Confessions Themes

From the beginning of his Confessions, Augustine, a fourth- and fifth-century North African bishop and theologian, argues that human beings are made to worship God and can only be eternally fulfilled by doing so. He famously addresses God directly, writing, “you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.” However, because of human sin (preeminently the sin of pride), coming to rest in God is not…

In Confessions, Augustine frames the story of his conversion around sin, or breaking God’s law. For him, sin is the fundamental problem that all human beings must deal with in one way or another. While begetting his illegitimate son, for example, would seem to rank higher in a hierarchy of sins, Augustine tellingly uses the story of the pear tree as one of his key illustrations of sin. In his youth, Augustine and his…

There is a polemical tone to parts of Confessions, meaning that Augustine freely criticizes groups that he believes teach falsely about God. Although Augustine occasionally discusses the distinctively Christian doctrine of God as one Being in three divine Persons (the Holy Trinity), this idea is not his main focus in Confessions, likely because it wasn’t a primary obstacle for him in his youthful intellectual struggle to figure out his beliefs about God…

Throughout Confessions, Augustine occasionally introduces intellectual problems whose relevance to the book’s larger themes isn’t immediately apparent. For example, he spends most of Book X wrestling with how the faculty of human memory works, and Book XI is preoccupied with the question of what time is and how it is measured. He often proposes several alternatives for explaining a phenomenon like time, only to admit to God, when his theories are exhausted, that…