Confessions

[1] Augustine ponders and prays about the reason for writing these confessions. [3] He hopes that others, too, will be moved to confess and repent of their sins before God. [4] He also considers the purpose of confessing not what he used to be, but what he currently is—both the good he does and the evils he commits. He concludes that by doing so, he serves his fellow Christians, giving them cause for both rejoicing and grief.

[6] Augustine considers what it means to say that he loves God. By looking at created things, he learned that God is not part of creation, but the creator. [7] He also wonders by what faculty he is able to find and love God. It can’t be just the spirit that animates his body, or else animals would find God, too; likewise, it can’t be just the power by which he uses his sensory perception. [8] Above these faculties is memory, which stores the images that the senses convey to it and can recall those images when needed. Augustine is fascinated by the mystery of how these sensory images are recorded and brought forth by the mind, as well as memories of himself and things that have happened to him or others. And yet, as vast as the memory is, there remains a part of himself that Augustine cannot understand.

[9] Augustine’s memory also contains all the facts he has learned and not forgotten. [10] But, given that these facts didn’t enter his mind through one of his senses, how did they get there? He concludes that they must have already been there, in some remote recess of his mind, and that when he heard about them, he recognized them as true. [11] The process of learning facts, then, is really a process of gathering scattered thoughts and placing them “ready to hand.” Forgetting is when he fails to attend to facts for a time, thus allowing them to sink back into the recesses of his mind. [12] His memory contains items such as mathematical principles and dimensions. [14] He can likewise recall past feelings and desires without directly experiencing those feelings and desires again.

[17] Continuing to puzzle over the workings of his mind, Augustine concludes that memory is “the great force of life in living man.” And yet it’s necessary to go beyond even memory in order to find God—and how is it possible for Augustine to find God if he has no memory of God? [18] After all, when we lose things, it is only possible for us to find them again because we remember and recognize them. [20] If blessed happiness is what everyone desires, then is there a sense in which people remember happiness? [22] While everyone has experienced joy in some sense, not everyone desires true happiness, which is to rejoice in God. 

[23] Augustine further concludes that true happiness is the same thing as rejoicing in the truth, which is the same thing as to rejoice in God, who is the Truth. No one, he observes, wants to be deceived. So, there is a sense in which everyone does love the truth, even if their memory of it has grown dim. And people often deceive themselves, replacing truth in their hearts with something else. To become happy, one must learn “to ignore all that distracts […] and to rejoice in […] the sole Truth by which all else is true.”

 [24] The remembrance of God is “holy joy.” [25] But in what part of the memory is God present? Everything about the mind is changeable, yet God deigns to dwell there. [26] God is not confined to any place, yet he answers all who seek him.

[27] Augustine cries out that he has learned late in his life to love God, “Beauty at once so ancient and so new.” God was within him, yet he searched for God among God’s beautiful creation. But even those created things only had their existence in God. It was God’s call, his light, his “fragrance,” taste, and touch that finally drew Augustine to God.

[28] Augustine considers that until his life is wholly filled by God, he will always be a burden to himself, and that life is a continual trial, even under prosperity (because even then, one must fear the possibility of adversity and grieve the fleeting nature of joy). [29] His only hope is in God’s mercy. He begs God, “Give me the grace to do as you command, and command me to do what you will!” He begs this especially in regard to continence, or the control of bodily desires. It is only by continence that a person may “regain that unity of self” that was lost in the search for a variety of pleasures.

[30] Even though God gave Augustine the grace to forgo marriage, Augustine still struggles with images imprinted on his memory by his old lustful habits. He puzzles over the fact that he is far more susceptible to such images while asleep than while he is awake. He trusts that, more and more, God will free him from the concupiscence that binds his soul.

[31] Another daily struggle is appetite, which Augustine resists by fasting. Even though food is a necessary remedy for hunger and thirst, pleasure often overtakes health as the motivation for eating and drinking, and it is difficult to know where to draw the line. He acknowledges that food is a gift from God but prays for strength to resist the ongoing temptation to gluttony.

[33] While the pleasures of smell don’t pose much of a problem, Augustine admits that the attractions of sound are greater, particularly because of the mysterious relationship between song and the emotions. The senses should be “adjuncts to reason,” but they always want gratification beyond their due. Augustine doesn’t want to be too strict on this point, because he acknowledges the spiritual benefit that can come from singing psalms in church, for instance.

[34] Temptations also come through the sense of sight, as people are too easily beguiled by the light of this world rather than the true Light. And people create lavish goods that are pleasing to the eye while forgetting their own Maker. Yet even such earthly beauty ultimately flows from supreme Beauty, and their standards of beauty come from the same place, though they don’t realize it.

[35] There’s a yet more subtle kind of temptation—the mind’s temptation to use the bodily senses to satisfy its curiosity. For example, people will gather around a mangled corpse or go to see “freaks and prodigies” in a theater show, all out of unhealthy curiosity. The same holds true when people resort to sorcery, or even when religious people demand signs and wonders from God simply because they crave the experience. Augustine is constantly tempted to give in to worthless speculation or to trivial distractions, especially from prayer. [36] The third form of temptation is the desire to be feared or loved by others. Augustine often feels this temptation to hear others’ applause and to be loved not for the sake of God, but in God’s place.

[42] Having considered this world and the forms of temptation to which he is subject, Augustine asks how, in view of his sins, he can be reconciled to God. He understands that a mediator between God and man must have something in common with both. If such a mediator were mortal and sinful like humanity, then he would be far from God; if he were both immortal and without sin like God, then he would be far from humanity. [43] The true Mediator God has sent is Jesus Christ, who is mortal like human beings and just like God. Christ came so that by his justice, he “might make null the death of the wicked” by sharing in their death.

If he weren’t able to trust in Christ to cure his sins, Augustine would despair. God’s medicine is greater than human ills, and because the Word—so seemingly distant—has been “made flesh and come to dwell among us,” humanity need not despair.