Summary
Created near 400BC this book constitutes one of the earliest Christian autobiographies we have. Written as a protracted and one-sided conversation with God, Augustine attempts to lay out his soul to God and his many readers. Written as a collection of thirteen books, the first nine deal with his life up to the age of 33 which is the traditionally accepted age of Jesus when he was crucified. The main story is his conversion to Catholicism and the backdrop is his own personal struggles and failings. His central struggle was in the eradication of his sexuality, the journey to celibacy was a difficult one for Augustine, he had a few mistresses including one during his pending engagement which was broken off after his conversion. This struggle takes up most of the pages dedicated to character flaws, while his key psychological struggle was being converted from Manicheism. Another interesting topic that got discussed thoroughly was astrology, evidently Augustine used to be paid by others to read their future in the stars, he would have had all the girls in 2023. If there is one thing to know about Augustine, it is that he questions, he questions everything. This ultimately leads him to lose faith in Manicheism in favor of the more convincing ideas presented by Catholicism. One way of looking at this text is as a tract to any would be Catholics who were currently Manichaeans. The last four books shift into abstract questions about memory, time, creation, and interpretation of scriptures.
Thoughts
As an autobiography one expects to learn about the life of the author, if this was your hope while reading confessions, you’ll be largely disappointed. We do learn about what Augustine does, but only as background deeds. This book is completely introspective, it should be considered more as a spiritual autobiography. The necessities of life do show up, but often with maddingly few details. As a spiritual autobiography this book is fantastic. I found it relatable, the constant questioning, the cyclically revelations, the feeling of progression, the assumptions made invisible by time and place. Sidebar The ‘question’ is the central character in this book and I heartily agree with this choice probably even more than Augustine intended. The ‘question’ is renewing, it keeps ideas from becoming brittle, it breaks and destroys, but the best questions create something new. I am convinced that we can never completely know any one thing and that the right questions can act as paths to new perspectives. Following this rabbit trail a little further, I think this is one of the things that makes life so exciting, the idea that a diamond rotated will produce different sparkles and be beautiful in a completely new way. We may have explored every inch of the surface of the earth but there are still many places in the mind with few footprints. Why stay on the main roads? I am not an expert in Manicheism and so the many of his arguments against it were lost on me. I do know that following a more Zoroastrian worldview they believe in a dualistic reality. That good and evil are two separate forces that are in constant battle. This neatly answers one of the most difficult questions for Christianity, the problem of evil. The problem of evil was a large hurdle for Augustine to climb over before coming into the Holy C. His answer became the pillar of many modern responses to this problem, and as a result it will be somewhat familiar. Oversimplifying and possibly misunderstanding, it is that evil is man’s creation by abusing free will, since the will is free it allows God to remain unsoiled by our sin. This response of course has its criticisms, even by contemporary Manichaeans. I still agree with Camus on this topic:
You know the alternative: either we are not free and God the all-powerful is responsible for evil. Or we are free and responsible but God is not all powerful. All the scholastic subtleties have neither added anything to nor subtracted anything from the acuteness of this paradox.
Myth of Sisyphus
I am also of the opinion that Augustine, the prodigious questioner still had his doubts on the topic perhaps shared in a separate more personal confession. His discussions on time and memory were really good especially from an experiential standpoint, but I imagine anyone who isn’t interested in these questions would be pulling their hair out trying to follow his logic along its tortious steps before arriving at a temporary conclusion. The pacing of the book is fairly slow, and very melancholic. I am not quite convinced that the conversion brought him the internal peace that he was looking for excepting the biggest questions. The old Augustine was bothered by his mistresses, the new Augustine was troubled by the fact that he enjoyed eating when he was hungry, and that this proclivity was only a few steps removed from gluttony. Again, I found this mindset very relatable. This book played a foundational role in Western thought, it isn’t necessarily a fun read but it fairly important. That being said while I enjoyed it, I think it would only be enjoyable for a small subset of readers outside of seminary.