Confessions

Augustine’s narrative, often considered an autobiography, is conspicuous from the very start for its focus not on himself but on another figure: God. Augustine writes in second person, placing his focus on God before himself, and certainly before any other potential audience. Considering that Augustine labeled this work as his confessions and that those confessions are religious in nature, it is natural that he would position God as his reader. Realistically, though, a God whom Augustine views as “fill[ing] heaven and earth” (15), “omnipotent,” and “know[ing] everything” would not require sins to be written out, a contradiction that Augustine addresses explicitly: “[H]ow can I […] ask you to come into me, when I would not exist at all unless you were already in me?” (14-15). Augustine discusses this redundancy more directly at several later points throughout the book, such as the beginning of Book V (76).

Then again, even if it is logistically redundant, Christianity places enormous value on the act of confessing, and Augustine suggests it is an inevitable consequence of faith: “I believe, and so I will speak” (16). Moreover, confession means more than simply admitting to sin. Catholic nun and translator Maria Boulding lists two other meanings in her introduction to this version: “confession of God’s glory” and “a creative process” by which Augustine “is at one with God who is creating him” (12). This first sense is made clear enough through Augustine’s regular interruptions of his story with eloquent praise of and awe at God. The second links back to the spiritual necessity of confessing one’s sins. Through writing out his story for God, constantly invoking and interweaving God into it, Augustine is seeking the divine power necessary not just to tell the story but to bring meaning and truth into life. As Boulding puts it, Augustine is “constituting himself in being by confession” (12).

Important though Augustine’s personal spiritual motivations for writing Confessions may have been, as a practical matter he never intended God to be his sole audience, as evidenced by his decision to publish. Even if personal religious convictions were Augustine’s main impetus, they were unlikely to have been his only considerations. Of course, many readers would find interest in and identify with Augustine’s journey from sin to salvation, a purpose Augustine acknowledges in Book II (35), but to grasp this and Constantine’s other motivations fully, one must consider the historical context.

Augustine was born and spent his entire life in the Western Roman Empire, the heir of Classical Rome’s legacy and power. Though the Rome Augustine knew had declined since the time of Julius and Augustus Caesar, the stabilizing regimes of Diocletian and Constantine, whose rules together comprised the majority of the century preceding Augustine’s birth, had restored faith in the empire’s potential. Diocletian is remembered for splitting the empire into east and west, ending the vast unity once associated with Rome yet making each half more manageable to rule, at least for the time being. Far more significantly for Augustine, Constantine’s legacies include the Edict of Milan, which declared tolerance for Christianity throughout the empire, and the emperor’s own conversion to the fledgling faith, a first among Roman emperors, who had previously been known for violent persecution of Christians.

Still, while Christianity’s rise had been astounding, its path forward was not free of obstacles. The emperors who followed Constantine would fracture the faith by promoting paganism and heresies. By the time Confessions was published, Theodosius’s promotion of Catholic orthodoxy provided the religion its most stable footing yet. Still, the future remained uncertain, not just for the religion but also for the empire. A decade later, Rome was sacked for the first time in eight centuries. Less than 50 years after Augustine’s death, the Western Roman Empire dissolved.

Thus, Augustine’s complicated relationship with both Rome and Christianity and his ultimate conversion can be viewed as a microcosm of the forces operating within the empire at the time. Of Rome, he attributes his youthful preference for Latin literature to his Roman identity while simultaneously rejecting this literature for what he views as pagan immoralities (27). Meanwhile, despite his father’s paganism, his household was solidly Christian, and yet even in Book I it is clear that he will stray quite far from this faith before he consciously embraces it.

This brutal, humble sincerity would have been exactly what was needed to quell mistrust among Augustine’s Catholic readers, many of whom, traumatized by and sensitive to the religion’s tragic past, might have been skeptical of newcomers to the faith, especially someone like Augustine who had spent a decade as a prominent Manichee, following a religion that many Christians felt threatened their own. Conversely, non-Christians considering conversion would have found Constantine’s journey a valuable resource in considering their religious prospects. Augustine hoped to win all these people over. By the end of Confessions, it becomes clear that these purposes were at the heart of Augustine’s decision not just to publish the work but also to compose it.

In another historical parallel, Augustine’s fruitful conversion correctly presaged Christianity’s continued growth after his death. Symbolically, the decay of his affection for Rome holds up equally well as an analog for the dim prospects that awaited the empire, though the implications of his perspectives on Roman society reach far beyond. In Book I, when he criticizes Roman culture for “invest[ing] the disgraceful deeds of human beings with an aura of divinity, so that depraved actions should be reckoned depraved no longer” (28), he foreshadows an argument that is at the core of the final book of Confessions and that would become the focus of his later work The City of God (426 CE)—namely, that society must be redesigned according to Christian values.

Christian readers through the ages have also connected with Augustine’s constant invocation of Biblical verse, what Boulding sees as evidence of Augustine’s essential, confessional creative collaboration with God. There is scarcely a page in the entire text that does not directly reproduce some phrasing from the Bible, and Augustine often goes beyond this to draw explicit parallels between his narrative and Biblical stories. In Book I, he introduces one of the most prominent of these analogies by comparing himself to the Prodigal Son. This figure, introduced in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 15:11-32), is the focus of one of Jesus’s most celebrated parables, a tale of a father and his two sons, the younger of whom requests his inheritance early only to lose it through prodigal behavior and return pleading for forgiveness and a second chance. Expecting anger, the Prodigal Son is surprised when his loving father not only forgives him but celebrates his return. The parallels with Augustine’s spiritual journey are obvious. Although the personal comparison is brief and tacit here in Book I, the emotional depth Augustine conveys as he marvels at the father’s love and grace despite his son’s wastefulness is potent: “Gentle you were then [when the son was gone], but gentler still with him when he returned. No, to be estranged in a spirit of lust, and lost in its darkness, that is what it means to be far away from your face” (30). Augustine is conflating the father with God, and the sincerity of his sentiments suggest that he identifies with the Prodigal Son.

The father’s forgiveness and the divine grace it represents are crucial to Augustine’s understanding of Christianity and, in particular, to his conceptualization of original sin, a central Christian concept that Augustine is credited with establishing. To believe in original sin is to acknowledge that no human can be morally perfect and thus that sin is inherent within each of us, passed down from Adam’s literal original sin. Therefore, since all humans are on some level sinners, salvation is impossible without God’s compassion and grace.

The thematic centrality of original sin to Confessions is clear from the first paragraph when Augustine speaks of "we humans […] who carry our mortality with us, carry the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you must thwart the proud” (14). Augustine applies the idea directly to himself when commenting on the pride and greed that plagued him as a boy: “Is this boyhood innocence? No, Lord, it is not; hear me, dear God, it is not” (31). Even newborns, Augustine argues, are afflicted by original sin from the very first moment of life, their sinfulness merely cloaked by their feebleness: “The only innocent feature in babies is the weakness of their frames; the minds of infants are far from innocent” (20).

While this might feel drastic to the modern reader, Augustine finds solace in the idea of original sin, for it makes attainable the standard a human must reach in order to be saved. Augustine’s faith, “this faith which is your gift to me, which you have breathed into me through the humanity of your Son and the ministry of your preacher” (14), leaves him with the conviction that God will forgive his and all humanity’s sins if sincerely asked, for, “You owe us nothing, yet you pay your debts” (16).