It was, as they say, "thick."
Augustine is writing a book to God, detailing his struggles to accept His Lordship. He tells of his early life, and some of what happened to him, but it is not really a well-laid out biography. It's a prayer. It's a conversation with God. We can almost hear God answering back or at least nodding as he reads the treatise.
The title has a double connotation. Augustine is confessing his sins. He is confessing his wayward heart that struggled against what he ultimately knew to be right. He is confessing his faulty ideas and beliefs. But it is also a confession of praise. He is giving God what God is due - his praise and adoration.
He opens with, "You are great, Lord, and highly to be praised. (Ps. 47:2)" (p. 3) In fact the entire book is almost one scriptural quotation after another. It is clear that Augustine has studied and KNOWS the Word of God.
He follows that the most well-known of statements, "Nevertheless, to praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. you stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in your." (p. 3)
He admits early on that it wasn't always so easy for him to praise God. God felt distant. Yet Augustine states, "So too let him rejoice and delight in finding you who are beyond discovery rather than fail to find you by supposing you to be discoverable." (p. 8) The failure, he sees, in in the not seeking.
As an intellectual, Augustine admits that he used his mental abilities to question God and his tenets. He strayed far from the faith his mother, Monica, raised him in. Now he sees his error and confesses his sins. He now recognizes the supremacy of God. But that is now. Augustine has to take us (and God) back through the journey that led him here.
He begins, "I intend to remind myself of my past foulnesses and carnal corruptions, not because I love them but so that I many love you, my God. It is from love of your love that I make the act of recollection." (p. 24) Augustine's purpose is not to revel in his sin, but to demonstrate the glory of God in rescuing such a sinner as he.
His father was not a believer, but raised him with a good education. Augustine abandoned his mother's cries that he serve God and followed the path of worldliness offered by his father. It is at this point he relates the famous "pear story." He and some friends stole some pears from a neighbor's tree and threw them to the pigs. This seemingly innocent prank has weighed heavily upon Augustine and he analyzes it to see what actually happened.
Upon reflection, he says, "So the soul fornicates (Ps. 72:27) when it is turned away from you and seeks outside you the pure and clear intentions which are not to be found except by returning to you. In their perverted way all humanity imitates you. Yet they put themselves at a distance from you and exalt themselves against you. But even by thus imitating you they acknowledge that you are the creator of all nature and so concede that there is no place where one can entirely escape from you." (p. 32) He discovers in this theft an act of pure rebellion against a God he refuses to serve. His childish folly indicated the depth of his sinful heart. "Was it possible to take pleasure in what was illicit for no reason other than that it was not allowed?" (p. 32) For Augustine, all sin is humanity shaking their fist and saying, "You are not the God of me." In that way, we "imitate" Him and seek to become Him.
As a student at Carthage, Augustine became swept up in an intellectual group called the Manichees who fancied themselves deep philosophers.They asked questions about God that Augustine couldn't answer. They repeated ancient heresies concerning the make up of God as a physical being and whether He created evil or not. They deceived and confused Augustine and caused him to doubt what his mother had taught him. Meanwhile she prayed. She poured her heart out to God, begging Him for the soul of her son. God graciously kept Augustine in the dark until he could wrestle his way out of it, while comforting his mom with signs of a future conversion.
Augustine loved his life of the mind and good friends. He delighted in their conversations, knowing they were taking him further away from the truth. But eventually, a friend dies. This brutal blast of reality has him realizing that there must be something more stable. He comes to acknowledge that "O Lord our God, under the covering of our wings (Exod. 19:4) we set our hope. Protect us and bear us up. It is you who will carry us; you will bear us up from our infancy until old age (Isa. 46:4) When you are our firm support, then it is firm indeed. But when your support rests on our own strength, it is infirmity." (p. 71)
Augustine recounts his time in Carthage, then Rome, then Milan He finds himself increasingly questioning the Manichee philosophy and finding himself drawn to Catholicism. The bishop Ambrose, whom Augustine began to listen to out of curiosity, seemed to easily answer the questions the Manichees found so vexing and unanswerable. Augustine realized that the Catholic faith had already wrestled with these questions and had answers. Intellectually, Augustine feels the pull, but cannot yet convert with his heart. While his mother is confident that he will, he continues to resist that pull. He states, "I had not yet come to groan in prayer that you might come to my aid. My mind was intent on inquiry and restless for debate." (p. 92) He was anxious to confront the Manichees with his new found answers. But he had not yet come to a place of surrender.
