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Book 6
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] As Augustine entered maturity, his “self-delusion” deepened. Struggling to think correctly of God, he rightly held that God does not change, yet he continued to believe that God was “some kind of bodily substance extended in space,” reaching everywhere and filling everything. He could not conceive of something existing without having spatial dimensions. It didn’t occur to him that his very thoughts had no spatial qualities.
Shifting to some of the intellectual errors that hindered his acceptance of Christianity, Augustine notes the capacity for “self-delusion”—even if a person isn’t struggling with more obvious sins like ambition or lust, there are plenty of ways for the mind to lead them astray. His old Manichean beliefs are still an obstacle to his embrace of a Christian understanding of God’s being.
Themes
[3] Likewise, Augustine was unable to determine the cause of evil. All he knew for sure was that the Manichees were wrong that evil resulted from some corruption of God’s substance. He was beginning to understand that people choose to do evil out of their free will and that they suffer evil because of God’s justice, but he kept getting stuck on the question of where a wicked will originates, given that God is “Goodness itself” and all his creations are good. [5] Having established that God cannot undergo change or corruption, Augustine kept seeking the origin of evil and finding no satisfying answers. Yet, even in the midst of his uncertainty, he found that he believed more and more deeply in Christ as Lord and Savior, as the Catholic Church taught.
Recall that the origin of evil is one of the questions that tripped up Augustine and led him away from Christianity and toward Manicheism years earlier; even though he has moved beyond the idea of evil as an entity, it’s still difficult for him to reconcile the existence of evil with the existence of a good God. At the same time, the fact that he can’t resolve that difficulty doesn’t stop him from beginning to believe in Christ as the savior of sinners, suggesting that coming to faith isn’t necessarily a linear process or dependent on being able to articulate clear logical answers at every step.
Themes
[6] Though Augustine’s friends had tried to talk him out of believing in astrology before, he resisted them until God sent him a friend named Firminus. Firminus asked Augustine to consult the stars for him, and Augustine halfheartedly complied, admitting that he thought astrology might be meaningless. Then Firminus told him a story: when his mother gave birth to him, an enslaved woman in a friend’s household also delivered a baby at the same moment. Firminus’s father and his friend were obsessed with astrology and carefully cast horoscopes for both babies; yet while Firminus’s life went along smoothly, the child who was born into slavery remained enslaved to this day, his situation no better. Hearing this story, Augustine changed his mind once and for all; astrology, he decided, only got things right by chance.
Although this interlude about astrology isn’t clearly connected to the questions Augustine sought to resolve in the previous section, Augustine seems to regard his final rejection of astrology as a further positive step away from falsehood and toward Christianity. For Augustine, the providence of God is always and everywhere at work in people’s lives, but as the structure of Confessions bears out, that providence can usually only be understood long after the fact. So the error of astrology is not simply believing that the stars and not God determine people’s fates, but also the attempt to pry into knowledge of the future that isn’t meant for human beings.
Themes
[7] Even as Augustine accepted some beliefs and rejected others, he suffered in his soul, longing for the truth but separated from it by his ignorant pride. [8] Yet this suffering was God’s way of healing him. [9] By God’s will, Augustine read some Platonist works in Latin translation. From these writings, though in different words from those used in the Bible, he learned that the Word has always existed; that the Word is God; and through him all things have been made. He did not read in these works, however, that “the Word was made flesh and came to dwell among us” or that he suffered death for sinners.
In this section, readers might recognize some of the most famous lines from the New Testament’s Gospel of John. The verses refer to Christ existing eternally with God the Father and later being “made flesh” and living within human history. Augustine explains that he found some of these ideas—namely Christ’s (the “Word’s”) divinity, coeternity with God, and the creation of all things through him—by reading Platonist works that had become available in Latin translation fairly recently. Yet, while certain Christian teachings were discernible through these pre-Christian writings, they could not reveal others, such as Christ’s incarnation and atoning death.
Themes
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[10] These books reminded Augustine to look into his own soul, and there, he saw the Light of God and no longer had any cause to doubt; he “might more easily have doubted that I was alive than that Truth had being.” [11] As he thought about these things, Augustine also realized that God alone truly is, in the sense that he does not change; all lesser things have their being not in themselves, but from God. [12] From this, he also concluded that evil does not exist as a substance, because everything that exists, having been made by God, is good.
This section recalls the Manichean idea that the light of divinity is found in the human soul—yet, in a polemical move, Augustine finds the light of the God of the Bible and of Catholic teaching illuminating his soul, not that of any other being. What’s more, he doesn’t just find a truthful proposition, but a “Truth [that] had being,” suggesting that he has come to believe not because his questions have been spontaneously resolved, but because he has met and believed in someone. As a result of this encounter in his soul, he finally understands, too, that evil as such doesn’t exist, because things only derive their being from a perfectly good Being; evil, in that sense, is a non-thing, an absence of good.
Themes
[17] To Augustine’s dismay, though he now loved God, the habits of his flesh pulled him away from enjoying God. He had only “the memory of something that I loved and longed for.” [18] Augustine could not find the means of enjoying God because he was not yet humble enough to understand that Jesus Christ was his God. He didn’t grasp that Christ took on human flesh and lived on earth in order to draw human beings to himself. [19] At this point, he just thought of Christ as an extraordinary teacher, or even a perfect man. [21] However, having read the Platonists, Augustine now began studying the Bible, especially the letters of the apostle Paul. He saw that while the truth contained in the Platonist books was also contained in the Bible, the Platonists couldn’t tell him about God’s love and salvation.
Though Augustine has begun to believe in God, this section makes it clear that he isn’t fully a Christian yet, either—he’s only gotten a taste, or memory, of what being a Christian would mean for him. For one thing, he hasn’t yet committed himself to giving up the sins he most enjoys. More importantly, he doesn’t yet believe in Jesus Christ. Having recognized the truth to be found in the Platonist writers, but recognizing that the Platonists can’t tell him about Christ, he starts reading the Bible in earnest—not just out of curiosity, as before, but with faith that it will reveal truth to him. The distinction between the Platonists and the Bible follows the theological distinction between general and special revelation—that is, what the world at large can reveal about God and what only the Bible and church teaching can reveal about him, namely the particulars of who Christ is and what his salvation means for sinners.
Themes
