Summary: Confessions

Augustine describes his childhood and the petty thefts he may have committed during that time. He concludes that childhood innocence does not exist ¹.

His adolescence was also marked by misconduct, most notably the theft of some pears — remarkable in that they were not stolen to be eaten, but simply to be thrown to the pigs: our only pleasure lay in committing a forbidden act ².

Augustine's youth was given over to debauchery: romantic entanglements and one-night stands consumed 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 held back 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 Cicero’s majesty ⁴.

He encounters the Manichaeans—adherents of a doctrine that describes the world as a battleground between Good and Evil—and is at first captivated by their teachings, only to reject them vehemently later as a diabolical trap, a kind of 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 other such things.

Nevertheless, Augustine is troubled by certain questions raised by the Manichaeans, such as: Where does evil come from? and Is God confined to a bodily form? ⁶.

He teaches rhetoric and develops a passing interest in astrology. He loses a close friend and departs for Carthage. He writes a treatise, On the Beautiful and the Proper, which he later loses. The future Bishop of Hippo also immerses himself in Aristotle’s Categories.

His encounter with Faustus, a Manichaean bishop and a great snare of the devil ⁷, plunges him into deep confusion. He defends the idea that it is not human beings who sin, but a foreign nature within them, and that God is a body, opposed by another body representing 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 dense, like earth, or light and diffuse, like an ethereal body [...]. I set the two masses against each other, both of them infinite ⁸.

Augustine had not yet grasped the idea of mind, or of an immaterial being: I could only conceive of the mind as a subtle body ⁹.

This materialist conception of the world stifles him:

Above all, it was these immense masses that held me captive and seemed to stifle me — I, who could conceive only of material realities; gasping under their weight, I longed for the clear and pure air of Your truth ¹⁰.

To conceive of evil as a body is to limit God’s perfection: God would then no longer be infinite, but locked in conflict with an opposing force.

In Milan, Bishop Ambrose captivated him, but he paid more attention to his eloquence than to his message. He distanced himself from the Manichaeans, adopting a sceptical stance while remaining drawn to Catholicism, awaiting some decisive 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, Monica, a fervent Catholic.

At thirty, he had a son by his companion and was preparing 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