“In my case, love is the weight by which I act. To whatever place I go, I am drawn to it by love.” St. Augustine, The Confessions, Book XIII.9

How do you start learning about Christianity?

Your first thought might be to read the Bible. This isn’t the worst advice. It will give you an idea of what Christians believe. But it’s too raw. The Bible is a collection of stories, not a collection of beliefs or justifications. It contains lived encounters with the divine, but not the rational synthesis derived from them. Handing a seeker the Bible with no additional instruction is like handing someone the data from the double-slit experiment and expecting them to rederive quantum physics.

The Confessions of St. Augustine would be a much better choice. The account it provides is deeply relatable: a conversion of a reasonable, educated person from another religion to Christ. It’s also one of the first major autobiographies in Western literature. I read this book in a book club and loved it. This is essential reading for any Christian.

Summary

As a civilization begin its decline, there is always a moment when it trembles in the air, very nearly static, just after the apogee, when it seems as its most permanent. A flame is brightest when it consumes fastest; a person is most impressive right before they begin to age.

This was how the Roman Empire felt when Augustine was born. He first saw the day in the Roman province of Numidia (present-day Algeria) in 354. A precocious young man, he pursued rhetoric, a field of study in line with the tastes of the Roman elite. At age thirty-two, after a long and occasionally torturous conversion process, he was baptized into the Catholic Church. He later used his rhetorical powers to become the most influential theologian in Christian history.

The Confessions is two books in one. The first half is a memoir documenting Augustine’s conversion to Christianity. The second is a collection of philosophical meditations. All of this is organized as a prayer. These two parts are both completed wholes, but sticking them in the same work seems haphazard. The stitching together of these two works is the book’s greatest weakness. It is so jarring that it’s easy to imagine it being a clerical error made by later scribes.

Part I:

Augustine first recalls his infancy and boyhood. He emphasizes that all children are conceived in sin and that the very nature of babies is sinful, giving us the first written record of the doctrine of Original Sin.

As an adolescent, Augustine falls into the muck of lust and debauchery. As he “could not distinguish true love from lust,” he takes a mistress and begins to study rhetoric to pursue the career his parents have planned for him.

I cannot go further until I mention Augustine’s mother, Monica. Later canonized, Monica embodied Christian devotion and hope. Unlike Augustine’s father, she was a devout Christian. She prays day and night or Augustine’s conversion.

Augustine studies for years and excels at rhetoric and philosophy. He has a son, Adeodatus, by his mistress and eventually goes to Rome to teach, much to Monica’s chagrin. All throughout his early life he follows an enigmatic religion that is rarely discussed today except in connection with St. Augustine: Manichaeism.

Augustine struggled to shed the esoteric and materialistic teachings of the Manichees who surrounded him: “’truth and truth alone’ was the motto which they repeated… although the truth was nowhere to be found in them.” (Book 3.6) The more he learns the gospel, the further he distances himself from Manichaeism.

In Rome, St. Augustine’s ear is tickled by the words of a nearby preacher, St. Ambrose. Augustine finds a mentor in Ambrose, who clears up his youthful misconceptions about Christianity. For example, as a youth Augustine had felt that the Bible was intellectually primitive, as it could not compare with the elegance of Cicero. Ambrose teaches him that its simplicity is an advantage, as a sign that God’s word is for everyone.

Under Ambrose’s tutelage, Augustine vacillates between Christianity and his old ways, but through interacting with the Christian community, rational thought, realizing that the Bible need not be interpreted literally, and love, he converts.

The conversion itself is the most moving moment I have ever read in autobiographic literature:

“… a great storm broke within me, bringing with it a great deluge of tears. I stood up and left Alypius so that I might weep and cry to my heart’s content… for I felt that I was still the captive of my sins, and in my misery I kept crying ‘How long shall I go on saying ‘tomorrow, tomorrow’? Why not now? Why not make an end of my ugly sins at this moment?

… all at once I heard the sing-song voice of a child in a nearby house… again and again it repeated the refrain ‘Take it and read, take it and read’…. I stemmed my flood of tears and stood up, telling myself that this could only be a divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the first passage on which my eyes should fall… I hurried back to the place where Alypius was sitting, for when I stood up to move away I had put down the book containing Paul’s Epistles. I seized it and opened it, and in silence I read the first passage on which my eyes fell: Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites.

I had no more wish to read more and no need to do so. For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.”

Book VIII.12

Augustine is converted by what appears to him as a miracle.

Book IX presents the denoument in which Augustine recounts his time living in a group house with his newfound Christian friends (how little things have changed!). Shortly after the narrative ends, he founded a monastic community at Hippo and was pronounced its bishop, a position he held for the rest of his life. The rest of his career he largely devoted to developing Christian theology against heretics. So as soon as he finishes his narrative, he drifts to writing what he knows: theology.

