AUGUSTINE’S CONFESSIONS

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“God, help me to love you the way Augustine did.” 

This is what I prayed the first time I finished the Confessions of St Augustine almost ten years ago, as a church camp counselor in 2015. I had picked it off slowly through the whole summer, somehow plowing my way through, with affection but little comprehension. But one thing was sure: I was blown away by the sincerity and depth of Augustine’s faith. It was infused with holiness and deep affection. I wanted whatever Augustine had. His heart was poured out like water before the Lord. Most impressive to me was the use of Scripture infused throughout. It was more than a set of prooftext that Augustine believed. No, it was sonorous. It felt like a sponge that had been dipped in Scripture and emerged sopping wet, white and glistering. A baptism of Word.

Confessions is split into thirteen long chapters, or “books.” Books I–IX feel different than Books X–XIII. In Book X, Augustine shifts from narrative to discourse. These latter four books are do not feel directly connected to the riveting autobiography of I–IX. What happened? Much ink has been spilled on the relationship between the autobiographical sections and philosophical sections of Confessions, but I would like to focus on the debut book of the philosophical sections, Book X. 

This Book is dedicated to memory. After recounting his whole life leading up to the fateful conversion in the garden in Milan, Augustine now reflects at length in the present as to how memory itself works: the very faculty by which he is able to make confession. “Now I arrive in the fields and vast mansions of memory.” (1) He summarizes how he remembers things, ascending from images of sensory impression, to abstract concepts from his education, emotional life, and even what it means to remember that he forgets without knowing what has been forgotten. True to his philosophical education in Plotinus, Augustine was confident that such a turn inward can be a place to know God. (2) 

But Augustine is overwhelmed. There is no verdant serenity in these fields, no stately order in the mansions. He catalogues three major ways in which he is tempted and gives into temptation, (3) and admits in conclusion, “From time to time you lead me into an inward experience quite unlike any other, a sweetness beyond understanding… But I am dragged down again by my weight of woe… grievously I lament, but just as grievously am I held.” (4) His inner life overwhelms him the more he examines, as if trying to count microorganisms by hand in a handful of soil: “What is my nature? It is teeming life of every conceivable kind, and exceedingly vast.” (5)

For all the triumph of his conversion, Augustine is still conflicted inside and sin still holds sway over his desires. Brown says, “The amazing Book Ten of the Confessions is not the affirmation of a cured man: it is the self-portrait of a convalescent.” (6) Someone who only knows the Confessions from the story of Augustine’s conversion will be mistaken into perceiving it like other Christian testimonies—there is a simple Before and After, where the new believer has walked from darkness into light, from doubt into certainty, and can conquer all vice, like St. Anthony in the desert. But this perception is undercut by Augustine himself. There is a profundity to his commitment to probing his memory and looking inside himself after his conversion, and finding strife. He does this publicly as a bishop; his abstract philosophy is really a pastoral move to reassure the souls of his flock. (7) As another bishop remarks in our time: 

“Conversion is a beginning, not an end, an entry into a perilous and confused world.” (8)

So the great bishop and rhetor Augustine is no superhero; he is merely human. How then can conversion matter at all? Because if Augustine is human than he is God’s, and God is Truth, and “the happy life is joy in the truth.” (9) That God is “Truth” (10) is a refrain which anchors Augustine’s search in Book X: “I have never forgotten you, because wherever I have found truth I have found my God who is absolute Truth… That is why you have dwelt in my memory ever since I learned to know you, and it is there that I find you when I remember and delight in you.” (11) If Augustine remembers true knowledge, then he has been set free a little more in recognizing the God who desires to enlighten “anyone who does truth.” (12) When he seeks and searches in the caverns of mind and memory, he ultimately is reassured that God is there. The presence of God rests in the memory in spite of strife and “this vast thicket.” (13) This is grace. This is hope. This is love. Most of all, this is a kind of communion through repair. Theologian Matt Jenson explains Augustine’s conviction: “worship of the one true God gathers a person into a harmonious unity with God, self, and others.” (14) Augustine said he lived as “a disintegrated self” and “went to pieces” in desiring “a multitude of things” at the beginning of Confessions, (15) but now he knows, he remembers now, that in God, “only there are the scattered elements of my being collected, so that no part of me may escape from you.” (16)

As for Augustine, so too for the human soul, so too for my soul. Like Augustine, I am a convert, a Christian by personal confession that the Gospel is Truth, the center of the universe. And yet, like Augustine, my inner world is not automatically cleansed simply by being Christian. My memory is often not kind to me. It has been condemnatory and anxious. It can be is a place to get lost. One of its secular names is clinical depression, a phenomenon I learned to recognize painfully by almost flunking out of both college and a masters program. “I was at odds with myself, and fragmenting myself.” (17) I consider myself fairly smart, and yet have often acted frustratingly ineffective as a student, knowing what work to do, wanting to do it, yet constantly doubtful to the point of inaction and avoidance, creating inner cycles of condemnation and harsh criticism that trap me in my bed and thoughts for days. “Grievously I lament, but just as grievously am I held.” (18) 

I reread Confessions this year. It felt like reuniting with an old friend. It has proven to be a difficult year for me. I had believed for years I was called to ordination and full time ministry. I moved eight times in four years to find a supportive place to enter an ordination process. Last summer, I found a full time job in ministry and a place to live that I thought would finally, after all this time, facilitate my goal. But I was asked to resign after a year. It stung. I have been reevaluating what to do with myself. I am still a pilgrim creature on the way, yearning, hoping, seeking, sighing, crying. “As for the rest of this life’s experiences, the more tears are shed over them the less they are worth weeping over.” (19) Rowan Williams says conversion and faith are “the heartbreaking source of human unrest… the vision always to be found and realized in the ambivalent and tormented flesh.” (20) Augustine shows me how being a Christian means being on the Way to “do Truth” and take joy in it, and one day to rest in it. (21) 

I suppose the Lord, in His wisdom, has answered my prayer from long ago, but not in the way I expected. Augustine’s way of relating to God constantly involves an intensity of feeling that disarms me—modeling an acceptable sacrifice that I can make too. He is a master guide on the risk and the redemption of looking inside oneself to recognize one’s sin yet be reassured of God’s presence.“You see the fear in my heart, hemmed in as I am by all these dangers and struggles, and many another like them. It is not that I have ceased to inflict these wounds on myself; rather I am conscious that ever and anew you are healing them.” (22) The lifelong journey to love the right things and shun the wrong things will be painful, but it recreates me. I am confident the time hidden in my memory is not lost as long as the gentle voice of Jesus beckons me with molten love. I will be whole because I, like Augustine long ago, am baptized in an eternal Word. “You are the selfsame: all our tomorrows and beyond, all our yesterdays and further back, you will make in your Today, you have made in your Today.” (23)