Confessions

“Matters are so arranged at your command that every disordered soul is its own punishment.”

This quotation provides the first look at Augustine’s conception of God’s justice, which Augustine asserts is perfect and dynamic, capable of immense adaptation depending on the circumstances. While elsewhere Augustine describes God’s justice in more familiar and tangible terms, here he speaks specifically of spiritual justice, asserting that there is no greater punishment for sin than the miserable, disfiguring separation from God that accompanies it, something he knows from personal experience.

“The beautiful form of material things attracts our eyes, so we are drawn to gold, silver and the like. […] We may seek all these things, but in seeking them we must not deviate from your law. The life we live here is open to temptation by reason of a certain measure and harmony between its own splendor and all these beautiful things of low degree. […] Sin gains entrance through these and similar good things when we turn to them with immoderate desire, since they are the lowest kind of goods and we thereby turn away from the better and higher: from you yourself, O Lord our God, and your truth and your law.”

This passage comes near the beginning of Augustine’s extensive reflection on the pear episode and is his first articulation of his theory of sin. After Augustine discovered Neoplatonism, his perspectives on sin shifted so significantly that for the first time he was able to make sense of the moral framework of Christianity and its all-powerful, infinitely good God. That perspective, encapsulated here, holds that sin is a sort of sickness that affects the soul when one values God’s creations over God himself. Using this explanation, Augustine reaches an explanation of his seemingly senseless theft of pears, asserting that these sorts of transgressions, crimes for the sake of crime, are in fact prideful attempts to break free of the need for a balanced appreciation of God and God’s creation, to wrest control over all of creation and our own destinies by treasuring things according to our own whims and predilections.

“If there is anyone whom you have called, who by responding to your summons has avoided these sins which he finds me remembering and confessing in my own life as he reads this, let him not mock me; for I have been healed by the same doctor who has granted him the grace not to fall ill.”

Here Augustine lays out one implication of his faith in God’s infinite goodness and the doctrine of original sin. Since Augustine believes that God is the source of everything good in the world and that, thanks to Adam, humans are inevitably stained by sin, it follows that salvation only occurs because God ordains it, either by forgiving the sins of those who err or by imbuing sufficient virtue into a person that sin can be avoided to begin with. Thus, Augustine preaches the importance of humility and warns those who credit themselves for their own goodness that they are thereby sinfully ignoring God’s gifts.

“The theft gave us a thrill, and we laughed to think we were outwitting people who had no idea what we were doing, and would angrily stop us if they knew. Why could I not have derived the same pleasure from doing it alone? Perhaps because it is not easy to enjoy a joke by oneself?”

After drawing lessons about the nature of sin from his theft of pears in his adolescence, Augustine finds himself befuddled by the role camaraderie played in that sin. Having thought he committed the act only out of a misguided hunger to sin, his realization that he would never have done it alone complicates that conclusion, for he must have been motivated not just by the desire to sin but also out of a craving for the joys of kinship. In considering the issue from the angle of his and his friends’ derisive laughter, he captures some of the mystery of this conundrum. Just as it is hard to understand why jokes are less funny when we are alone, it is hard to apprehend the mysterious ways in which companionship affects everything we do in life.

“We must conclude that, while some sorrow is commendable, no sorrow is to be valued for its own sake.”

Augustine draws this conclusion after reflecting on the plays he eagerly attended while studying in Carthage. Having criticized their frivolously tragic plots, he then calls out those who seek out such art to arouse in themselves feelings of pity. Sorrow is one of the emotions that most perplexes Augustine, though here he confidently resolves that it has no value in and of itself and should only be tolerated when it emerges naturally alongside the effort to love and follow God. In this sense, his conclusion about sorrow can be applied to pretty much everything else in life. For Augustine, God absolutely comes first. What remains should only be let into one’s life insofar as it accompanies the pursuit of divine truth and love.

“[E]vil is nothing but the diminishment of good to the point where nothing at all is left.”

Augustine includes this observation, fundamental to his understanding of morality, as a juxtaposition to the Manichean perspective on good and evil when discussing his conversion to that faith. The Manichees taught that good and evil were opposing forces, each with its own god who battled the other for control of each individual and for all of existence. This explanation made sense to young Augustine, especially when compared with the Christian notion that an omnipotent, infinitely good God had created a cosmology in which sin thrives. Thanks to the ideas of the Neoplatonists, Augustine was able to reconceptualize evil as an absence of good that is born out of the foolish human tendency to turn away from the greatness of God, an idea that had enormous consequences for Augustine as well as for Christianity as a whole.

“I lacked the insight to understand that justice, of which good and holy people are the servants, contains in itself, in a far more excellent and sublime way, the principles of all it prescribes, and is unvaryingly self-consistent, yet does not impose all its demands at once, but adjusts and allots to different periods the provisions most apt for them.”

