Confessions Summary

Augustine addresses God in prayer, observing that human beings, having been created by God, find no peace until they rest in God. He muses on the seeming paradoxes of God’s being and the impossibility of expressing in words who God is and what he means to Augustine.

Augustine reflects on his life, beginning with his childhood in Thagaste in North Africa, growing up in a household with a devout Christian mother, Monica, and a non-Christian father, Patricius. Despite Monica’s faith, Augustine was not baptized as a child, since it was thought that sins committed after baptism would incur greater guilt. Young Augustine was sent to school and trained in Latin and Greek, which he often hated at the time and later regarded as a waste compared to learning the Christian Scriptures. Though he values his achievements as a boy, he knows he mainly sought to please adults and didn’t care about loving or obeying God. Instead of making sure Augustine grew up as a Christian, Patricius and Monica focused on preparing him for a successful career in rhetoric. As a teenager, Augustine committed lustful acts without restraint, and he recalls that one day, he and his friends stole pears from a neighbor’s orchard for no reason except for the fun of stealing and fitting in with the group. Besides showing how far Augustine had wandered from God, this incident also reminds him that people often sin simply because they love the evil they’re committing.

Augustine moved to Carthage to continue his rhetorical studies. Though he thrived academically, he continued to indulge his lust, waste time at the theater, and hang out with a bad crowd. However, at 19, he also fell in love with the study of philosophy and longed to discover truth. He tried to study the Bible, but he abandoned it as unsophisticated compared to the works of Cicero. Around this time, he began spending time with “sensualists,” or Manichees, and believing some of their ideas, such as that matter is corrupt, that God has bodily features, and above all that the Bible is filled with foolish inaccuracies. All this time, his mother Monica prayed fervently for Augustine’s conversion.

During a period of teaching in Thagaste, a dear friend of Augustine’s died suddenly, plunging Augustine into profound grief. At the time, he didn’t understand that worldly things can only be loved properly when that love is ultimately directed to God, and he didn’t know that through Christ, God has defeated death. Still, by the time Augustine was 29, he was beginning to question the coherence of Manichean doctrine. An eloquent Manichean bishop named Faustus failed to answer Augustine’s questions, and though Augustine didn’t realize it at the time, this was another turning point toward Christianity.

Not long after, Augustine left Africa and moved to Rome and subsequently to Milan in search of a better teaching environment. He began listening to the sermons of Milan’s bishop, Ambrose, and was impressed with Ambrose’s figurative approach to interpreting the Bible. Through Ambrose’s approach, Augustine realized that, contrary to Manichean claims, the Christian Bible could be defended. He began to believe that the Bible is God’s authoritative word and that it’s simple enough for anyone to understand, yet deep enough to challenge the wise. Once he understood that the Manichees were criticizing their imagined version of Christianity and not the real thing, he gave up on them. Yet Augustine wasn’t ready to take the leap of becoming a Christian himself. Beyond his intellectual reservations, Augustine wasn’t willing to give up his career ambitions, and the idea of practicing sexual continence seemed impossible. Following his mother’s advice to get respectably married, Augustine sent his longtime mistress back to Africa. Now 30, he was a broken-hearted father of an illegitimate son (Adeodatus), feeling stuck in spiritual turmoil.

Around this time Augustine read some Platonist works that helped remove his doubts about God’s eternity and goodness. However, these works could not teach him that Jesus Christ is God and the savior of sinners. Lust had also become a habit for Augustine, and he felt like he was being torn between his habit and his desire to serve God. One day, Augustine and his friend Alypius were visited by another friend, Ponticianus, who shared the story of the desert monk Antony and the story of two friends who were converted to the monastic life by Antony’s example.

The latter story forced Augustine to a crisis point. He retreated to the garden of the house where he was staying and wrestled with his will to convert and his will to keep freely sinning. Suddenly he heard a child’s voice chanting, “take it and read,” and took this as a divine command. Opening his Bible at random, he read a verse from the book of Romans charging the reader to abandon lust and believe in Christ. Instantly, Augustine’s doubts and hesitations disappeared, and he believed. Soon after, his mother Monica was overjoyed to learn that her prayers for his conversion had finally been answered.

Augustine resigned from his teaching post, and Augustine, Alypius, and Monica retreated to the country for a season. Upon their return to Milan, Augustine, his teenaged son, and Alypius were all baptized into the Catholic Church. Not too long after this, Monica became ill and died.

Augustine reflects on memory as the greatest of human faculties. He is particularly fascinated by the relationship between memory and a person’s ability to find God. Augustine holds that a person can only desire and recognize what is already hidden in some deep recess of memory. And since nobody likes to be deceived, he argues that in some sense, everyone loves the truth—even if their memory of truth has grown dim and obscured, making it harder for them to recognize God as the ultimate Truth and so experience the highest happiness of remembering God. Augustine laments that he came to love God so late in life and that he still struggles so much with temptations, particularly the temptation to gratify his senses excessively or to be loved and applauded by others. In view of all his sins, it’s difficult for Augustine to understand how he can be reconciled with a perfect God, but he believes that God has provided a mediator between himself and mortal sinners in Jesus Christ, who shared in sinners’ death in order to save them.

Augustine turns to considering the opening verses of the book of Genesis. Defining time, especially how to measure time’s passage, is a major challenge for interpreting these verses. Ultimately, God’s relationship to time is completely different than humans’, because God is eternal and unchanging, while ever-changing time is his creation. But this belief doesn’t remove all the difficulties in interpreting the creation account in Genesis. Well-intentioned readers can disagree, for example, about precisely what Moses meant when he wrote that “In the beginning God made heaven and earth.” The key thing is to believe the truth that God is the creator, and when it comes to more esoteric matters, to deal charitably with those who hold different opinions from oneself rather than pridefully insisting on one’s own view.

Augustine closes his confessions by contemplating the glimpse of the Holy Trinity he finds in Genesis and giving a spiritual interpretation of the creation account, showing how it can be applied to God’s salvation of the soul. For example, the “firmament” can be figuratively understood as the Scriptures, the land emerging from the “bitter waters” as baptism, the “stars” as the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the fruits of the earth as people’s works of mercy. Augustine praises God for the goodness of creation. He observes that all created things have an allotted “morning and evening”—but that the seventh and final day, the eternal Sabbath, will last forever, and God’s people will enjoy perfect rest in their Creator. God, who is Goodness itself, will teach this truth to any soul that seeks him.