Document Outline

, in eastern Algeria (then part of the Roman empire),

Augustine enters a social world that he now sees as sinful to the point of utter folly. Grade school
teaches questionable pursuits with misguided aims, and everywhere boys like Augustine are
trained to devote themselves to transient, material pursuits rather than to the pursuit of God. As a
student in Thagaste and then

philosophies (most notably

, Augustine runs amok in sexual adventures and false

Manicheism

). He sees this period of his life primarily as a lesson in

how immersion in the material world is its own punishment of disorder, confusion, and grief.

The young Augustine does, however, catch a passion for the pursuit of Philosophical

truth, learning the doctrines of Manicheism,

skepticism

, and

Neoplatonism

. This last philosophy

will have a profound influence on him-- the Confessions are perhaps the most masterful
expression of his intricate fusion of Catholic theology with Neoplatonic ideas.

Moving back to Thagaste, then back to Carthage again, and on to

Augustine continues to wrestle with his doubts about what he has learned and with his budding
interest in Catholicism, the faith of his mother,

. He also continues to pursue his career as

a teacher of rhetoric (an occupation he later frowns upon as the salesmanship of empty words)
and his habits of indulgence in sex and other pleasures of the sensual world. Things change in
Milan, where Augustine finally decides that Catholicism holds the only real truth. Convinced of
this but lacking the will to make the leap into a fully devoted life (including baptism and sexual
abstinence), Augustine has a famous conversion experience in his Milan garden and becomes a
devoted and chaste Catholic.

The last four Books of the Confessions depart from autobiography altogether, focusing

directly on religious and philosophical issues of

(Book X),

and the interpretation of the

and eternity (Book XI),

Book of Genesis

(Books XII and XIII). Despite this apparent sudden

shift in content, however, the Confessions are remarkably coherent as a whole; in making his
autobiography a profoundly reflective one, Augustine has already introduced many of the same
ideas and themes that receive a direct treatment in the last four Books. The unifying theme that
emerges over the course of the entire work is that of redemption: Augustine sees his own painful
process of returning to God as an instance of the return of the entire creation to God.

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The form of the work corresponds closely to its aim and its content; the work is about the

return of creation to God, it aims to inspire others to actively seek this return, and it takes the
highly original form of a direct address to God from one being in his creation. In this context, it is
also noteworthy that, for Augustine, "confession" carried the dual meanings of an admission of
guilt and an act of praise.

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Context

Saint Augustine was born Aurelius Augustinus on November 13, 354 CE. He lived his

early years in Roman North Africa (now eastern Algeria), where he would have spoken Latin at
home and in school. His parents were by no means wealthy, but neither were they destitute—
Augustine's father Patrick was a small-time landowner (Henry Chadwick writes that, given
Ovid's definition of 'pauper' as 'a man who knows how many sheep he has,' "Patrick is likely to
have known how many he had"). Augustine's mother, Monica, looms much larger in the
Confessions than his father, largely because she was a lifelong Christian who always hoped for
Augustine to become a baptized believer. Patrick remained a Pagan until being baptized on his
deathbed.

The context of fourth-century Christianity is important to keep in mind throughout much

of the Confessions, not only with regard to Augustine's parents but also as a framework for his
own lengthy struggle with becoming a Catholic. In the fourth century, Catholicism was one
young theological philosophy among many, competing for followers with Christian splinter
groups like the Manichees, secular philosophies like Neoplatonism, trendy returns to ancient
religions like the cult of Osiris, and the much more traditional propitiation of 'pagan' Greek and
Roman deities (this last being the primary religion of the Roman aristocracy which Augustine
was trying for a long time to join). Becoming a Catholic or any other kind of orthodox Christian
would not have been seen as an entirely normal thing for a person of society to do, and could in
fact hinder the kind of successful public career Augustine pursued for much of his young life.

Augustine's teenage years are recounted in the Confessions as being particularly decadent

and useless ones. He has almost nothing but regret for his schooling, in which he would have
studied literature (mostly in Latin, with some Greek), rhetoric (the art of eloquent speaking,
which Augustine would later teach), and dialectic (logical argumentation). Meanwhile, he took a
concubine at the age of 17, a decision which went against both Catholic teaching and the societal
formula for public success. He would stay with her for some fifteen years, and she bore him a
son, Adeodatus.

After his studies at Carthage, where he was an outstanding but quiet student, Augustine

returned briefly to Thagaste, setting up a school and a career as a teacher. He left once again for
Carthage after the death of a close friend made his hometown unbearable, and continued to teach
there. It was at this point that Augustine became a Manichee 'Hearer,' a class of believer less
exalted and rigorous than the orthodox Manichee 'Elect.'

Mani, a self-proclaimed prophet of the third century CE, had developed a cosmology

designed primarily to deal with the paradox of the presence of evil in a world created by God
(who is fundamentally good). Mani claimed that God was not omnipotent, and that He was in fact
locked in a constant struggle with an opposite, evil force. This would explain how evil could exist
without God willing it. The epitome of this evil nature was held to be matter, encompassing all
the sensory pleasures (especially sex). Manichees were therefore purists, following a complex set

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of dietary and domestic laws (the Elect followed them more strictly than the Hearers, who served
them).

Augustine was among a large number of cultivated, well-educated people that joined the

Manichees, in part because their texts were written in what Augustine called 'a good Latin' and
were presented in handsome volumes. Manicheism was an impressive, colorful faith, depending
heavily on its forceful, rhetorically embellished disagreements with Christianity and also on an
elaborate cosmology. For ten years, Augustine preferred the well-worded Manichee arguments to
the simple parables of the Bible, which he thought crass and uneducated (it didn't help that the
Latin Bible was at that time in a particularly poor and unliterary version). Eventually, however,
as he moved from Carthage to Rome (to escape rowdy students) and then on to Milan (to escape
cheating ones), he became increasingly suspicious of the fantastical cosmology and esoteric laws
of the Manichees. Of particular concern were its conflicts with the budding science of astronomy,
which was already able to predict things like eclipses. After meeting Faustus, a Manichee wise
man, Augustine was ready to explore more truthful, less loquacious forms of belief.

Neoplatonism, which enjoyed a small, erudite following, soon came in to replace

Augustine's shaky Manichee beliefs. He was particularly impressed by the Neoplatonic solution
to the problem of evil and by its striking philosophical similarity to the Bible. The Bishop at
Milan, Ambrose, also had a strong influence on Augustine, teaching him through sermons how to
read allegorical depth into the apparently simple parables of the Bible.

With these texts in mind, and after a long process of agonizing decision, Augustine

finally committed himself fully to the church after a conversion experience in his garden in Milan
in July of 386. He was baptized by Ambrose shortly thereafter, and his mother Monica died
shortly after that. The burial of Monica completes the chronological span covered by the
autobiographical sections of the Confessions. Augustine would not actually write the
Confessions, however, until some thirteen years later, after he had returned once again to
Thagaste, this time to start a semi-monastic community.

The immediate reasons for writing his masterpiece seem largely to have to do with his

appointment as a bishop at Hippo (also in Northern Africa) in 396. Augustine does not seem to
have wanted this post—it was more of an offer he couldn't refuse (the forcing of ordination on a
person was not uncommon at the time). His critics, however, had even stronger doubts that he
was the right man for the job, citing his Manichee past, his cleverness in rhetoric, and his
relatively recent conversion. The Confessions were written partly as a response to these critics,
openly confessing Augustine's past mistakes, praising God with effusiveness and poetry, and
roundly denouncing the Manichees.

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Thagaste

Augustine's hometown in Eastern Algeria (then part of the Roman empire). After growing up and
attending primary school in Thagaste, Augustine left the city for

for further studies. He

returned to Thagaste afterward to begin his teaching career, leaving again for good after the death
of a close friend there made the city unbearable.

Monica

Augustine's Catholic mother. She accompanied him on many of his moves from city to city,
spending time with him not only in

, and Ostia. Augustine

gives great credit to Monica for being God's instrument for his own salvation; although she
postponed his baptism as a child (feeling he wasn't ready), she never stopped encouraging him to
convert to Catholicism. A number of visions are associated with Monica in the Confessions. The
most significant is the vision of "eternal wisdom" that she and Augustine share in Ostia (Book
IX).

Carthage

Augustine moved to Carthage twice: once for further studies in rhetoric after finishing grade
school in

, and once after the death of his close friend (again in Thagaste) left him too

stricken with grief to stay in his hometown. On neither occasion is the city a good experience for
Augustine (at least in retrospect). The first time he goes, he describes it as a "cauldron of illicit
loves." The second time, he finds his students too rowdy and decamps for

Neoplatonism

Neoplatonism infuses Augustine's entire conception of God and God's creation. Plotinus founded
the school, which views God as a spiritual substance inherent in all things; as Augustine puts it,
"in filling all things, you [God] fill them all with the whole of yourself" (Book I). In the
Neoplatonist view, all things (including souls) have this infinite, timeless, and unchangeable God
as the cause of their existence--everything exists only to the extent to which it participates in
God. The Neoplatonist account of

is also extremely important to Augustine. According to

this doctrine, evil has no actual existence--things are "evil" or "wicked" according to a hierarchy

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of being in which some things are closer to God's supreme and infinite being than others. Evil
arises only as a relative quality: things further down in the hierarchy have less complete being
than things higher up, and so are imperfect or "evil" by comparison. This view, in which the
goodness of individual things varies but everything is part of a whole from God's point of view,
allows Augustine to answer

challenges about the source of evil.

Manicheism

Augustine comes across the Manichee sect in

, when he goes there for his studies. He

ends up believing strongly in Manichee doctrine for nearly ten years, until rational philosophy
and astronomy persuade him that the colorful Manichee cosmology is false. The self-declared
prophet Mani claimed that God was not omnipotent and struggled against the opposing substance
of

If creation turns away from God's eternity to become mired in

. The Manicheans also believed that the human soul was of the same substance of God.

The opposition of these views is one of the main themes of the Confessions. Manichee doctrines
depended heavily on visualization of the concepts of God and evil, and this dependence greatly
delayed Augustine from coming to know God without imagining him.

Time / Temporality

Time is the subject of Book XI of the Confessions, in which Augustine explores the relationship
between God's timelessness and his creation's experience of time. Augustine emphasizes the view
that God's creation of the universe did not occur at any point in time, since time only came into
being with creation: there was no "before." God has nothing to do with time, and in his eyes all
time is present as one unified moment. His creation, however, experiences time (which Augustine
sees as a painful quality). Augustine argues that, although we assume there is a past and a future,
neither have any existence. Even the present instant has no dimension or duration. Thus, "time
cannot be said to exist." Augustine suggests that time may be a kind of "distension," a stretching
of the soul (as opposed to a quality of the outside world). This is a sign of distance from God--
creation has fallen away from God's eternity into successive time.

Multiplicity

, it also turns away

from God's unity to become scattered into multiplicity. Augustine follows the

Neoplatonist

view

of multiplicity as a marker of flawed being, or distance from God.

Inwardness

Inwardness is the method by which Augustine attains his clearest views of God. First reading in
the

the advice to look inward for the truth, this idea will become central to what

Augustine sees as the path to God. External things, for Augustine, simply scatter the mind into

and dependence on transient things. Turning away from these things and looking

inward, Augustine searches for God. This practice leads to two ecstatic visions of God, the first
while he is reading the Neoplatonists and the second with

in Ostia. In both cases,

Augustine ascends by moving up through the levels of himself (such as body, senses, memory, or
mind) until only God is higher. In Book X, Augustine answers the problem of how to seek God
without knowing what he looks like by arguing that God is simply that which is higher than the
highest in himself. By knowing himself inwardly, he can find God.

Mind / Soul

The mind or soul (the terms are somewhat interchangeable in Augustine) is the element that

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animates human beings. It is the "life of the body," commanding the body, receiving and storing
sensory input, and using concepts and ideas. It is not, however, God or some kind of piece of
God. The

Manicheans

made the mistake of identifying the soul with God, an opinion that

Augustine now strongly rebukes. The soul or mind is also the site of Augustine's search for God,
which he pursues by looking

to find the truth that transcends the soul. This process leads

to the extended investigation of memory (which is a feature of the mind) in Book X.