One of Christianity’s greatest allures for Augustine is what he perceived to be its adaptability when compared with Manicheism and other worldviews he had encountered. While he was underwhelmed by scripture when he first encountered it, disappointed that it lacked the rhetorical complexity of Cicero and the precision of the Manichean texts, later he came to see these as marks of its superiority. The ministry of Ambrose in particular helped him to appreciate the interpretability of the Bible, which he here notes as it pertains to Biblical justice. In truth, all texts are subject to interpretation and non-literal readings, and so perhaps Augustine would have found more satisfaction in Manicheism had there been a Manichean Ambrose to reframe those teachings in a comparable manner.

“[F]riendship is genuine only when you bind fast together people who cleave to you through the charity poured abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us.”

In probing friendship and the value of human relations, Augustine asserts with confidence that friendship ought to arise out of a mutual devotion to God among its parties. Following this, he relates the story of the death of his friend in Thagaste, denigrating that friendship because God had no part in it, at least not on Augustine’s end. Ironically, the friend was a Christian until Augustine convinced him to become a Manichee, though the friend’s family baptized him back into Christianity on his deathbed, much to Augustine’s horror at the time. Regardless of the conviction suggested by this statement, Augustine’s inconclusive meditations on human relationships elsewhere in Confessions seem to suggest that their complex value does not fit neatly into these parameters.

“You have endowed [beautiful things] so richly because they belong to a society of things that do not all exist at once, but in their passing away and succession together form a whole, of which the several creatures are parts.”

In this passage Augustine accounts for the grand design behind creation, which explains the greater beauty and goodness some elements possess over others. In Augustine’s conception, everything exists along a gradation of quality that correlates to proximity to God’s essence. In Book XII, Augustine asserts that the formless creation that predated the world as we know it is at the lowest level of this spectrum while heaven’s heaven, the spiritual realm of God which Christians strive to reach in the afterlife, is at the highest level. Everything else, then, is somewhere between. Collectively, all these things are greater and more beautiful than even their greatest and most beautiful elements would be on their own, and it is through proportionate valuation of each element, recognition of the supreme beauty of the whole, and adoration of God first and foremost that salvation can be achieved.

“[N]othing should be regarded as true because it is eloquently stated, nor false because the words sound clumsy.”

Augustine expresses this insight in reflecting on the visit of the Manichean bishop Faustus to Carthage. He had eagerly awaited this man’s arrival, hoping that through his wisdom he would be able to repair the cracks that had begun to emerge in Augustine’s faith in Manicheism. However, Faustus’s eloquence and passion proved to be hollow, as the man lacked the knowledge necessary to resolve Augustine’s doubts. Augustine, who himself was an impressive speaker and rhetorician, became very wary of anything that appears polished on the surface, as experiences such as these drove home how much more important it is that the message being conveyed is truthful. Nevertheless, his writing in Confessions is elegant and compelling, though he of course believed that the messages his words communicate are truthful enough to merit this lovely phrasing.

“I came to see that in commanding that certain things must be believed without demonstration the Church was a good deal more moderate and very much less deceitful than those parties who rashly promised knowledge and derided credulity, but then went on to demand belief in a whole host of fabulous and absurd myths which certainly could not be demonstrated.”

In the end it was the demonstrably inaccurate claims of Mani, the founder of Manicheism, concerning astronomy that caused Augustine to leave that faith, and so he became very cautious around any religions that expected similar suspensions of disbelief. Thus, Augustine’s view that Catholicism was more moderate in this regard became an important factor in his conversion. It bears noting that his conversion was also contingent on figurative interpretations of certain passages of scripture, passages that other Catholics and Christians over the years have taken literally. Similar, it would have been possible for him to regard Mani’s astronomical beliefs through a figurative lens, though perhaps this perspective would have brought him into conflict with Manichean clergy. Either way, all religions by their very nature require faith in the unprovable, and so this passage demonstrates the bias that Augustine adopted in favor of the religion that would define his life and legacy.

“The authority of the sacred writings seemed to me all the more deserving of reverence and divine faith in that scripture was easily accessible to every reader, while yet guarding a mysterious dignity in its deeper sense.”

Again, Augustine is developing his argument for the interpretability of the Bible. Earlier in life, his literal readings of scripture had driven him away from Christianity, as he initially saw only simplicity in the text, which he then perceived as crudity. Later, the figurative readings of scripture that Augustine heard from Ambrose revealed a depth he had not recognized before, and Augustine would make interpretation of this sort a cornerstone of his own ministry, as evidenced by the final two books of Confessions. While this perspective may seem open-minded by comparison to some of the fundamentalist manifestations Christianity has taken on throughout history, it is important to note that Augustine did place certain limits on what might and might not be viable interpretations of scripture, some of which might seem inhumane by modern standards.

