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Course 12 · Lesson 4.1

Augustine: life, conversion and the Confessions

11 minute read

Lessons in this course

Course 12 outline

Module 1: The Apostolic Fathers and the Early Apologists

  1. Who the Apostolic Fathers were: Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp and the Didache
  2. Church order, worship and martyrdom in the second century
  3. Why Christians wrote apologies: charges, persecution and public defense
  4. Justin Martyr, philosophy and the Logos

Module 2: Irenaeus, Tertullian and Origen

  1. Irenaeus against the Gnostics: the rule of faith and apostolic succession
  2. Tertullian and the beginnings of Latin theology
  3. Origen: biblical scholarship, allegory and speculation
  4. Heresy and orthodoxy: the scholarly debate about early diversity

Module 3: Creeds and Councils: Nicaea to Chalcedon

  1. From baptismal confession to creed
  2. Arius, the Council of Nicaea (325) and Athanasius
  3. The Cappadocian Fathers and the Council of Constantinople (381)
  4. Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451): one Christ, two natures
  5. The seven councils and how the churches receive them

Module 4: Augustine, Chrysostom and the Desert

  1. Augustine: life, conversion and the Confessions
  2. Augustine on grace, the Pelagian controversy and the City of God
  3. John Chrysostom: preacher, pastor and critic of wealth
  4. The Desert Fathers and Mothers: Anthony, Macarius and Amma Syncletica

Module 5: The Medieval Church and Scholasticism

  1. The medieval setting: monasteries, cathedral schools and universities
  2. Anselm and the method of scholasticism
  3. Thomas Aquinas: life and the structure of the Summa Theologiae
  4. Aquinas on faith, reason, nature and grace
  5. East and West: the growing divide and the schism of 1054

Module 6: The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation

  1. Luther and the question of justification
  2. Zwingli, Calvin and the Reformed tradition
  3. The Radical Reformation and the English Reformation
  4. The Council of Trent and Catholic reform
  5. Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant readings of the Reformation

Module 7: Modern Theology and Tracing a Doctrine

  1. The Enlightenment and its challenges to inherited doctrine
  2. Schleiermacher, liberal theology and Karl Barth
  3. Vatican II, Orthodox renewal and the evangelical and Pentecostal movements
  4. How to trace a doctrine: development, change and corruption

All courses

Program / Course 12: Patristics and Historical Theology / Lesson 4.1

What you will learn

  • Outline the main stages of Augustine’s life from Thagaste to Hippo.
  • Explain the three meanings of confession in the Confessions.
  • Describe the conversion scene in the Milan garden and the debates about how to read it.
  • Identify the themes of restlessness, memory and time in the book.

The big idea

Augustine of Hippo (354 to 430) wrote the most famous autobiography of the ancient world, but the Confessions is not mainly about Augustine. It is a prayer addressed to God, in which he tells his life as the story of a restless heart searching for rest. The word confession in the title has three meanings at once: admitting sin, praising God and declaring faith. The book is both a record of one person’s conversion and a long reflection on memory, time, creation and the nature of God.

Key terms

Confession (confessio)
In Augustine’s Latin, a word with three senses: acknowledging one’s sins, praising God, and professing faith.
Manichaeism
A religion founded by the Persian prophet Mani in the third century. It taught a cosmic struggle between light and darkness, and it appealed to Augustine in his youth.
Neoplatonism
A philosophy based on Plato, developed by Plotinus and others, which taught that all things flow from a single source called the One and that the soul can ascend toward it.
Rhetoric
The art of persuasive speaking, which Augustine taught professionally before his conversion.
Catechumen
A person receiving instruction in preparation for baptism.
Concupiscence
A Latin-derived word for disordered desire, in Augustine’s sense the pull toward things that are less than God.
Hippo Regius
A port city in North Africa, in what is now Algeria, where Augustine served as bishop.

Background

Augustine was born in 354 in Thagaste, a small town in the Roman province of Numidia in North Africa. His father, Patricius, was a pagan of modest means, and his mother, Monica, was a devoted Christian who prayed for her son for many years. Augustine received an education in grammar and rhetoric in Madauros and then Carthage. At about nineteen he read Cicero’s Hortensius, which awakened in him a love of wisdom. He took a concubine, with whom he lived for about fifteen years and who bore him a son, Adeodatus. For roughly nine years he followed the Manichaeans, then became skeptical of their answers.

In 383 he left for Rome, and in 384 he became a teacher of rhetoric in Milan, the seat of the imperial court. There he heard the sermons of Bishop Ambrose and read books by Platonists, which helped free him from the idea that God must be a material thing and that evil is a substance. His conversion came in 386. He was baptized by Ambrose at Easter in 387. Monica died shortly afterward at Ostia, the port of Rome.

Augustine returned to Africa, was ordained a priest at Hippo about 391 and became its bishop in the middle 390s. He wrote the Confessions around 397 to 400, and many other works. He died in 430 as the Vandals besieged Hippo.

Step-by-step explanation

Step 1: A prayer, not a diary

The Confessions is addressed from the first page to God. It begins with praise: great are you, Lord, and greatly to be praised. Augustine tells his story in prayer, which means he sees every event in the light of God’s presence. When he records a childhood theft of pears, he is less interested in the crime itself than in the question of why he wanted to do wrong for its own sake. This is a book about desire.

The first nine books tell his life up to his mother’s death. Book 10 is a long reflection on memory. Book 11 is a meditation on time. Books 12 and 13 interpret the opening of Genesis. Some readers wonder why an autobiography ends with Genesis. Augustine seems to answer that the story of his soul and the story of creation are parts of one story of return to God.

