The Confessions — Commentary

In brief

Augustine was born in 354 at Thagaste in Roman Africa, to a pagan father and a Christian mother. He studied at Madaura and Carthage, taught rhetoric at Carthage, Rome and Milan, lived for some fifteen years with a woman he never names, had a son by her, and spent nine years among the Manichees. In a Milan garden in 386, aged thirty-one, he heard a child’s voice, opened Paul, and gave up career, marriage and sex at a stroke. Ten years later, when he was a bishop in North Africa, he wrote it all down in thirteen books, as one long prayer.

Every sentence is addressed to God, and the reader overhears. “Great art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised”, it begins (Book I), and within a paragraph it has given the sentence that holds the book together: “Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”

The argument

The Latin confessio means an admission of sin, and also a declaration of faith and an act of praise. Augustine means all three, and modern readers who come for the first alone are puzzled by how much of the book is the other two. He tells God nothing God does not know, and he says so: “he who confesses to Thee doth not teach Thee” (Book V). The telling is for himself and his hearers, and its claim is that a life makes sense only from outside itself. Each event was, he now sees, God at work without his knowing: a move to Rome for bad reasons, even his lies to his mother.

The psychology that comes out of this is what has lasted. Augustine is convinced that people do not know what they want, that the will is not one thing, and that one can want a good thing and be unable to do it for years. In the eighth book, a grown man in a garden tears his hair, and observes that his body obeys him at once while his mind will not obey itself. “Thus did my two wills, one new, and the other old, one carnal, the other spiritual, struggle within me; and by their discord, undid my soul” (Book VIII). The Manichees explained such splits by giving us two souls, one good and one evil. He now thinks that an alibi. There is one self, and it is sick.

So the cure cannot be his own doing. The line in Book X, “Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt”, repeated three times there, is the whole theology of grace in one line (Book X). The British monk Pelagius, by Augustine’s own later report, could not bear it when he heard it read in Rome. I find that sentence both the most consoling and the most frightening in the book: it hands everything to God, including whether you will ever be able to ask.

The shape of the book

Nine books tell the life. Book I covers infancy and school, with tears for Dido and a greed in babies that Augustine refuses to call innocent. Book II is one year of adolescence and one theft. Book III brings him to Carthage, “a cauldron of unholy loves”, where Cicero’s Hortensius sets him on fire for wisdom and the Bible disappoints him as bad prose. Book IV holds the death of a friend at Thagaste, “Thou half of my soul”. In Book V the Manichee bishop Faustus proves a charming lightweight, and Augustine sails for Rome and reaches Milan and Ambrose.

Book VI shows the career and the marriage plan, and Ambrose reading to himself: “his eye glided over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were at rest.” Book VII has “certain books of the Platonists”, which solve his intellectual problem and leave him unchanged. Book VIII is the garden. Book IX has the baptism, the talk with his mother at a window in Ostia, her death, and the end of the narrative, in 387.

Then the story stops. Book X asks who he is now. Book XI takes up the first verse of Genesis and is detained by the problem of time. Book XII argues over what that verse means, and Book XIII reads the whole week of creation as an allegory of the Church. In his Retractations, thirty years on, Augustine describes the division plainly: ten books on himself, three on Scripture, from “In the beginning” to the Sabbath rest.

Why it does not stop

Many readers stop at Book IX. I think this mistakes the book. A conversion story would end in the garden, and this one goes on because Augustine does not believe that the garden settled anything. Book X says so at once: readers want to know “what I now am, at the very time of making these confessions”. What he now is, is a bishop in his forties who still has sexual dreams, enjoys the singing in church too much for comfort, watches a lizard catch flies when he should be praying, and likes being praised. A book that stopped at nine would have told a lie by its shape.

The turn to memory follows from this. To tell nine books he has had to go into “the fields and spacious palaces of my memory”, and now he asks what he has been doing there. He finds that memory is bigger than he is: “nor do I myself comprehend all that I am.” He can seek a happy life that he has never had, so he must somehow remember it. Seeking God is like that. The narrative method of the first nine books has become the subject.

Book XI is the most famous philosophy Augustine wrote. “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.” The past is gone and the future is not yet, so they exist only in the soul: “a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future”. His example is reciting a Psalm, in which expectation passes through attention into memory, and he then lets the example grow: “the same holds in the whole life of man, whereof all the actions of man are parts.” A life told from memory is a Psalm half-recited, and he is the one reciting.

The last two books are harder, but they finish the argument. A man who has described himself as scattered and formless turns to the text about how formless matter was given form, and reads his own history at the scale of the cosmos. In Book XII he asks what Moses meant and decides that nobody can be sure: “what hurt is it, if a man understand what Thou, the light of all true-speaking minds, dost show him to be true”. The garden had been an act of reading, a verse found at random. The end of the book teaches how to read. And the seventh day, which alone has no evening in Genesis, answers the opening line. “Our heart is restless” becomes “the peace of rest, the peace of the Sabbath, which hath no evening” (Book XIII). The book cannot end in a biography because the rest it wants is not in a life.

The voice

Augustine had been a professor of rhetoric, “to sell words”, as he says on resigning (Book IX), and he writes against rhetoric with all of its tools: antithesis, rhyme, runs of questions. The other great source is the Psalms, which he had learned late and which run through almost every paragraph, so that his own voice and theirs cannot be told apart. The set piece of Book X shows both: “Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! too late I loved Thee!”

