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Book 5
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 asks where God was all this time, as Augustine wandered in darkness, in despair of finding the truth. By this time, Monica had followed him to Italy. She wasn’t surprised to learn that Augustine was no longer a Manichee and confidently told him that she believed that before she died, she would see him become a Catholic. [2] Back in Africa, it had been Monica’s custom to bring offerings of food and wine to saints’ shrines, but when she learned that Ambrose had forbidden this practice in Milan for fear of people getting drunk and becoming superstitious, she gladly obeyed the bishop. She loved Ambrose for his influence in her son’s life, and he admired Monica’s piety as well.
Of course, looking back, Augustine believes that God was present even in his “darkness,” but he rhetorically underscores the degree to which he felt lost in his early days in Milan. Ambrose’s and Augustine’s other writings attest to drunkenness at Christian gatherings at saints’ shrines, and it’s also possible that Ambrose wanted to draw firm lines between Christian practices of venerating saints and “superstitious” practices at pagan shrines that might have appeared similar. Augustine uses this section to bolster the reputation of his beloved mother, who was eventually canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church herself.
Themes
[3] Though Augustine was full of spiritual questions and admired Ambrose, he kept his questions to himself, knowing the bishop was busy. But the more Augustine listened to Ambrose’s sermons, the more he began to believe that it was possible to answer the Manichees’ falsehoods about the Bible. Even though he did not yet understand Christian teachings, he now understood that he had previously been criticizing a made-up version of the faith, not the real thing. [4] Still, he remained in a state of suspense, unable to be certain of the truth and unwilling to accept in his heart what Ambrose taught.
Augustine’s openness to the Catholic Church’s teachings was clearly growing during this time. He was beginning to listen to the substance of Ambrose’s sermons and find them more and more persuasive; his criticism of the Manichees also became more nuanced, as he saw that what the Manichees had been denouncing wasn’t actually genuine Christian teaching. But there’s clearly a difference in Augustine’s mind between greater intellectual openness and an embrace of Christianity; while the former is necessary in his journey to becoming a Christian, it isn't sufficient to make him a Christian.
Themes
[5] Augustine appreciated that the Church demanded that certain things be accepted on faith instead of proven. This was different from the Manichees, who mocked the idea of faith, yet put forward “preposterous inventions” that passed for scientific truth. God also showed Augustine that he already accepted many things on faith—facts of history, places he’d never seen, and the words of those he trusted. He even had to accept by faith that his parents were really his parents. In this way, Augustine realized he shouldn’t fault those who believed the Bible on the basis of faith.
Augustine begins to realize that although his intellect is active in his faith, ultimately faith goes beyond where the intellect alone can follow. While the Manichees didn’t approve of faith as commended by the Catholic Church, Augustine recognizes that faith operates in people’s everyday lives in a variety of ways, and that it isn’t in conflict with the intellect. Given that the human intellect isn’t unlimited, there are things that human beings must simply accept—though, notably, Augustine’s examples are things that people generally have a strong rational basis for accepting (e.g., their parentage). This suggests that Augustine’s view of supernatural faith, too, does not commend faith as simply “blind”; faith can and does harmonize with reason.
Themes
Believing that human beings are too weak to discover the truth by means of reason alone, Augustine came to believe that God had made the Bible the means by which humanity would find and believe in him, granting it “conspicuous authority” the world over. Uniquely, the Bible is simple enough for anyone to read and understand, yet profound enough for the most learned to be captivated and challenged by it.
Far from the skepticism of his Manichean days, Augustine comes to believe that the Bible is not only coherent, but that it is the divinely-provided means of knowing and believing in God. Recall that when he first tried to read the Bible as a young man, Augustine found it embarrassingly unsophisticated. More than a decade later, he finds that the Bible’s very simplicity is one of the same things that makes it “conspicuously” authoritative—in part because he believes that simplicity also contains depths that a wise reader could never exhaust in their lifetime.
Themes
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[6] Augustine still wanted to be rich and famous and to get married, but God allowed great difficulties to thwart his plans and make him miserable. One day he saw a laughing beggar and realized that this man, after a good meal, had found the happiness that Augustine was seeking by means of his ambitions, yet Augustine had only found unhappy burdens. The beggar’s happiness may not have been true joy, but Augustine now sees that the honor he was seeking was even more empty, because he was not seeking it in God.
Augustine will repeatedly cite lust and ambition as two of the major obstacles to his becoming a Christian. The nature of true happiness has been a recurring interest ever since Augustine read Cicero in his youth. The image of the contented beggar forces Augustine to recognize that the happiness he’s seeking in his career is actually false happiness. In other words, it’s no more substantial or lasting than the happiness the beggar finds in a good meal.
