Confessions: Book 3 Summary & Analysis

Again, because of his nominally Christian background, Augustine’s first instinct, in his newfound desire to pursue wisdom, is to turn to the Christian scriptures. However, the Bible seems strange and inscrutable to him at this point in his life. He is used to studying ancient epics and philosophical treatises authored by pre-Christian pagans, and here he implies that the Bible doesn’t fit into the categories familiar to him and, because of that, he doesn’t know what to make of it and dismisses it as unsophisticated. It’s also true that the Latin translation available to Augustine was probably fairly wooden and not exactly beautiful to read.

The “sensualists” are the Manichees, a Persian religious sect that emerged in the 200s and had spread rapidly throughout the Roman world by the time Augustine met them in Carthage in the mid-370s. It’s important to note that the Manichees called themselves Christians and taught their own version of the doctrine of the Trinity but believed, among other departures from orthodox Christian doctrine, that Jesus was not really divine. They also regarded celestial bodies as divine—hence Augustine’s comment about the sun, moon, and stars. Manichees regarded themselves as having insights into God and the Bible that ordinary, inferior Christians didn’t have, which might help explain why Augustine, a budding scholar who found the Bible unimpressive, would find this group attractive.

Manichean mythology taught that five elements dwelt in five dark caverns, from which various parts of the created world emerged. Augustine doesn’t explain these myths in detail, and it’s not important for readers to know the specifics, except to notice that even the poetry and mythology Augustine studied as a child, which he rejected as immoral earlier in Confessions, is better than what the Manichees taught him. This is probably because, unlike the ancient literature Augustine studied as a child, Manichean myths intentionally trained Augustine to think of God in ways he later rejected as utterly false.

The Manichees intimidated Augustine with questions that he didn’t have answers to and that therefore made them seem wiser in his eyes than they later proved to be. They especially challenged the Genesis account of humanity’s creation “in God’s image,” falsely assuming that it means God the Father must have a physical human body. Augustine alludes to his later, mature belief that (contra the Manichees) evil is not an entity in itself but the privation of good. But because Augustine lacked a clear understanding of foundational Christian teachings, it’s not surprising that he was thrown further off course by Manichean attacks on them.

The Manichees were also known for criticizing details of the Old Testament, such as the fact that some of the early patriarchs (like Abraham and Jacob) had polygamous marriages. Augustine’s argument reads as a bit cagey here. Plenty of later Christian commentators do regard the patriarchs’ marriage customs as sinful, but Augustine seems to want to say that God gave them a pass because of the times. However, Augustine’s overall point is that God’s standard of justice is the one people must judge by, and that the Manichean critics were reading and interpreting Scripture by their own flawed standards.

Augustine moves into a discussion of categories of sin more generally. While different societies might have different views of what constitutes appropriate conduct, he holds that there are sins, such as violence against other human beings and “unnatural” sexual acts, that are wrong regardless of the context because they contradict God’s law. Human law and custom are relative in a way that divine law is not.

In Augustine’s view, sin does not harm God—it can’t, because God doesn’t change in reaction to circumstances (a point he’ll develop later). But when people sin, they move away from God’s perfect goodness, thereby hurting themselves.

While all sin represents a movement away from God, not all sins are equally damaging or severe: much depends, Augustine suggests, on someone’s trajectory at the time they commit a given sin. And, anyway, human beings are not equipped to judge one another’s sins; only God has the eternal perspective and perfect wisdom to do that.

The upper-level or “Elect” Manichees held to strict vegetarianism, and Mani had taught that plucking and eating some fruits tormented them. Augustine suggests that it was absurd for him to buy into Manichean critiques of the Bible while embracing such silly myths at the same time. Meanwhile, even at this point when Augustine was so far from Christianity, God was still drawing him in the church’s direction through his mother’s prayers, though he didn’t know it at the time.

When Monica sought out a bishop to debate her wayward son, the bishop seems to have discerned that this approach would backfire with Augustine and that Augustine needed to be left alone to make mistakes and come to his own conclusions about them over time. Moreover, the bishop movingly suggests that God will work through Monica’s heartfelt prayers to save Augustine from his false beliefs in God’s timing.