of Hippo Saint Augustine - Confessions

Table of Contents

Yet, my god, my life, my holy joy, what is this that I have said? What can any man say when he speaks of you? But woe to them that keep silencesince even those who say most are dumb. (pages 4-5)

I believe, and therefore I speak.

(page 5)

Look down, lord god, and see patiently, as you are accustomed to do, how diligently the sons of men observe the conventional rules of letters and syllables, taught them by those who learned their letters beforehand, while they neglect the eternal rules of everlasting salvation taught by you.

(page 17)

These things I declare and confess to you, my god. I was applauded by those whom I then thought it my whole duty to please, for I did not perceive the gulf of infamy wherein I was cast away from your eyes.

(page 17)

We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden. Such was my heart, god, such was my heartwhich you pitied even in that bottomless pit.

(page 23)

Let me learn from you, who are truth, and put the ear of my heart to your mouth, so that you may tell me why weeping should be so sweet to the unhappy. Have youthough omnipresentdismissed our miseries from your concern? You abide in yourself while we are tossed by trial after trial. Yet unless we wept in your ears, there would be no hope left for us. How does it happen that such sweet fruit is plucked from the bitterness of life, from groans, tears, sighs, and lamentations? Is it the hope that you will hear us that sweetens it?

(page 45)

I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof. I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.

(page 126)

And while we were thus speaking and straining after it, we just barely touched it with the whole effort of our hearts. Then with a sigh, leaving the first fruits of the spirit bound to that ecstasy, we returned to the sounds of our own tongue, where the spoken word had both beginning and end. But what is like to your word, our lord, which remains in itself without becoming old, and makes all things new?

(page 141)

My heart is deeply stirred, lord, when in this poor life of mine the words of your holy scripture strike upon it. This is why the poverty of the human intellect expresses itself in an abundance of language. Inquiry is more loquacious than discovery. Demanding takes longer than obtaining and the hand that knocks is more active than the hand that receives.

(page 207)

What man will teach men to understand this? And what angel will teach the angels? Or what angels will teach men? We must ask it of you; we must seek it in you; we must knock for it at your door. Only thus shall we receive; only thus shall we find; only thus shall your door be opened.

(page 260)

The most seminal Christian thinker after Saint Paul, of whom he would be an influential interpreter, Augustine of Hippo was born Aurelius Augustinus on November 13, 354, in Thagaste, a small town in the province of Numidia in what was then Roman North Africa (today Souk Ahras, Algeria). His mother, Monica, was a devout Christian; his father, Patricius, was a pagan who converted to Christianity on his deathbed. With financial help from a local grandee, his parents saw to it that he got the best possible education, culminating in study at Carthage, the regional metropolis. While at Carthage, Augustine began a longstanding and apparently monogamous relationship with a woman with whom he fathered a son, Adeodatus. He also joined the Manicheans, an outlawed Christian sect whose complex dualistic cosmology must have appealed to a brilliant young man in search of answers to difficult questions about the world and his place in it.

From 375 to 386 Augustine taught grammar and rhetoric in Thagaste, Carthage, Rome, and Milan, building a career that promised to carry him to the pinnacle of secular distinction. Once exposed to the Neoplatonist philosophy of writers like Plotinus, however, he quickly became weary with the Manicheans. Other, more specifically Christian influences also began to bear on him in Milan, includingas he would later recallthe preaching and example of Ambrose, the impressive and austere bishop of that city. Augustine was baptized by Ambrose at Easter 387, and in 389 moved back to Thagaste to set up a small community of Christian philosophers committed to the contemplative life as servants of god.

During a visit to the nearby African city of Hippo in 391, Augustine was ordained as a presbyter, reportedly in response to popular demand. Then, in 395 or 396, he became bishop. Aside from travel to neighboring episcopal sees, he would remain in Hippo and its diocese for the rest of his life, heavily involved in the affairs of the locality at all levelspreaching and advising on spiritual matters, settling disputes, intervening with higher authorities to save prisoners from torture and execution, using church funds for the relief of orphans and the poor or to buy freedom for slaves. After the Catholic church in North Africa had received imperial endorsement against the rival party of Donatist Christians in the region, Augustine used all means at his disposalincluding the civil armto enforce unity. He was no less tireless in controversy with those who were judged to be heretics, such as the followers of Pelagius. As the letters and books that he wrote on these and a range of other doctrinal and disciplinary topics increasingly found an audience beyond the confines of his diocese, he became one of the best-known Christian intellectuals of his age.

From Augustines enormous literary output (some 100 books and many more letters and sermons), a handful of works notably transcend the original circumstances of their composition. Around the year 400, Augustine published the Confessions, a soliloquy addressed to an almighty and all-knowing god, made to be heard as well by the authors fellow men and women, and full of curious and intimate detail about himself. In another idiom altogether, his treatise On the Trinity is a soaring synthesis of philosophy and biblical exegesis, without equal in Western theology down to his time or for long afterward. Between earth and heaven, The City of God ransacks the library of classical or pagan intellectual culture to reaffirm an understanding of the created order based on the Christian scriptures from Genesis to Revelation. Both these other works were long in the writing and were finished only in the late 420s. Seeing how much he had written by that date, and how closely some of it was being read, Augustine then began his Retractationes (Revisions), a self-critical review of all his works, designed to guide future readers. On August 28, 430, while Hippo was under siege by the Vandals, and before he could extend this annotated catalog to his letters and sermons, Augustine died of a fever. Western Christianityand Western culture more generallyhas been taking stock ever since of his extraordinary written legacy.