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<b>AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO</b> (354-430) was one of the foremost philosopher-theologians of early Christianity and the leading figure in the church of North Africa. He became bishop of Hippo in 396 and held that position until his death. Before becoming a Christian, Augustine lived a very secular life. His mother Monica prayed for him diligently and at age 32, during a trip to Milan, Augustine heard the preaching of St. Ambrose, was convicted by the Holy Spirit, and became a Christian. His numerous written works, the most important of which are his <i>Confessions</i> and <i>City of God, </i> shaped the practice of biblical exegesis and helped lay the foundation for much of medieval and modern Christian thought.

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The Confessions of St. Augustine

MOODY PUBLISHERS

Contents

INTRODUCTION.........................9THE FIRST BOOK.......................19THE SECOND BOOK......................44THE THIRD BOOK.......................58THE FOURTH BOOK......................78THE FIFTH BOOK.......................102THE SIXTH BOOK.......................126THE SEVENTH BOOK.....................153THE EIGHTH BOOK......................183THE NINTH BOOK.......................212THE TENTH BOOK.......................243NOTES................................299TO THINK ABOUT.......................304

Introduction

Who will give me help, so that I may rest in you? Who will help me, so that you will come into my heart and inebriate it to the end that I may forget my evils and embrace you, my one good? -Book 1, Chap. 5

That Augustine was one of the greatest minds who has ever been in the church is a given, and his most well-known work, the Confessions, has a unique place among the world's great classics, The line that appears in the opening paragraph of Book 1, "our heart is restless, until it rest in thee," is quoted everywhere, though not everyone who quotes it or hears it knows where it came from and may even think it's a biblical saying.

Many people also know that Augustine was the son of Monica, a mother who prayed faithfully and arduously for him for years, and that he was finally converted from a rebellious and promiscuous life. Sadly, however, too few mainstream Christians outside of academia or a classroom where the hook is required pick up the book and read it, though its analysis of sin, both theological and psychological, is dramatic, colorful, convicting, and utterly contemporary. Unlike so many of the soft pop-culture treatments that come and go like the seasons, this work remains, for reasons that become obvious immediately. Even a casual reading of sonic of its parts is memorable.

The thirteen books of St. Augustine's Confessions (ten of which are reproduced here) were written by a man who had complex emotional understanding as well as great intellectual gifts combined with a strong will. He was a genius in philosophy, theology, and psychology, a pioneer in scriptural studies, an extraordinary master of language, and a powerful leader. From a willfully decadent, pagan life, he turned to Catholicism in all its austerity and discipline and became a larger-than-life figure, influencing theologians and church leaders and laypeople enduringly. For example, Martin Luther looked to hint as a father and quoted him on grace and justification.

Augustine was born in 354 in North Africa in the town of Thagaste, in Numidia, near the eastern border of Algeria, then a province of Rome, to Patricius, a pagan property owner and minor official, and Monica, faithful Catholic. He had at least two siblings, one of them Perpetua, who catered a religious order. In the mid-fourth century, Thagaste was prosperous agriculturally and was populated in part by a group the Romans called Afri (Africans) who were European in origin and typically fair-skinned and who had pagan practices and gods. Augustine appears to have belonged to this native North African stock, but his family also associated with the Roman ruling class and the Christian community in Thagaste.

Augustine showed intellectual promise early in life, but he was instructed in his youth by a cruel schoolmaster. As a result he never learned Greek well and writes that he "detested the Greek Language" (Bk. 1, chap. 13). In further education in Madauros, he studied pagan literature and became acquainted with Plato's work (an influence that would be part of his acceptance of Christianity much later), after which he came home and spent his sixteenth year falling into what he describes as "the sweeping tide of passions" including a promiscuous lifestyle, a habit of lying and thievery, breaking "all God's laws." He describes himself aptly and articulately as "a soul in waste ... a land of want" (Bk. 2).

His analysis of the motivation for sin, what he calls "the anatomy of evil" in this book, is chilling, words that make the actively sinning reader afraid and cause those who have abandoned sin to soberly give thanks for their decision. Utterly forthright, Augustine never denies the initial beauty of sin. "There is splendor in beautiful bodies, both in gold and silver, and in all things ... worldly honor, too, and the power to command and to rule over others" (Bk. 2, chap. 10). Why, after all, would anyone sin if it weren't appealing? As he looks with wonderment at the beauty that allured him, Augustine recognizes that all sin is dark imitation of good. "Curiosity pretends to be a desire for knowledge, while you [God] know all things in the highest degree" (Bk. 2, chap. 13). He asks himself despairingly whether he commits the sin simply because it is unlawful and laments, "O rottenness! O monstrous life and deepest death!" (Bk. 2, chap. 14).

