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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Confessions, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Faith and Conversion
Sin and Salvation
Interpreting the Bible
God, Goodness, and Being
Time, Eternity, and the Mind
Summary
Analysis
[1] Augustine addresses God, noting that even though human beings are marked by sin and its consequence, death, they are still part of God’s creation and therefore praise God by instinct. In fact, human hearts find no peace until they rest in God.
Note that Confessions is divided into 13 books, with each book subdivided into many shorter sections. Section numbers are indicated in brackets to help readers who wish to refer to the book. One key to understanding Confessions is that the entire work is written as an extended prayer to God. While readers might think of a confession as an admission of guilt (and such admissions will be plentiful throughout Confessions), a confession can also be positive—in the sense of confessing what one believes or confessing one’s praise of someone or something. Readers should keep this manifold meaning of confession in mind and also consider that Augustine is writing not just to God, but also for an audience of fellow churchmen and other Christians in a context in which his reputation was far from secure. In other words, he writes with his peers in mind, perhaps especially those who question his suitedness to be a bishop (his consecration having taking place at least a couple of years before he began writing the book). Augustine’s assertion that a soul only finds rest in the God who created it will be an important motif in Confessions and will be modeled by his own spiritual struggle.
Themes
Augustine wonders whether it is possible to pray to God without first knowing him. He says that he will seek God by praying to him, and as he prays he will believe, because humankind has been told about God by preachers. His faith in God comes through the ministry of preachers and also through Jesus Christ.
The problem of how a mortal human being can know the eternal God comes up often in the book. It’s not an abstract problem, but an intimately personal one for Augustine. His approach of seeking God by praying suggests that he believes God is not only able to hear prayer, but willing to hear and, implicitly, willing to be found. God also reaches toward humanity by notably human means: not only by sending preachers to tell about him, but by sending his own son, Jesus, to be incarnate as a man and to live among people.
Themes
[2] Augustine ponders whether there is a place within him that is fit to receive God’s presence, when even heaven and earth cannot contain God. And how can he ask God to come into him when Augustine can’t exist without God, and so in a sense, God is already present within him? Rather, Augustine could not exist if he did not exist in God.
Here, Augustine considers the idea of God’s omnipresence, or that God is everywhere and cannot be contained. He puts it in terms of a set of paradoxes—that he wants the infinite God to occupy his finite soul and that he searches for God while, in fact, Augustine’s very existence is contingent on God sustaining his being and therefore being as close to him as it’s possible to be. These paradoxes hint at Augustine’s later explorations of God’s infinity and eternality—ideas that, by their nature, are beyond what finite humans can grasp or express.
Themes
[4] Augustine continues addressing God and praising God for his many attributes, like his supreme goodness, mercy, and justice. He meditates on the paradoxes of God’s being: that God is hidden yet ever-present, unchangeable yet changing all things, and neither new nor old. God seeks to make his creatures his own, even though he lacks for nothing. No one could say enough about God, and yet even the most gifted speakers can’t find the right words to speak of him.
Augustine again uses paradoxes to communicate that God transcends human categories. In doing so, he also demonstrates his belief that while a human being can never fully understand God, that doesn’t mean a person can’t or shouldn’t praise God within the limits of language. He suggests that people should be aware of language’s inability to truly capture the divine, but that as God’s creatures, human beings are nevertheless compelled to praise him through the means available to them.
Themes
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[5] Augustine longs for words to explain what God means to him. He likens his soul to a small, broken-down house that only God can restore and inhabit. [6] Augustine does not remember coming into this world, but he knows that it was by God’s mercy that he was conceived, born, and given nourishment. Even though Augustine can’t remember being a baby, his observations of other babies tell him how he must have behaved in his infancy. He wonders if he had any existence before his life in his mother’s womb.
Augustine’s comparison of his soul to a dilapidated house in need of God’s restoration hints at his robust doctrine of human sin and his belief that God must save people from their sins; they cannot save themselves. Confessions is heavily autobiographical, and readers will notice that Augustine’s memories of his past are woven in with more philosophical reflections as Augustine is reminded of events or pursues related trains of thought. Readers may find it best to simply follow Augustine’s line of thought for a while even if it isn’t obvious where it is heading; often, his point, or at least the reason behind his musings, becomes clearer in retrospect.
Themes
Augustine continues to muse about God’s infinitude. God remains eternally the same, and he does not experience change and time’s passing the way humans do. While people should freely ask God about such things, they must also be content to not receive answers, “for it is better […] to find you [God] and leave the question unanswered than to find the answer without finding you.”
