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Book 9
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 ponders and prays about the reason for writing these confessions. [3] He hopes that others, too, will be moved to confess and repent of their sins before God. [4] He also considers the purpose of confessing not what he used to be, but what he currently is—both the good he does and the evils he commits. He concludes that by doing so, he serves his fellow Christians, giving them cause for both rejoicing and grief.
Readers will quickly notice that the remaining books of Confessions turn away from the autobiographical and toward the philosophical. There is a hint here that Augustine anticipates criticism from some of his audience, particularly those who mistrust him on the basis of his past sinful life. In response, he suggests that if nothing else, his sins can move others to similar confession and changes of heart.
Themes
[6] Augustine considers what it means to say that he loves God. By looking at created things, he learned that God is not part of creation, but the creator. [7] He also wonders by what faculty he is able to find and love God. It can’t be just the spirit that animates his body, or else animals would find God, too; likewise, it can’t be just the power by which he uses his sensory perception. [8] Above these faculties is memory, which stores the images that the senses convey to it and can recall those images when needed. Augustine is fascinated by the mystery of how these sensory images are recorded and brought forth by the mind, as well as memories of himself and things that have happened to him or others. And yet, as vast as the memory is, there remains a part of himself that Augustine cannot understand.
In Book X, Augustine will focus on the human faculty of memory, especially as it connects to a person’s ability to know and love God. While it isn’t necessary for readers to grasp an ancient understanding of how the mind and senses worked, readers should note that for Augustine, the concept of memoria goes deeper than simply the aspect of psychology that’s concerned with recalling ideas or images. For Augustine, it’s a part of a human being that isn’t fully within his command and therefore represents the deep mystery of being human—of being a creature rather than the Creator.
Themes
[9] Augustine’s memory also contains all the facts he has learned and not forgotten. [10] But, given that these facts didn’t enter his mind through one of his senses, how did they get there? He concludes that they must have already been there, in some remote recess of his mind, and that when he heard about them, he recognized them as true. [11] The process of learning facts, then, is really a process of gathering scattered thoughts and placing them “ready to hand.” Forgetting is when he fails to attend to facts for a time, thus allowing them to sink back into the recesses of his mind. [12] His memory contains items such as mathematical principles and dimensions. [14] He can likewise recall past feelings and desires without directly experiencing those feelings and desires again.
The way Augustine describes the function of memory here, as basically a process of gathering and deploying things a person already knows, is very different from a modern conception of memory and rests on a Platonic concept called anamnesis. This concept teaches that the soul already knows things from past existence, and learning is just a process of bringing those things to consciousness. Augustine will build on this conception of memory as a way of considering how people come to recognize true happiness.
Themes
[17] Continuing to puzzle over the workings of his mind, Augustine concludes that memory is “the great force of life in living man.” And yet it’s necessary to go beyond even memory in order to find God—and how is it possible for Augustine to find God if he has no memory of God? [18] After all, when we lose things, it is only possible for us to find them again because we remember and recognize them. [20] If blessed happiness is what everyone desires, then is there a sense in which people remember happiness? [22] While everyone has experienced joy in some sense, not everyone desires true happiness, which is to rejoice in God.
Augustine assumes here that in order for a person to find God, they must remember God somewhere deep in their memory; in other words, if they find him, they will recognize him as what they’ve been seeking all along. Augustine also assumes that true happiness is only found in God, and so people’s failure to find him suggests that they haven’t yet remembered rightly what true happiness is—that they have settled for a lesser form of happiness, perhaps misrecognizing it as true joy. Readers might pick up on how these ideas fit with Augustine’s account of his journey toward God, even if he doesn’t describe it exactly this way—that when God illuminates his mind in the garden in Milan, he suddenly knows beyond doubt that he’s found what he long sought.
Themes
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[23] Augustine further concludes that true happiness is the same thing as rejoicing in the truth, which is the same thing as to rejoice in God, who is the Truth. No one, he observes, wants to be deceived. So, there is a sense in which everyone does love the truth, even if their memory of it has grown dim. And people often deceive themselves, replacing truth in their hearts with something else. To become happy, one must learn “to ignore all that distracts […] and to rejoice in […] the sole Truth by which all else is true.”
Here Augustine argues that everyone, in general, wants to be told the truth. He then implies that everyday truth is a kind of dim reflection in miniature of God, the ultimate Truth. To be truly happy, people must learn to recognize God as the ultimate Truth; if they don’t, they will always be prone to distraction by lesser truths at best, and deception by untruths at worst.
Themes
[24] The remembrance of God is “holy joy.” [25] But in what part of the memory is God present? Everything about the mind is changeable, yet God deigns to dwell there. [26] God is not confined to any place, yet he answers all who seek him.
This section echoes the ponderings with which Augustine opened Confessions, in which he marvels that God could enter the soul of something as small as a creature. His interest in subjects like the memory seems to be, in part, a way of meditating on the paradox of God’s care for and presence with people, who are too small to even comprehend God.
Themes
[27] Augustine cries out that he has learned late in his life to love God, “Beauty at once so ancient and so new.” God was within him, yet he searched for God among God’s beautiful creation. But even those created things only had their existence in God. It was God’s call, his light, his “fragrance,” taste, and touch that finally drew Augustine to God.
By this point, readers will likely have noticed that Augustine favors paradoxical expressions like “at once […] ancient and […] new” as a way of indicating that language can never fully capture what God is like. His use of sensory metaphors—voice, light, fragrance, taste, and touch—to express how God converted him is especially interesting because of the Manichean belief that matter is inherently corrupt. While an elite Manichee would seek to purify himself from the effects of the senses, Augustine portrays God as using those very senses to purify Augustine.