At nineteen, Augustine went to Carthage where he took as his mistress an unnamed woman. After his conversion, pressured by his mother, he sent her back to Africa from Milan where they were living, a decision that left him "raw and bleeding." She bore him a son, Adeodatus.

Before his conversion, he states clearly, he was restless and wanting love. As he puts it, "For there was a hunger within me from a lack of that inner food, which is yourself, my God ... but was without desire for incorruptible food" {Bk. 3, chap. 1). Augustine thanks God for the "gall" He threw into his experience of love, a gall that caused him to be "hound about with painful chains of iron, so that I might be scourged by burning rods of jealousy and suspicion and fear and anger and quarrelling" {Bk. 3, chap. 1). Interestingly and so humanly, Augustine talks in this section about coming to love his sorrow; he even "sought opportunities for sorrow," leaning especially to a delight in theater, an escape certainly easy for today's visual, movie-obsessed world to understand.

In Carthage, Augustine's knowledge of rhetoric, literature, music, mathematics, and Greek and Latin philosophy deepened, and his intellectual style-one that insistently asked questions and pursued them tenaciously-took hold, one that also, he admits, made him "swollen tip with vanity" (Bk. 3, chap. 6}. In Carthage, this vanity combined with his longings-which, as many have noted, are still spiritual though easily exhausted with substitute and fraudulent human escapes-probably made him prey for the Manichean religion.

The chief characteristic of this sect was Gnosticism, or the claim to have special knowledge that leads to salvation, an extreme dualism that claimed evil and good as equal. Augustine writes that this doctrine was the "snare of the Devil" (Bk. 3, chap. 10}. Augustine is a master psychologist and describes the tremendous irony that he, "who was then a most wicked servant of base lusts, should read and understand all the books on the liberal arts." He beautifully summaries his condition when he says, "I had my back to the light and my face turned towards the things upon which the light fell: hence my face, by which I looked upon the things that were lighted tip, was not itself in the light" (Bk. 4, chap. 31).

In 383, Augustine set out for Rome, his mother following him to the seashore, wanting to go with him. Apparently he tricked her, setting off without her though she joined him later when he was in Milan. In Rome he continued his connection to the Manicheans, suffered a severe illness while living in one of their homes, and then in a stroke of good fortune received an official appointment as professor of rhetoric in Milan where he successfully taught the arts of speech.

At this time, however, he began to experience the old restlessness, morally, intellectually, and spiritually, wanting to live a life of integrity but feeling too weak to do so. In Milan he met Bishop Ambrose, the great rhetorician and preacher, and what Ambrose had to say moved him deeply, starting him on his journey to Christ. Every pastor and teacher should read Augustine's description of the power of language to move the soul and spirit. "At the same time," he notes, "with the words which I loved, there also entered into my mind the things themselves, to which I was indifferent ... and when I opened up my heart to receive the eloquence with which he spoke, there likewise entered ... the truths that he spoke" (Bk. 5, chap. 24).

Always, always, throughout the Confessions the reader feels the power of a pursuing, haunting God, a God who uses every part of Augustine's (and by implication the reader's) experience, whether that be intellectual curiosity, arrogance, power, or even erotic desires. God will not be limited by His creation. What Augustine found was that his stubborn tenacity paled in the face of God's tenacious love. The Confessions are riddled with that understanding.

Throughout eight books, Augustine establishes the building blocks for the famous conversion, the climax of the world, whose drama never seems to diminish with retelling. He is held back by his "lovers of old, trifles of trifles and vanities of vanities," sins that whisper to him seductively telling him he cannot live without them, "muttering behind [his] back," "furtively picking at [him]," delaying the fullness of the grace of God till he finally flings himself down under a fig tree weeping. While lying there, Augustine heard the voice of a child repeating over and over, "Take up and read," and he got up and opening the Bible read the first chapter he came upon, that said, "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in strife and envying, but put you on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh.... Instantly, in truth, at the end of this sentence, as if before a peaceful light streaming into my heart, all the dark shadows of doubt fled away" (Bk. 8, chap. 29).

Following this cataclysmic spiritual event, Books 9 and 10 are the testimony of a soul set free. Augustine's language is metaphorically unforgettable. "Now was my mind free from the gnawing cares of favor-seeking, of striving for gain, of wallowing in the mire, and of scratching lust's itchy sore. I spoke like a child to you, my light, my wealth, my salvation, my Lord God." I cannot read those words without feeling my own deliverance, without wanting to love God more.