Recall that Augustine just mused about whether his soul had some form of existence before he was conceived; while he doesn’t answer this question, it does prompt him to reflect on his belief that God has always existed, and that this makes God categorically different from humans—a perennial fascination for Augustine and one he will explore more deeply in Book XI. Given Augustine’s love of philosophical questions, it’s clear that when he says it’s better to have unanswered questions with God than to find answers without God, he isn’t denigrating intellectual inquiry. Rather, he’s putting such inquiry into perspective—for him, knowing and loving God is more important than anything else—and again noting humanity’s limited capacity for understanding the infinite.
Themes
[7] Augustine muses on sin, something that no human being is free from. Even babies desire to do wrong; it’s just that they are too little to carry it out, and adults deal tenderly with faults that babies will outgrow. Augustine praises God as the one who has granted him his life and his body, with all of the senses and instincts needed in order to sustain life. But since Augustine remembers nothing of his infancy, he will talk about it no further.
Sin simply refers to transgressing God’s law as contained in God’s word, the Bible. Augustine’s theology famously emphasizes that all human beings inherit the consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin, as related in the book of Genesis, and part of that inheritance is that every human being is inclined to go on sinning themselves, even before they’re old enough to really understand what they’re doing. It will become clear that this is why Augustine believes human beings need a savior, which God provides in Jesus.
Themes
[8] The next stage in Augustine’s life was his boyhood. In this stage, he learned to speak, using his God-given intelligence. He listened to repeated phrases in order to learn what they meant, gradually learned to pronounce them, and began using them to express his own wishes. This was a “further step into the stormy life of human society.”
In his vast collection of writings, notably in his later magnum opus The City of God, Augustine drew on classical ideas to develop a schema that traced the “six ages of man,” from infancy to old age; he saw these ages corresponding to the ages of the history of the world, a correspondence that readers can detect elsewhere in Confessions. For now, it’s enough to observe that Augustine’s attention even to the earliest years of his life has classical precedent, even though it doesn’t seem to contain great insight. It also fits with his belief that God’s providence was operating at every stage of his life, long before he acknowledged God for himself.
Themes
[9] But then, Augustine tells God, he went through a humiliating time of suffering. He was told that academic achievement was the way to win others’ respect and succeed in the world, so he was sent to school. Per tradition, he was beaten if he didn’t do well in school, even though he was too young to fully understand why. Nevertheless, Augustine learned in school that some people prayed to God and, thinking of God as a “great person” who could listen and help even though he could not be seen, Augustine began to pray, too—especially praying for God to prevent him from being beaten at school.
In Augustine’s day, corporal punishment would have been the standard method of discipline in schools. Though Augustine seems ambivalent regarding the wisdom of this method, the memory sets a pattern readers will see throughout Confessions—that God works even through negative experiences to draw people’s souls to himself. At this stage, Augustine’s view of God is decidedly childlike: God is basically a big person, albeit invisible, who can protect him from bad things.
Themes
[10] Even though not all of the beatings Augustine got in school were justified, he acknowledges to God that he sinned by not obeying his parents or teachers. He especially loved games and stage-plays—and he notes the irony that while parents allow their children to be punished for being distracted by such things, those same parents also praise wealthy adults who become patrons of the games and the theater. Augustine prays that God would free everyone from delusion and folly.
Regret for past sins is a constant refrain in Confessions, even when, as at this stage of Augustine’s life, the sins seem pretty minor. He believes that even trifling sins point to the underlying reality of humanity’s rebellion against God. Patronage of public games such as horse races and gladiatorial fights was a sign of social prestige in the fourth-century Roman Empire.
Themes
[11] When Augustine was still a boy, he learned of the eternal life promised by God. His devout mother frequently blessed him with the sign of the cross and with salt. At one point, Augustine was deathly ill with a stomach ailment, and he begged to be baptized, but since he recovered quickly, his baptism was postponed. The rationale was that if he was baptized and lived, he would “defile” himself with sin, and then his guilt would be all the greater.
This is the first mention of direct Christian influence in Augustine’s childhood. Placing salt on the tongue was part of the rite of exorcism, which was standard when a person became a catechumen—a candidate for eventual baptism. (Here, it appears that Augustine’s mother gave him extra salt-blessings for good measure.) The postponement of baptism was also typical for fourth-century Christianity, since the church didn’t yet have a clear position on how sins committed after baptism could be forgiven.
Themes
At that time, Augustine and his whole household believed in God, except for his father. Yet Augustine’s mother made sure that God was more of a father to him than his earthly father was, and this greatly influenced him. Augustine wonders, though, why his baptism was postponed at the time. He thinks it would have been better if he had been baptized and his family had then done everything they could to make sure that Augustine continued to live a Christian life. But his mother feared the temptations he would face as he grew up.
Augustine will come to view his mother, Monica, as a major influence on his eventually becoming a Christian. But his situation as an unbaptized child of a Christian mother further reveals tensions in the fourth-century North African church. Though Monica clearly wanted Augustine to believe in God, she feared Augustine would essentially forfeit his baptism if he were baptized too young. In the coming centuries, the theology surrounding baptism would evolve to account for post-baptismal sin, and baptism of infants would become the norm; but at this time, Augustine remains stuck in a religiously ambiguous state.
