together was to be a theme for the rest of the life he faced from then on. “Son, for my own part I have no further delight in any thing in this life.” She was one of the few whose only worldly hope, for the conversion of her son, had been fulfilled. “My God hath done this for me more abundantly, that I should now see thee withal, despising earthly happiness, become his servant: what am I doing still here?” (9.10.26)The saints are those who live in the world but who are not quite of it. If we are justified in calling Augustine a saint, it is probably accurate to say that he began to live his sainthood just at this moment. Henceforth, he knew a freedom he had only suspected might exist before. His future as a servant of God was out of his own hands. His immediate return to Africa and the foundation of the quasi-monastic community at Tagaste was to be thwarted by other needs of the church. He wound up in a city far from his cloister, far from all the ambitions he had known, perfectly content to do the work he found himself busied with. (Augustine in Hippo and Newman in Birmingham resemble each other in more than a few ways, not least in the misplaced pity of those who think their talents wasted in such obscurity.) The autobiography of Augustine the sinner is at an end. Henceforth, Augustine is freed of time and narrative, and his Confessions reflect that freedom.Free WillWith Book 10, the reader must give up all hope of concluding that the Confessions autobiography in any conventional sense. What narrative line there had been is lost altogether and a more complex literary strategy obtrudes its presence upon the reader. While it has been fashionable to argue whether the last four books have anything to do with the first nine, the simple bulk of the material should give us pause: two-fifths of the work’s pages remain, and scarcely an autobiographical scrap is to be found among them. We might rather argue that, since the pieces of reminiscence are so clearly confined to one part of the work, it is more remarkable that the impression could ever have grown up that the work was autobiography at all.The place to begin to seek an authentic reading of this work is still with the fact of prayer. The first nine books of the Confessions, written by the neophyte bishop in his first episcopal years at Hippo, present a double image to our consideration. They are about the early life of a sinful young man determined to find his own way to salvation but destined to be dragged off in a direction he at first resented. But they are also the prayerful reflection on those events of a mature man, a bishop in the church of Christ, living out the transformation those books describe.In Book 10 the images of the past fade away and we are left to face Augustine the bishop, the product of the years of growth and change the first books suggest to us. What we know of the early Augustine comes to us in the main through the eyes of this middle-aged man. Any reading of the Confessions that does not confront him, and not merely the phantasms of the young Augustine that he presents, is doomed to inadequacy. And this bishop is a man of prayer.But perhaps we need a more subtle description of the nature of prayer and confession to understand what is going on here. Prayer is endemic to the human condition, in all places and cultures. We know full well how self-centered and unloving such prayer can be, even when it is as innocent as the child’s plea for a new toy or revenge on a playmate. Prayer, the turning of the mind and heart to God, takes place even where grace is absent, but this inferior communication between God and man is still evidence of the possibility of authentic communication.[15]The sinner who prays in ignorance and darkness prays badly, and prays in the imperative and subjunctive moods. He commands God to give him what he wants, he pleads his cause. God’s will is of no account. Such prayer begins to become authentic only when it is founded in the knowledge that comes of revelation. God reaches down to mankind with the gospel, and this forms the basis for the transformation of the individual (we saw all this on the first page of the Confessions). Gradually, immature prayer becomes what we will call (to distinguish it from the immature variety and to conform to Augustine’s usage) confession. The fully enlightened Christian would no long need to speak in the irreal grammar of imperative and subjunctive. What God has promised, God gives, and the indicative mood is adequate to present this. Hence, there is no longer need for plea and impetration, but for confession and acceptance.Prayer of the second kind is what Augustine the bishop is seeking throughout the Confessions. Confession is man’s part in revelation: God reveals, man praises, and the circle is complete. In mortal life the process is imperfect, but the only business of the saints in heaven is the praise of God, the complete fullness of confession begun here below in the dark light of revelation.Augustine’s literary Confessions fall then into two parts. First, there is the reassessment of his own past in the light of divine mercy that filled the first books. Augustine lived through those years under a variety of delusions about himself and the world; as bishop he can now look back in the light of revelation and see the true pattern of those years. What was, as it was lived through, a puzzling search for truth and knowledge, turns out to have been a piece of Christian salvation history all along, with its own fall into sin and rise through grace.But Augustine in the Confessions was concerned with the present as much as with the past. Present imperfections were as puzzling and important to him as those of his past. Confession is difficult and its success only partial, for the author of the confession is still sinful and in need of grace lest he fall again. The last books of the Confessions, among other things, bring us to Augustine at the moment of confession. They present him, as he could then imagine himself, and they present his praise of God, working in him as he then saw it.The structure he imparts to this confession resembles a conventional examination of conscience. To the outsider, such considerations can easily seem morbid and self-absorbed. Here again the outsider is at a disadvantage. The whole of the Confessions is a self-examination in the light of divine truth, and what passes for examination of conscience is only a small part of this whole.On another level, Augustine is demolishing his own human words by the instrumentality of the divine Word. What were inadequate words arranged in immature prayer now become an embodiment of the Word itself being given back to God. The authority for all speech comes not from the human voice itself but from God’s Word, wholly outside human comprehension. Human beings no longer comprehend themselves with their words, but God’s word comprehends human beings and revitalizes all discourse. What men say has meaning only if the divine Word speaks through them. What men men say of and for themselves is inauthentic. Prayer, in its fulfilled form as confession, is the only form of discourse with a claim to legitimacy. Confession becomes the vital basis of all discourse, hence of all human life insofar as it is human. (”Pray without ceasing”: 1 Thess. 5.17.) All that is not confession is partial and imperfect by comparison.”Let me know Thee, O Lord, who knowest me:let me know Thee, as I am known.Power of my soul,enter into it, and fit it for Thee,that Thou mayest have and hold itwithout spot or wrinkle.This is my hope, therefore do I speak.” (10.1.1)[16]The scriptural echoes are unusually important here. First, Augustine uses God’s own words to make the central prayer of the whole work–for self-knowledge based in divine knowledge. Then he offers his whole soul to God as something to be possessed “without spot or wrinkle,” deliberately using a phrase explicitly applied in scripture to the church as a whole (Eph. 5.27). The individual human soul is inextricably part of the church and hence resembles it. Finally, God’s Word itself is the justification for speaking at all.”For behold, Thou lovest the Truth,and he that doth the truth,cometh to the light.This would I do in my heart before Thee in confession,and in my writing, before many witnesses.”God himself strictly does not need the literary artefact for the act of confession to be complete, but the text is the instrument by which confession comes before men as well as God and hence obeys the twofold command to love neighbor as well as God. Putting confession in writing does not limit or narrow its authenticit

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