Secondly, however, Augustine mourns deeply the sins of his past, becoming angry with himself, tortured over the wasted years. "Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new, too late have I loved you! Behold you were within me, while I was outside: it was there that I sought you, and a deformed creature, rushed headlong upon these things of beauty which you have made.... They kept me far from you, those fair things which, if they were not in you, would not exist at all" (Bk. 10, chap. 38). In addition to grieving over the past, he suffered physically both with pain in his teeth and chest and with difficulty breathing. His story reminds us that dramatic spiritual change does not ensure a life of case.

After resigning his professorship as "a seller of words for students," he and a few friends and his mother, Monica, retired to a countryside retreat at Cassiasicum where they discussed philosophical, theological, and literary problems centered on religion. On Easter 387, Augustine was baptized by Bishop Ambrose. Then, while he prepared with his mother and friends to return to North Africa, Monica fell ill and died at Ostia, the port of Rome, having after years of agonizing prayer seen the conversion of her beloved son. The description of Monica's passing has been called among the loveliest passages in the Confessions. Comforting himself in deep grief, Augustine writes, "I took joy indeed from her testimony, when in that last illness she mingled her endearments with my dutiful deeds and called mc a good son" (Bk. 9, chap. 30). A second grief was to follow later, after Augustine had returned to Thagaste and established a religious community, when his son Adeodatus, whose character and intellect his father praised and upon whom he had set his hopes, died.

Within this religious community, Augustine thought, studied, and wrote, his reputation growing and spreading, the number and brilliance of his books astonishing. In 391 he began a new calling in the seaport of Hippo Regius as an administrator, a complex job because a large mixture of nationalities and religions filled Hippo, and the Donatist heresy was strong. He established a monastery there also, which became the center of Catholic learning. In 396 Augustine was consecrated Bishop of Hippo, a position he occupied until his death in 430.

In Book 10, immediately following the beautiful treatment of the loss of his mother and the grief attending it, Augustine lapses into an elaborate discussion of the nature of memory, one that has been called the most extended piece of psychology in the book. Because he has completed the mammoth task of recording the memory of his life in Books 1-9 preceding this section, he is naturally thinking about this power within him. "Where within my memory do you abide, Lord, where do you abide?" he asks (Bk. 10, chap. 36). He wishes to examine his motivation for writing the Confessions. He also examines all his desires, including his love for and delight in music, the arts, and literature, and tends to, by his own admission, "err by an excess of severity" (Bk. 10, chap. 50). While his rejection of certain things is extreme, probably a reaction to his early excesses, his unwavering love for God and stringent, focused desire to be holy cannot be faulted.

What is eminently clear is that Augustine is no narcissistic memoir writer in the tradition of so many we see today. This is not an autobiography in the conventional sense; rather, it is a theological treatise because even in the first nine books the reader sees only not Augustine, but also the Lord Jesus Christ. There are always two people on each page, Augustine and God, the stuff of human experience and God, side by side. The Confessions are written so that we might know God and His seeking/saving grace. With that ideal in mind, he includes only those events that manifest how much he needed God.

In the process, Augustine broke theological ground. Up until this time the church had been consumed with questions of how to define the Trinity, while questions of setiology had not emerged with clarity. In 397, when this work was written, Augustine was pioneering the salvation discussion (something hard for a modern evangelical audience to understand, since evangelicals emphasize evangelism, and sometimes at the expense of theology). Augustine undergirded everything he wrote with Scriptures the work was a confession of sin, a confession of faith, and a confession of praise. We, in a sense, stand on Augustine's shoulders.

What also marks The Confessions is that Augustine never thought of God without thinking of his sin, nor of his sin without thinking of Christ. He constantly affirms that "he to whom little is forgiven loves little." His highest happiness was God and His Son, Jesus Christ. Through reflection, as he models, one becomes acquainted more and more with the person of God. Augustine reminds every Christian that "great is the power of memory, exceeding great is it ... an inner chamber, vast and unbounded" (Bk. 10, chap. 15), but that memory belongs to God, its contents to be used as a testimony to God's work in our lives, a reminder of what has gone before, a goad to holiness. As he concludes, "In all these things which I review as I consult you, I can find no safe place for my soul except in you" (Bk. 10, chap. 40).

Rosalie de Rosset

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Confessions of St. Augustine Copyright © 2007 by MOODY BIBLE INSTITUTE. Excerpted by permission.
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