Epic and the Person - Part 3 Confessions

What are two reasons Augustine gives for stealing his neighbor's pears? (2.5-2.7)

1) Peer pressure 2) The desire to do wrong

Book 7

Although Augustine has been using Neoplatonic 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 evil (the two concepts that Neoplatonism would alter most for him). The problem of picturing God remained central. Having rejected Manichee 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 Neoplatonic experience. Picking up a Neoplatonic text, he read what seemed to be almost another version of Genesis. 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 almost immediately turns to what he didn't find there: namely, he didn't find any reference to Christ 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 soul 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 inward 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 Christ 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 Neoplatonic 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]."

Book 5

Book V follows the young Augustine from Carthage (where he finds his students too rowdy for his liking) to Rome (where he finds them too corrupt) and on to Milan, where he will remain until his conversion. Manichee 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 Ambrose (the Bishop of Milan, who will eventually baptize Augustine) and Faustus, a Manichee luminary. He 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 Neoplatonic ideas discussed in Book III; nothing is inherently evil, 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). At age twenty-nine, still in Carthage, Augustine gets to meet 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 Carthage for Rome. Monica, 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. 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 evil are two warring substances) meant that he still took no real responsibility for his sins. Worse still, he accepted the Manichee disbelief in Christ'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 Rome, 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 Milan. 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. Genesis, 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 spiritual substance.

How does Augustine's theory of evil help him to solve his major problem with the Christian God? (7.1-7.7)

Both moral and natural evil occurs, believed that this evil will was a corruption given by God making suffering a just punishment for the sin of humans

Can you pinpoint one or more themes in Augustine's boyhood account? What seems most important to the author? (1.8-1.20)

Communication, wanted to learn that for a selfish reason — so he demand things of others

How does Augustine describe his mother at this point? What kind of person is she? (6.1-6.2)

Credited his mom as being a devout. Catholic serving as a reminder that he may well have been destined for Catholicism

Why does Augustine narrate the story of Alypius? What is this story doing in a book about Augustine's own confession? (6.7-6.10)

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.

How did the books of the Platonists influence Augustine, personally and intellectually, at this point in his life? (7.10-7.20)

Gave him a powerful vision of God

Book 8

Having achieved both some understanding of God (and evil) and the humility to accept Christ, Augustine still agonizes over becoming a full member of the church. Book VIII tells the story of his conversion experience in Milan, 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 Neoplatonic 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. Nebridius was turning down work at the law courts to have more time for spiritual pursuits, and Alypius 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 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 Christ 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 Alypius (who is in the garden and who joins Augustine in his decision to convert) and to Monica (who is thrilled). Augustine has finally arrived at his goal.

Why did Augustine fall more deeply into sin in his youth (2.1-2.3)

He began acting out his erotic desires

Why does Augustine suffer so intensely when a childhood friend dies? (4.4-4.13)

He felt like it was another message from God, his friend's family had him baptized on his deathbed just was almost done to himself.

How can we summarize Augustine's comments on infancy? Is there a point? (1.6-1.7)

He questions if God is infinite then are people and where he was before birth

Why was baptism postponed for Augustine after he suffers a serious illness? (1.11)

He realized he was recovering, so he called off the baptism. He believed that he could lose his salvation if he committed sins after his baptism, so he wanted to wait until he was on his death bed to be baptized.

When Monica tells a local bishop about her son's involvement with Manicheaism, how does the bishop her? (3.11-3.12)

He tells her that Augustine will recognize the errors of the Manichees soon enough on his own

How does Augustine describe Faustus and why is Augustine disappointed? (5.6-5.7)

He thinks he's a nice guy but doesn't think what he teaches is right.

Book 6

In his account of these early times in Milan, 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 he begins Book VI by crediting Monica (who has followed him to Milan as well) and Ambrose 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 Genesis 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 Nebridius (with whom Augustine had discussed astrology in Book IV) and Alypius, 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 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 Adeodatus). Book VI ends with Augustine in a state of extreme suspension, nearly ready to convert, nearly ready to marry, and still plagued by doubts.

Book 3

Leaving for Carthage from his hometown of Thagaste, 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 Manichee 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 Christ. Throughout his Confessions, Augustine will take care to intersperse his philosophy with plentiful doses of praise to God and Christ. Feeling that Hortensius was compromised by the lack of any reference to Christ (he attributes this feeling to Monica'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 (followers of the self-declared prophet Mani). Most of the 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 soul (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 evil. 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 Neoplatonic 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 multiplicity, greater temporality, 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 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 Genesis 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, inward justice," which can be found by finding God inside 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 Manichee 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 Monica at 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 Manichee illusion), God has a plan for his salvation, executed partly through Monica.

Why does Augustine describe his lust and his desire to live as a Christian as "two wills"?

One will wants God and the other wants lust — his stronger will (sex addiction)

What appears to be the main purpose of Augustine's reflection on the theft? (2.7-2.10)

Out of the desire to do wrong

Who is better off, the "religious" Manichean or the pagan philosopher, and why? (5.4-5.5)

Pagan because the Manichean says a lot of bogus science stuff

How can we read the opening of St. Augustine as a proem and invocation? (1.1-1.5)

Pray to God and calling upon him

Book 4

Returning to Thagaste from his studies at Carthage, 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). This hypocritical life, in 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 (Adeodatus, who would die at age seventeen). Augustine does recall, however, making some progress toward truth. In part through the influence of his close friend Nebridius, Augustine concluded that astrology is "utterly bogus." (This will prove an important first step in discarding the colorful Manichee 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 soul without God--misery is 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." With everything around him looking like death, Augustine again left Thagaste for Carthage. 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, temporality 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 Carthage, 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 evil 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 Manichee 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 Neoplatonists, 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!"

Why is Augustine anticipating the visit of the Manichean leader Faustus? (5.3-5.4)

So he can make points about the difference between scientific astronomy and the Manichee account of the heavens

What more does St. Paul have to offer than what Augustine found in the Platonists? (7.21)

Teaches him how to be closer to God

In Augustine's view, what do the Platonists seem to get right, and where do they seem to fall short of the Christian faith? (7.8-7.9)

The cause of the existence of human form and the mentioning of God

What does Augustine see in philosophy that attracts him so much? (3.4-3.5)

The challenging of the Bible

Book 1

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 Thagaste (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 memory. [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 being, Augustine sums up for now with a deeply Neoplatonic 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 Neoplatonists in refusing to speculate on how the soul 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 (Monica) 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 the changing multiplicity of the created world.

What about Bishop Ambrose impresses Augustine? (5.13-5.14)

The way he speaks and what he says

What kinds of things interest Augustine in the city of Carthage? (3.1-3.3)

Theatrical shows, and the foul/immortal state of being

Why does Augustine reject astrology? (4.3)

Thinks its bogus, shunning this form of prediction and the sacrificial rituals that come with it.

What, according to Augustine, is the purpose of confession? (5.1-5.2)

To both to give an account of one's faults to God and to praise God

As Augustine becomes more interested in a life of study and contemplation, how does he plan to handle his need for sex?

To get married

What does the Manichean sect offer to Augustine, such that he joins them? (3.6-3.9)

To study in Rome

Why do the stories of Victorinus and the friends of Ponticianus have such a dramatic affect on Augustine?

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

Book 2

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 with mind." Hence, pure love was perverted by its 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 Carthage 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 Monica 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 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, Neoplatonic. For the Neoplatonists, all creation (the material world) has "turned away" from God's perfection, becoming scattered into a chaotic state of mutability, temporality, and multiplicity. 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.