Pears and figs

At sixteen, back home for a year because money for Carthage had run out, Augustine and some friends robbed a neighbour’s tree. “A pear tree there was near our vineyard, laden with fruit, tempting neither for colour nor taste.” They threw most to the pigs. He gives most of Book II to it, which can look absurd after the sexual sins he passes in a clause. It is the right choice, because the theft had no motive. Every other crime wants something; this one wanted only the doing of the forbidden. “Fair were those pears, but not them did my wretched soul desire.” And then a human detail: “Yet alone I had not done it” (Book II).

The fruit is Eden’s, of course, and the book’s other tree answers it. In the Milan garden, wrecked, he leaves Alypius and throws himself down “under a certain fig-tree”, the tree of Adam’s covering. From the next house comes a voice “as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting, and oft repeating, ‘Take up and read; Take up and read.’” He opens Paul and finds Romans 13: “Not in rioting and drunkenness”. “Instantly” his doubt is gone (Book VIII). In 1950 Pierre Courcelle argued that the scene is partly literary, the fig tree symbolic and the voice a device, and the argument has not stopped. I doubt Augustine would have seen the choice: he wrote what the event meant.

The people

Monica

Monica is the book’s second subject, and Augustine’s account of her is more alarming than he knows. A bishop tells her “it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish” (Book III). She follows him across the sea after he slips away from her at Carthage: “That night I privily departed” (Book V). In Milan she arranges his marriage. At Ostia, by a window over a garden, mother and son talk of eternal life and “slightly touched on her with the whole effort of our heart”, and she dies days later, in “the fifty-sixth year of her age, and the three-and-thirtieth of mine” (Book IX). He holds back his tears and then lets them go. Her name appears once in the book, in the last lines of her story, in Pusey’s spelling as “Monnica Thy handmaid”.

The companion and Adeodatus

She never gets a name at all. “In those years I had one,—not in that which is called lawful marriage”, he writes, “yet but one, remaining faithful even to her” (Book IV). After some fifteen years a wealthy match was found for him, “a maiden asked in marriage, two years under the fit age”, and the woman was sent back: “my concubine being torn from my side as a hindrance to my marriage, my heart which clave unto her was torn and wounded and bleeding. And she returned to Afric, vowing unto Thee never to know any other man, leaving with me my son by her” (Book VI). He took another woman while waiting for the girl. This is the worst thing in the book, and he confesses it as his lust and not as a wrong done to her. Jostein Gaarder’s novel Vita Brevis (1996) answers in her voice.

Their son, Adeodatus, is baptised beside him at “not quite fifteen” and described as “born after the flesh, of my sin”, and straight away as a marvel, whose ideas fill a dialogue, The Master. “Soon didst Thou take his life from the earth” (Book IX). Apart from his cry at Monica’s deathbed, those lines are all the book gives him.

Alypius

Alypius, a younger man from Thagaste, was his pupil and then his closest friend. Book VI gives him a story of his own: dragged to the gladiators in Rome, he swears to keep his eyes shut, hears the crowd’s roar, “he opened his eyes”, and is lost (Book VI). He is the witness in the garden, reads on to the next verse, “him that is weak in the faith, receive”, and takes it for himself. He became Bishop of Thagaste.

How it was made

Augustine was ordained priest at Hippo in 391 and made bishop there about 395, and the book dates from 397 to 400. Book X reads in part as an answer to curiosity: “Why seek they to hear from me what I am”. Scholars still debate whether the last four books were planned from the first. Its first and last words make me think they were.

Readers and critics

Petrarch opened his pocket copy at the top of Mont Ventoux and found Book X scolding him for admiring mountains. Rousseau’s Confessions took the title and removed God from the audience. Husserl opens his lectures on time-consciousness by sending the reader to Book XI, Heidegger lectured on Book X in 1921, and Hannah Arendt wrote her dissertation on love in Augustine. Wittgenstein opens the Philosophical Investigations with Augustine on learning to speak in Book I, in order to disagree. T. S. Eliot put “To Carthage then I came” in The Waste Land and cited the source in his notes. The standard biography is Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo (1967), and James O’Donnell’s commentary (1992) is the deepest scholarly reading.

How to read it

Know what this English is. The free text linked here is E. B. Pusey’s translation of 1838, for his Library of the Fathers: all thirteen books, Project Gutenberg #3296. Gutenberg’s #77585 is a much shorter 1924 cut of it: avoid that.
Know its weaknesses. Pusey is reverent and close, and can be beautiful. The “Thou” and “-eth” hide how sharp Augustine is. This file has only book headings, with no chapter or paragraph numbers, so references like 8.12.29 cannot be followed, and it does not mark the Bible, so you cannot see where Augustine is quoting.
Buy a modern version. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 1991) is exact and has the best notes. Maria Boulding (New City, 1997) is the warmest and the most readable. Sarah Ruden (Modern Library, 2017) is vivid, with Dominus as “Master”. Garry Wills (Penguin, 2006) is bold and terse, and argues for calling the book The Testimony. Carolyn Hammond’s Loeb (two volumes, 2014 and 2016) has the Latin on facing pages.
Do not stop at Book IX. Read X and XI at least. If XII and XIII defeat you, read the last pages of XIII anyway.