You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.
Saint Augustine of Hippo lived when the Roman Empire was beginning to crumble. He was born in 354 to a Christian mother and a pagan father; he wrote the Confessions somewhere between 397 and 400, as the Western Roman Empire was falling into disarray; and he died in 430 in Hippo, as invading tribes from the north besieged the city. Less than a half-century later Rome would be sacked, and the empire would be lost.
Augustine's work, then, stands at a turning point in European history, between antiquity and the glory of Rome and the Middle Ages, when mediaeval Christianity took hold and spread throughout Europe. His Confessions are the story of his own conversion to Christianity, set against the backdrop of neo-Platonist philosophy, but they are also the story of much of the west. The ideas discussed therein would come to make up a significant part of the moral background of mediaeval Europe.
The Confessions can be divided into three main parts based on the ground that they cover. Books I through IX are autobiographical, dealing with Augustine's early life and his conversion to Christianity. Book X sees a transition from the subjectivity of Augustine's experiences to an objective consideration of the phenomenon of conversion. It closes with books XI through to XIII, which are Augustine's interpretation of and commentary on the book of Genesis.
Books I through IX are remarkable in their own right because they are one of the first autobiographical works in western literature. The "confessions" in it take two forms -- the more traditional, Biblical profession of faith in God and praises for Him, as well as exposition of sins. In the entirety of the work, confessions-as-praise are generally rendered as quotations from Scripture or the Psalms worked into the prose -- and Augustine certainly uses a lot of them; for how better to praise God than with the songs that divinely-inspired Scripture gives us?
Book I recounts Augustine's infancy and childhood. Along with the rest of the autobiographical section of the Confessions, it is presented subjectively, relating occurrences as Augustine understood them. Often, this means that things that happened are coloured by his later experiences; this even extends to Augustine's earliest infancy, onto which he projects original sin (manifest as infantile wilfulness): "Where or when was I innocent?"
During his education, Augustine finds himself feeling more and more distanced from the works he is studying. The classical literature that he is being taught, he says, is nothing but a "poetic fiction" -- there is something missing, and he doubts that school will be able to fill in the blanks. Frustrated at the lack of easy answers, Augustine leaves. In retrospect, he likens himself to the prodigal son from the Biblical parable; he also observes that he has lost the "latent unity" of his relatively-innocent youth, instead getting lost in "the shadowy jungle" of uncertain multiplicity.
During his adolescence, Augustine begins to think that perhaps the answer lies in love; he expresses the fervent desire to love and to be loved, not knowing at the time that what he sought could be found in God. Then, the first critical turning point in the Confessions: with a group of friends, Augustine steals pears from an orchard that neither he nor his companions had any intention of eating, for the sheer rush of doing something illicit.
After stealing the pears -- and discarding them uneaten -- Augustine begins to question what motivated the crime. The results are strangely unnerving, even for a contemporary reader. Of course, the worst part is that it was utterly motiveless; Augustine realises that he wouldn't have done it had his friends not been with him, and that makes it even more heinous, worse even than murder -- even the bloodthirsty ruler Cataline had a motive, however twisted it might have been, for ordering the deaths of innocents, but stealing the pears was nothing more than a mindless act of defiance.
In this way, Augustine realises that the "freedom" of doing whatever one wishes is not really freedom at all. Like the prodigal son, he had become "a wasteland".
Escaping to Carthage to pursue another chapter of his education, Augustine encounters a work of Cicero, the Hortensius (unfortunately no longer extant). This text kindles his interest in philosophy; Augustine says that he "longed for wisdom" and that upon reading Cicero he "began to return" to intellectual curiosity, leaving behind the licentiousness of his youth.
This was also when Augustine encountered the Bible. His impression was that it was a work of "mountainous difficulty" (and at times I can hardly blame him for thinking that way). He fell in with the Manicheans, mostly because they provided easy and comforting answers to pressing problems. Manicheans believed in the dualism of good and evil, and that God existed on a higher plane of pure light; the corporeal world was a world of darkness, and a perpetual struggle between the two forces kept the sensible world balanced.
