Confessions — themes & analysis

The most quoted sentence Augustine ever wrote is the first one: "You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." The line announces not just a mood but an anthropology. Human beings are, by their nature, oriented toward something beyond every finite object they can name or possess. No finite good — not friendship, not pleasure, not knowledge, not success — will fully satisfy the desire that drives the search. The restlessness is constitutional.

What makes the Confessions persuasive rather than merely asserted is that Augustine demonstrates this in his own case with painful specificity. He traces the sequence of resting-places he tried before finding the one that held. First, literature — he wept over Dido while remaining dry-eyed about his own sins. Then rhetoric and a career in the law courts. Then Manichaeism, which promised a clean cosmological answer to the problem of evil and delivered, when scrutinized, nothing. Then the unnamed concubine in Carthage, with whom he lived for fifteen years and whose departure he mourns in one of the most devastating sentences of Book 6. Then the philosophical schools. Then the position as public orator in Milan, which he obtained and detested. None of these were contemptible; Augustine is careful throughout to say they were genuine goods. The mistake was in the expectation of rest.

The doctrine that emerges — that the human soul is structured by a desire no finite object can satisfy — has been immensely influential. Pascal's famous wager turns on it: the human heart has an infinite capacity for desire that only an infinite object can fill. Kierkegaard's aesthete, who exhausts one mode of existence after another without finding peace, is a secular version of it. The modern existentialist literature of the absurd — Camus, Sartre — inherits the problem while rejecting the solution. Whether Augustine's resolution is the right one is the question the book asks every reader to settle. What the book does is name the condition with a precision that makes it impossible to pretend the condition does not exist.

The restlessness is not, in Augustine's telling, simply a deficiency. It is the trace in the creature of the creator — the mark, pressed into the soul at its making, of the one toward whom the soul is ordered. The restlessness is what keeps Augustine from settling permanently in the wrong place. It is what makes the Manichaean years temporary, what makes the rhetoric chair in Milan unsatisfying, what opens him, finally, to the voice in the garden. The restless heart is the mechanism of conversion.

Where to follow it: Book 1 (the opening prayer), Book 2 (the pear theft — motiveless sin), Book 6 (the departure of the concubine), Book 8 (the garden at Milan).

There had been autobiography before Augustine — Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, the letters of Cicero, scattered self-reflective passages in Greek and Roman literature. None of them produced what the Confessions produces. What is new in Augustine is the sustained, methodical, relentless turn inward: the attempt to attend to one's own interior life with the same seriousness that philosophy had always brought to the external world.

He attends to his infant self, reconstructed from watching other infants, with the seriousness most writers reserve for adult moral choice. He attends to his fourteen-year-old theft of pears from a neighbour's orchard — a small incident, a handful of bitter fruit stolen for no reason — with a philosophical care that has struck every reader as disproportionate and that, examined closely, is exactly proportionate. The question Augustine is asking with the pear theft is what motiveless sin can possibly mean. The pears were not wanted. They were not eaten. They were stolen and thrown to the pigs. The only motive was the transgression itself — to do what was forbidden, in company, for the pleasure of the forbidden. Augustine returns to this five times. He wants to understand the shape of evil that has no utility at its core.

He attends to his grief at the death of a friend in Thagaste — one of the most acute early treatments of grief in European literature — and examines his own response to it with the same relentless attention: why do I weep, what is the weeping for, why does the world seem wrong when a particular person is no longer in it? He attends to his own embarrassment at being moved by the theater in Carthage, his own inability to pray the prayer he knew he needed to pray, his own prolonged postponement — "Lord, make me chaste, but not yet."

After Augustine, this kind of interior attention is a permanent feature of European literature. Rousseau's Confessions in 1782 is the most direct heir; the modern memoir, the diary, the confessional poem, the analyst's couch all trace somewhere in their lineage back to this book. What Augustine adds that Rousseau does not is that the interior life he describes is not the end of the inquiry. It is the beginning of a theology. The self that the Confessions examines is not a final answer but a clue — the particular site at which, if examined with sufficient care, the trace of the creator becomes visible.

Where to follow it: Book 1 (infant psychology), Book 2 (the pear theft), Book 4 (grief at the death of a friend), Book 10 (the vast hall of memory).

The garden scene in Book 8 is so precisely described that fifteen hundred years of imitation have not exhausted its strangeness. Augustine is staying with his mother Monica, his closest friend Alypius, and a few others in a house in Milan. He is thirty-two years old. He has been, for some time, a Christian intellectually — he has read the Platonists, heard Ambrose preach, acknowledged that Manichaeism is untenable. What he has not been able to do is take the last step: give up his mistresses, give up his career as public orator, accept the celibate Christian life he believes is being demanded of him.

The day in question he has been visited by Ponticianus, an African Christian who told him the story of Antony of Egypt and of two imperial agents who had read Antony's life and renounced their careers on the spot to become monks. Augustine hears this and is shaken. He retreats to the garden, paces, cannot stay still. He reports, with the dry self-awareness that runs through the book, that he had for years been praying for chastity with the silent additional clause "but not yet." He sits under a fig tree and weeps.