Cicero

Cicero is the author of the Hortensius, a treatise in defense of the pursuit of philosophy. Reading
the work at age eighteen, Augustine gets his first urges to give up his indulgent lifestyle and
devote himself to the pursuit of truth (although this will take quite a while).

Spiritual Substance

A spiritual substance is a substance that exists without any spatial qualities at all, and it is the
substance of God. The understanding of spiritual substance is one of the final steps Augustine
makes before his conversion to Catholicism. Partly due to the influence of

images of

God as an immense body of light, Augustine has difficulty conceiving of God without resorting
to any visualization whatsoever. Spiritual substance, however, cannot be visualized, because it
has nothing to do with space--it is both everywhere and nowhere. Augustine tells us in Book XII
that spiritual substance is the substance of the heaven of heavens, the order of near-perfect
creation, whose counterpart is formless matter (of which the firmament and the earth were made).

Evil

Evil is a major theme in the Confessions, particularly in regard to its origin. Like the

Manicheans

the young Augustine could not understand how evil could exist if God was omnipotent. The
Manichee answer is that evil is a separate substance against which God is constantly battling.
Augustine harshly criticizes this view for its arrogance--wickedness is attributed to a weakness in
God rather than a weakness in human will. Augustine now replies to the Manichean challenge on
evil with a

view: evil has no existence of its own, but is entirely a product of the

contrast between greater and lesser goods. All of creation is part of a perfect whole in God, but
individual things may be closer to or further from God's perfection--the things furthest from God
appear evil or wicked by comparison. Human free will can turn toward these lower things, and it
is in this sense that evil stems not from God but from a "perversion" of human will.

Book of Genesis

Genesis is the first book of the Christian Bible, and Augustine devotes a good deal of writing to
its interpretation toward the end of the Confessions. Augustine's early encounters with the Book
of Genesis were negative. The

doctrines he followed attacked Genesis, and much of its

simple language about God "making" the heavens and the earth or speaking his "word" initially
struck Augustine as extremely flawed. His opinion began to change rapidly upon hearing

Bishop

's interpretations, which read the words in a highly spiritual, metaphorical sense.

Genesis spurs the discussion of time and eternity in Book XI, as well as providing the material
for a consideration of "the creation" in Book XII. Book XIII is an exegesis of Genesis as an
instruction on finding the church and living in God.

Justice

Though this is not a primary theme of the Confessions, Augustine sees all the events of his life as

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divinely just; he sinned, suffered, and was saved all according to God's perfect justice. There is
very little sense of cause and effect in this idea of justice, since sinning is largely its own
punishment (Augustine speaks of his early sexual adventures as a "hell of lust"). Following the

, Augustine suggests that a disordered mind or perverted will is punished by its own

miserable state and by its attachment to transient things. The only true reward is the return to the
stability of God.

Memory

Memory is the subject of most of Book X. Augustine's idea of memory is infused with

Plato

argument that learning is really a process of the soul remembering what it knew before birth.
After investigating the contents of the "vast storehouse" of memory (which contains sensory
images, skills, emotions, and ideas), Augustine argues that any recognition of truth is really a
process of "assembling" scattered pieces of a kind of eternal memory of God. Memory is strange
for Augustine because it contains images that can be re-experienced almost like the original. He
wonders at his capacity to remember sights from long ago almost as if he were seeing them again,
as well as his capacity to remember emotions without feeling them. Memory is also the place
where Augustine finally locates time. Rather than an external phenomenon, measurable time
exists solely in the mind (or soul)--the future is that which we imagine based on present signs,
and the past exists only in our memory.

Adeodatus

Augustine's son by his long-term concubine. Adeodatus dies at age seventeen, two years after he
is baptized alongside his father and

Rome

Augustine moves to Rome from

, hoping to find students who are less rowdy. The

students in Rome turn out to be dishonest, however, and Augustine moves on to

after a

short tenure.

Milan

Milan is the last place Augustine lives in the Confessions, and it is the site of his final steps
toward Christianity and of his conversion experience in the garden. Just prior to this experience,
he and his friends

As he gradually becomes disillusioned with

live in close contact, ardently pursuing truth together.

Skepticism (Academics)

beliefs, Augustine comes close to this

Greek school of total doubt that anything is certain. Referring to the skeptics as the Academics
(the school began at

Plato

's Academy), Augustine says he found them to be "shrewder" than most

other schools of thought. First

Neoplatonism

and then Catholicism would come to fill in the gap

left in him by Manicheism, and Augustine eventually emphasizes faith more than the demand for
absolute proof.

Faustus

Augustine meets Faustus, a highly respected

, during his time as a teacher in

Ambrose was the Catholic Bishop at

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Faustus impresses Augustine with his modesty, but disappoints him by using loquacious
language and by failing to answer Augustine's challenges to the Manichee cosmology. The
meeting pushes Augustine further from Manichee beliefs.

Ambrose

. He is, along with

, one of the people most

directly responsible for Augustine's conversion. Ambrose's interpretation of the bible
(particularly the Old Testament) had an immense influence on Augustine, who had previously
been put off by its simple and apparently literal language. Ambrose interprets the scriptures in a
much more abstract, spiritual sense--an approach which allowed Augustine to overcome

objections to specific phrases in the text. Ambrose baptized Augustine alongside

Nebridius

One of Augustine's close friends in

accompanies Augustine and

Augustine's closest friend and philosophical companion at

in their

philosophical struggles. He also joins Augustine in his decision to convert.

Alypius

, though it ultimately has no existence of its own, appears due to this turning

. It is during a conversation with

Alypius that Augustine becomes enraged at himself, storms out into the garden, and has his
conversion experience. Alypius joins him in conversion and in baptism.

Free Will

According to Augustine, although their choices are ultimately part of God's plan, humans have
the free will to choose to turn toward God or away from him toward the lower spectrum of the
created order.

Evil

away from God. The concept of free will is important to Augustine in opposing the

notion of evil as a dark substance in conflict with God. If this were the case, humans would have
no responsibility for their wicked acts. Augustine's view maintains that evil (or what appears to
be evil) is a misdirection of the human will.

Christ (the Word of God)

For Christians, Christ is the only true access to God. Christ is "God made flesh," God as a human
and so subject to death. As such, he represents God's infinite mercy, his promise to humanity that
God is within reach. Christ for Augustine is also eternal, perfect wisdom itself, since such
wisdom is both the nature of and the access to God. Christ is also referred to as the Word of God,
that by which God made all of creation. This idea informs Augustine's reading of the statement in

that "In the beginning was the Word." Since God cannot have anything to do with

and other dialogues influences Augustine's conception of

Augustine suggests a reading of "beginning'" as referring to God as the primary cause of
existence. His "Word" is read as Christ, the eternal wisdom by which and in which the universe is
created (rather than some kind of temporal speech).

Plato (Platonism)

Plato's philosophy in the

Meno

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memory. Plato believed that learning is a kind of remembering, in which the soul rediscovers a
truth it knew before birth. Augustine's early insistence on philosophy as the most noble pursuit in
life comes partly from

Cicero

, who is heavily influenced by Plato's similar claim. Augustine also

follows Plato in refusing to claim to know how the soul is joined to the body at or before birth.

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Augustine's Confessions

Analysis

Augustine titled his deeply philosophical and theological autobiography Confessions to

implicate two aspects of the form the work would take. To confess, in Augustine's time, meant
both to give an account of one's faults to God and to praise God (to speak one's love for God).
These two aims come together in the Confessions in an elegant but complex sense: Augustine
narrates his ascent from sinfulness to faithfulness not simply for the practical edification of his
readers, but also because he believes that narrative to be itself a story of God's greatness and of
the fundamental love all things have for Him. Thus, in the Confessions form equals content to a
large degree—the natural form for Augustine's story of redemption to take would be a direct
address to God, since it is God who must be thanked for such redemption. (That said, a direct
address to God was a highly original form for Augustine to have used at the time).

This idea should also help us understand the apparently lopsided and unusual structure of

the text. The first nine Books of the Confessions are devoted to the story of Augustine's life up to
his mother's death, but the last four Books make a sudden, lengthy departure into pure theology
and philosophy. This shift should be understood in the same context as the double meaning of
'confessions'—for Augustine, the story of his sinful life and redemption is in fact a profoundly
philosophical and religious matter, since his story is only one example of the way all imperfect
creation yearns to return to God. Thus, the story of the return to God is set out first as an
autobiography, and then in conceptual terms.

This idea of the return also serves as a good access to the philosophical and theological

context in which Augustine is thinking and writing. The most important influence here (besides
the Bible) is Neoplatonism, a few major texts of which Augustine read shortly before his
conversion. The Neoplatonist universe is hierarchical, but things lower on the scale of being
cannot be said to be bad or evil. Everything is good in so far as it exists, but things lower on the
scale have a less complete and perfect Being. In contrast to God, who is eternal, unchanging, and
unified, the lower levels of being involve what we know as the visible universe—a universe of
matter in constant flux, in a vast multiplicity, and caught up in the ravages of time.

Augustine's lasting influence lies largely in his success in combining this Neoplatonic

worldview with the Christian one. In Augustine's hybrid system, the idea that all creation is good
in as much as it exists means that all creation, no matter how nasty or ugly, has its existence only
in God. Because of this, all creation seeks to return to God, who is the purest and most perfected
form of the compromised Being enjoyed by individual things. Again, then, any story of an
individual's return to God is also a statement about the relationship between God and the created
universe: namely, everything tends back toward God, its constant source and ideal form.

A question to which much of the last four Books of the Confessions is devoted is how this

relationship between an eternal God and a temporal creation could exist. How could the return to

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God be a process that takes place over time, if God is an eternal essence to which we already owe
our very existence? How did God create the world (and 'when' could this have happened) if God
is eternal and unchanging? The solution, for Augustine, involves a deep understanding of the
simultaneity of eternity and time. Time, he argues, does not really exist—it is more of an illusion
we generate for ourselves for unclear reasons (fundamentally, we fall into time because of our
distance from God's perfection). Past and future exist only in our present constructions of them.
From God's point of view, all of time exists at once--nothing comes 'before' or 'after' anything
else temporally. God created the universe not 'at' a specific time, but rather creates it constantly
and always, in one eternal act.

This idea puts the both the Neoplatonic worldview and Augustine's own act of

'confessing' in a new perspective. There no longer needs to be any conflict between the idea of a
return to God over 'time' (as with the young and sinful Augustine) on the one hand and
everything's constant existence in God on the other. Since time is simply an illusion of the lower
hierarchy, it means the same thing to wander and return to God as it does to owe one's existence
to God at every moment—these are just two aspects of the same thing, one aspect told as a story
and the other told in religious and philosophical terms.

Thus, again, Augustine's text is remarkably and complexly coherent, despite its apparent

eccentricities and shifts in content. He is laying out the story of his life, opening himself as
completely as possible to God and to his readers. In so doing, he is praising God for his salvation.
Further, he is illustrating, with a temporal example, a specific view of the universe as unified
across all time in an unchanging God.

We have left Christ out of this discussion, largely because the most challenging aspects of

Augustine's thought often concern his use of the Neoplatonic system. Nonetheless, Christ is
crucial to Augustine, although he has no place in Neoplatonism. Christ is the mechanism by
which the return to God is effected. It is through Christ that a human can come to know his or her
existence in God, since Christ is God made human. Augustine suggests that Christ is also wisdom
itself, since wisdom too is a kind of intermediary between God and the lower levels of creation. It
is in this wisdom, in the context of this 'Christ,' that God created the universe, and it is through
this wisdom, Christ, that the universe can return to Him.

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Book I
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)

The first book of the Confessions is devoted primarily to an analysis of Augustine's life as

a child, from his infancy (which he cannot recall and must reconstruct) up through his days as a
schoolboy in

(in Eastern Algeria). Wasting no time in getting to the philosophical

content of his autobiography, Augustine's account of his early years leads him to reflect on
human origin,

will

and desire, language, and

being, Augustine sums up for now with a deeply

[I.1-3] Augustine begins each Book of the Confessions with a prayer in praise of God, but

Book I has a particularly extensive invocation. The first question raised in this invocation
concerns how one can seek God without yet knowing what he is. In other words, how can we
look for something if we don't know exactly what we're looking for? The imperfect answer, at
least for now, is simply to have faith--if we seek God at all, he will reveal himself to us.