“So deeply was she engrafted into my heart that it was left torn and wounded and trailing blood.”

Augustine’s description of his emotional state following the dismissal of his unnamed lover is tragically evocative. The emotional power of what little he shares here begs the questions of whether he ever got over this heartbreak, how he felt about Monica for forcing his lover to leave, how he ultimately regarded this woman and the powerful love he felt for her, and to what degree his mind, his heart, and his soul remained in discord over this relationship.

“What need is there to prove at any length why that substance which is God cannot be corruptible? If it were, it would not be God.”

Having left Manicheism and its flawed deities behind, Augustine found himself contemplating the Christian notion of an all-powerful God. He had no certainty that this God existed until he began to believe that by the very definition of God he had to exist. Known as an ontological proof, this sort of argument would become popular about six centuries later after Saint Anselm of Canterbury articulated it with greater force and clarity. Based as it is on an acceptance of words and their definitions on the most literal level, this argument may not be terribly convincing to more skeptical readers, but the logic of it was an important part of Augustine’s approach to Christianity.

“It was further made clear to me that things prone to destruction are good, since this destructibility would be out of the question if they were either supremely good or not good at all; because if they were supremely good they would be indestructible, whereas if they were not good a tall there would be nothing in them that could be destroyed.”

After Augustine encountered Neoplatonism, he came to understand evil in a way that made sense to him despite God’s omnipotence and infinite goodness. This passage reveals an illuminating stage in that logical process. Whereas before he had viewed certain elements of creation as bad or evil, he now recognized that their very transience and destructibility were proof of their goodness. Similar to the ontological proof of God, this argument hinges on an acceptance of very strict relationships between semantics and reality, but once again the logic here was key to Augustine as well as to many who followed him in facilitating a functional understanding of Christian cosmology.

“[A]s I prayed to you for the gift of chastity I had even pleaded, ‘Grant me chastity and self-control, but please not yet.’ I was afraid you might hear me immediately and heal me forthwith of the morbid lust which I was more anxious to satisfy than to snuff out.”

This passage, which contains one of Augustine’s most memorable lines, reveals the author at the depth of his dependence on sin, struggling against what ultimately proved to be the greatest obstacle to his conversion. It suggests that he believed very deeply that God was real and that his own life was subject to God’s power and yet that, despite this conviction, he had the hubris to request his salvation be delayed so that he could continue to enjoy the carnal transience of sex in place of the spiritual eternity of God. While many appreciate this prayer for tongue-in-cheek reasons, this passage provides a stunningly candid look into the internal turmoil that plagued Augustine leading up to his conversion.

“When I was making up my mind to serve the Lord my God at last, as I had long since purposed, I was the one who wanted to follow that course, and I was the one who wanted not to. I was the only one involved. I neither wanted it wholeheartedly nor turned from it wholeheartedly. I was at odds with myself, and fragmenting myself. This disintegration was occurring without my consent, but what it indicated was not the presence in me of a mind belonging to some alien nature but the punishment undergone by my own. In this sense, and this sense only, it was not I who brought it about, but the sin that dwelt within me as penalty for that other sin committed with greater freedom; for I was a son of Adam.”

Generally, Augustine blames no one but himself for his sins, but here, reflecting on the anguished equivocation he experienced in the garden near his home in Milan just before he converted, Augustine takes the doctrine of original sin to a new level. He marvels at his inability to bring his will to bear over his base impulses toward sin, which as a Manichee he would have attributed to the material force of evil working through him. Having abandoned that conception in favor of his Neoplatonist perspective, he finds this struggle hard to fathom until he determines that it must be evidence of the original sin all humans inherit from Adam, the first man, who, in violating God’s specific injunction against eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, committed the true original sin.

“If the tumult of flesh fell silent for someone,

[…] and then he alone were to speak,

not through the things that are made, but of himself,

that we might hear his Word,

not through fleshly tongue nor angel’s voice,

nor thundercloud,

nor any riddling parable,

hear him unmediated, […]

would not Enter into the joy of your Lord

be this, and this alone?”

This poem, which Augustine attributes jointly to himself and his mother, though he acknowledges that neither of them spoke in these terms, is a poetic representation of the religious experience Augustine and Monica shared in Ostia just before her unexpected death. Following their exultant, sublime joint meditation, which Augustine asserts brought them into actual contact with God’s realm, he concludes that it might be possible to experience unity with God in this lifetime if only the distractions of the world could be blocked out. This is the goal of mysticism and meditation in a great many traditions, and his desire to recreate this experience provides some insight into his attraction to monastic life, which he pursued after leaving Milan. Moreover, that he not only underwent this experience alongside his mother but also related it as a joint poetic utterance is an enormous testament to crucial role affection for other humans played in his spiritual journey.

