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Book 3
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] During these nine years—from Augustine’s 19th to his 28th year—Augustine was both led astray and led others astray. He begs God to let him continue to confess the story, even if the proud and mighty laugh at the likes of him. [2] At the time, for love of money, Augustine became a teacher of public speaking. He did his best to teach his pupils to use their gifts honestly and not for dishonest gain. He was also living with a mistress; he didn’t love her, but he stayed faithful to her.
In Augustine’s role as a teacher of rhetoric, he had considerable influence over the minds of the young men who came to study with him, and his reference to leading others astray suggests that he harbors guilt about that. Even though rhetoric was the foundation of education in the ancient Roman world, it also had a reputation for being a slippery and manipulative set of tools in the wrong hands. Even though Augustine seems to have wanted to use his talents for good, he couldn’t control what his students did with his teachings after they left his classroom.
Themes
[3] Even though Augustine avoided sorcerers who offered sacrifices to demons, that didn’t stop him from consulting astrologers. At one point, however, a kindly old proconsul persuaded Augustine that astrology was rubbish and only sometimes predicted the future by chance. Still, Augustine didn’t give up his astrology books.
The proconsul, unnamed here, was a man named Vindicianus, who served as physician to Emperor Valentinian I. In late antiquity, Vindicianus’s stance was actually an unusual one for a physician to hold, since doctors often consulted astrologers or even cast spells as part of their treatment of patients. Even though Augustine stops giving as much credence to astrology at this point, it still seems to have been enough of a “given” culturally that he doesn’t give it up completely.
Themes
[4] During this period, while teaching in Thagaste, Augustine made a close friend; the two had grown up together. Though their friendship wasn’t founded on the love of God, and in fact Augustine led his friend away from God and into error, it was nevertheless precious. By the end of their first year of friendship, however, Augustine’s dear friend died.
Readers might find the story of Augustine’s good friend to be an abrupt detour, but Augustine uses it in part to illustrate the fragility of anything—even a genuine friendship—that isn’t founded on love for God and its potential to lead to grief.
Themes
After pausing to praise God’s “unfathomable […] judgement,” Augustine explains that his friend came down with a sudden fever and was baptized while unconscious. When his friend regained consciousness, he was horrified by Augustine’s jokes about his baptism. A few days later, his friend relapsed and died. Filled with grief, Augustine “saw only death” wherever he looked.
Recall that in fourth-century Christianity, baptism was often postponed until a person was on their deathbed. In this case, Augustine’s flippancy about his friend’s emergency baptism shows how much he held himself aloof from church teachings at this stage, though his friend clearly didn’t feel the same way. Augustine’s hyperbolic statement that in his grief he “saw only death” conveys to readers what an impression this loss made on him.
Themes
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[6] Like anyone who loves only timebound things, Augustine was miserable, feeling that now he was only “half a soul.” Yet, far from wanting to die himself, he feared death even more. [7] Augustine found no consolation in earthly things, only in his tears. Yet the god he believed in was too unreal and insubstantial to bear the burden of his grief. The only solution was to leave behind Thagaste and move to Carthage.
Augustine suggests that because he didn’t love anything beyond this world (namely, God), he was unable to put his friend’s death into a larger perspective and thereby find comfort. Not only that, but the deity he did believe in—the one the Manicheans professed—didn’t offer any answers for the grief Augustine was facing. In other words, his religion wasn’t equal to life’s sorrows.
Themes
[8] As time passed, Augustine found comfort in the joys of other friendships and his grief healed, though his heart was still captive to the Manichean “fable” that he and his other friends believed. [9] Only those who love their friends “in God,” who is never lost, will never lose those who are dear to them. [10] Even when the soul clings to beauty, if that beauty is outside of God, then the soul ultimately clings to sorrow. Yet beauty could not exist unless it came from God. God sets a course for each of the things his word has created, and if the soul tries to find its rest in such transient things, its desires will destroy it.
Though Augustine doesn’t explain exactly what it means to love others “in God,” his belief in God’s eternality and goodness are key. If God is good and lives forever, and if he is also the creator of all things, then his creations—including human beings—are loved best when they are loved as gifts of God and expressions of his goodness. If, on the other hand, his creations are loved as ends in themselves, that love will always lead to sorrow, because none of God’s creations lasts forever in and of itself. Recall Augustine’s claim, at the beginning of the book, that a soul can only find lasting rest in the God who made it. A soul that seeks rest in anything less than God cannot be satisfied.
Themes
Augustine exhorts his own soul to heed the word of God, because only in God can the soul find undisturbed peace. Therefore, too, the soul must entrust to God all that God has given it, and that way, nothing will be lost. That even includes the mortal body, which will someday be remade and bound again to the soul. [12] The delightful things of this world are properly loved when that love is directed to God. These things will turn bitter if they are loved without God. Augustine adds that by taking mortal human flesh in the Virgin Mary’s womb, Christ called humanity to himself; indeed, “Life himself […] slew [death] with his own abounding life.”
Augustine expands on the idea that only those things that are entrusted to the eternal God will last beyond mortal, earthly life. He then uses this idea as a basis for discussing the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ—the eternal God becoming flesh and living a fully human life—and what it means for human beings, namely that even human bodies and souls, having been united with Christ by virtue of his becoming human, will one day enjoy eternal life. Not only did Christ live a mortal life, Augustine takes care to emphasize, but he also suffered death—and death could not overcome a man who was also God. In Augustine’s view, therefore, Christ’s defeat of death should offer great hope to all of humanity.
Themes
[13] Back then, Augustine didn’t know all this. Instead, he loved a lower form of beauty and was dragged down by it; he even wrote a book on his ideas of beauty, which was lost. [14] He dedicated the book to a public speaker named Hierius, yet now he knows that he didn’t admire the man mainly for his accomplishments, but more because others admired him. [15] In his book, Augustine focused on material beauty and conceived of the human mind as the supreme good and evil as a kind of substance. In those days, he reflects, he failed to understand that the human mind isn’t the essence of truth, but “must be illumined by another light.” Though Augustine was struggling towards God, God resisted him because of Augustine’s pride in asserting falsehoods about God.
Augustine’s ideas in his lost book on beauty clearly reflect Manichean ideas, especially that evil is some kind of material entity. In fact, his whole description of the book has an air of youthful arrogance—he dedicated the book to Hierius because the man was popular and Augustine presumably hoped to gain from that celebrity in some way, and he champions the potential of the human mind above all. Manichees taught that bits of cosmic light were trapped in human consciousness; Augustine’s reference to “another light” (that is, God’s) is therefore actually a subtle polemic against Manicheism.
Themes
[16] When Augustine was about 20, he studied Aristotle’s work Ten Categories, which defines substance and its attributes. Looking back, Augustine doesn’t believe studying this work benefited him, because it led him to think of God as having substance and attributes, in the same way that any other object does. Augustine read many other books on logic, rhetoric, and the other liberal arts, but because he didn’t know God as the source of truth, his studies did him little good.
Ten Categories is part of the collection of Aristotle’s works on logic known as the Organon and proposes a 10-fold classification of everything that exists. In Augustine’s later thought, and in classical Christian theology as it emerged in part from Augustine, God is not said to “have” attributes the way other things do; rather, God simply is good and beautiful, for instance. Readers can see why Augustine looks back on Aristotle’s work as being misleading for him at the time; still, it would be wrong to read Augustine as simply being anti-intellectual here, as he believes his studies failed to benefit him mainly because God was not at the center of them.
Themes