[I.4-6] Nonetheless, Augustine launches immediately into a highly rhetorical (and

relatively brief) discussion of God's attributes. Asking God to "come into me," Augustine then
questions what that phrase could possibly mean when addressed to God. The heart of this
dilemma, which will turn out later to be one of the final stumbling blocks to Augustine's
conversion (see Books VI and VII), is that God seems both to transcend everything and to be
within everything. In either case, it doesn't make precise sense to ask him to "come into"
Augustine.

God cannot be contained by what he created, so he can't "come to" Augustine in any

literal sense. At the same time, God is the necessary condition for the existence of anything, so
he's "within" Augustine already (so again it makes no sense to ask him to "come into me").
Further, God is not "in" everything in amounts or proportions--small pieces of the world don't
have any less of God than big ones.

Having hurriedly discredited the idea of God as any sort of bounded, mobile, or divisible

statement on the question of

"where" God is: "In filling all things, you fill them all with the whole of yourself."

Augustine then rephrases his question about God's nature, asking "who are you then, my

God?" This rather direct approach generates a litany of metaphors concerning God, taken partly
from scripture and partly from Augustine's own considerations. Examples include: "most high...
deeply hidden yet most intimately present...you are wrathful and remain tranquil...you pay off
debts, though owing nothing to anyone...." This list is rhetorical rather than analytic, and
develops no coherent argument about God--it just introduces the mysteries of the subject.

[I.7-8] Augustine now turns to the story of his childhood, beginning with his birth and

earliest infancy. As he would continue to do throughout his life, Augustine here follows the

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in refusing to speculate on how the

joins the body to become an infant. "I do

not know," he writes, "whence I came to be in this mortal life or...living death" (following Plato,
Augustine leaves open the possibility that life is really a kind of death and that true "life" is
enjoyed by the soul when it is not in this world).

With this question left up in the air, Augustine considers his infancy. He's extremely

careful here, since he can't actually remember this period-- claims about it are explicitly justified
with references to Augustine's later observations of infants. Infancy, it seems, turns out to be a
fairly miserable state. All desires are internal, since infants have only "a small number of signs"
to express their wants and also no physical power to fulfill them. Thoughtless and already sinful,
the tiny Augustine made demands on everyone, thanked no one, and revenged himself on his
caretakers with obnoxious weeping.

[I.9-10] There is a brief interlude here while Augustine asks again what he was before

birth, and again the question goes unanswered. He only knows that at birth he had both being and
life. He also points out here that God is the most extreme instantiation of both being and life, and
that God is responsible for uniting these two qualities in new humans.

[I.11-12] Returning to brutish infancy, Augustine considers to what extent he was sinning

at that age. He's harsh on himself for the nasty attitude mentioned above, but concludes with a
dismissal of responsibility for those times, of which he "can recall not a single trace."

[I.13-16] Soon, however, the infant Augustine began to exercise his memory, particularly

in the service of learning to communicate through language (in Roman North Africa, this
language was Latin). As always, Augustine is ambivalent about this skill, and here he notes that
with it he "entered more deeply into the stormy society of human life." Particularly disturbing to
Augustine is the way language was used and taught at school--he regrets that he was taught to
speak and write for corrupted purposes, namely in the service of gaining future honor and wealth.
Using a term he will return to often, he refers to the use of this flashy language of public oratory
(which emphasizes form over content) as "loquacity."

In fact, Augustine continues, the whole scholastic system concentrated on "follies,"

punishing the students for boyish games in order to train them for equally misguided adult ones
(such as business or politics).

[I.17-18] Another issue Augustine has to consider here is his early religious status. Born

to a devoutly Catholic mother (

) and a pagan father (Patrick), Augustine's baptism is

deferred until he's older. This was a common practice, meant to leave the cleansing of sin until
after the hazards of youth and so to get the most out of the ritual when it was finally performed.

[I.19-29] Meanwhile, the folly of school continues. Most of the remaining sections of

Book I are devoted to the errors of Augustine's early teachers, who meant well but were ignorant
of the proper purposes of education. Of central concern here are the classical texts the young,
unhappy Augustine was forced to read and, more broadly, the high-flown rhetorical language he
was supposed to learn from them. Augustine particularly disapproves of fiction, which he sees as
a misleading waste of time. It is sinful, he argues, to read of other people's sins while remaining
ignorant of one's own.

Overall, Augustine gives his boyhood teachers credit only for giving him the most basic

tools for potentially good reading and writing--his "primary education." All the rest was simply a
matter of learning perverted human custom rather than truth or morality (which are, in any case,
more deep-seated than the "conventions" of language).

[I.30-31] Book I closes with a very brief list of Augustine's selfish sins as a little boy,

which he claims were "shocking even to the worldly set." He sees these as smaller, less
significant versions of the sins of a worldly adult life. He admits, however, that there were some
good things about him as well. These, though, were due entirely to God. The sins, on the other
hand, were due to a "misdirection" of Augustine's gifts away from God and toward the material,
created world.

This "misdirection" is a reference to a key idea in

Neoplatonism

that informs most of

Augustine's work, namely that God's creation has turned away from his eternal unity and toward

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of the created world.

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with mind." Hence, pure love was perverted by its

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With the onset of adolescence in Book II, Augustine enters what he seems to consider the

most lurid and sinful period of his life. He "ran wild," he writes, "in the jungle of erotic
adventures...and became putrid in [God's] sight." In addition to his first sexual escapades,
Augustine is also quite concerned with an incident in which he and some friends stole pears from
a neighborhood orchard. Augustine deeply regrets both of these sins, and offers a few brief
insights as to how and why he committed them.

[II.1-4] Though sinful in acting out his erotic desires, Augustine gives himself some

credit, writing that "the single desire that dominated my search for delight was simply to love and
be loved." Again, God has given Augustine only good properties, and it is his own fault for
misdirecting those properties. In this case, the problem was that his love had "no restraint
imposed [on it] by the exchange of

mind

misdirection toward worldly things (bodies). Ideally, according to Augustine, sex is used only for
procreation, and even then only in a relationship focused not on lust but on a loving, rational
partnership (as he sees Adam and Eve relating before their fall).

[II.5-8] Having finished grade school at this point, Augustine was preparing to leave for

for further study. His father Patrick had managed to raise funds for this, and Augustine

praises him for trying so hard to educate his son. Still, he notes, his father had no proper moral
concern for him--as was the overwhelming custom, education was seen simply as a means to
worldly success.

"But in my mother's heart," writes Augustine, "you had already begun your temple." The

Catholic

often admonished young Augustine against fornication, and he now recognizes

that God was speaking through her. At the time, however, her warnings seemed "womanish
advice which I would have blushed to take the least notice of." Eventually, Monica tends to lets
Augustine do as he will, fearing that a proper wife at this stage would impede his chances for a
good career.

[II.9-14] Augustine considers the theft of the pears next. What particularly disturbs him

about this teenage prank is that he did it out of no other motive than a desire to do wrong. "I
loved my fall [into sin]," he writes. The pears were not stolen for their beauty, their taste, or their
nourishment (there were better pears at home), but out of sheer mischief.

Investigating this point further, Augustine again concludes that his actions simply

represent a human perversion of his God-given goodness. In fact, each thing he sought to gain
from stealing the pears (and everything humans desire in sinning) turns out to be a twisted
version of one of God's attributes. In a remarkable rhetorical feat, Augustine matches each sinful
desire with a desire to be like God: pride seeks loftiness (and God is the highest), perverse

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curiosity desires knowledge (and God knows all), idleness is really aiming at "quietude" (and
God is unchanging in his eternal repose), and so on.

The underlying theme here is, again,

. For the Neoplatonists, all creation (the

material world) has "turned away" from God's perfection, becoming scattered into a chaotic state
of mutability,

, and

. God remains unchangeable, eternal, and unified, and

creation always seeks (whether it realizes it or not) to return to God. Here, Augustine has argued
that even sin itself fundamentally aims at a return to God.

[II.15-18] Book II ends with a consideration of the peer pressure on which Augustine

partly blames the theft of the pears. The main lesson he takes from this is that "friendship can be
a dangerous enemy, a seduction of the

mind

." Like love, it must be subjected to reason if it is to

be truly good.

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, Augustine enters a place and a

lifestyle in which "all around me hissed a cauldron of illicit loves." His range of "rotten...
ulcerous" sins expands from teenage pranks to include attending public spectacles and reading
tragedies. This is a low point in Augustine's relationship with God--turned almost entirely toward
transient diversions, he seems to feel he could get no lower. It is at this point, however, that
Augustine first suspects that seeking truth might be more important than worldly success.
Shopping around for the right philosophy, he stumbles onto the

faith (a heretical

version of Christianity). Listening to the Manichees will turn out to be perhaps the biggest
mistake of his life, and much of Book III is devoted to an initial attack on the Manichee faith.

[III.1-4] Augustine begins Book III with a wholesale self-condemnation, recalling his

"foul and immoral" state of being at Carthage and comparing it to a kind of "bondage," a "joy that
enchains." His sexual adventures continued unabated, a "hell of lust" that Augustine again
attributes to a misdirection of the love for God ("I sought an object for my love").

Augustine also expanded his schoolboy "sin" of reading fiction, taking advantage of

cosmopolitan Carthage to attend "theatrical shows." He particularly regrets having attended
tragedies, since this constitutes immersion in fictional suffering without a recognition of one's
own suffering in sin. Tragedy also encourages a "love of suffering" that Augustine now finds
absurd and wrong. There is more of the language of bondage and masochism here, as Augustine
recalls seeking out tragic stories that "scratched" his soul and became "inflamed spots, pus, and
repulsive sores" according to God's justice ("you beat me with heavy punishments").

[III.5-9] At this point Augustine came across a book by

Cicero

called Hortensius, which

aims to rebut the position that philosophy is useless and does not lead to happiness. Cicero argues
that this anti-philosophy opinion can only be judged by philosophy, since it is itself a
philosophical statement. Augustine read the book at age eighteen, in the course of his studies to
become a skilled and stylish orator. But this book, which also argues that the pursuit of truth
through philosophy is the route to a happy life, moved him deeply: for the first time, he "longed
for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardor in my heart." Perhaps most significantly,
Augustine recalls reading Hortensius for its content rather than its form--an important initial
deviation from his pursuit of "loquacity."

It should also be noted that Augustine does not consider the Hortensius to be the most

redemptive book that he could have loved at that point (that, of course, would have been the
Bible). Specifically, he is at pains here to point out the apostle Paul's warning in the scriptures not
to be deceived by philosophy to the exclusion of

. Throughout his Confessions, Augustine

will take care to intersperse his philosophy with plentiful doses of praise to God and Christ.

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Feeling that Hortensius was compromised by the lack of any reference to Christ (he

attributes this feeling to

(followers of the self-declared prophet Mani). Most of the

's early influence), Augustine finally decided to take a look at the

Christian Bible. Unfortunately, the early Latin bible was crudely worded and somewhat obscure.
For a student of rhetoric and oratory like the young Augustine, its language was blunt and
repulsive. He put it aside, missing what he now recognizes as its sublime simplicity, its
"

inwardness

[III.10-18] Still burning for truth, Augustine began to fall in with the pseudo-Christian

sect known as the

Manichees

remainder of Book III is devoted to an initial rundown of basic Manichee beliefs, their conflicts
with the Catholic faith, and Augustine's errors in falling in with them (he would remain a
Manichee for close to ten years).

Augustine's first criticism of the Manichee doctrines he believed concerns their

dependence on an elaborate mythology. The sun and moon are venerated as divine beings, and
Manichees tended to picture divinity in terms of "physical images" or "bodily shapes." These
"fantasies" and "dreams" will plague Augustine almost until his conversion, keeping him from
recognizing God as a "

spiritual substance

" rather than some sort of enormous physical mass.

Augustine offers a brief account of the proper view here, noting that God is not a body or even a

(the life of the body). Rather, God is "the life of souls, the life of lives," more truthful and

reliable than either bodies or the soul.

