The Confessions as a Work

The Confessions (Confessiones), written around 397–401 when Augustine was already bishop of Hippo, is one of the most influential books in the history of the West and, in a real sense, the first autobiography — though to call it only that is to miss what it is. It is a sustained prayer addressed to God, a “confession” in the double Latin sense of both avowal of sin and praise of God, an exploration of memory, time, and desire, and a theology of grace told as the story of one soul. This file treats the Confessions as a literary and theological work: its novelty of genre, its structure, the philosophical Books 10–13, and how it should be read.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; “Blessed Augustine”)

A New Kind of Book

There had been memoirs before the Confessions — Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, the letters of Cicero, the philosophical self-portraits of the schools — but there had been nothing quite like Augustine’s book, and the centuries that followed produced its imitators by the hundred. What was new was not merely that a man wrote about his own life, but the posture in which he wrote: the entire work is addressed not to a reader but to God, in the second person, as a prolonged prayer (Brown 2000, ch. 16; Chadwick 1986, ch. 5). “Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise” — so the book opens, with the words of Psalm 144/145, and so it continues for thirteen books (Confessions 1.1; trans. Chadwick 1991). The reader overhears a soul speaking to its Maker. This is the formal invention of the Confessions, and it determines everything else.

The double meaning of the Latin confessio is the key to the title and the genre. In Augustine’s usage, following the Psalms and the African Latin Bible, confessio means at once the confession of sin (the avowal of one’s failures) and the confession of praise (the acknowledgment of God’s greatness and mercy) — and, derivatively, the confession of faith (Chadwick 1991, introduction; Confessions 5.1). The book is all three at once: Augustine lays bare his sins precisely in order to praise the grace that drew him out of them. To confess one’s sin and to confess God’s mercy are, in the Confessions, a single act.

Memory and Desire

The deep theme of the Confessions is the one announced in its first paragraph: the restless heart and its homecoming. The whole narrative of Books 1–9 — infancy, the theft of pears, the years of lust and ambition, the Manichaean detour, the Platonist liberation, the garden, Ostia — is read backward from the conversion as the long working of grace upon a soul that did not know what it sought. “You were with me, and I was not with you” (mecum eras, et tecum non eram) is the book’s recurring confession (Confessions 10.27; trans. Chadwick 1991). The famous apostrophe gathers the whole:

“Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there… You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you… You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness.” (Confessions 10.27; trans. Chadwick 1991)

Desire is the engine of the Confessions — a desire that is always, at bottom, desire for God, even when misdirected onto lesser goods. And memory is the faculty through which the soul recovers the trace of God within it. Augustine’s great meditation on memory in Book 10 — the “vast palaces” and “fields and spacious halls” of memory, where the self stores and searches and is astonished at its own depths — is one of the most original pieces of philosophical psychology in antiquity (Confessions 10.8–17; Brown 2000, ch. 16). The question driving it is: where, in the vastness of the remembering mind, do I find God, whom I did not know but somehow sought? The answer — that God is “above” the mind even while dwelling within it, the truth by which the mind judges — is at once Platonist in idiom and biblical in content.

The Structure: A Book of Two Halves

The Confessions divides into two unequal parts, and the relation between them has long puzzled readers. Books 1–9 are the autobiographical narrative, ending with the death of Monica. Book 10 turns to the present — to the bishop Augustine as he writes, examining his soul before God, confessing his standing temptations, and meditating on memory. Books 11–13 abandon autobiography altogether for an extended philosophical and exegetical meditation on the opening chapters of Genesis — on creation, on the nature of time (Book 11), on formless matter and the heaven of heavens (Book 12), and an allegorical reading of the days of creation (Book 13).

Why should a spiritual autobiography end in a commentary on Genesis? Older readers sometimes treated Books 10–13 as an afterthought or even a separate work appended by accident; modern scholarship reads them as integral [Disputed: the unity of the *Confessions* is debated; some earlier critics judged Books 11–13 a digression poorly joined to the autobiography, while the consensus of recent scholarship (Brown 2000; O'Donnell 1992; Chadwick 1991) holds that the turn to creation is the work's intended climax — the individual soul's return to God in Books 1–9 opening into the whole creation's procession from and return to God in Books 11–13, so that the personal confession is completed only in the cosmic one]. On this reading the structure is theological: the story of one soul’s restless return to God in Books 1–9 is shown, in Books 11–13, to be a particular case of the universal movement of all creation out of God and back to Him. The “restless heart” of Book 1 finds its rest in the “Sabbath” of God at the very end of Book 13 (Confessions 13.35–36; Chadwick 1991).

On Time

Book 11’s meditation on time has had a philosophical afterlife of its own, independent of the rest of the work. Asking what God was doing “before” He made the world, Augustine answers that the question is malformed: time itself is a creature, made with the world, so there is no “before” creation (Confessions 11.13; trans. Chadwick 1991). He then turns to the puzzle of time’s reality: the past is no longer, the future is not yet, and the present has no duration — so in what sense does time exist? “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to someone who asks, I do not know” (Confessions 11.14; trans. Chadwick 1991). Augustine’s resolution — that time is a “distension” (distentio) of the soul, which measures the present memory of the past, the present attention to what passes, and the present expectation of the future (Confessions 11.26–28) — is one of the seminal analyses of time in Western philosophy, discussed by thinkers from the medieval schoolmen to Husserl and Heidegger (Chadwick 1986, ch. 5).

How to Read It

For the purposes of this guide three things must be held together about the Confessions. First, it is theology before it is autobiography: Augustine is not chronicling a life for its own interest but reading a life as the field of grace, and the reader who takes it as a simple record of fact (or who tries to use it to reconstruct the events behind it without attention to its art) will misread it. Second, it is therefore a retrospective construction: the bishop of Hippo in his forties, already formed by the controversies that lay ahead, reads his earlier self through the lens of the doctrine of grace he had by then articulated, so that the helplessness of the converted will in Book 8 already anticipates the anti-Pelagian theology (Brown 2000, ch. 16; see Against Pelagius). Third, it is, across all the disputes about its sources and structure, an undisputed and inexhaustible spiritual classic, read with profit in the Orthodox East no less than the Catholic and Protestant West — the one work of Augustine’s whose universal Christian value no party contests.

It is worth marking, for a collection concerned with Augustine’s Eastern reception, that the Confessions is the least contested of all his major works among Orthodox readers. Its theology of the heart’s restlessness and homecoming, its penitential depth, and its prayerful form resonate with the Eastern tradition of the heart and of nepsis (watchfulness), and even sharp critics of Augustine’s later doctrine of grace tend to receive the Confessions warmly (see The Spectrum of Orthodox Opinion). Whatever the reservations about the predestinarian Augustine, the Augustine of the Confessions — the penitent crying “late have I loved you” — is received across the divided Christian traditions as a common possession.

References

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. (The double sense of confessio; “late have I loved you” at 10.27; memory at 10.8–17; time at 11.13–28; the Genesis books 11–13; the Sabbath rest at 13.35–36.)
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. New ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. (Ch. 16 on the Confessions.)
Chadwick, Henry. Augustine: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. (Ch. 5.)
O’Donnell, James J. Augustine: Confessions. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. (Critical text and commentary; the unity of the work.)