Memory, Time and the Last Four Books

Readers who come to the Confessions for the life story are often surprised that the story ends with book nine. The remaining four books turn from the past to the present of the writer, and they contain some of the most influential philosophy of late antiquity. Book ten is an inventory of memory, which Augustine explores as vast inner fields and palaces where images, skills and affections are stored, asking how he can seek a God he could not recognise unless in some sense already remembered. Book eleven confronts time. To the mocking question of what God was doing before creation, Augustine answers that time itself is a creature: there was no before. His own account follows, that past and future exist only in the soul, as memory and expectation held together in an attention that measures duration, an analysis that Husserl and Wittgenstein would still be engaging fifteen centuries later.

Books twelve and thirteen interpret the opening of Genesis, defending the possibility of many true readings of the same inspired text. The four books belong to the design. Having confessed what he was, Augustine confesses what he is, a mind still stretched between distraction and attention, and the exegesis of creation returns the whole work to praise, ending the book, as it began, in the rest that God alone gives.