Augustine now turns to the three primary Manichee criticisms of Catholic belief (the

refutation of these criticisms will be one of his central focuses toward the end of the
Confessions). The first, and most famous, Manichee challenge concerns the nature and source of

. If God is supremely good, and if he is also all-powerful, eternal, and the cause of all

existence, how can evil exist? Where can it come from except God? At the very least, why can't
God eliminate it? Manichees insisted that God is not all-powerful and that he is in fact in constant
struggle against his opposite, the dark, material world that is by nature evil.

The second Manichee challenge concerns the nature of God as a being: "is God confined

within a corporeal form? has he hair and nails?" This question is intimately tied to the question
about evil, since it also challenges the idea of God as omnipotent and omnipresent. In the
Manichee view, God is limited--he is not everywhere, and does not control everything.

The rebuttal Augustine introduces to these first two challenges is

in nature,

and its use for the defense of Catholic theology is one of the central achievements of his work.
Simply put, God is Being itself, the most pure and supreme form of existence. Everything else is
God's creation, and fits into a descending scale of Being--the further something is from God, the
less true existence it has.

Things lower on this descending scale have greater

, greater

, and

greater general disorder. In short, the further away from God something is, the more scattered and
fleeting it is. Heaven (not the starry firmament but the realm of angels) is close to God, and
comes very close to having his full, unchanging Being (maximum existence). Human souls or
minds are a step further down, and bodies and other material things are at the bottom of the pile.
(Of course, these spatial images serve only as a metaphor-- to believe in them literally would be a
big mistake).

This idea allows Augustine to answer the Manichee question of evil as follows: "evil has

no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being."
Evil is just a name for a lack of true existence, a label for how far a thing (or person) has
wandered from unity with God. We might think of evil, metaphorically at least, as a king of
tattered Being, with the evilest things barely more than ghosts. (It's helpful here to recall
Augustine's treatment of the pear theft in Book II, where he tried to demonstrate that each sin was
really a twisted or incomplete attempt to be like God). Thus, evil is not some dark substance that
exists in conflict with God; it is simply the extent to which something in God's creation has
turned away from him, the extent to which a thing (or human) is unaware of its existence in God.
In a significant sense, Augustine argues that there is no evil.

This argument depends on the recognition of God as a spirit, the "life of life," the

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condition for existence itself. God is being and goodness, and his creation is a hierarchy in which
each existing thing is good in its own order (so that evil is simply a matter of relative good). The
recognition of God as such a spirit also answers the second Manichee challenge, which concerns
the statement in

that man is made in God's image. How could this be, asked the

Manichees, unless God is somehow corporeal?

Though he does not elaborate much here, Augustine interprets the scripture to refer to

God as "Spirit," and man as capable of finding that Spirit within himself at any time. Thus, God
need not be corporeal to explain the statement in Genesis. Neither is God some sort of infinite
mass, some kind of substance that extends in all directions to infinity. In general, Augustine
faults the Manichees (and his own sinful lifestyle) for keeping him from understanding

spiritual

substance

. He will be plagued for quite awhile by the effort to conceive of God without forming

an image of him (even if the "image" is of an infinite mass), without using "the mind of my flesh"
rather than pure mind.

Augustine now moves on to the third major Manichee challenge: the rejection of the book

of Genesis and much of the Old Testament. The Manichees ridiculed the recurrence of polygamy
and animal sacrifice in these parts of the bible, finding them in conflict with God's laws as they
are set out elsewhere in the Bible. Augustine argues that, while God's law is by definition eternal
and unchanging, it reveals itself to humans by degrees and manifests itself differently according
to the historical context.

The contrast is between "true,

," which can be found by finding God inside

justice

oneself (apart from the material world), and relative justice, which serves the everyday human
world. But interestingly, Augustine cannot bring himself to separate sodomy from his somewhat
mystical concept of absolute justice, and notes that it is a "perversion of nature" and therefore
wrong regardless of the context.

Dismissing, then, the

criticisms of Old Testament behavior (which, he says,

were correct at the time), Augustine sketches out a brief classification of kinds of sin (which
presumably are unchanging). There are, he writes, three basic motives for misdeeds: "the lust for
domination...the lust of the eyes...[and] sensuality--either one or two of these, or all three at
once." (In later works, this classification would evolve into a division of sinful motives into
pleasure, pride, and curiosity).

Augustine proceeds to note a few cases where it may be unclear to what extent an act is

sinful. Making "progress" in the world, for example, may be done for good or sinful motives--
likewise the punishment of others. Some sinful acts, such as animal sacrifice, may be justifiable if
they are prophetic acts (as was the case with the sacrifices in the Old Testament).

[III.19-21] Book III concludes with a description of a vision experienced by

this point in Augustine's life. She is standing on a "rule" (presumably a long, narrow strip or
platform). She meets a stranger and tells him she is distraught over her son's refusal to become a
good Christian. The stranger tells her: "'Where you are, there will he be also.'" Monica then turns
to find Augustine standing behind her on the rule.

Taking the vision as a good omen, Monica nonetheless proceeded to beg a local priest to

try to convert Augustine. Refusing, the priest says Augustine is not ready yet. He does, however,
also say: "'as you live, it cannot be that the son of these tears should perish.'" Augustine uses the
story to remind his readers that despite all his errors (including his fall into

illusion),

God has a plan for his salvation, executed partly through Monica.

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Returning to

from his studies at

). This hypocritical life, in

, Augustine began to teach rhetoric,

making friends and chasing a career along the way. Though giving some account of these worldly
matters, Augustine spends much of Book IV examining his conflicted state of mind during this
period. Having begun his turn toward God (through the desire for truth) but continuing to be
ensnared in sinful ways, Augustine wrestled painfully with the transitory nature of the material
world and with the question of God's nature in relation to such a world.

[IV.1-7] Augustine opens this Book with a short description of his pursuits in Thagaste,

which he says consisted primarily of "being seduced and seducing, being deceived and
deceiving." He points out that he spent his public hours in pursuit of empty, worldly goals (his
ambition to attain public office, which required great skill in oratory as well as contacts and
money) and his private hours pursuing a "false religion" (

Manicheism

which he sought both material gain and (false) spiritual purity, was nothing but a form of "self-
destruction."

Chief among Augustine's regrets about this period are his career as a "salesman" of the

"tricks of rhetoric" (he was an instructor in rhetoric, partly to students at the law courts) and his
persistence in keeping a concubine. Although he doesn't say much about this unnamed woman,
she stayed with Augustine for nearly ten years, eventually bearing him a son (

influence of his close friend

, who

would die at age seventeen).

Augustine does recall, however, making some progress toward truth. In part through the

, Augustine concluded that astrology is "utterly

bogus." (This will prove an important first step in discarding the colorful

mythology,

which contains a number of bizarre accounts of the heavenly bodies). Shunning this dubious form
of prediction and the elaborate sacrificial rituals that often accompanied it, Augustine began to
attribute its occasional success almost entirely to chance, which he sees as "a power everywhere
diffused in the nature of things."

[IV.8-18] Such considerations were interrupted for a while when a close friend of

Augustine suddenly passed away, leaving him grief-stricken: "everything on which I set my gaze
was death." Realizing now that his grief would have been alleviated by faith in God, Augustine
concludes that his grief meant he had "become to myself a vast problem." Attached to the
transient, embodied things of the world (rather than to God), he suffered grief when they
disappeared.

This theme gets a lengthy treatment here, as Augustine investigates the unreliability and

transience of things and the permanence of God. Misery, he writes, is due to an unreasonable
attachment to "mortal things." Further, this is always the state of the

With everything around him looking like death, Augustine again left

without God--misery is

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everywhere when there is nothing eternal to depend on. "Where," Augustine asks, "should I go to
escape from myself?... Wherever the human soul turns itself, other than you, it is fixed in
sorrows."

for

. His state of mind at this point was not good, but the lessons he learned from his grief

are still with him. The chief lesson, again, is transience. Every material thing, no matter how
beautiful, is demarcated by a beginning and an end--no sooner does anything come to be than it is
"rush[ing] toward non-being." These things, then, should only be the object of love in as much as
one is loving the presence of God in them.

God, on the other hand, is "a place of undisturbed quietness." Though the things of the

world pass away, taken together they are part of a timeless whole. Through God, one can
perceive this whole, since God is the ground for all existence. If this is recognized,

shouldn't be a concern.

There are a few references here to speech and language in the context of transience.

Speech for Augustine is problematic in two deeply intertwined ways. Firstly, it is always
successive--one cannot say anything all at once. Thus, speech (and writing, for that matter) is
always bound in temporality, that state which is unknown to God but suffered by his estranged
creation. In addition, speech is incapable of accurately describing God (a concern of the first
pages of the Confessions). In both form and content, then, language is a poor tool with which to
pursue the truth of God. There is an exception, however: prayer or confessions, forms of direct
address to God's mercy. (The Latin for this word carries the double meaning of admitting guilt to
God and praising God.) God is always listening, and direct address to him is the format for the
Confessions as a whole.

[IV.19-27] Augustine devotes some time to a reappraisal of a book he wrote during this

period in

, called The Beautiful and the Fitting. The book argued that there were two

kinds of beauty: beauty inherent in the thing itself and beauty by virtue of the thing's use value.

There are a number of retractions Augustine wants to make concerning this work, most of

which he now considers "miserable folly." First to go is the dedication, which was made to
Hierius, a Roman orator well known at the time. Augustine recognizes that he dedicated his work
to this man solely because Hierius was popular: "I used to love people on the basis of human
judgement, not your judgement, my God."

In The Beautiful and the Fitting, Augustine also argued that there is an

substance that

causes division and conflict, whereas the nature of the good is the unity and peace whose most
perfect instantiation is in pure

mind

. Two things are wrong with this view, and both are

errors. First, there is the idea of evil as a substance--an impossibility if God is to be omnipotent
and omnipresent. Second, there is the idea of the mind as "the supreme and unchangeable good."

Augustine considers his second error in particular to be "amazing madness." The soul, he

now knows, is not itself the fundamental truth or good. It participates in God, but is not itself God
or some small piece of God. The error about evil and this error about the soul together constitute,
in Augustine's eyes, a massive arrogance characteristic of Manichee beliefs: evil is thought to
exist due to God's impotence (rather than human impotence), and humans mistake themselves for
God.

With this retraction made, Augustine moves from what he was writing at the time to what

he was reading: Aristotle's Categories. Like the

, Augustine now understands

Aristotle's work as a system applicable only to this world (and to logical exercises in general), but
not to God. At the time, however, he was puzzled and misled. Trying to conceive how God could
have beauty and magnitude as attributes (following Aristotle's system), he failed to realize that
"you [God] yourself are your own magnitude and your own beauty."

This error led Augustine further into the false problems of trying to imagine God. With

the influence of Manichee beliefs all around him, he pictured God as "like a luminous body of
immense size and myself a bit of that body. What extraordinary perversity!"

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Book V follows the young Augustine from

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(where he finds his students too

rowdy for his liking) to

(where he finds them too corrupt) and on to

remain until his conversion.

, where he will

beliefs begin to lose their luster for him during this period,

and by the end of the Book he considers himself an unbaptized Christian (a "catechumen": a
beginner who is being taught the principles of Christianity; a neophyte). Augustine encounters a
number of important figures during this period of relentless searching, including

Bishop of Milan, who will eventually baptize Augustine) and

(the

also encounters the profound doubt of the

skeptical

school and comes close to total skepticism in

his own philosophy.

[V.1-13] Augustine begins by reminding us that everything and everyone is part of the

whole of God's creation. This is in line with the

ideas discussed in Book III; nothing

is inherently

At age twenty-nine, still in Carthage, Augustine gets to meet

, and even the most "wicked" people continually praise God (though they do not

know it). "You [God] see them and pierce their shadowy existence," he writes, and "even with
them everything is beautiful, though they are vile." (Later, in his City of God, Augustine will
liken such apparently evil people and things to the dark areas in a beautiful painting).

Faustus

, a respected sage of

the Manichees. Before describing the encounter, Augustine takes the opportunity to make some
points about the difference between scientific astronomy and the Manichee account of the
heavens, a comparison that he was considering at the time.