Then, from the next garden, he hears a child's voice — he cannot tell if it is a boy or a girl — chanting in a singsong: tolle, lege, tolle, lege. Pick up and read. He returns to where he left the codex of Paul's epistles, opens it at random, and reads the verse on which his eye falls: "not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfil its lusts." The resistance breaks. He marks the place and closes the book. He tells Alypius. Alypius, reading the next verse, takes the same step. They go in to tell Monica.

The scene has been read as the model of Christian conversion, as a piece of literary retrospection that Augustine constructed years later to give shape to a slower interior change, and as both at once. What is undeniable is the refusal to make the conversion clean. Augustine does not emerge from the garden a whole man. The Confessions makes clear that what began there takes years to complete and is still in progress while the book is being written. The tolle, lege moment is the turning point of a life, not its resolution. The rest of the book — including the four philosophical books at the end — is what Augustine has been doing with the fact of conversion ever since.

Where to follow it: Book 6 ("not yet" — the deferred prayer), Book 8 (Ponticianus, the garden, tolle lege), Book 9 (Monica's response, the baptism).

Book 10 of the Confessions is where the autobiography stops and the philosophy begins. Having brought his life to the death of Monica at Ostia, Augustine stops and asks a question that the autobiography has been quietly pressing all along: where, exactly, does the past go? The answer he gives, after a long and almost dazzled examination, is that the past exists in memory — and memory turns out to be one of the strangest and most capacious things a soul contains.

Augustine walks through what he finds in his memory. Not just images of past sights and sounds — the face of Monica, the walls of Carthage — but the things themselves he has learned and mastered: mathematical demonstrations, logical principles, the disciplines of grammar and rhetoric. He can remember being sad without being sad now. He can remember the smell of bread without the bread being present. He can remember the logical principle that a triangle's angles sum to two right angles, and this truth is not an image of any particular triangle he once saw; it is the truth itself, preserved entire.

Memory, he concludes, is a vast field, an immense palace, a great court — "and there I meet myself." He can walk into it and retrieve whatever he wishes, but he keeps finding things he had forgotten he had. The self that is doing the examining and the memory being examined turn out to be the same thing; the act of self-examination is itself a movement through memory. This leads Augustine to the larger claim: if the soul contains truths it could not have derived from the senses in this life — the very idea of God, the desire for happiness, the standards by which we judge experience — then the soul is larger than this life can fully account for.

The implication is ontological. The memory by which Augustine has narrated his past is also the faculty by which the soul reaches toward God. The long act of remembering that the Confessions performs is, on this account, a kind of homecoming: the soul, tracing its own history with sufficient care, finds in that history the marks of the one who made it. Book 10 is the hinge of the whole work — the moment where autobiography opens into ontology, and the narrator discovers that the story he has been telling has a theological structure he had not planned.

Where to follow it: Book 4 (grief — memory of loss), Book 9 (Monica at Ostia — remembered vision), Book 10 (the vast hall of memory), Book 11 (the psalm — memory and expectation).

Book 11 begins with a question forced by the opening of Genesis: if God created heaven and earth in the beginning, what was there before the beginning? And what does before mean, if time itself is one of the things that was created? The question would have been familiar to any educated late-antique reader. Augustine's answers are not.

Time, he argues, is not a property of the world, not a stretch alongside other things, not a container in which events occur. Time is a stretching of the soul. The past does not exist any more; the future does not exist yet; the present is the vanishing line between them — so narrow that it cannot be measured, because by the time you take the measure the moment has already gone. And yet we measure time, and we measure it accurately. How?

Because the soul holds the past in memory and the future in expectation, and the present is the soul's attention as it moves from one to the other. To prove this, Augustine uses an example that has become one of the most discussed passages in the philosophy of mind: the recitation of a psalm. Before I begin a psalm I know by heart, the whole psalm exists in my expectation; as I say it, what I have already said shifts from expectation into memory, and what I am saying now is the present attention moving between them. When the psalm ends, all of it is in memory and the expectation has shrunk to nothing. The same structure, Augustine says, governs the longer recitation of a man's life, and the still longer recitation of all human history.

Time, on this account, is the soul's own structure — not something that happens to the soul from outside but something the soul itself performs. Eternity, by contrast, has no such stretching; it is a present that does not pass. The doctrine has been argued with and refined by every later philosopher who has taken the question seriously — Bergson on duration, Husserl on the phenomenology of time-consciousness, Heidegger on temporality. Whether it is exactly right is contested. That it changed the question is not. Book 11 is the reason the Confessions is still read in philosophy departments as well as theology seminars.

Where to follow it: Book 10 (memory as the soul's past), Book 11 (what is time? the psalm example), Book 12 (before the beginning — formless matter), Book 13 (the sixth day and the eternal sabbath).