“It is cheering to good people to hear about the past evil deeds of those who are now freed from them: cheering not because the deeds were evil but because they existed once but exist no more.”

This assertion provides some explanation of a mystery that Augustine explores a few times throughout Confessions: namely, that of the appeal of stories of sin and redemption such as the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Augustine’s logic here positions the holy members of the audience of such stories as cheerleaders in a battle of virtue against sin. Thus, Augustine suggests that the righteous enjoy these stories in the same way a crowd at a sports game cheers wildly when their team comes back from behind. What this explanation does not account for is why the righteous do not feel nearly as invested in people who have always been good, people whose goodness may in fact have done far more for God’s glory, and this remains a logical quandary for which Augustine is never able to find satisfactory resolution.

“To the sky I put my question, to sun, moon, stars,

but they denied me: ‘We are not the God you seek.’

And to all things which stood around the portals of my flesh I said,

‘Tell me of my God.

You are not he, but tell me something of him.’

Then they lifted up their mighty voices and cried,

‘He made us.’

My questioning was my attentive spirit,

and their reply, their beauty.”

As Augustine begins the four non-autobiographical books that conclude Confessions, the first question he asks is what he is loving when he loves God. He discusses the instinct to identify the beauty of creation with God, which would mean that to love the beauty of the world is to love God. However, insistent that God’s immaculate spiritual essence is imperceptible by any normal human faculty, Augustine asserts that this is not the answer. This idea becomes the inspiration of the most playful poem in Confessions, which presents a conversation between Augustine and the beautiful elements of creation. Through this poem, he conveys his Neoplatonist-influenced belief that, although loving beauty may not be the same as loving God, recognizing God as the source of beauty provides the intellect an opportunity to perceive God via internal spiritual senses and to love him thereby.

“Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new,

late have I loved you!

Lo, you were within,

but I outside, seeking there for you,

and upon the shapely things you have made I rushed headlong,

I, misshapen.

You were with me, but I was not with you.

They held me back far from you,

those things which would have no being

were they not in you.

You called, shouted, broke through my deafness;

you flared, blazed, banished my blindness;

you lavished your fragrance, I gasped, and now I pant for you;

I tasted you, and I hunger and thirst;

you touched me, and I burned for your peace.”

This poem, sometimes referred to as the Prayer of St. Augustine, is one of the most enduring and beloved legacies of Confessions. Augustine includes it following the extensive investigation of the workings of memory and mind that comprise a major portion of Book X. The investigation ends with the conviction that God does in fact reside within the human mind and can be accessed by anyone attentive and loving enough to seek him there. The poem, then, presents in some of Augustine’s most elegant language his realization not only that God is within him but that God has been calling to Augustine his whole life. Furthermore, this poem conveys Augustine’s awareness that, now that he has heard that call, he cannot get enough.

“To get up without delay is one thing, not to fall in the first place is another.”

In Book X Augustine presents an exhaustive rundown of every category of sin. With each category, he examines his own predilections and chastises himself for his perceived failings. At this point in his life, he seems to have developed impressive self-control, and yet he still reprimands himself for appreciating beauty for its own sake or for getting distracted by unimportant events that simply satisfy his curiosity. These sorts of behaviors deflect his attention and love away from God, and so, even though he is able to redirect his attention back to God once he realizes what has happened, he considers them sins. His ambition to overcome even these knee-jerk impulses is a testament to the incredibly high standard he has come to set for himself and again provides some insight into why the monastic lifestyle appealed to him.

“[A]nyone who lacks the insight to be certain whether he can despise wealth while still possessing it can test himself by getting rid of it. But what of praise? Are we to lead evil lives in order to be rid of it and so test our ability? Should we live in such an abandoned and brutal fashion that everyone who knows us will hate us? Can one imagine a crazier idea than this? If a good life characterized by noble works inevitably and rightly entails being commended, neither the good life, nor the resultant commendation can be renounced.”

Augustine is greatly disconcerted by the problem of pridefulness. Reflecting on his life before his conversion to Christianity, he recognizes his vanity and ambition as two of the greatest sources of his sin. By putting an end to his career and removing himself from the limelight for a time, his conversion mitigated these tendencies significantly. However, his meditation on pride in Book X reveals his remaining conundrum: Just as was the case with lust, he cannot help that he enjoys that which leads to pride, but, since the proper fulfilment of his duties invariably results in praise, he is unable to cut it out of his life like he could with sex. Thus, he can never know to what degree his virtuous actions are attributable to his love of praise rather than to his love of God. Given that he was essentially forced away from monastic life and into the clergy, this begs the question of whether part of the appeal of life as a monk was his ability to live in a low-praise environment and thereby eliminate from his life the temptations that fed his pride.