The Key to the Confessions of St. Augustine

St. Augustine of Hippo was a prolific writer, so much so that it has been said that anyone who claims to have read all of Augustine lies.  He wrote on philosophy, theology, and scripture.  Of all his works, perhaps the most widely read is his Confessions.

            St. Augustine was born in 354 in present day Algeria.  While he was not baptized, he was exposed to Christianity by his mother, Monica.  His education was important to his father, who enrolled Augustine with the best masters that could be found.  In school, Augustine lost interest in Christianity and found the Scriptures to be uninteresting and poorly written.  He also learned to indulge in his passions and took a mistress when he reached adulthood.

            As an adult, he became interested in the Manicheans, finding their esoteric teachings attractive.  Yet as years went on, his constant intellectual quest for truth in knowledge led him to see flaws in the teachings of the heresy.  In 386, Augustine made his conversion to Catholic Christianity, and became bishop of Hippo ten years later.  It was while he was bishop of Hippo that he wrote his Confessions.

            In its layout, the Confessions is confusing, disjointed.  Moving through the story of his life are a series of commentaries and meditations.  As I read, I found this to be distracting.  I wanted to read about the next episode in the life of this great saint, but he kept interrupting the story with lengthy addresses to God.  Then, halfway through the book, Augustine abandoned the narrative of his life and devoted the remaining pages to a series of philosophical discourses on memory, creation and time.  What did this have to do with his life?

            Annemaré Kotzé, author of “The Puzzle of the Last Four Books of Augustine’s Confessions”: An Illegitimate Issue? provides the key.  The Confessions is not a book about the life of Augustine, rather it is a book about a specific philosophical view; it is an apologetic for what Augustine holds to be true.  The first half of the book merely explains how the author has come to hold the beliefs that are explained in the second half.  Kotzé also claims that the book’s purpose is to bring others to the Catholic faith: “I argue that at least one of the communicative aims of the Confessions, both in the autobiographical section and in the so-called exegetical books, is that of converting its reader to Catholic Christianity, i.e. a protreptic [instructional] purpose.”[1]

            In reading what Kotzé wrote, I realized that I had been approaching the Confessions with a gross misconception.  The Confessions is not an autobiography or memoir, rather it is an apologetical work, and the autobiographical material in its first half only serves as a foundation to give support to the all-important second half.  This manner of writing was also common in antiquity.

            Kotzé explains that many apologists wrote in the same fashion.  She references De Trinitate by Hilary of Poitiers, the Ad Donatum by Cyprian of Carthage and Justin Martyr’s Dialogus cum Tryphone to show that this was a standard writing style in antiquity, one with which the ancient reader would have been familiar. “The ancient reader, who lived in a milieu where conversion stories abounded, may as a matter of course have expected the autobiographical narration of a man like Augustine to be a conversion story, to have a protreptic purpose, and to be followed by more protreptic or polemic writing, by something with didactic intent.”[2]  Kotzé further supposes that a strict autobiography without a didactic purpose would have been unsatisfactory to the ancient reader.[3]

            Understood in this light, the Confessions make sense.  The book is not intended to be a public confession of Augustine’s wayward life, although that is a prominent feature in its first half; rather it is a confession of belief.  The second half of the book is thus the more important part.

            While this was not an uncommon standard of writing in antiquity, it has been used in more recent times as well.  Hugh Wire wrote a review of Margaret Miles’ Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter.  According to Wire, Margate Miles wrote a book that has a similar structure to the Confessions.  Wire explains that Miles had a similar upbringing as Augustine, and also fell into immorality.  However, “[Miles] persists in looking at her sexual experience in its complexity as central to her being, until her attention yields for her awareness of the All, contra Augustine who decided he had to renounce physical sexual experience to find his passion satisfied in God.”[4]  Thus, while Miles was inspired by Augustine, she arrived at a different conclusion.  The point of interest, though, is that Miles used her autobiographical experience to explain her philosophy of life.  The philosophy is the most important point in the book.

            The logic of the Confessions is that of complete dependence on God.  Augustine addressed his words to his creator, recounting how he was led to union with God.  In recalling his earliest years of childhood to the death of his mother, Augustine marveled at how God has used every event to bring an unwilling soul to Himself.  Augustine was even able to see the workings of Providence in sin.

            Having shown how he was led to the knowledge of God, Augustine then expounds on the nature of that knowledge in Book X.  Throughout this book, he wrestles with the nature of memory, and how he could come to know the infinite God through finite memories – memories that are clouded and even disordered.  While he does not arrive at a satisfactory answer, he concludes with the thought that the only safe place in his soul is God.

            From the knowledge of God, Augustine moves to the consideration of the relationship of time and eternity.  For Augustine, this is a natural progression.  He is able to know God in time, yet God does not live in time.  Thus he concludes that time is a creature, and that from all eternity, God creates.  This leads Augustine to his last topic.

            Admitting that the creation story in Genesis is open to interpretation, Augustine claims that creation is still something in time.  As for God, however, creation is always present, since there is no before or after for the unchanging God.

            The Confessions is a difficult book to read.  Yet, in spite of that difficulty, it retains its value as an apologetic for Catholic belief.  While it lacks the clear order and precision of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Confessions is able to deepen the reader’s knowledge of God, both in regard to the divine nature and in regard to his two main actions: creation and redemption. 

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[1] Annemaré Kotzé, 2006. “The Puzzle of the Last Four Books of Augustine’s Confessions”: An Illegitimate Issue?.” Vigiliae Christianae 60, no. 1: 65-79. Religion and Philosophy Collection, EBSCOhost (accessed March 2, 2015) 70

[2] Kotzé “The Puzzle of the Last Four Books” 70

[3] Kotzé “The Puzzle of the Last Four Books” 71

[4] Hugh Wire. 2013. “A Book to Think With: Margaret Miles’ Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter.” Pastoral Psychology 62, no. 3: 387-391. Religion and Philosophy Collection, EBSCOhost (accessed March 2, 2015) 390