Though he now knows that science is worthless without praise to God (who made the

scientists and even the numbers they use), at the time he was impressed by astronomy's reliability
in accounting for heavenly movements. In contrast, the Manichee account (which included claims
that the eclipses serve to "hide" heavenly battles) was starting to seem inaccurate.

Augustine is initially impressed by the modesty Faustus exhibits--the sage simply refuses

to theorize about subjects he doesn't know intimately (astrology is an example). Interestingly,
however, Faustus' rhetorical flashiness doesn't impress Augustine, who claims that by this time
he had learned to value the content of speech over mere loquacity. The net result of the interview
was disillusionment: Augustine departed with more doubts than ever about Manichee myths and
pseudo-science.

[V.14-21] Finding his students too rowdy and altogether too reminiscent of himself when

he was a student, Augustine departed

, who had accompanied him to

Carthage, grieved at his departure, and Augustine confesses that he told her a white lie in order to
get on the boat to Rome without delay.

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Almost immediately on arrival in Rome, Augustine was stricken gravely ill (in referring

to this illness as a punishment from God, he makes the first-ever use of the phrase "original sin").
For his recovery, he gives credit to God, of course, but also to Monica's prayers.

Appraising what he knew when he began living in Rome, Augustine makes a reference to

"the Academics," the

skeptical

school that arose at Plato's Academy. He thought the Academics

"shrewder than others," and their pervasive logical challenges to any belief at all had, in
Augustine's mind, a particularly devastating effect on the somewhat goofy postulates of
Manichee mythology.

Still, however, the Manichees had left Augustine plagued by images when he thought of

God or of evil: God as "a physical mass" or "a luminous body," even evil as "a malignant mind
creeping through the earth." Even worse, his lingering dualism (the idea that God and

are

two warring substances) meant that he still took no real responsibility for his sins. Worse still, he
accepted the Manichee disbelief in

's incarnation in human form, picturing him instead as a

wholly divine being "emerging from the mass of [God's] dazzling body."

[V.22-25] Things were going poorly in

, where Augustine quickly discovered his

students to be cheaters who would often walk out just before the end of classes to avoid paying
the teacher. Disgusted, Augustine took an opening for a teacher of rhetoric in

. This will

turn out to be an important move: it was "to end my association with [the Manichees], but neither
of us knew that [yet]." In Milan waited

Bishop Ambrose

, who would be a major influence in

Augustine's conversion to Catholicism.

In Milan, Augustine became increasingly open to Christian philosophy and theology,

primarily for the reason that he hears the Old Testament "figuratively interpreted" for the first
time. This experience is the practical catalyst that allows Augustine to begin to move toward total
faith in the church.

, with its apparently intractable issues of a God that "created" and did

things like a being who lived in time and in a body, suddenly seemed much more reasonable
when "expounded spiritually." The apparently sinful actions of the prophets of the Old Testament
also took on new sense when read metaphorically.

Augustine became at this point a near-convert, a "catechumen" waiting for a final sign

from God that he should take the plunge and be baptized. The one remaining obstacle to his total
belief, he says, was his persistent imagery of God as a physical mass or ghostly substance,
expanded or diffused through everything like a gas. He still lacked the concept of a

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Book V

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In his account of these early times in

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he begins Book VI by crediting

, Augustine spends most of his time

addressing disparate events and discussions that occurred in his circle of friends and family. One
feels he is clearing aside details and setting the scene before launching into an account of his final
steps toward conversion in Books VII and VIII. A number of issues are raised and briefly
discussed, most importantly those of marriage and the good life.

[VI.1-8] In Milan, Augustine was becoming increasingly open to Christian doctrine, and

(who has followed him to Milan as well) and

for this. Monica led a quiet and extremely devout life in Milan, serving as a constant reminder to
Augustine that he may well have been destined for Catholicism. Ambrose, as Bishop, was
extremely busy and Augustine found it hard to find a moment for a private audience with him.

Ambrose's sermons, however, continued to make an impact on Augustine, particularly in

their interpretive approach to the Old Testament. As Ambrose described this interpretive method,
"the letter kills, the spirit gives life." A big step came when Augustine learned that most
Catholics do not take literally the passage in

in which God makes man "in his own

image." He began to suspect that other "knotty" passages in scripture may hide deeper meanings
as well.

Augustine was also increasingly attracted to the refusal of the church to offer "proof" of

its doctrines. Augustine finds this an engaging form of modesty, and the idea that faith, not
reason, is the basis for true knowledge helps alleviate his

skepticism

to some degree.

[VI.9-24] Turning to events in his daily life at Milan, Augustine recounts some of the

issues discussed in his circle of friends. The first concerns a beggar they passed on the way to an
important speech Augustine was to deliver. Augustine was miserably nervous about his
upcoming performance, but the wretched, filthy beggar appeared to be immensely happy in his
drunken stupor. This disturbed Augustine deeply, and he spoke to his friends about "the many
sufferings that accompany our follies."

These friends, whose spiritual condition Augustine felt to be "much the same as mine,"

are named as

(with whom Augustine had discussed astrology in Book IV) and

who will later witness Augustine's conversion and become a very close friend. Alypius is
described here as full of integrity in his career at the law courts but possessing a potentially "fatal
passion for the circus" and public shows in general. Augustine depicts himself and his two
friends as three young spiritual questers after truth, and he seems to have depended on their
company and moral support.

Having nearly convinced himself that Catholicism is the only place where he will find the

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truth, Augustine began to worry deeply about the issue of sexual abstinence. Although the church
allowed sex in the context of marriage, it encouraged men to try to live without it if possible.
Augustine felt at least that he should get married, in large part because marital status and the
money that came with the bride (the dowry) would help advance his career to still higher levels.
He debated the topic often with Alypius, who had remained chaste after an early and unpleasant
sexual experience.

Though fascinated by Augustine's sexual appetite, Alypius argued against a wife, in large

part because he and his two compatriots had been toying seriously with the idea of withdrawing
from society to lead a bohemian philosopher's life. Nonetheless, Augustine agreed to marry. The
bride-to-be was only twelve, however, so the marriage would not have been for a few years. In
the meantime, Augustine is forced to send away his concubine (the mother of his son

Book VI ends with Augustine in a state of extreme suspension, nearly ready to convert,

nearly ready to marry, and still plagued by doubts.

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Although Augustine has been using

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terms and ideas throughout the

Confessions thus far, it isn't until Book VII that he reaches the point in his autobiography when
he first reads Neoplatonic philosophy. This is a watershed moment for the young Augustine, who
finds in Neoplatonism a way of reconciling his long pursuit of philosophy with his new and
serious faith in the Catholic church. The union of this philosophy and this theology will guide his
work (including the Confessions) for the rest of his life.

[VII.1-7] Augustine begins with another appraisal of his philosophy at the time, paying

particular attention to his conceptions of God as a being and of the nature of

(the two

concepts that Neoplatonism would alter most for him). The problem of picturing God remained
central. Having rejected

dualism, Augustine was finally trying to imagine God as

"incorruptible and inviolable and unchangeable" rather than as some kind of limited, partly
impotent substance.

He still, however, has no conception of

spiritual substance

(a substance that is not matter

and does not exist in space). He pictured God as "a secret breath of life" or like sunlight, when he
shouldn't have been "picturing" him at all. "My eyes are accustomed to such images," he writes,
and "my heart accepted the same structure. Augustine couldn't get around the idea that anything
not occupying space could still have existence. (He notes that even the power of thought itself, if
he had considered it, would have served as an example).

Similarly, although Augustine now thought of Manichee dualism as "an abomination," he

still had no solution to the problem of evil. He even reached the point of suspecting (after
listening to other Catholics) that human

free will

causes evil, but was left with the question of

why humans can choose evil at all. How could it even be an option to choose something other
than God, if God is omnipotent?

This problem, too, Augustine now attributes to improper visualization. He thought of God

like an immense ocean, with the world as "a large but finite sponge" within it. Thus, he asked,
"how [did] evil creep in?" And if matter itself was evil (as the Manicheans taught), why did God
create it?

[VII.8-22] After a brief discussion of astrology (which, in a conversation with a

prominent astrologer called Firminus, he finds as improbable as ever), Augustine turns to his

experience. Picking up a Neoplatonic text, he read what seemed to be almost another

version of

. The book (he doesn't name it) struck Augustine as thrillingly similar to

Genesis, and authoritatively contrary to Manichee dualism.

Having briefly touched on his excitement about what he found in this text, Augustine

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almost immediately turns to what he didn't find there: namely, he didn't find any reference to

as God in human form. The Neoplatonists back up the idea of God as the cause of the

existence of all things (as well as the assertion that the

is not the same thing as God), but

they mention nothing about the idea that "the Word was made flesh [i.e., Christ] and dwelt
among us." (This sudden attention to the absence of Christ from these texts may be an attempt to
pre-empt criticism from purist Catholics. Throughout the Confessions, Augustine is careful not to
show unmitigated enthusiasm for philosophy in and of itself).

Augustine also makes two other criticisms of Neoplatonism here: it fails to give any

praise to God, and it is tainted by polytheist tendencies. These problems notwithstanding, the
young Augustine was inspired enough by his new reading that he had a powerful vision of God.
Turning

as the Neoplatonists advised, Augustine "entered and with my soul's eye, such as

it was, saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than my mind."

Perhaps for the first time, this wasn't a visual kind of light. It was "utterly different from

all other kinds of light. It transcended my mind, [but] not in the way that oil floats on water."
There was no false imagery in this vision, but no imagery at all ("this way of seeing you did not
come from the flesh"): Augustine was finally able to "see" God with his mind instead of his
mind's eye. What he "saw," he writes, "is Being, and that I who saw am not yet Being." This is
indeed a very Neoplatonic vision, and it allowed Augustine finally to understand God and
creation as part of the same spectrum of relative Being (with God as the pinnacle and Augustine
"far" from him).

In this moment, Augustine also finally understood the nature of evil: namely that, "for

[God] evil does not exist at all." All elements of the world are "good in themselves," but may
appear evil when there is "a conflict of interest." Further, Augustine saw that human
"wickedness" is not a substance "but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance,
you O God, toward inferior things, rejecting its own inner life." This, too, is a Neoplatonic
position: nothing can be truly antagonistic to God (the cause of all existence), but human free will
allows a turn away from him.

[VII.23-27] Unfortunately, Augustine's inward view of God proved to be transient, a

"flash of a trembling glance." Augustine blames the weight of his sins (especially his "sexual
habit") for pulling him back down out of the vision. He also gives attention to another obstacle
that prevented him from "enjoying" God for more than a moment: he had not yet put his faith in
Christ, "the mediator between God and man."

Augustine attributes this hesitation to follow

to a lack of humility, without which

knowledge only goes so far. Christ, writes Augustine, "detaches [those who accept him] from
themselves." At the time of his

vision, however, he seems to have taken on the

Neoplatonic idea of Christ "only as a man of excellent wisdom" who was chosen by God (though
in Book V he claims the opposite error of believing Christ to be wholly divine).

"Of these Neoplatonic conceptions I was sure," writes Augustine, "but to enjoy you I was

too weak." An answer presented itself soon after, however, when Augustine began to read the
apostle Paul. Here he again finds strong affinities with Neoplatonism, but also the element of
grace and humility lacking from those more strictly philosophical texts. "I...found that all the
truth I had read in the [Neo]Platonists was stated here together with the commendation of your
grace [i.e., praise to God]."

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Having achieved both some understanding of God (and

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, Augustine still agonizes over becoming a full member of the church. Book VIII tells the

story of his conversion experience in

, which begins with an agonizing state of spiritual

paralysis and ends with an ecstatic decision (in a Milan garden) to wholly embrace celibacy and
the Catholic faith.

[VIII.1-18] Characteristically of this part of the Confessions, Augustine begins by taking

stock of his progress toward God at the time. He had removed all doubt "that there is an
indestructible substance from which comes all substance," and recognized that God was a

spiritual substance

with no spatial extension. "My desire," he writes, "was not to be more certain

of you but to be more stable in you."

