Confessions

What makes the Confessions unlike any book before it is its address. Augustine does not write about God for readers; he writes to God, with readers permitted to overhear. The Latin word confessio carries three senses at once, and he uses all of them: confession of sin, confession of praise, and confession of faith. Within that prayer he examines his own life with a scrutiny previously unknown in ancient literature. The famous episodes are small on purpose.

The theft of pears from a neighbour's tree matters not for its harm but because he stole what he did not want, and so found in himself a will turned toward wrongdoing for its own sake. His grief at a friend's death, his years teaching rhetoric, his ambition for advancement in Milan, his long entanglement with a concubine he loved and dismissed, all are weighed as movements of a heart seeking rest in the wrong places. The turning point in book eight has him weeping under a fig tree when he hears a child's voice chanting words he took as a command, tolle lege, take up and read; opening Paul's epistles at random, he read, and the struggle ended. The narrative closes not with triumph but with the quiet scene at Ostia, where he and Monica, shortly before her death, together touch for a moment the eternal wisdom they had been discussing.

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.