Themes
[7] Augustine often talked with his friends about such things, especially Alypius and Nebridius. Alypius came from the same town as Augustine and was his former pupil. In his youth Alypius was obsessed with the entertainment in the Carthage amphitheater, but hearing some chance words of Augustine set him on a better path. [8] However, one day after Alypius had moved to Rome, some friends dragged him to the gladiatorial games despite his protests. During the games, Alypius kept his eyes shut tight. But, enticed by the roars of the crowd, he peeked at the fighting and was immediately sucked into the violence. Augustine says that Alypius’s attendance at the games was an example of presumption, not courage. [10] At Rome Alypius became Augustine’s close friend, and Augustine admired Alypius’s honesty and integrity in his work as a government official. Like Alypius and Augustine, Nebridius was in Milan seeking wisdom.
The story of Augustine’s friend Alypius at the amphitheater is a good example of how Augustine believes sin works. When Augustine says that Alypius was presumptuous, he anticipates the argument that, having overcome his past obsession with gladiatorial games, Alypius should not have been afraid to attend the games again. Rather, Augustine says, Alypius assumed he could not be easily tempted by the sin around him—a form of pride that most often goes before a fall. Sin, Augustine thus suggests, is a perennial threat even to someone who is experienced at resisting it, if they don’t watch out. By mentioning Alypius and Nebridius in his life at Milan, Augustine shows that his journey to faith wasn’t a solitary one, but that the search for wisdom is often strengthened by community.
Themes
[11] In Milan, now 30, Augustine realized he was still wrestling with the same old problems and telling himself foolish excuses—that any day now, he’d discover the truth or find someone who could resolve his doubts. He also procrastinated by telling himself he couldn’t pursue the truth until he acquired the right books, or that he didn’t have enough spare time to study, or that he shouldn’t be too hasty in abandoning worldly hopes and ambitions. He also resisted the thought of forgoing marriage, imagining sexual continence to be unbearable.
By this point in his life, Augustine’s struggle has moved away from discerning between one philosophical school or religion and another and has become much more of an internal struggle with his own conflicting desires. He keeps coming up with reasons that he shouldn’t commit to the church just yet, but the real problem is his desire for satisfaction in worldly things—namely, career and marriage.
Themes
[12] Alypius tried to talk Augustine out of marriage, but Augustine argued that Alypius was inexperienced and didn’t understand. As a result, Alypius became curious about marriage, and Augustine continued to lust, simply out of habit. Neither man cared about having an honorable marriage and family. [13] Meanwhile, Monica had been urging Augustine to marry in the hope that it would push him towards baptism. Accordingly, Augustine proposed and was accepted by a girl he liked, with the goal of marrying when she was a little older.
The subject of Augustine’s views on sexuality and marriage is vast. Here, it’s worth noting that while the Bible doesn’t denounce marriage or sexuality within marriage, the view in the fourth-century Catholic church was more complicated. Monasticism or at least celibacy had increasingly become an ideal for ordained priests and bishops, with marriage often viewed as more of a concession (a way to keep lust in check) than a positive good, and mostly intended for regular people. Augustine appears to assume that same perspective here, though his view is marriage is much more positive than that of the Manichees, who saw procreation as repugnant.
Themes
[14] Around this time, Augustine and about 10 of his friends decided to pursue an experiment in communal living, in retirement from “the bustle and worry of life.” However, some of the prospective members were married or hoping to be, so the plan collapsed. [15] Meanwhile, because of Augustine’s impending marriage, the woman he’d been living with “was torn from [his] side” and sent back to Africa, leaving him with a son, Adeodatus, and a broken heart. He tried to cope by taking another mistress, but this only made things worse. [16] Augustine thanks God that through all his fluctuating opinions—his failure to understand good and evil and the nature of true happiness—the fear of death and God’s judgment kept him from sinning still worse.
Readers may find it striking that this is the first mention of Augustine’s young son, Adeodatus, and that his separation from his unnamed mistress, whom he apparently loved and stayed faithful to for many years, receives relatively little comment. Scholars can only speculate (and have) on this subject; but consider that, for someone of Augustine’s standing, a socially advantageous marriage would have been regarded as paramount, even to his pious mother Monica; and no well-off Milanese family would marry their daughter to a man with a known mistress. In any event, Augustine’s language here leaves little room to doubt that he was genuinely crushed by the loss of this woman, whose identity has been likewise lost to history (beyond the conjecture that she was North African and probably both uneducated and lower-class).
Themes