Part II:

Reading books XI-XIII feels like taking a course in “problems in theology.” Augustine expatiates countless theological subjects. Among much else, he establishes:

• That God is not a consequentialist: “But you, O Lord, reward them, not according to the ends which you achieve by using them, but according to the purpose which they have in mind.” (Book XII.8)

• The Privation theory of evil, which is now standard Christian theology: “...evil is nothing but the removal of good until finally no good remains.” (Book III.7)

• That there was no time before God made the universe, so it doesn’t make sense to ask what he was doing before the creation (Book XII.13)

• What exactly is meant by Genesis by “God created the heavens and the Earth.” Augustine thinks that the phrase “ heaven and earth” is allegorical. “Heaven” means the world of abstract forms, whereas “Earth” represents the world of our own reality. This exemplifies the neoplatonic influence in Augustine’s thought. (Book XII.13)

• Why worshiping God is good even though we have nothing to offer Him: “I can only serve you and worship you so that good may come from me to you, and but for you no good could come to me, for I should not even exist to receive it.” (Book XIII.1)

• The doctrine of the trinity (Book XIII.11)

• That women and men are equal: “For you created man male and female, but in your spiritual grace they are as one. Your grace no more discriminates between them according to their sex than it draws distinction between Jew and Greek or slave and freeman.” (Book XIII.23)

• That the present has no duration, and therefore does not exist. But the past and the future also don’t exist because at no point do they actually appear… or maybe they all do exist? Augustine isn’t quite sure about this. (Book XII)

• Some leeway for personal interpretation of scripture: “Provided, therefore, that each of us tries as best he can to understand in the Holy Scriptures what the writer meant by them, what harm is there if a reader believes what you, the Light of all truthful minds, show him to be the true meaning?” (Book XII.18)

• Crucially, Why the Bible is sometimes ambiguous. This was important for me. I’ve always wondered why God imparted revelation in a book that can be misinterpreted, rather than in the form of innate instinct. Augustine argues that the fact that a single passage has many interpretation is a strength:

“… I declare resolutely and with all my heart that if I were called upon to write a book which was to be vested with the highest authority, I should prefer to write it in such a way that a reader could find reechoed in my words whatever truths he was able to apprehend. I would rather write in this way than impose a single true meaning so explicitly that it would exclude all others, even though they contained no falsehood that could give me offense.” (Book XII.31)

Prose:

I’m a sucker for good prose, and for the most part, Augustine delivers. The Penguin translation keeps the elegance and clarity of the Latin largely intact.

Augustine expresses his philosophy with such flourish and pathos that it is no surprise to me that he was considered a major rhetorician in his lifetime. I earmarked many, many excellent quotes. Here are a few of my favorites:

• “Who gathered the bitter sea of humanity into one society? All men are united by one purpose, temporal happiness on earth, and all that they do is aimed at this goal, although in the endless variety of their struggles to attain it they pitch and toss like the waves of the sea.” (Book XIII.17)

• “What, then, am I, my God? What is my nature? A life that is ever varying, full of change, and of immense power.” (Book X.17)

• “… and to reach [salvation] I needed no chariot or ship. I need not even walk as far as I had come from the house to the place where we sat, for to make the journey, and to arrive safely, no more was required than an act of will.” (Book VIII.8)

Quotes like that glisten on every third page. This is often enough of a hook to drag the reader through the pages, making the confessions an entertaining read.

On the other hand, some aspects of the prose will turn off most modern readers. The entire book is constructed as one long prayer, so Augustine frequently makes asides in which he praises God to the highest heights and waxes on his inscrutability. These are no doubt heartfelt but sometimes made my eyes glaze over.

Furthermore, the organization of the book is basic and the pacing is primitive. It’s hard to forget that this was a narrative crafted before the modern rules of pacing were established. Three and a half sections of narrative will often be interrupted by five sections of philosophy and two of prayer. I suspect this is more of a chronological barrier than a real barrier of quality, but am unsure how classical rules of pacing differed from our own.

Themes:

Christianity is the theme of the work, and it is explored from every possible angle and dimension. However, a few particular facets of a relationship with God seem to be of particular importance for Augustine.

Augustine was a terrible sinner and debaucherer in his youth. After his conversion, he seems to want to counterbalance with as much strength as he can muster by attacking sin with every atom of force and fury in his soul. His anger at sin is so intense at some points it singes his life and spreads into scrupulosity. This can even result in unintended comedy, as in this example:

“What excuse can I make for myself when often, as I sit at home, I cannot turn my eyes from the sight of a lizard catching flies or a spider entangling them as they fly into her web? Does it make any difference that these are only small animals? It is true that the sight of them inspires me to praise you for the wonders of your creation and the order in which you have disposed all things, but I am not intent upon your praises when I first begin to watch. It is one thing to rise quickly from a fall, another not to fall at all.”

-- (Book X.35)

Other than Christianity, the other big theme of Augustine’s work is philosophy. All his philosophy is soaked in neoplatonism.

Jesus, like the Buddha, had little to say about metaphysics. He’s interested in how souls rise to heaven, not how water vapor rises into clouds. In order for Christian philosophy to grow into the universalizing system it became at its height inn the middle ages, it needed explanations of how reality works. The work of the so-called “virtuous pagans,” especially Plato and Aristotle, was harnessed for this purpose. Augustine is the first Plato fanboy in the Christian tradition, and it’s likely he identified God with “the one” posited as the source of all being by Plotinus.

For example, he repeats the Platonic argument that learning is actually remembering that which we knew before. This is a good example of something we often see in classical literature: there will be something so close, so incredibly like our own culture, in one breath. For example, at one point Augustine rails against fraternity culture. And then in the next breath they’ll mention something incredibly bizarre.

Conclusion

The book has issues with pacing and organization. It may be good to allow yourself to skip certain passages when reading it. It would have flowed better if the memoir was separate from the theology. This explains the missing star in my rating.

That being said, for anyone looking for an introduction to Christian theology from an inside view, there’s no better book. The prose is well-crafted, the main character sympathetic; and everywhere the narrative is deeply moving. Just be prepared to read a lot of prayer. It’s best to read the book as you would read the Bible, not like a summer reading book. You will be taken on a deeply personal journey with one of history’s greatest theologians.

(4/5 Stars)

Now leave me alone. I need to go and count my sins.