This explained not only the origin of evil -- it comes from the darkness -- but also gave a simple reason for the innate human tendency to sin: to maintain the balance between dark and light. Thus Saint Paul's famous line in his epistle to the Romans -- "The good that I would do, I do not do, and the evil I would not do, that I do" -- becomes less a problem of the human condition than a signifier that humans are pawns in the struggle between dark and light and therefore not responsible for their actions.
Augustine was involved with the Manicheans for nine years, until a meeting with a Manichean leader caused him to become disillusioned with their philosophies, and disappointed at a lack of solid proof of the correctness of their doctrine. After his departure from the Manicheans (and from Carthage, for Milan, where he meets with Bishop Ambrose) there followed another search for enlightenment, this time relating to the mystery of human evil as Augustine questions in greater depth what motivated him to do unjust things.
A real answer isn't presented until book VII, which is arguably the heart of the work. Here, after much contemplation, Augustine comes to know the true nature of God through studying neo-Platonist philosophy. The single most vital tenet from earlier philosophers rehashed in the Confessions is that the divine is incorporeal spirit, and essential goodness itself. Responsibility for one's own deeds follows closely behind in terms of importance; this contrasts sharply with the Manichean notions that held Augustine in thrall for nine years, but his disillusionment made the neo-Platonic texts (specifically those of Plotinus) more appealing. Turning to the Bible again, Augustine began to move toward Christianity, but there was a problem; though he now knew for sure the nature of God, inherited from the neo-Platonists, he found himself at loose ends with no way to actually reach the divine.
According to the neo-Platonists, there was a hierarchy in divinity; God was at the top, with a number of intermediate levels beneath Him, and finally the sensible world as we know it at the bottom. Augustine's frustration stemmed from God being simultaneously above him and near him -- but since God is essential goodness, not human, he felt that there needed to be a mediator between them to create a truly meaningful relationship with mutual understanding.
The mediator he sought was Jesus. Hearing the conversion stories of some devout Christians whom he admires, Augustine moves closer to conversion himself; but his resolve is not made firm until he overhears a children's song by chance, in a garden in Milan. "Tolle, lege," it urged, "Take up and read." Augustine picked up the Bible (it being the nearest book to hand) and found a passage from Saint Paul's epistle to the Romans:
Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.
Paul's words resolve Augustine's spiritual crisis; his conversion is now complete. Book IX is the last of the autobiographical books; in it Augustine is baptised and returns to Africa upon the death of his mother, Monica. The book ends with a prayer for Monica and for all departed souls, and all those in the heavenly city of Jerusalem.
The last three books of the Confessions are often thought of as being somewhat out of place. They are an exegesis of the book of Genesis, superficially not related at all to Augustine's conversion story and confessions. But for all that, they can be thought of as an allegory for that same conversion process, effectively tying together the entire work.
Genesis begins with formless earth, and the spirit of God moving over the waters in darkness; light is brought forth by God and then all of creation, in sequence. The formlessness is analogous to Augustine's restless heart as he gradually comes to consciousness of his own faults and of the need for some higher power in which he might find peace; for "things which are not in their intended position are restless".
The slow realisation of the fact that the truth is in God is like the creation process, the drawing out of a human soul from the void, but it cannot come to completion until the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is embraced as the only possible answer to the problem of restlessness -- since, for Augustine, it is only in God's gift that rest can be found. The exegesis solves it theologically, but instead of providing a firm conclusion it is left open-ended, for the reader to consider on his own terms after being presented with Augustine's argument.
What man can enable the human mind to understand this? Which angel can interpret it to an angel? What angel can help a human being to grasp it? Only you can be asked, only you can be begged, only on your door can we knock. Yes indeed, that is how it is received, how it is found, how the door is opened.
The cool part about the Confessions is that you don't even have to be Christian to appreciate their beauty. Tolle, lege, indeed.
Sources:
The Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Background information and analysis comes courtesy of lecture notes and subsequent discussion.
An online version of this work is available for your perusal at http://www.ccel.org/a/augustine/confessions/confessions.html.