Augustine is further moved by the story (told by his Christian friend Simplicianus) of

Victorinus, a highly respected rhetorician and translator of the

texts Augustine had

just read. Victorinus had converted to Christianity toward the end of his life, and Augustine was
much impressed that such an intelligent and successful man had had the faith to become Catholic.

Nonetheless, Augustine did not yet convert. Though no further obstacles stood in his way,

he felt he was struggling against a second will within himself: "my two wills...one carnal, one
spiritual, were in conflict with one and other." Augustine remained attached by habit to the
beauty of material things and pleasures, though he felt that this habit was "no more I."

Comparing his state with that of a drowsy sleeper trying to get up, Augustine continued to

edge closer to conversion.

was turning down work at the law courts to have more time

for spiritual pursuits, and

was in close dialogue with Augustine about the same issues.

With a great deal of motivation already in the air, a friend (Ponticianus) tells Augustine of
monasteries outside the city and of two men who had given up their worldly lives in an instant to
become monks. For Augustine, this is almost like an accusation: "you thrust me before my own
eyes.... The day had now come when I stood naked to myself."

[VIII.19-26] Augustine's crisis of will finally came to a head when, in conversation with

Alypius, he became angry at himself and "distressed not only in mind but in appearance."
Walking out into the garden to calm down, Augustine began beating himself and tearing his hair,
stricken over his failure of will. It was not even a matter of deciding to do something and then
having to do it: "at this point the power to act is identical with the will."

This, indeed, was partly what was so maddening about the situation--Augustine did not

need the will to do something so much as the will to will something. He reflects here on the
paradox that, in beating himself, his limbs obeyed the will of his mind even as his mind could not

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obey itself. The answer, he suggests, is that he had two wills. This idea is quickly dismissed,
however. It would be

Manichean

to blame his fault on the existence of two separate wills. "It was

I," Augustine admits. "I...was dissociated from myself" (hence his soul felt "torn apart").

Augustine's habits continued to nag and whisper to him, even as he said to himself, "let it

be now, let it be now." Finally, as the voices of habit began to weaken, Augustine says that "Lady
Continence" came on the scene and moved to embrace him (a metaphor rather than a vision,
although the garden scene as a whole blurs the line between rhetoric and a literal account). All
Augustine's self-contained misery welled up, and he moved off to a bench to weep.

As he sat there, he says, he heard a child's voice "from a nearby house" repeating the

words, "pick up and read, pick up and read" (one old manuscript reads "from the house of God,"
so it is unclear if this is a vision or a literary device). Hearing this as a divine command to open
his Bible, Augustine did so and read an injunction against "indecencies," a command to "put on
the Lord Jesus

and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts."

This was enough to convert Augustine immediately and finally, and he hurries to tell the

good news to

(who is in the garden and who joins Augustine in his decision to convert)

and to

(who is thrilled). Augustine has finally arrived at his goal.

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This is the final Book of the autobiographical part of the Confessions (the concluding four

Books address more strictly philosophical and theological issues). Book IX recounts some of the
events directly following Augustine's conversion: his retirement from his secular post, his
baptism with

, a shared vision with

at Ostia just before her death,

and a section of praise for her.

[IX.1-15] With the complete emergence of Augustine's

free will

in fully embracing God,

he knew he had to retire from his position as a teacher (a salesman of loquacity). Not wishing to
cause a stir, he waited until the next period of vacation before leaving his post--at this point,
recurrent chest pain would have excused his withdrawal in any case. Meanwhile,

There is a brief glance back to the

and

another friend, Verecundus, had also decided to follow Augustine in converting to Catholicism.

Having shed his worldly occupation, Augustine continued to read and write. His chief

works during this period were dialogues that set out the

Neoplatonist

reading of Christianity he

had come to embrace. These he now sees as prideful works, though he does not retract anything
specific from them. Augustine also had a powerful experience reading the Psalms at this point:
"emotions exuded from my eyes and my voice."

Manicheans

here, for whom Augustine now had

nothing but pity and a lingering disgust. Now that he had saved himself, he began to wonder what
to do about people who were as lost as they were.

Augustine was finally baptized, by

and in the company of his son

and his friend

. He immediately began to take greater part in Ambrose's congregation,

participating in a sit--in against the anti- Catholic policies of Arian Justina (the mother of
Valentinian II).

[IX.16-37] After recounting these events, Augustine turns his attention to

Recalling her devout, humble, and wise nature over the course of her life, Augustine praises his
mother for maintaining peace with his father and among her friends. He also suggests that God
was using her for a higher purpose--in part, to see Augustine safely into the arms of the church.
Although his father Patrick has passed away, Augustine tells us that Monica finally persuaded
Patrick to be baptized shortly before his death.

Part of the occasion for this reminiscence is a vision Augustine and Monica shared in

Ostia after his conversion and just before she fell ill and passed away. Augustine tells this story
next. Looking out over a garden in Ostia, Augustine and Monica were discussing the nature of
the reward met by saints in the afterlife. In the attempt to conceive of this paradise, Augustine
recalls, they sought past earthly bodies to the stars, then went further, seeking for the answer

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(in the nature of their own minds).

Still chasing this idea through dialogue, mother and son reach a kind of eternal wisdom

(again a transient experience): "we touched it to some small degree by a moment of total
concentration of the heart." Unlike Augustine's previously recounted visionary ascent (after first
reading the

), this one seems to be a quest for truth infused by love; the shared

nature of the experience is in part a testimony to this change.

Attempting to describe the experience further, Augustine postulates that, if everything

(including the

) were utterly quiescent and unmoving, God would speak through himself

rather than through any mediation. This is similar to what he and Monica experienced. "Eternal
life," he writes, "is of the quality of that moment of understanding."

Following the vision, Monica told Augustine that she felt she had done all she had to do

on earth. She fell gravely ill soon thereafter. Exhibiting an indifference as to whether she was to
be buried back in

or not, she told Augustine that "nothing is distant from God."

Augustine decided not to grieve over her death (since she was going to be with God), but

he recalls feeling a great deal of pain nonetheless. Unable to answer rationally why he was so
sad, Augustine concludes nonetheless that weeping before God is acceptable because God is
infinitely compassionate. He closes the Book (and the story of his life) with a prayer for Monica's
soul.

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Book X marks the transition in the Confessions from autobiography to the direct analysis

of philosophical and theological issues. It is also noteworthy that the length of the Books begins
to increase dramatically here (Book X is more than twice the length of most of the previous
Books). Although this is a sudden transition in form and content, Augustine is following an
underlying structure. This structure depends mainly on his view (which is not explicitly
mentioned in the work) that the story of a

's return to God is essentially the same as the story

of the return to God of creation as a whole. Thus, the last four Books of the Confessions, in their
deep vindication of Christianity, focus primarily on details of the world's existence in God rather
than Augustine's own ascent to God.

Book X pursues this aim through an analysis of

, which poses truly mystical

problems for Augustine. This topic may seem like a somewhat odd choice to us, and it may help
to note that Augustine's sense of the Latin memoria carries overtones of

Platonic

ideas

concerning the life of the soul before birth; Plato argued that learning is really a process of the
soul remembering what it already knew and forgot upon taking human form. In any case,
Augustine will focus less on this idea than on the idea of memory as unconscious knowledge--a
new,

twist on the Platonic idea.

[X.1-11] Augustine introduces his investigation with an appraisal of his love for God.

"When I love [God]," he asks, "what do I love?" It is nothing to do with the five physical senses,
but rather with their five spiritual counterparts: metaphorical and intangible versions of God's
light, voice, food, odor, and embrace. In other words, Augustine must look inward at his own
mind (or soul) to "sense" God.

This is an ability that is not directly possible for inanimate things or beasts. Nonetheless,

Augustine argues, they all participate in God because they have their existence only in him.
Further, they highlight the wonder of the consciousness of God attainable by humans: "the
created order speaks to all, but is understood" only by contrasting it with inner truth.

Yet "sensing" God with his spiritual faculties is not quite direct knowledge of God, and

Augustine delves deeper into himself in this attempt to "find" God and know him. Briefly
considering the life of the body, which God gives, Augustine rejects it--God is not this, but the
"life of life." Moving on, he considers "another power," not that which animates his body but
"that by which I enable its senses to perceive." This is the mind, but Augustine is again
unsatisfied: even horses, he points out, have this basic form of mind.

[X.12-26] And so "I come to the fields and vast palaces of memory," writes Augustine.

He begins his analysis of this most puzzling human faculty with a discussion of what kinds of
things the memory holds. Each kind, considered in turn, raises its own (often extremely

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involuted) philosophical dilemmas.

The first kind of memory to be treated is the rough category of sensory perceptions--the

most familiar and obvious kind of memories. Augustine draws the initial metaphor of a
storehouse of memory, in which images of things experienced are stored (sometimes
inconveniently), retrieved, and re-stored (sometimes in new places).

This leads Augustine to consider what sort of things the images stored in the memory are.

Profoundly strange entities, these "images" can be tasted, heard, seen, etc., all without the things
of which they are images actually being present. Augustine professes to be flabbergasted at the
sheer immensity of such a storehouse of images, which can seem almost real: memory is "a vast
and infinite profundity."

The vastness of memory is thus more than Augustine can grasp, which means that "I

myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am." This state of affairs, however, seems to be a
paradox. How, asks Augustine, could the mind be external to itself such than it cannot know
itself? Memory is seeming increasingly enigmatic.

Leaving this train of thought for a moment, Augustine notes that his memory also holds

skills. This kind of memory seems to be another case altogether, since it is not images of the
skills but the skills themselves that are retained.

From skills, Augustine moves quickly to consider ideas, which constitute yet another

distinct kind of memory. By ideas, Augustine means the ideas themselves, not any sensory
information by which they might be communicated. How is it, he wonders, that a new idea can be
self-evidently true? There are many cases in which we believe something not on the authority of
the source, but because the idea itself strikes us as true.

Augustine's answer is a deeply

Platonic

one: the memory of such ideas must have been

"there before I learnt them," waiting to be recognized. Augustine suggests that, although we don't
recognize them as memories when we recognize the truth of ideas, the pieces of these ideas are
present somewhere far back in our memories. In coming across an idea (whether through our own
thoughts or through an external source) whose truth we recognize, we are actually "assembling"
the disordered pieces of an eternal "memory."

To secure the distinction between the idea itself and the form in which we learn it,

Augustine here points to the examples of mathematical lines and numbers: although we may see
a line or number written, this material form simply signifies a more perfect form already in our
minds (a perfect form we have never actually seen outside of us).

The next type of memory named is emotional memory, which poses the following

problem: how is it that we can remember emotions without re-experiencing them? Augustine
recalls times when he has even found himself sad at the memory of joy (the joy of his carnal
lusts, for example), or joyful upon remembering a past sorrow. Are emotional memories images,
then, stored at some sort of remove from the original? Emotion seems too much a part of the
mind itself for this to be likely.

Leaving these dilemmas as well, Augustine's inward analysis reaches a fever pitch when

he tries to understand how he can remember forgetfulness. Reaching no real conclusion in the
rapidly expanding knot of paradoxes this question generates, Augustine stops to marvel at
memory, "a power of profound and infinite multiplicity."

In passages like this last one, Augustine seems determined to employ every rhetorical

device at his disposal to illustrate the profundity and infinite complexity of memory. This is due
to some extent to his overall effort to demonstrate the finding of an infinite God within one's own
mind, but he also wants to designate memory as a particularly fecund ground for self-
investigation.

Summarizing the kinds of memory covered thus far (senses, skills, ideas, and emotions),

Augustine briefly suggests looking for God elsewhere in himself, since even "beasts" have
memory. But one question intrudes: how can we be mindful of God if he is not already in our
memories? This same question, the reader will remember, opens the Confessions in Book I: how

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can we seek God if we don't already know what he looks like?

[X.27-37] Augustine's initial response to this paradox here offers a slightly different

account of the same answer given in Book I (which amounted to "seek and ye shall find"). He
suggests that, even when something is lost to memory, we should still look for it there. It's likely,
he argues, that some part or trace is retained such that we can "reassemble" the knowledge of
God as we "reassemble" other true ideas from their scattered parts deep in the memory.