Augustine spends a couple of chapters telling God of the intellectual struggles he faced. He goes through his reasoning premise by premise. He finally manages to come to a place where he feels his questions answered, especially about the nature of evil.
Knowing he must convert, but continuing to resist, Augustine confesses despair at how easily those less intellectual than he and his friends come to faith. This stumbling block in addition to the knowledge that he must give up his illicit love life, almost causes him to turn back. Finally, in desperation, he grabs a Bible. "I seized it, opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit: 'Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts.' (Rom. 13:13-14)" (p. 153) He was delighted and astonished to find a "random" verse that spoke so directly to his struggles. It was time to "make no provision for the flesh" and follow Christ.
After his conversion, Augustine gives up his job as a teacher of rhetoric. He returns to his delighted mother. When she dies shortly afterwards, he mourns her, but is grateful that she saw the day he converted to her faith.
This is followed by a few other "books" on Augustine's thoughts concerning various philosophical truths. In Book X he reflects upon "memory." He believes that we "remember" ephemeral things. We long for more. This, he believes, is proof of God's existence. Or else where do these "memories" come from? He believes our desire to be happy comes from God. He seems to be arguing that the fact that we know there is more to life is proof that there is in fact, more to life. He also comes to believe that he can actually put all sin in his life to death in order to pursue the good he "remembers" and longs for.
Book XI has Augustine going very deep into the concept of time and eternity. His arguments twist and turn and take a lot of brainpower to keep up with. One concept, though, that I found especially intriguing was the fact that God exists in the eternal "now." I sort of already knew this, but it helps explain why God never changes. If God changed, it would indicate the passage of time. But time does not pass for Him. It's also why one thousand years can be like a day and vice versa. If all moments are "now" then it's all just the present for God. He really stretched my brain when he discusses the fact that there can be no "before" God created time. "Before" indicates an existence of time, which by definition did not exist then. I cannot even really speak of "then." That also indicates a time frame. Mind. Blown.
He goes even deeper still in Book XII, discussing what exactly Moses meant when he called the world "formless and void" at the start of creation. He offers multiple interpretations and then speculates that all or none of them are correct. Don't read this part in bed, like I did. It definitely deserves a second or third reading to make sense of it.
Finally, in Book XIII, he meditates deeply on who God is. This part also requires a few re-readings. He dives into the nature of God and man and the Trinity. He wonders about parts of Genesis and cautions against hyperliteralism. He knows man is made for God, but that without man, God is complete in Himself. He sums up his ultimate confession of the supremacy of God.
The beauty of Confessions is that Augustine wrestles with questions man has wrestled with for eons. As he works through it all, he ends up right where his mother and other "simpletons" knew he would - praising God. While Augustine is no fool, it becomes clear that God "uses the foolish things of this world to shame the wise." Augustine takes thirteen books to conclude that man's chief purpose is to glorify God.
One particular paragraph really caught my eye. It is so timeless, expressing the eternal truth about mankind's struggle to submit to God. "But why is it that 'truth engenders hatred'? Why does your man who preaches what is true become to them an enemy (Gal. 4:16) when they love the happy life which is simply joy grounded on truth? The answer must be this: their love for truth takes the form that they love something else and want this object of their love to be the truth; and because they do not wish to be deceived, they do not wish to be persuaded that they are mistaken. And so they hate the truth for the sake of the object which they love instead of the truth. They love truth for the light it sheds, but hate it when it shows them up as being wrong (John 3;20; 5:35)" (p. 199-200) This is perfect encapsulation of our rejection of God. We cannot give up our idols. We cannot be told we are wrong.
Augustine makes a powerful case for surrender. He finds true happiness, joy, and answers to his deepest questions when he turns his life over to Truth.
