Summary: Confessions
Augustine’s Confessions is considered the first autobiographical work.
In this book, Saint Augustine acknowledges his sins and extols the glory of God. He recounts his wayward youth and his conversion to Christianity.
He reflects on the origin of evil, contemplates the nature of time, and marvels at the power of memory.
Augustine describes his childhood and the petty theft he may have committed during that period. He concludes that childhood innocence does not exist
1.
His adolescence was also marked by delinquent acts, such as the theft of pears—particularly serious, as they were not stolen for consumption but merely to be thrown to the pigs: our only pleasure was in having committed a forbidden act
2.
Augustine’s youth was marked by debauchery: amorous escapades and fleeting encounters filled most of his nights.
He aspired to become a lawyer or a rhetorician, but after reading Cicero’s Hortensius, he turned to God. However, one thing alone restrained my ardour: the name of Christ was absent from that book
3. He reads the Holy Scriptures but finds Cicero’s work incomparably superior: This book seems to me unworthy of comparison with Ciceronian majesty
4.
He encounters the Manichaeans—adherents of a doctrine describing the Earth as the battleground between Good and Evil—and is at first captivated by their teachings, only to later reject them violently as a diabolical trap, a glue formed from the mere combination of the syllables of the [...] names of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit
5. In fact, they do not worship God himself, but rather his creations—the moon, the sun, and others.
Nevertheless, Augustine is troubled by certain questions posed by the Manichaeans, such as: Where does evil come from?
Or: Is God confined to a bodily form?
6.
He teaches rhetoric and takes a passing interest in astrology. He loses a dear friend and departs for Carthage. He writes a treatise, On the Beautiful and the Proper, which he later misplaces. The future Bishop of Hippo also immersed himself in Aristotle’s Categories.
His encounter with Faustus, a Manichaean bishop and great snare of the devil
7, plunges him into deep confusion. He defends the idea that it is not man who sins, but a foreign nature within us, and that God is a body, opposed by another body that represents evil:
Whenever I tried to conceive of God, I could only imagine a material mass—for me, there was nothing that was not matter. This led me to believe in a material substance of evil—a formless, hideous mass, either thick, like earth, or tenuous and subtle, like an ethereal body [...]. I set the two masses against each other, both infinite 8.
The idea of mind, or immaterial being, had not yet been grasped or possessed by Augustine: I could only conceive of the mind as a subtle body
9.
This materialistic conception of the world stifles him:
But above all, what held me captive and seemed to stifle me—I who conceived only material realities—was these immense masses; gasping under their weight, I was breathless for the limpid and pure air of Your truth 10.
Conceiving of evil as a body limits God's perfection, for God is no longer infinite but comes into conflict with this opposing force.
In Milan, Bishop Ambrose captivated him, but he was more attentive to his eloquence than to his message. He abandoned the Manichaeans and became both sceptical and Catholic, awaiting a message or a sign. This transitional phase—I had not yet reached the truth, but I had already torn myself away from error
11—brought him closer to his mother Monique, a fervent Catholic.
At thirty, he has an illegitimate son with his lover and prepares for an arranged marriage set to take place two years later.
1 Confessions, Book I, chapter 19
2 II, 4
3 III, 4
4 III, 5
5 III, 6
6 III, 7
7 V, 3
8 V, 10
9 ibid.
10 V, 11
11 VI, 1