The same question, he then notes, applies to the pursuit of the happy life (which for

Augustine is life with the knowledge of God). People everywhere seek the happy life, but how
can they seek it without already knowing what it is? "Where did they see it to love it?" Perhaps,
he considers, we did know happiness once (this is a reference to Adam, our common ancestor,
according to the Bible, who led the supremely good life before his fall into mortality). Something
like a memory of this original goodness seems likely, since the characteristics of the happy life
that people seek seem largely universal.

Specifically, the universal feature of what people seek in life seems to be joy. The true

and greatest joy, argues Augustine, is joy in God. Even those who do not seek God nonetheless
"remain drawn toward some image of [this] true joy." Their will is for this joy; the obstacle to
their pursuit of it in God is nothing but a lack of will. This idea is, again,

sense of memory beyond a single human life). Augustine makes the point that the

Wickedness or distance from God is due not to any flaw in God's creation, but rather to the
misdirection or impotence of the human will to recognize God's perfection.

Augustine bolsters this argument with the further proposition that the joy universally

sought in the happy life must be joy in the truth. Thus, we know how to seek the happy life not
because we remember any particular joys but because we remember the nature of truth itself (in
the

Platonic

desire for truth is at least as universal as the desire for joy; no one wants to be deceived.

This "memory" of eternal truth, however, is tenuous. People often love mundane objects

or bodies themselves in place of the higher truth in them, and are reluctant to change because to
do so would be to admit deception.

At this point, Augustine stops again to take stock of his pursuit of knowledge about God.

He cannot find God in the senses, nor in emotion. Neither, he says, can he find God himself in
the mind, which is much too changeable. Asking yet again how he could have ever found God if
God wasn't already in Augustine's memory, Augustine finally identifies one characteristic by
which he sought God without knowing him per se: he found God simply by the fact that God
transcends the mind where he had been looking. God is that which is above all aspects of the
mind. The beauty of this account, it seems, lies largely in the fact that the nature of God, if he is
provisionally defined as that which transcends the mind, can only be known in as much as the
mind is known first. Thus, the search for God remains an

search.

[X.38-69] Perhaps in humble response to the knowledge of the search for God that he has

just claimed, Augustine spends the remainder of Book X confessing the ways in which he is still
separated from a truly (almost impossibly) Godly life.

The first obstacle is that, although celibate, he is still plagued by erotic images. Wet

dreams are particularly disturbing to him, since it appears that his reason (with which he would
normally fend off lurid images) falls asleep along with his body. Food, although it is necessary,
also holds "a dangerous pleasantness," and Augustine struggles to eat as though he were simply
taking medicine. Smell is also mentioned briefly, though Augustine doesn't see it as much of a
problem.

Sound is equally dangerous in its potentially pleasing qualities. (It should be noted that

the appreciation of the beauty of God's creation is not the issue in these "dangerous" sensory
phenomena, but rather the potential attachment to worldly things at the expense of God himself).
A particularly tricky issue with regard to sound concerns music in church--what is the proper
balance between inspiring the congregation to seek God and miring them in the sensory pleasures
of his creation?

Vision comes next, and gets the same wary treatment. Considering light itself, Augustine

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prays, "may [this] get no hold upon my soul." Taking sight as the best sensory metaphor for
knowledge, he also takes this opportunity to return briefly to the issue of beauty in mundane
objects (the subject of his early work On the Beautiful and the Fitting). As before, Augustine
attributes most false attachments to worldly beauty to a confusion of means with ends (things
should be loved for their ends, their use value). Thus, artistic beauty should never be "excessive"
and art should never be made without a careful consideration of its morality.

Augustine continues his most up-to-date confession, admitting that he still enjoys a

certain feeling of power or glory when he is praised. He feels he has "almost no" insight into this
problem, though he knows that praise should only please him in as much as it expresses the true
benefit someone else has gained from him. The ego, he notes, should not be the focus of praise,
since (as stated in the discussion of memory above) it is not God.

In the end, Augustine feels he "can find no safe place for my soul except in [God]." He

must do his best against the bombardments of sin from all sides, and have faith that God will
have mercy on him.

Book X concludes with a note against the visions of God claimed by the

These were not true insights, since they were based on a kind of pagan "theurgy" that did not
include Christ. "They sought a mediator to purify them," writes Augustine, "and it was not the
true one."

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Book X

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, Augustine moves on to the consideration of

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which any recollection and confession must take place. Beginning with questions about

itself, in

word "beginning." God himself (in the form of

and the creation of the world, Augustine expands his realm of inquiry in an attempt to account for
the apparent separation of God (who is eternal) from his creation (which seems trapped in
temporality). Throughout this Book, Augustine lets us know that these are extremely difficult
questions for him, and continually asks God to help keep his mind focused. (This device probably
serves at least two purposes: it mitigates the extent to which Augustine might be criticized for
putting philosophy over God, and it helps to keep the reader from simply giving up on the
intricacies of the argument).

[XI.1-16] Noting that any confession he makes must be ordered in time, Augustine again

reminds us of the common ground between the philosophical, religious, and autobiographical
material in his book: all are in praise of God.

Following this introduction (and justification), Augustine begins in earnest to determine

when time started and the nature of God's relation to this "beginning." The first misconception to
clear up concerns the statement in the Book of Genesis that God "made" creation. Augustine
argues that God did not make the heavens and the earth in a literal sense (like a craftsman). In
fact, God did not make his creation "within" the universe at all, since nothing (including space)
could exist before this act of creation.

Turning to the mechanism by which God created, Augustine again puzzles over Genesis:

"by your word you made [the creation]...but how did you speak?" As with his reading of the term
"made" above, Augustine here shows us that the words of Genesis are not to be taken literally but
spiritually (a crucial approach that he learned largely from

Bishop Ambrose

God created the universe with a "word," but this word is not like normal speech. Normal

speech is successive--even a single word has a part that comes before and a part that follows.
This cannot be the case with God's "word" of creation, because it would require there already to
have been time before God created it. God's word cannot have unfolded in time (which did not
yet exist), but must be "spoken eternally." It has no "becoming," and does not come into being
over time. Rather, it is "spoken" continuously, and never changes.

If this is the case, however, how could it come to be that creation is temporal? If God

created all through an eternally uttered Word, how could the things he created succeed one and
other and change constantly? Augustine is not yet sure how to answer this question precisely, but
he hints at a kind of holism-in- determinism. Things change, but only according to God's whole,
unchanging design: "everything which begins to be and ceases to be begins and ends its existence
at that moment when, in the eternal reason where nothing begins or ends, it is known that it is

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right for it to begin and end."

In the context of this roughly sketched answer, Augustine notes a deeper meaning of the

, who is the living "Word" of God) is the

"beginning," not in the sense that he was there "first" (remember, God is eternal and has nothing
to do with time) but in the sense that he is the "fixed point" to which we can return. "The Word"
is first in the sense that he is the first cause, the unmoving point that is the source of all things.
This reading of the "beginning" as the Word (Christ) allows Augustine to get around the
apparently

temporal

implications of the "beginning" in Genesis.

Another way of stating this same interpretation is to refer to Christ (who is the

"beginning") as "wisdom." Christ, for Augustine (and for all Christians), is the route by which
one can seek the wisdom of God. Hence, Augustine can write here: "Wisdom is the beginning,
and in the beginning you made heaven and earth." Again, this is a profoundly spiritual reading of
the words used in

Porphyry (the primary disciple of Plotinus). Porphyry claimed that the creation was

. We are no longer talking about a temporal beginning at all, but simply

about the context of eternal wisdom (accessible to us through Christ) in which God eternally
"makes" the world.

Such a reading of Genesis also allows Augustine to respond to a criticism made by the

Neoplatonist

impossible, because there would have had to be a moment when God decided to create. In other
words, the will of God (which is by definition unchanging) would have had to change.

Augustine can now reply that this is a misconception based on the failure to recognize the

eternal, constant sense of the word "creation." God did not create the universe at a given time,
because for God there is no time. The act of creation is both instantaneous and eternal. Since time
is a feature only of the created world (not of God), there couldn't have been any time before God
created the universe. Augustine puts this in a number of ways: "There was no 'then' when there
was no time," or, "It is not in time that you [God] precede all times. Otherwise you would not
precede all times." Again, God is "first" only in the sense of being the eternal cause of all
creation. He wasn't "doing" anything before he created the world (a common

challenge), because there was no "before."

[XI.17-41] Augustine now begins to consider

itself. He has argued that time has

nothing to do with God himself (thus clearing up the apparent temporality of the creation act), but
the creation in which we live still seems to exist in time. Following Aristotle, Augustine notes
that everyone thinks they know what time is, at least until they are asked.

Past, present, and future seem to be the defining elements of time. Augustine begins,

then, by noting that time depends on things passing away (past), things existing (present), and
things arriving (future). Already, Augustine is ready to hint at a significant point: if time is
defined by things arriving, remaining for a moment, and passing away, then time seems to
depend utterly on a movement toward non-being. As Augustine quickly concludes, "indeed we
cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it tends toward non-existence."

This idea (and its paradoxical consequences) will occupy Augustine for the rest of Book

XI. He strengthens his proof that time does not exist with a lengthy discussion of past, present
and future. Neither past nor future, he points out, actually exist--the past is certainly not extant
now, and neither is the future (if they were, they would be the present). Even the present is hard
to pin down; Augustine divides it into years, months, days, and so on, eventually determining that
the present itself cannot truly be said to exist. The present occupies "no space" of course, but it
also has "no duration" (any duration would immediately become past and future, which do not
exist). Thus, when we look for time we find it to have no real existence.

Nonetheless, time would seem to have some sort of existence, since we can all talk about

it and even measure it. The best Augustine can do here is to say that time can only exist in the
present, through the mechanisms of memory and prediction. The past is nothing but memory
images that exist in the present. The future, on the other hand, gets its apparent existence from
predictions based on signs that exist in the present. With this provisional account of "where" time
exists, Augustine is willing to accept the common "usage" of the terms past, present, and future
(as long as we know we are actually only referring to a present instant without duration).

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Augustine still has a problem, however, because it does appear that we can measure time.

Yet how could we possibly be measuring something that has no actual duration and (of course)
no extension? A provisional answer may lie in the fact that we seem to measure time as it
"passes" through the present moment.

This still leaves us, however, with the paradox of measurement--we may measure time as

it passes us, but with what? Given only the present instant, what increments could we possibly
use to measure something with no duration or extension?

Augustine toys with and dismisses some possible accounts of temporal measurement put

forth by others, most significantly the astronomically inspired idea that time is measured by the
movements of the heavenly bodies. He argues strongly that bodies, heavenly or otherwise, move
in time, and are not themselves definitive of time. The course of the sun may mark a day, but
twenty-four hours would still pass if the sun stopped.

Augustine has now debunked a number of ideas about time, namely the idea that it has

any existence other than in a durationless present instant. He still, however, cannot account for
the "time" with which we all are familiar. Indeed, he will not provide a solid answer at all. He
does make one suggestion, however: time seems to be a sort of "distention" (distentio; stretching)
of the

. The soul, which should be abiding in the eternal present (since no other time truly

exists), becomes stretched out into temporality, into an apparent successiveness of events.

This idea, though it goes largely unexplicated, comes from Plotinus, who wrote of time as

"a spreading out of life." Unlike Plotinus, however, Augustine sees this stretching or distension as
a painful fall away from God. This is another version of the fall from God's eternal, unified, and
unchanging grace into the created world of

and temporality.

Augustine does offer some brief confirmation of this idea that time is a property not of

the external world but rather of the soul itself. Returning to the issue of memory, he notes that
when we appear to be measuring time as some property of the world, we are actually measuring
something in our own memory. Since the past does not truly exist, we can only be considering
the images of past times as they are now retained within us. Thus, it would indeed seem that time
is some property of the mind (or soul) itself, perhaps a kind of "distention."

Augustine closes this discussion with a comparison between his own existence in

temporality and God's existence in eternity. Augustine, muddled in his complex pursuit of the
nature of time, finds himself "scattered in times whose order I do not understand." For God, on
the other hand, it is not simply a matter of being able to know all times (as a superhuman might),
but a matter of the unity of all times in a single, timeless eternity.

