Memory — the vast hall of the soul

Book 10 opens with a new question: not who was I, but who am I now? Augustine has spent nine books narrating his past; now, at the present moment, at the moment of writing, he asks what the Confessions themselves are for. Who is he confessing to, and who is he confessing for? To God, who knows all; and to the human readers who will read the book — and for whom his own present state is the most useful part, since his past is over and his future is opaque.

This brings him to memory. The Confessions are an act of memory; the self that is doing the confessing is constituted by what it remembers. Augustine begins to examine his memory's contents. He finds images of past sensory experience — he can remember the look of Carthage without being there, remember the smell of bread without bread present. He finds the disciplines he has learned — grammar, rhetoric, mathematics — and these are not images of sensory experience; a mathematical demonstration is not an image of a triangle he once drew. He finds emotions he has had: he can remember fear without being afraid now, remember grief without grieving. Memory is vast, strangely organized, containing more than he has consciously stored.

The chapter ends with Augustine's most candid account of his current spiritual state. Conversion did not make him whole. He is still pulled by food beyond mere sustenance; by music that carries him away before he can steady himself; by the pleasure of praise; by curiosity — the desire to look at things, to know things, that distracts him from prayer. He names each temptation carefully and evaluates how far he has and has not come. It is the most self-aware and least comforting account of Christian life in the early church — and it is placed here precisely because the earlier autobiography, if read alone, might look like a story of problem solved. Book 10 corrects that impression.