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Book 7
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 says he will now tell how God broke the “chains” that bound him. At this point in his life, Augustine believed firmly in God and in the truth of the Bible, but his life was a mess. He was no longer ambitious in his career, but he was still stuck “in the bonds of woman’s love,” and this stopped him from committing to the Church. He decided to visit a devout old man named Simplicianus, Ambrose’s spiritual mentor, for help.
While Augustine has essentially figured out what he believes by now, that isn’t enough for him to be a Christian—he has to commit his whole life to the church, and for him, that means giving up his propensity to lust. The language he uses, of “chains” and being in “bonds,” suggests that his will needs to be broken in some way.
Themes
[2] When Augustine described his wanderings, Simplicianus was glad that Augustine had read the Platonists (in whom “God and his Word are constantly implied”) instead of other, error-riddled philosophers. As an example of humility, he told Augustine the story of Victorinus, the renowned rhetoric professor who had translated the Platonists into Latin and who decided to be baptized in his old age. [4] Augustine remarks that, due to their pride, those in positions of power make unlikely converts; so, the Church’s rejoicing is all the greater when someone like Victorinus becomes a Christian.
Simplicianus followed Ambrose as Bishop of Milan, and Victorinus, the Christian convert whose story he tells Augustine, was a highly cultured and accomplished North African rhetorician. So, Simplicianus’s choice of example for Augustine is a very intentional one—Victorinus was at the top of his field and didn’t have anything to gain socially by embracing Christianity. Simplicianus suggests that Augustine must find the same kind of humility in order to convert. Again, too, Augustine’s ability to perceive Christian ideas in more academically recognized writings like those of the Platonists is not unique in late antiquity.
Themes
[5] Hearing Victorinus’s story, Augustine longed to follow his example. But he felt like he was being torn apart by two different wills: his desire to serve God and his lust. He explains that giving in to lust formed a habit, and when he didn’t resist that habit, habit became necessity. Even though he was convinced that serving God was the right path, he battled inertia and an ongoing enslavement to his sin.
Augustine explains the inner conflict that keeps him from converting—that he knows the right thing to do and even wants to do it, but that his will to continue serving sin is at this point as strong as his will to begin serving God. One of these wills has to conquer the other. Recall the story of the pears—Augustine believes that all sin, on some level, comes down to the will’s stubborn choice to pursue sin for its own sake.
Themes
[6] Augustine will now confess how God released him from this slavery to sin. Augustine had been attending church whenever his workload permitted. One day, Alypius and Augustine’s friend Ponticianus visited them, noticed Augustine’s interest in the Bible, and told them the story of Antony, an Egyptian monk, and the story of two of Ponticianus’s friends, who had been suddenly converted to the monastic life upon reading Antony’s story for themselves. [7] As Augustine listened to Ponticianus, God forced him to face his own wickedness. He thought back over the past 12 years of studying philosophy, chasing lust, and dabbling in the Manichaean religion. All this time, Augustine had told himself that he was postponing his commitment to Christianity because he had no specific goal toward which to direct his life. Now, the example of Ponticianus’s two friends weighed on Augustine’s conscience.
Antony “the Great” was born in the middle of the third century C.E. and is traditionally regarded as the first Christian monk. His story was popularized by Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, who wrote of the wealthy young Antony going to church one day and hearing the gospel story in which Jesus tells a young man to sell everything he has. Accordingly, Antony gave his possessions to the poor and retreated into the Egyptian desert for the rest of his life, inspiring a community of like-minded ascetics sometimes referred to as the Desert Fathers. Ponticianus’s two friends were inspired on the spot by Antony’s story, much like Antony himself is said to have been inspired in church. Augustine, too, is struck by the idea of an instantaneous submission of one’s will to a completely different way of life, in sharp contrast to his attempt to hang onto both Christianity and his favorite sins.
Themes
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[8] After Ponticianus left, Augustine had an emotional outburst, shocking Alypius: Augustine asked what was wrong with the two of them, that despite all their learning, they had not followed in the footsteps of Ponticianus’s friends and given up the world’s pleasures. Overwhelmed and wrestling with his soul, Augustine retreated to the garden of the house where he and Alypius stayed.