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Book XI

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In Book XII, Augustine brings his ideas of

(from Books X and XI) to

bear on issues surrounding the story of the creation. His main concern here is to address the
diversity of opinion regarding the precise meaning of

by focusing on the use of language.

While accepting that scripture has more than one 'true' interpretation, Augustine devotes
significant time to delineating the limits of possible exegeses. This Book contains a great deal of
hair-splitting with regard to phrases like 'heaven and earth,' and repeats much of Augustine's own
reading of Genesis found in Book XI--take the more involute and confusing parts with a grain of
salt. This Book retains import chiefly for its basic layout of the concepts of formless matter and
the 'heaven of heaven.'

[XII.1-8] Augustine begins with the question of priority in the creation (he loosely

defines 'priority' later in Book XII). The text of Genesis describes a nascent earth as 'invisible and
unorganized,' in Augustine's reading - an earth comprised of fluid 'formless matter.' Genesis
further implies that the initial 'heaven' was not the starry firmament but rather the 'heaven of
heaven'--God's 'house,' the angelic order of being nearest to him.

It's important to remember here that Augustine has already posited the non-temporal

sense of the phrase 'in the beginning' (Book XI): the beginning is not a time at which God created
the heavens and the earth, but rather the eternal, unchanging wisdom (which is also the nature of

) in which he created them.

Augustine argues that the visible heavens and earth are not primary in creation; rather,

God constructed their concrete physical aspects from a totally 'formless matter' that was created
'first' (again, this 'first' has an ultimately non-temporal sense). This, he says, is the sense of the
'earth invisible and unorganized.'

This formless matter is virtually a quasi-nothingness; it is at the bottom of the

hierarchy of being, furthest from God, since it is matter (which is unlike God)

without form (form being more godly than formlessness), and possessing the weakest claim to
actual existence. The idea of formless matter is often difficult to grasp - the definition itself refers
to the inscrutable quality of this type of 'unintelligible' matter. Augustine again partly blames

theology for muddying his conception of this idea. With an emphasis on the visual,

Augustine previously pictured formless matter as 'many different' horrible forms in constant flux
rather than viewing it as completely lacking all form.

To reiterate, Augustine emphasizes that formless matter is almost nothing--a kind of

'nothing something' with so little existence that he freely refers to it simply as 'nothing.'

Along with formless matter, the 'heaven of heaven' also precedes the visible 'heaven and

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earth' in the order of creation. God first made the heaven of heaven and formless matter, then
forged the visible heaven and earth out of this formless matter.

[XII.9-16] Here, Augustine elaborates on the concept of a heaven of heaven, God's

'house' or 'city.' His reading of the phrase is inspired by the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry,
who recognized a 'world-soul,' which is neither God himself, nor the human soul, but a created
order which rests in eternal contemplation of God. Augustine refers to the heaven of heaven as
'the creation in the realm of the intellect'-- a static dimension composed purely of mind. Although
it is not 'co-eternal' with God (i.e., it is neither part of God nor equal to him in perfection), it
nonetheless 'participates' in God's eternity in a direct and open way. (Some of Augustine's
language regarding an unmediated, face-to-face view of God recalls the vision he shared with

at Ostia). If formless matter is almost nothing, the heaven of heaven is, in a basic sense,

almost God.

Both formless matter and the heaven of heaven, though not necessarily eternal in the

same way as God, also exist 'outside time.' Formless matter is atemporal precisely because it has
no form. Time, Augustine points out, has no relevance if nothing whatsoever changes. Formless
matter, by its very definition, lacks any forms that might change. Put simply, objects without
form can not change and without change there is no time.

The heaven of heaven, on the other hand, has a kind of absolute, extreme version of form

that precludes change, and therefore any temporal interaction. We might think of it as having an
absolutely rigid, perfect form. Since it does have form, it is capable of change. It's proximity to
God, however, insures that this never happens: it is 'so given form that, though mutable, yet
without any cessation of its contemplation [of God], without any...change, it experiences
unswerving enjoyment of [God's] eternity and immutability' (author's italics).

Here Augustine offers further explanation of the proposition that the heaven of heaven is

eternally 'contemplating' God. The heaven of heaven 'knows' God without any obstacle: 'the
intellect's knowing [in this case] is a matter of simultaneity...in total openness [to God].' The
knowledge of God associated with this realm of creation is not like human knowledge, in which
we know 'one thing at one moment and another thing at another.' It is knowledge 'without any
temporal successiveness,' a kind of instantaneous, universal knowledge not subject to the affects
of time.

With these descriptions Augustine elaborates on the two aspects of creation that 'precede'

the visible creation. Though in essence these spheres are virtual opposites, both are, by nature,
atemporal. Augustine claims that freedom from time accounts for the fact that the days of in
Genesis are not numbered until after God creates 'heaven and earth.' Again, Augustine reads this
description of the initial creation as covering only 'heaven of heaven and formless matter.'

[XII.17-31] The remainder of Book XII is primarily a response not to Manichee critics--a

position which Augustine spent considerable time denouncing--but rather to Catholic critics of
Augustine's very figurative reading of Genesis. Augustine is most concerned with the charge that
Moses, in writing Genesis, didn't anticipate or invite such lofty interpretation. Some Catholic
critics would argue that Moses simply meant exactly what he said, and that we must read phrases
like 'beginning' and 'heaven and earth' literally. In rebuttal, Augustine defends the validity and
even the necessity of certain fundamental aspects of his spiritual reading before asserting that no
one can really know what Moses was thinking.

Augustine then extends a reinforced argument for God's immutability and atemporality:

God's nature 'will never vary at different times,' and 'his will is not external to his nature.'
Augustine claims this interchangeability as an inherent truth, spoken in 'the inner ear' by God.
The literal sense of Genesis cannot be its deepest and truest, since it shows God making decisions
at different points in time. Rather, writes Augustine, 'once and for all and simultaneously, [God]
wills everything that he wills.'

Continuing to defend his reading of Genesis, Augustine turns to a statement from

scripture--'wisdom was created before everything.' Since he has previously linked 'wisdom' (that
in which everything was made) to the 'Word' referred to at the beginning of Genesis, Augustine
must now address the implication in this phrase--that 'wisdom' is itself a created thing. He does so
by arguing that 'wisdom' in this particular case refers to the heaven of heaven, the order of being

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that rests in pure contemplation of God but which is nonetheless part of his creation. The heaven
of heaven is 'an intellectual nature which is light from contemplation of the light,' 'not Being
itself' but the closest thing to it. Based on these assumptions, 'wisdom' can be both a created
thing, and the eternal divine in which creation takes place, as expressed in the first lines of
Genesis.

Following this retracing of the heaven of heaven, Augustine embarks on a painfully

intricate exegesis of all the possible alternate readings of 'heaven and earth.' He ventures an
interpretation that includes 'heaven of heaven [which has form] and formless matter [which has
none],' but it could also be read as anything from 'formless spiritual creation and formless
physical creation' to simply 'formless matter and its products [one product being 'heaven,' the
starry firmament].' This enumeration of other readings acts as an expedient, a proof for
Augustine's conclusion that there is no single true interpretation, provided the interpreter is
honestly pursuing truth.

Nevertheless, after arguing against the possibility of the one true reading, Augustine

quickly lists ten 'axioms' that seem to be required of all readings. Though covered previously, the
interpretive principles provide a decent summary of Augustine's main assumptions about
Genesis: 1) God made heaven and earth; 2) The 'beginning' refers to God's wisdom; 3) 'heaven
and earth' is a label for 'all natures made and created' (for Augustine, this means the heaven of
heaven and formless matter); 4) mutability implies 'a kind of formlessness' in that everything
mutable is in a state of flux; 5) what is so totally mutable as to be without form and therefore
changeless (as in the case of formless matter) has no experience of time; 6) what is totally
formless cannot suffer temporal successiveness (essentially the same point as 5); 7) a source
sometimes takes the name of its product (as in Augustine's reading of 'heaven and earth' as
'heaven of heaven and formless matter'); 8) 'earth and the abyss' in Genesis refers to formed
objects that possess almost total formlessness; 9) God made everything that has form as well as
everything capable of receiving form; and 10) anything that 'acquires form' is first formless.
Augustine does not number these points--they are presented in list form.

Following these axioms, Augustine briefly presents seven possible readings of the

creation story. Most are quite similar to his own, differing only in what God made first; some
readings assert that the initial creation includes only the formless matter that would become the
physical world, others broach the possibility of two distinct realms, and still others postulate one
realm with two implicit sub-realms. The reading that Augustine singles out for criticism holds
that God made heaven and earth out of a pre-existing formless matter. For Augustine, this view is
untenable because it suggests that there is something that God did not make. Augustine, speaking
for those who maintain this perspective on Genesis, offers a reply on their behalf--God did indeed
make this formless matter, but the act is not mentioned in Genesis.

[XII.32-37] After considering the possible and potentially proper readings of the creation

story, Augustine separates the most common disagreements over the meaning of the text into two
fundamental areas of debate. The first is reserved for issues regarding the 'truth of the matter in
question.' The second category centers upon the 'intention of the writer.' In the former case, there
is no leeway: the essential and basic truth of Genesis is, undeniably, God's unchanging truth, and
all parties must appeal to this single truth for justification. The latter case, in which readers argue
about Moses' intended meaning and the words he used to express it, leaves room for multiple
interpretations and therefore, disagreement, since no one can know Moses' motivation when he
wrote Genesis. For this very reason, however, it is somewhat futile to speculate on Moses'
authorial intention--to do so is to ignore the deeper truths for which his 'articulation is
appropriate.' Moses, whatever he desired to write, created the best possible version of God's truth.

Augustine derides all who claim to know Moses' original intentions as overly-proud and

arrogant--such people love their own opinion rather than the truth in the text. No one can own the
truth expressed in Genesis, since it is open to all practitioners of devotion and reason. When
people see truths in any number of interpretations, they are really seeing truth in God.

Augustine reasons that scripture, with its basic and easily understood language, allows for

so many different 'true' readings (that is, many different apprehensions of its truth) precisely
because it aims to reach the widest possible audience. Even if people are inspired by the literal
narrative--a story about a large deity who made things over time--this remains a 'true' reading in
that it is a step toward faith in God as creator of the universe. Augustine justifies this view with a
reminder of the Neoplatonic idea that all of creation, no matter how lowly, wants to return to

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God: 'it returns to you, the One, according to the capacity granted to each entity.'

[XII.38-43] Continuing to vacillate between this admission of interpretability and an

insistence on tenets of interpretation, Augustine eventually moves against what he sees as a
common mistake regarding priority in the creation. He emphasizes again that God's self (his
nature) is interchangeable with his will, so God did not have to 'decide' to create--there was no
'before,' before creation. It makes no sense to say that God made everything 'first' in a literal
sense, since there would be nothing that remained for him to create 'before' or 'after.' In order to
explicitly denote the proper sense of 'first,' Augustine repeats three of the five types of priority set
out in Aristotle's Categories: priority in time, priority in preference, and priority in origin. To
these he adds his own fourth type, priority in eternity.

Priority in eternity is the sense in which God is prior to everything else: namely,

everything else is more closely bound in time than he is, since he is altogether distinct from it.
Priority in time and in preference are self-explanatory. Priority in origin is more difficult to
understand, and is the type of priority Augustine wants to apply to Genesis. Sound is prior in
origin to a song, for example, not because the song is made from it in time, as a carpenter makes
a bench from wood, but because the song is made from sound at every moment--it subsists in
sound, and sound must always be present in order for there to be a song, but not vice-versa. The
sound is quintessential, the most basic element from which the song comes into being.

Augustine contends that the relationship between formless matter and the visible heaven

and earth is based on priority in origin--analogous to that of sound and its corresponding, co-
existent song. Formless matter did not precede the physical in time, but rather in origin. The
visible creation is not made from formless matter, but rather is of it--an entirely more dynamic
and interactive dependency.

After concluding this discussion, Augustine closes Book XII with a reminder that we

need not offer much consideration to Moses' authorial intention. If we insist on developing a
definitive understanding of the specific thought process by which Moses produced the scripture,
we should appease such curiosity with the assumption that he had all possible 'true'
interpretations in mind.