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Book 1
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] It’s time now for Augustine to recall his youthful, fleshly sins. He does this out of love for God; even though the memories are bitter, they help him enjoy God’s “sweetness” all the more. [2] In those days, Augustine wanted nothing except to love and be loved. This desire went beyond friendship, and Augustine was unable to distinguish between love and lust. He fell deeper and deeper into sin, unrestrained by God. If only someone had encouraged him to channel his desires into marriage and fatherhood, or else into chastity. Instead, by the age of 16, Augustine was swept away by lust. His family, caring only that he become a good public speaker, didn’t restrain him.
From his infancy and childhood, Augustine moves on to discuss his adolescence. While the story of his teenage years involves confession in the sense of admitting his sins, he sees the act of confessing as a testimony of God’s mercy to him as a sinner and hence an act of praise. Augustine doesn’t get into the specifics of his “lust,” but readers can infer that he wasn’t living a celibate life. There’s some implication that Augustine’s sexual behavior was regarded as typical for a teenage boy and that as long as it didn’t interfere with his future, his family didn’t worry much about the consequences.
Themes
[3] That same year, Augustine’s small-town literary and rhetorical studies were disrupted by his father’s determination to send him to Carthage. Augustine tells this story not for God’s sake, who already knows it, but for the sake of other people, who might need to learn that God hears the cries of a penitent person. Many people praised Augustine’s father who, though not rich, saved up to ensure that his son had the chance to study. Yet, Augustine notes, his father made no effort to ensure that Augustine matured as a Christian.
Up to now, Augustine had been living in the town of Thagaste, where scholars believe his father may have been a town councilman. Though the family is believed to have owned property and thus had some social prestige, they would not have been wealthy by any means. By scrimping and saving to send Augustine to the bigger city of Carthage (in what’s now Tunisia), Augustine’s father hoped to raise the family’s name and fortunes accordingly. Today, Carthage is a few hours’ journey from Souk Ahras, Algeria, the site of ancient Thagaste; obviously, it would have been a much longer journey in the fourth century.
Themes
In the meantime, Augustine lived lazily at home. Though his father wasn’t bothered by Augustine’s evident lust, his pious mother grew concerned. Yet his mother’s warnings about sexual misconduct went unheard—Augustine felt embarrassed to heed them, not realizing they came from God. Instead, he wanted his friends to believe he was just as depraved as they were, whether he had done the same things or not. And, indeed, even his mother didn’t restrain him entirely, because she feared that marriage might hinder Augustine’s academic success. So, Augustine was free to commit many wicked deeds.
Modern readers might find this section to be a strikingly believable description of a teenage boy’s life: Augustine is obsessed with sex, rolls his eyes at his mother’s scolding, and wants to fit in with his peers. It’s also notable that as much as Augustine reveres his mother, Monica, throughout Confessions, he doesn’t refrain from mentioning that her motives weren’t always perfect, either—even though she was a Christian, she put Augustine’s career first as much as her non-Christian husband did, a reminder that everyone is prone to sin.
Themes
[4] Augustine was even willing to steal, though he lacked for nothing. In fact, he only wanted “to enjoy the theft itself and the sin.” Near his family’s vineyard was a pear tree loaded with ugly fruits. One night, Augustine and his friends shook a bunch of pears off the tree, not even to eat them, but simply to throw them to the pigs. Augustine confesses to God that, at this time, he loved the evil he committed for its own sake.
This famous passage is also key to understanding Augustine’s doctrine of sin. Notice that the pear theft has almost nothing to do with the pears themselves; in fact, the stolen pears go entirely to waste. The boys steal just for the fun of stealing and doing something wrong; it’s a petty and pointless act, not done for any supposedly higher purpose. Augustine suggests that the pear theft epitomizes sin in general—that at heart, people simply love doing wicked things, which places them at enmity with God, who is pure Goodness.
Themes
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[5] Augustine observes that the world is filled with beautiful things, but that even these good things can be “occasions of sin” because they belong to the “lowest order of good” that can tempt people away from the higher good of truth and God himself.
Augustine expands on the idea that created things aren’t sinful in themselves, but that they can become pathways to or means of sin when they draw people away from the proper love of God. In other words, the fault for sin lies squarely within human beings themselves.
Themes
[6] Augustine returns to the subject of the stolen pears. He didn’t really want them, because he had better pears at home. He only found pleasure in the sin of stealing them. The theft didn’t even offer the “deceptive” beauty found in pride or ambition. Augustine observes that a sin like sloth can pose as a love of peace and extravagance can pose as abundance, and yet real peace and abundance can only be found in the Lord. Even grief, in a way, is a desire to be like God, “from whom nothing can be taken away.” All these things are examples of an “unchaste love” that seeks elsewhere what can only truly be found in God, and feebly try to imitate what only God can do.
Augustine suggests, again, that what made the theft of the pears so sinful was the wanton desire to do wrong for wrong’s sake. He couldn’t even pretend that there was some higher motivation behind the act, as a person might do to excuse behavior that’s actually just ambitious or lazy. Often, Augustine explains, there’s something attractive about sin in that the sinful act is a misguided attempt to imitate an aspect of God—he finds this to be true of grief, since a grieving person longs to be untouched by life’s painful changes (like God, who never changes and isn’t affected by time’s passing the way humans are). The pear theft, on the other hand, had nothing attractive about it, and its only motivation was a naked desire to be bad.
Themes
[8] Continuing to reflect on the pears incident, Augustine muses that he wouldn’t have committed the theft if he hadn’t also enjoyed his friends’ company at the time. If he had really desired the pears for themselves, he wouldn’t have needed the “thrill” of stealing alongside accomplices. [9] Why was it so much fun to steal with his friends? This kind of friendship “bewitch[es]” the mind, drawing on the shame people feel when they refrain from going along with a crowd.
Augustine derives another insight from the pear theft, namely the social aspect of sin. Modern readers might recognize this section as a description of peer pressure—people’s judgment is clouded by the desire to fit in with their friends and avoid ostracism, and at the time, the excitement of getting away with something as a group is often a reward in itself. But for Augustine, the moral distortion produced by peer pressure doesn’t excuse but rather compounds the sin.
Themes
[10] Augustine wonders if anyone can “unravel this twisted tangle[.]” Rather than thinking about it, he yearns for innocence and justice. In God is found the best way of life; yet, in his youth, Augustine had wandered far away from it.
Augustine concludes Book II by observing the entangling effects of sin, which are distasteful for him to dwell on now that he knows of God’s goodness. In his youth, Augustine had no regard for God, and so he had no desire to pursue a truly good life, either.
Themes
