The Confessions of St. Augustine

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"Give me chastity and continence...but not yet" (St. Augustine 354-430 C.E.).

St. Augustine was a fourth century bishop and scholar during the last vestiges of the Roman Empire. Throughout his lifetime, the Empire had been experiencing a slow and steady decline. It was at time of its fall that Augustine named the Church as the City of God: a concept he outlined in a book by that title. However, it was in his Confessions, (written between 387-398 C.E.), where Augustine plots out his journey from sinner to saint, and where he would create the document that became a highly influential text during the Middle Ages, and would strongly influence Western religion and philosophy.

The Confessions, originally entitled Confessions in Thirteen Books was later dubbed The Confessions of St. Augustine to avoid confusion with other documents of the same title. The text's first nine books are composed of autobiography, and deals with his youthful--and sinful--dalliances, his questioning of the Manichaen religion (an early gnostic faith from Persia, similar to Christianity) and astrology, and gives an account of his conversion to Christianity. The remaining four books are commentary. The text we will read, which was initially intended to be read aloud, contains a number of themes:

Literary vs. Moral Education

Biblical Quotations

Supremacy/Completeness of God

Errors in the Manichaean religion

Neoplatonism

Nature and Substance of God

The Story of Creation

Augustine's Confessions is significant for several reasons, among them was the fact that his was the first biography--"the story of one man's life in his own words." However, it is also confessional in the sense that he reveals his sins to God, "the hearer who is able to forgive the transgressions that Augustine recounts." Finally, Augustine's words have a second intended audience--those of would-be Christians who can trace their own spiritual journey to grace alongside that of his. In the end, the "overall effect of the Confessions is to turn the reader inward, away from the individual journey of Augustine and toward the collective journey of humanity toward the divine" (46).

In terms of its overall and lasting influence on Western religious and literary culture, the editors of our texts give insight:

"Augustine exemplifies the nexus of the classical and medieval worlds. Liminal in the extreme, his writings bridge boundaries geographical, theological, philosophical, and literary. Confessions, possibly the first autobiography, is formatively linked with Dante (The Divine Comedy) and Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales, particularly "The Wife of Bath's Prologue"). These unusually intimate narratives center on definitive events in a single life rather than the culturally or politically momentous movements of epic and the narrative distance and inevitability of scripture. The individual, rather than the collective, point of view becomes the locus of significance, and the merest personal discovery often takes on larger than life resonance. Recognizing that his life has been not only guided but 'made' by his mother, Monica, his mentor, Bishop Ambrose, and, ultimately, God, is Augustine's pivotal epiphany. In the medieval sense, poets were secular 'makers' as God was a divine creator, and Augustine admires each mentor's ability to understand him and make every choice his own. As comprehensive and absolute as his descriptions of belief can be, it is important to note that the language of Augustine's belief is Latin. When he complains about his Greek lessons and dismisses Homeric poetry, he ironically dismisses significant versions of the Old Testament as well as the New Testament in its original form. In contrast to the foundations of Islam--which would gain strength among North Africans in the era to follow--language, for Augustine, is not a transmitter of faith."