Reading Augustine. Jason Byassee
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angst. Such modern categories were foreign to his thought, and fail to provide sufficient explanatory insight into the text. Another misreading would be to see this as a sort of universally applicable “religious” text, one that could apply to any spiritual seeker in any culture, so that Augustine’s final goal of a specifically Christian adherence then need not weigh in to our appraisal of the work. Again, such an approach to the text smacks of modern notions rather than Augustinian ones, and Augustine himself insisted that his “restless heart” could only be satisfied by the quite material truth of the incarnation and the church.
Current scholarship on the Confessions suggests that we be attentive to the liturgical elements in this work, that is, those having to do with Christian worship: baptism, the Lord’s Supper, preaching, scripture, and so on.3 Augustine, at the time of this writing in the late 400s, was a preacher—a bishop of a port town in north Africa called Hippo Regius. As any good preacher is inclined to do, Augustine is here working on us, his hearers, trying to lure us into the truth of God, mediated as this is by the church’s worship. As such there is a fiercely adamant moral stridency to this text. Ancient Christians did not submit to baptism if not convinced they could live genuinely holy lives. One dare not return to a life of sin after baptism, for the refusal of a grace once given was worse than never having received baptism at all.4 Augustine himself delayed his approach to the baptismal font out of fear he could not remain chaste, for example. Now, on the far side of baptism and indeed from a bishop’s chair, Augustine wants to convince us to do other than he did: to embrace the truth of Christ immediately, with all the moral difficulty, stridency, and indeed, joy, that such an embrace entails.
This study guide is designed to be read simultaneously with the text of Confessions. This has proved difficult since the key themes of the work are so tightly intertwined as to be all but impossible to examine individually. Hopefully particular themes can be examined here without the coherence of the entire work unraveling. Like any great text, Confessions will stretch you at points, especially toward the end. Know that masterful intellects have spent lifetimes on this work, only to begin to discover its depths after years of study. All the same, you have much from which to benefit even on a cursory first reading. The questions here are designed to guide your intellectual perusal of the text, but more importantly to shape your spiritual life in Augustinian ways. For if that does not take place, then Augustine’s deepest purpose in Confessions has failed.
1 Henry Chadwick, in a very fine introduction to Augustine, nicely details the ways all of western thought and experience is affected by Augustinian categories. See his Augustine: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
2 I use the words “evangelical” and “catholic” with lower case letters intentionally—I do not mean to signal specific institutional affiliation by them, but rather to suggest a broad sense of each word. My own Methodist heritage itself is marked by a certain “evangelical catholicity.”
3 I refer especially here to the magisterial work of James J. O’Donnell, whose three-volume commentary on Confessions will remain the foundational scholarly treatment on this work for generations. See O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). The introduction to the work in volume I would be most helpful to beginners. Much of the rest of the work requires a high degree of Latin proficiency.
4 There was intense debate in the church before Augustine’s day whether one could sin at all after baptism and still be saved! Generally post-baptismal sin required serious and difficult public penance to be absolved. It was only later that a complex system of confession, penance, and absolution developed in the church to respond to this problem. Notice there is in Confessions little sense that Augustine might sin at all after his baptism. This does not represent any foolish confidence in his own power—far from it—but rather an extraordinary confidence in God’s ability to reshape life in the church, to make it holy. Later Augustine grew impatient with claims to permanent sinlessness after baptism. Robert Markus describes Augustine’s insistence on the continuing struggle with sin after baptism as “a vindication of Christian mediocrity”; The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 53.
Chapter One:
Book 1
T here is a great irony in the Confessions not often commented upon: that a Christian convinced that “pride,” that is, undue self-attention at the expense of attention to God, is the worst of sins should tell us such intimate details of his personal life.1 Critics of Augustine suggest that modern western culture’s obsession with selfish introspection—that is, combing the depths of oneself while neglecting others in the world outside—can be traced to Augustine.2 On this account there is a short step from Augustine’s Confessions to books by the same title on today’s bookshelves with subtitles like “confessions of a video vixen”; “confessions of an economic hit man”; and “confessions of an ugly step-sister”! Here “confession” is made as salacious as possible for the sake of self-aggrandizement and economic gain. How is Augustine’s work different?
Augustine’s answer might be that his Confessions slowly move from attention to himself to attention to God—he is rarely self-referential in the work’s final books.3 In fact, Augustine is surprisingly reticent in providing information about his own life at all. If one were to string together what we learn of his life altogether, Confessions might only include one book rather than thirteen.4 In fact, the bulk of Confessions is not about Augustine at all, but about God, or to God, in the form of prayer. Like the best autobiographers in the history of the church, Augustine does not seek attention to himself for his own sake, but rather he seeks to provide a model by which his readers will see their lives as similarly driven by providence to return from the loneliness of sin to the community with God and others that is divine grace.5 Besides, what sort of autobiography works so hard to detail the author’s embarrassing mistakes? In the ancient world especially someone of enough means to write about oneself would take pains to present one’s achievements and hide one’s missteps.
Theologian Charles Matthews goes a step further to argue that Confessions is a sort of anti-autobiography.6 From his first words Augustine is concerned not with himself, but with God. Augustine narrates his life here as a series of false steps in self-assertion—the desire to make a place for himself in a world that respects only power, self-amusement, wealth, and family status. He makes no mean effort toward accumulation of those things, and precisely so drifts farther away from the God in whose presence life is most fully lived. His is no life at all then—only after the fact of his conversion can he narrate his missteps as false attempts to flee a God he cannot escape. This is also no autobiography because Augustine cannot even remember his own beginning. He has to look for evidence for what infants are like from others. He just as certainly cannot see his own end, as none of us can. In fact, for the Christian bishop now looking retrospectively over his life as he writes, no one can see their end until the End, in which God gathers all things to himself, judges, and appropriates everything to its eternal place. In the meantime Augustine remains “scattered,” in a place of “disintegration,” until God gathers him and us all up and becomes all in all (Chadwick 24).7 Augustine can give no account of his life that does not look away from himself and toward that eschatological horizon when he will