Themes
[12] Augustine hated studying as a child and had to be forced to do so by adults. Even though the adults were mistaken in their motivations (Augustine’s eventual success), God brought about good from the fact that they compelled Augustine to study. [13] Young Augustine hated studying Greek, and his elementary Latin lessons weren’t much fun, either—but these studies allowed him to eventually read and write whatever he wished. In time, he studied the Aeneid. He notes the irony that he wept over Dido’s fate yet shed no tears over his failure to love God.
As an adult, Augustine obviously values the education that enabled him to become an accomplished scholar, but he regrets the fact that he spent much of his life—starting in childhood—pursuing education for pure ambition’s sake instead of for the goal of serving God through his efforts. Virgil’s epic The Aeneid, written in the first century B.C.E., would have formed a significant part of Augustine’s early Latin education. Dido (legendary queen of Carthage, in Augustine’s North Africa) killed herself after Aeneas left Carthage. Augustine’s remark on misguidedly weeping over Dido highlights that, at this stage of his life, he had not yet learned to love the right things, namely God.
Themes
[14] Augustine had no taste for Homer as a child, but supposes it is similar for Greek children struggling to learn Virgil. He observes that he picked up Latin easily as a child because he wanted to express himself, and this proves that people learn better “in a free spirit of curiosity than under fear and compulsion.” Nevertheless, God’s law allows the “bitter medicine” of force to save people from false pleasures.
Like the Aeneid, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey—ancient Greek epics that majorly influenced Virgil’s Latin epic—were foundational texts for schoolchildren in late antiquity. Latin was the language of government, commerce, and culture in Roman North Africa and would likely have been the everyday language in Augustine’s upper-class family; however, he was likely also conversant in Punic, a dialect of Phoenician, because of his mother’s Berber heritage. Recalling his ease at studying Latin because it was useful to him, Augustine acknowledges that curiosity is a much more effective motivator than force for learners, yet he grants that force has a God-ordained place.
Themes
[15] Augustine prays that God will not let him falter under divine discipline, that Augustine will never tire of thanking God, and that he will love God all his days, using the things he learned as a boy in God’s service. [16] He laments that children are taught stories of the gods that allow them to excuse immoral behavior, such as Jupiter’s adultery. The “filthy moral” doesn’t help children learn words more easily, yet they are certainly able to commit “filth” more easily as a result of learning such words—and young Augustine took pleasure in learning them. Indeed, he was praised for doing so.
Here is a good example of a place where Augustine praises God in a seeming tangent, as the unpleasant memory of discipline at school reminds him of God’s benign discipline. He also expands on his ideas about pedagogy, as he argues that stories containing immorality do more than teach language and rhetoric; they give children sinful examples to emulate. Implicitly, the study of Scripture instead of classical Roman myths would not have the same morally degrading effect.
Themes
[17] Augustine squandered the mind God gave him on many “foolish delusions.” Once, he had to recite a passage from the Aeneid in prose and won praise above his classmates; now, he considers it a waste that he didn’t learn the Scriptures instead, with which he could have uttered praises to God. [18] Augustine cites the prodigal son, who wasted his wealth on foolish pleasures and was lovingly welcomed back by God. He asks God to be patient with worldly men who fret over the rules of rhetoric and seek fame by them, blind to the fact that they break God’s laws by hating and condemning their fellow human beings.
To a certain extent, Augustine’s description of his education as a waste can be taken with a grain of salt. Many ancient Christian scholars developed their biblical interpretation skills by first learning to analyze works like the Aeneid and Homer’s epics. Augustine makes a rhetorical move meant to show just how much he elevates the Christian Scriptures above the non-Christian classical texts he studied as a child. The parable of the prodigal son appears in the Gospel of Luke, with the son squandering his inheritance and later being forgiven by his father. The allusion suggests that Augustine should have cherished the Bible as his birthright but only embraced its teachings later in life.
Themes
[19] As a child, Augustine was being trained for this world, and he sought to please the adults in his life by succeeding. Yet, all the while he envied, lied, stole, and cheated. He begs God’s forgiveness for the sins of his childhood. [20] He also praises God for all the good in him as a boy, which could only have come from God. His sin was that he sought “pleasure, beauty, and truth” not in God but in himself and others, which led only to suffering.
Again, Augustine regards sin as ever-present in human life and in need of divine forgiveness, even if some might dismiss childhood sins like his as no big deal. But for him, the pervasiveness of sin doesn’t mean that there’s no good in human beings, since after all, they are created by a good God. Sin occurs when people look for ultimate happiness and meaning in created things instead of in the creator; then, they are drawn farther and farther away from God.
Themes
