Confessions Study Guide

Augustine was born in the city of Thagaste, in what is now Souk Ahras, Algeria, to a Roman father and a Berber mother. He is arguably the most important writer and theologian in Western Christianity. Classified as a saint and a Doctor of the Church by the Roman Catholic Church, he is influential for much of Protestantism as well. Augustine was enrolled as a catechumen as a child but grew up studying rhetoric and philosophy, and he remained uncommitted to religion. As a young man, he spent about a decade following the Manichean movement. Career success took him from Carthage to Rome and then to Milan, where he took a position as professor of rhetoric. In Milan, Augustine became disillusioned with Manicheism and drawn to the preaching of Ambrose, the city’s bishop. Following the long inner struggle detailed in Confessions, Augustine became a Christian and got baptized in his early 30s. After his mother’s death he moved back to Africa where, on a visit to the port of Hippo Regius, he was pressured into being ordained as a priest. By 395, he was consecrated bishop. His prodigious theological writings encompassed not just autobiography, sermons, and biblical commentary, but careful articulations of Christian doctrines such as the Trinity, the nature of the Church, and the role of God’s grace in salvation, often in response to dissident preachers and sects that arose in his lifetime. Augustine never married, but he was strongly attached to an unnamed concubine for many years before his conversion, and she bore him a son named Adeodatus. He died during a Vandal siege of Hippo on August 28, 430.

Importantly, Confessions was written at a time when Christianity was no longer legally suppressed or persecuted by the Roman Empire. Christianity was granted legal status and toleration by the Edict of Milan in 313 under Constantine the Great, though it didn’t become the religion of the Empire until Theodosius I in 380. So, Augustine grew up in a world in which Christians no longer faced the threat of violence for practicing their faith. Arguably, the very leisure that allowed Augustine to write so prolifically testifies to that fact—as well as Augustine’s clear focus on internal conflict as his primary antagonist, not external conflict. Scholars have suggested that the emergence of desert monasticism, like that practiced by St. Antony and inspiring to Augustine and his friends, was also partly a response to the decline of outward persecution—Christians who sought a rigorous test of their faith now had to seek out challenging external conditions like the Egyptian desert. However, Christianity had plenty of rivals. In Augustine’s day, the Manichean religion was very popular throughout the Roman world, especially in his native North Africa. Manicheism was founded by a Persian visionary named Mani in the 200s. By the late 300s, Manichees had established a tight network throughout the Roman Empire; Augustine even secured his teaching position in Milan from Manichean patronage. Manicheism attempted to make some biblical teachings more universally applicable, and it drew on elements of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Gnostic sects in so doing. It was soundly condemned as a heretical movement by the later Augustine and other early Christian theologians. Manicheism taught that a cosmic battle was being waged between good and evil, and that souls were entrapped within the material world and must be liberated through various ascetical practices. As Christianity gained strength and bishops mounted a concerted opposition to what they classified as heretical teachings, Manicheism went into a sharp decline from the sixth century onward.

Augustine was trained in classical Latin and Greek literature, such as the Aeneid by Virgil and The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer. As a young adult training to become a professor of rhetoric, Augustine read Cicero’s lost Hortensius, an introductory philosophical text, which he describes as a turning point in his life because it awakened his desire not just to study philosophy as a discipline, but to discover true wisdom. He later used Hortensius, particularly its ideas on the meaning of happiness and philosophy as a way of life, to train his own students. Augustine was also heavily influenced by Platonist writers such as Porphyry and Plotinus as he formed his understanding of happiness as consisting of union with God. Augustine is among the most prolific Christian theologians to date; while Confessions is probably his best-known work, his City of God, a massive work exploring the church’s impact on earthly society, and The Trinity, an apologetic for the tenets expressed in the Nicene Creed, are also considered among his most influential. Of course, the Bible was the single biggest influence on Augustine’s life and writings, and his commentaries, especially on Genesis, the Gospel of John, and the Psalms are valued today. Other works inspired by Augustine’s thought more broadly include the treatise Consolation of Philosophy (524) by Boethius and Dante’s epic poem Divine Comedy (14th century); Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1670s) is a distinctly Protestant allegory of the soul’s journey to God, and C. S. Lewis’s more theological writings, such as Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters, have an Augustinian foundation as well.