Reading Augustine. Jason Byassee
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is fully aware of the presumption not only in writing his own life’s story, but in trying to address God properly at all. We are mere creatures, God is an unchanging and infinitely good creator—what words can the former properly apply to the latter? Yet as creatures of a good God we have been gifted by the desire to pray and praise. In that gift we can see a mirror image of the one whom we seek, without whom we are unendingly restless, in whom we have our fullest joy (3). Augustine here wrestles with what philosophers call “epistemology”—the question of how we know what we know. For him, our desire to praise is key to our knowledge about anything. For our knowledge runs aground as it seeks after God:
Who then are you, my God? . . . Most high, utterly good, utterly powerful, most omnipotent, most merciful and most just, deeply hidden yet most intimately present, perfection of both beauty and strength, stable and incomprehensible, immutable and yet changing all things, never new, never old, making everything new . . . .” (5)
Language itself creaks under the strain, and must resort to paradox to show that this one cannot properly be spoken about. Yet language itself stretches toward the one who is all wisdom and delight, and in our very failed efforts to speak of God we can see something of his grace. Throughout Confessions knowledge and love are twins, reflecting in us creatures the Wisdom and Love that are the Son and Holy Spirit within the life of God. Our attempts to know God, or anything else, are indelibly triune, if only in fits and starts. When we properly love and know God we catch a glimpse insofar as creatures can of the Mystery of the divine life. Our very desire to praise rightly is a hint at the nature of the One we desire. Fortunately for us we can do more than strain intellectually and morally after such glimpses—for the One we strain to see becomes incarnate among us, giving us far more than mere hints.
There is much we could focus upon in this and every book, and much we must leave behind. Another key theme in this first book is that of education. Since this series is aimed at those who have invested a great deal of time and money in their own educations, it should prove worthy of our attention. Augustine is clearly unimpressed with his early educational experiences. Not only was the teaching poor, and often accompanied by beatings, its goal was clearly the acquisition of “deceitful riches,” rather than any love of learning for its own sake (11). Like any child he loved to play, and remembers his disciplinarians as hypocrites for refusing to let the children do so, while “playing” their own games with impunity (12).8 He remembers with disdain the meticulous attention paid to proper grammar and phrasing, all the while reciting licentious actions of pagan gods without shame (20). In a moment of dark humor, Augustine muses that a student would be ridiculed for mispronouncing the “h” in homo (Latin for “human”), while he could hate another human being with no questions asked (21). For the converted and consecrated bishop looking back on his life, both the form and content of his early education were intolerably antithetical to the love for Christ that now guides his life.
For Reflection
. To what extent does Confessions seem to be an autobiography?
. How, and to what degree, can we know1
. This book leads us to ask about our own educations. How were their form (the way we were taught) and content (what we were taught) helpful or a hindrance to our returning from the prodigal’s far country to our father’s house?9
. In our day as in Augustine’s, an expensive education is crucial to a lucrative career. For Augustine it is clear that this pursuit of social and economic advance was a detriment to his nascent spiritual life. How have you experienced anything similar?
1 James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 1:xlii.
2 The charge that Augustine paved the way for the modern, interiorly obsessed self (or even invented it) is common in Augustine scholarship. Its most sophisticated proponent may be Charles Taylor in his Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
3 Ibid., xlix.
4 Serge Lancel, St. Augustine, trans. Antonia Nevill (London: SCM, 2002) 211.
5 A modern parallel would be the autobiographical work of Frederick Buechner; among others see his Telling Secrets (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991). Though it may be that Buechner remains mostly in the orbit of self-examination and never quite reaches for contemplation of the divine mystery that Augustine achieves in Confessions books X–XIII.
6 See his “Book One: The Presumptuousness of Autobiography and the Paradoxes of Beginning,” in A Reader’s Companion to Augustine’s Confessions, ed. Kim Paffenroth and Robert Kennedy (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003) 7–23.
7 This study guide will use the translation by Henry Chadwick: Confessions, World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Subsequent references to Chadwick will be parenthetical.
8 Rowan Williams brilliantly discusses the theological and moral seriousness of childhood playing in his Lost Icons (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000).
9 For example, I write as one whose education cost my family and others’ some quarter of a million dollars (mostly in the form of scholarships), which has bought me the privilege of writing books like these, and being addressed as “reverend” and “doctor.”
Chapter Two:
Book II
For whom does Augustine write these Confessions? He is surely not informing God of anything God does not already know. Therefore he can only be writing for us: “that I and any of my readers may reflect on the great depth from which we have to cry to you” (26). These “depths” are summed up for Augustine in a key scriptural verse, 1 John 2:16, where lust, ambition, and curiositas1—a distracting interest in created things without reference to their Creator—are diagnosed as a kind of malevolent trinity of sin. Much of Confessions can be read as a commentary upon the intertwining of these three in a web that catches the young Augustine until God unravels it, and re-strings it, so that Augustine’s desire would be turned into a harp on which to play music pleasing to God.
We have already noted Augustine’s wrestling with his ambition in the previous book. This also explains a curious episode here in Book II—his father Patrick’s pride at seeing Augustine’s sexual maturity in the bathhouse, a moment that tempts us moderns to armchair Freudian analysis (26–27). In point of fact, the issue at hand here is the worldly desire to see a family grow in size, wealth, and power, all of which would redound to the glory of the head of the household (and all of which is rejected by Christian asceticism, discussed below).2 The second strand of the malevolent trinity is seen here for the first time: Augustine’s struggle with lust, which he now wishes his pious mother had curbed by arranging a marriage for him (24–26). The third strand is here shown in greater detail than before: curiositas, a misdirected attention to trivial things for their own sake. We see it in the strange episode of the theft of the pears (28–29). He and his friends had no need of the fruit. They had far better pears available at home. They did not even put them to any use. They simply stole them because stealing is forbidden, and