The story of Antony and Ponticianus’s friends brings Augustine to a crisis point. No longer is it a matter of figuring out what he believes; he knows now, and simply knowing isn’t enough. Rather, like the two friends inspired by Antony’s monasticism, he has to act on what he believes. Augustine probably intends for his retreat into a garden to allude to both the Garden of Eden (a place of new life) and the Garden of Gethsemane (where Jesus prayed before his death, finally submitting to the Father’s will).
Themes
[9] Augustine ponders the fact that when the mind commands the body to do something, the body obeys at once, but when the mind commands itself to do something, the mind resists—even though the mind could not make that command in the first place if it did not will the thing commanded. He concludes that this is because the thing commanded is not fully willed. So it is possible for the mind to have two wills—both to will to do something and to will the opposite.
Augustine returns to the problem of the twofold will. The workings of the mind are an ongoing mystery to Augustine in Confessions, and as this conflict shows, that mystery is never simply abstract to him. The mind’s conflict with itself is a higher-stakes battle than any philosophical debate and, at least for Augustine, far more difficult to resolve.
Themes
[10] Observing this phenomenon, some, like the Manichees, have claimed that the two wills spring from two minds of opposing natures—one good and one evil. But Augustine believes that his conflicted will did not spring from two warring natures within him, but from “Adam, [his] first father.” [11] This is why Augustine suffered in suspense; even as he crept closer to a decision, his “lower instincts” kept a firm hold, trying to convince him he couldn’t live without the “paltry inanities” he’d have to give up if he became a Christian. Nevertheless, “the voice of habit was very faint” by this time, and beautiful “Continence […] modestly beckoned.” Alypius stayed by Augustine’s side in the garden while Augustine struggled internally.
This section shows how much Augustine’s earlier Manichean view has changed. He believes that there are two wills, but they don’t originate from different natures, but from humanity’s progenitor, Adam, who disobeyed God and then passed down his sinful nature to all who came after him. In one way or another, every human being must therefore fight the same battle Augustine fights here in the garden. Note his emphasis that the sins he’s loath to give up are actually insipid and trifling, and they fight him all the harder the closer he gets to giving them up—another example of the same pathetic desire to do wrong that gripped him in the pear orchard years earlier. Augustine personifies “Continence” in order to show that the idea of chastity no longer feels like a threat to him and has in fact become “beautiful”—clearly, his will to convert is winning out.
Themes
[12] Finally, Augustine left Alypius and sat down under a fig tree so that he could weep and pray in solitude. Suddenly, he heard a child’s singsong voice repeating the phrase, “Take it and read, take it and read.” Augustine recalled no such words being part of any children’s game. He decided the child’s words must be a divine command to pick up and read his Bible. He recalled that Antony had been converted instantly by hearing a similar command in church. He rushed back to Alypius, grabbed his Bible, and opened it at random to the passage: “Not in revelling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites.” He didn’t need to read any further. Immediately, “light […] flooded into my heart” and doubt disappeared.
In this famous passage, Augustine’s sitting under a tree might again be an allusion to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis, from which Adam sinfully took fruit against God’s word. This time, in heeding the mysterious child’s voice, Augustine hears and heeds God’s word. When he opens the Bible to Romans 13:13-14, readers should note that randomly flipping through one’s Bible for guidance is not a practice Augustine himself would generally condone, and in fact he condemned it as superstitious in later writings! Rather, he seems to view his garden experience as equivalent to Antony’s experience of walking into church and hearing a word God intended just for him; only here, God uses the child’s voice to authorize and guide Augustine at a pivotal moment. It’s significant here that the passage Augustine reads doesn’t just exhort him to give up “lust and wantonness” from sheer willpower, but commands him to “arm himself” with the power of Christ to overcome his sins. Afterward, the “light” from heaven Augustine has spoken of before resolves his inner struggle. Again, this is different from the Manichean light that wars constantly with a dark counterpart; the light Augustine speaks of cannot finally be resisted by darkness.
Themes
Now calm, Augustine told Alypius what had happened. Alypius read the passage for himself and, a little beyond it, found a verse that he felt applied to himself. He decided to join the church without undergoing distress like Augustine’s. They told Monica what had happened, and she was overjoyed that her prayers had been answered and her dream had come true.
Alypius’s conversion experience is markedly different from Augustine’s, suggesting that a person doesn’t have to endure a prolonged inner struggle in order to become a Christian, as long as the conversion is sincere. Alypius later became a bishop like his friend—of Thagaste, their common hometown.
Themes