Themes
[28] Augustine considers that until his life is wholly filled by God, he will always be a burden to himself, and that life is a continual trial, even under prosperity (because even then, one must fear the possibility of adversity and grieve the fleeting nature of joy). [29] His only hope is in God’s mercy. He begs God, “Give me the grace to do as you command, and command me to do what you will!” He begs this especially in regard to continence, or the control of bodily desires. It is only by continence that a person may “regain that unity of self” that was lost in the search for a variety of pleasures.
Even though Augustine is now a Christian and has been forgiven of his past sins, that doesn’t mean sin ceases to be a perennial problem; life in the world is characterized by a constant battle against temptation and sin. To obey God, a Christian must rely on God to supply undeserved favor, or grace, to continually strengthen the soul. Augustine describes the absence of continence (self-control) as a kind of disintegration of the self—a failure to be centered on God.
Themes
[30] Even though God gave Augustine the grace to forgo marriage, Augustine still struggles with images imprinted on his memory by his old lustful habits. He puzzles over the fact that he is far more susceptible to such images while asleep than while he is awake. He trusts that, more and more, God will free him from the concupiscence that binds his soul.
By the time Augustine wrote Confessions, he would have been an ordained Catholic priest for several years and a bishop for a few, which often (though by no means universally in the late fourth century) meant living celibately. His memory is a liability, retaining images of his former sexual sins. Concupiscence became an important concept in Catholic theology, describing the pervasive effects of sin even when a person doesn’t consciously choose to sin. It’s easy to see how Augustine’s personal struggle with lust shaped his articulation of the concept.
Themes
[31] Another daily struggle is appetite, which Augustine resists by fasting. Even though food is a necessary remedy for hunger and thirst, pleasure often overtakes health as the motivation for eating and drinking, and it is difficult to know where to draw the line. He acknowledges that food is a gift from God but prays for strength to resist the ongoing temptation to gluttony.
Augustine goes through the different senses, identifying ways that people sin by indulging them too much. Even though Augustine no longer upholds the Manichean view that matter is evil, he does believe that people can easily become attached to the pleasures of the senses as ends in themselves and thereby be led away from God and into sin.
Themes
[33] While the pleasures of smell don’t pose much of a problem, Augustine admits that the attractions of sound are greater, particularly because of the mysterious relationship between song and the emotions. The senses should be “adjuncts to reason,” but they always want gratification beyond their due. Augustine doesn’t want to be too strict on this point, because he acknowledges the spiritual benefit that can come from singing psalms in church, for instance.
Plato particularly emphasized the connection between music and the soul in his dialogue Timaeus, which Augustine might be influenced by here. His mention of psalm-singing may reflect a contemporary controversy in North African churches as to what kinds of music, if any, should be permitted in church services.
Themes
[34] Temptations also come through the sense of sight, as people are too easily beguiled by the light of this world rather than the true Light. And people create lavish goods that are pleasing to the eye while forgetting their own Maker. Yet even such earthly beauty ultimately flows from supreme Beauty, and their standards of beauty come from the same place, though they don’t realize it.
Throughout the book, light has been a prominent symbol of God’s goodness in drawing souls to himself. Even though people can mistake earthly beauty for God’s light, thus being led into sin, Augustine also suggests that anything that’s truly beautiful must originate from God in some sense, even if distantly. This sets his view apart from the Manichean belief that matter is intrinsically evil.
Themes
[35] There’s a yet more subtle kind of temptation—the mind’s temptation to use the bodily senses to satisfy its curiosity. For example, people will gather around a mangled corpse or go to see “freaks and prodigies” in a theater show, all out of unhealthy curiosity. The same holds true when people resort to sorcery, or even when religious people demand signs and wonders from God simply because they crave the experience. Augustine is constantly tempted to give in to worthless speculation or to trivial distractions, especially from prayer. [36] The third form of temptation is the desire to be feared or loved by others. Augustine often feels this temptation to hear others’ applause and to be loved not for the sake of God, but in God’s place.
Augustine addresses other forms of temptation that derive from the senses in a less immediate way. The type of religious curiosity he describes is reflected in Augustine’s other theological writings, in which he distinguishes between use and enjoyment, or means and ends—it’s sinful, for instance, to get hung up on an exciting religious experience (the means) rather than focusing on God as the goal (the end). He was also constantly concerned about people in his congregation being ensnared by pagan religious practices, a temptation he understood personally.
Themes
[42] Having considered this world and the forms of temptation to which he is subject, Augustine asks how, in view of his sins, he can be reconciled to God. He understands that a mediator between God and man must have something in common with both. If such a mediator were mortal and sinful like humanity, then he would be far from God; if he were both immortal and without sin like God, then he would be far from humanity. [43] The true Mediator God has sent is Jesus Christ, who is mortal like human beings and just like God. Christ came so that by his justice, he “might make null the death of the wicked” by sharing in their death.
From considering how memory and the mind function to the unique temptations to which the senses are susceptible, Augustine turns to how God rescues humans from their sins. He explains the Christian doctrine of Jesus Christ as the Mediator for sinners, by virtue of the fact that he shares fully both in divinity and humanity (excepting sin). Implied in this doctrine is that human beings die because, due to original sin (sin inherited from their forefather Adam), they have forfeited the eternal life they originally shared with God. Free from sin, Jesus did not deserve to die; yet he chose to share in death so that humanity could then share once more in eternal life.
Themes
If he weren’t able to trust in Christ to cure his sins, Augustine would despair. God’s medicine is greater than human ills, and because the Word—so seemingly distant—has been “made flesh and come to dwell among us,” humanity need not despair.
Even though Christians must continue to battle sin as long as they’re in this world, Augustine counsels that it’s ultimately a winning battle, because—quoting the opening verses of the gospel of John—Christ has shared human miseries and overcome them.
Themes