Step 2: The restless heart

The book’s best-known line says that God made human beings for himself, and the human heart is restless until it rests in him. Everything in the narrative can be read through that line. Augustine tries ambition, love, philosophy and a religion, and finds each of them good but not enough. The point is not that these things are worthless but that they cannot bear the weight he places on them.

Step 3: The garden in Milan

In Book 8, Augustine describes the crisis of his conversion. Torn between his desire to give himself to God and his attachment to his old life, he weeps in a garden. He hears a child’s voice nearby, chanting words that he takes to be take up and read. He picks up the book of Paul’s letters and reads the first passage he sees, Romans 13:13-14, which warns against wantonness and tells the reader to put on the Lord Jesus Christ. He says that all doubt left him.

Scholars discuss how to read this scene. Some take it as literal history. Others see a carefully shaped literary account, written years later, in which the event is told to teach as well as to record. Many historians suggest that the conversion was a process of several stages, including his reading of the Platonists and his hearing of Ambrose, and that the garden was its climax, not its sole cause. Others have argued that what he describes was a conversion to a philosophical Christianity more than to the church, though Augustine himself insists on the church.

Step 4: Memory and time

Book 10 examines memory as a vast inner space, where past experiences, learning and even God are somehow present. Augustine marvels that he can find God in his memory without having forgotten him. Book 11 asks what time is. Famously, he says that if no one asks him, he knows what time is, but if he is asked to explain, he does not know. He concludes that the past exists as memory, the future as expectation and the present as attention. These are philosophical reflections within a prayer, which is why the book is hard to classify.

Step 5: Reading the book with care

Some modern readers criticize Augustine’s handling of his concubine, whom he sent away when he planned a marriage and whose name he never gives. His handling of the sexual body and of desire has also been criticized and defended. Other readers find in the book a deep and honest account of inner life. A fair reading keeps both kinds of response in view, and remembers that the book is written by a bishop long after the events, to praise God and to teach his readers.

  1. Why does Augustine tell his story as a prayer instead of as a history?
  2. What does the restless heart explain about the choices he made?
  3. Why might the theft of pears matter more to him than a greater crime?
  4. How do you read the garden scene: as history, as literature or as both?
  5. What do you think Augustine means by saying that the present is attention?
  6. How do you weigh his treatment of his partner in the story?

Examples

A boy and the pear tree

Augustine and some friends stole pears they did not want and threw them to pigs. He says he loved the theft itself, the company and the thrill of wrongdoing. He uses the story to ask what the will wants when it chooses evil.

A mother’s prayer

Monica followed her son to Milan, prayed for him and sought the advice of Ambrose. In the book, her faith is shown as patient and persistent, and Augustine thinks her prayers were part of his conversion. The account of their shared vision at Ostia is among the most moving passages.

Asking what time is

A person who checks a watch feels sure they know what time is. Augustine’s argument shows how hard the question becomes when pressed, and the meditation turns into a prayer for understanding.

Different perspectives

Catholic

Augustine is a saint, a Doctor of the Church and a central Father of the West. Catholic readers value the Confessions as a model of conversion and of prayer, and the Church celebrates his feast and that of Monica on adjacent days.

Orthodox

Orthodox Christians honor Augustine as a saint, with some reservations about parts of his teaching on grace and original sin and about the Filioque. They tend to read the Confessions as a work of spiritual autobiography, and some Orthodox writers have defended him warmly.

Protestant

Protestants, especially in the Reformed and Lutheran traditions, have long valued Augustine, and Luther and Calvin cited him constantly. They read the Confessions as an account of grace at work in a sinner. Protestants differ with Catholic readers on matters such as the role of the church and sacraments in Augustine.

Scholarly views

Historians such as Peter Brown have placed Augustine in the culture of late antiquity. Scholars debate the historicity of details, the nature of his Platonism, and how far he shaped later Western ideas of the self. Some modern critics discuss his attitudes to sexuality and gender.

Why it matters

The Confessions invented a way of writing about the inner life that has shaped Western literature and spirituality ever since. For a Christian student, it models honest self-examination before God without self-display. Reading it also prepares for the next lesson, since Augustine’s later teaching on grace grows out of his own experience of being drawn to God against his own habits.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: The Confessions is mainly a list of Augustine’s sins.

Correction: Confession also means praise and profession of faith. The sins are told to show God’s mercy, not to dwell on the sins.

Misunderstanding: Augustine was a pagan who converted to Christianity in a single moment.

Correction: He was raised partly in the Christian faith by Monica, wandered through other beliefs and converted by stages. The garden scene is the turning point, not the whole process.

Misunderstanding: Augustine hated the body and sex.

Correction: He rejected Manichaean views that matter is evil and taught that creation is good. His views on desire remain debated, and critics and defenders both exist.

Misunderstanding: He wrote the Confessions as a young man.

Correction: He wrote it in his forties as a bishop, looking back at the events with a bishop’s judgment.

Knowledge check

What are the three meanings of confession in Augustine’s book?

Confession means acknowledging sin, praising God and professing faith. Augustine means all three at once. The book is a prayer in which he admits his failings, praises God’s mercy and declares what he believes. That is why it reads as both autobiography and worship.

What happened in the garden at Milan?

Augustine, tormented by the conflict between his desires and his wish to give himself to God, heard a child’s voice say take up and read. He read Romans 13:13-14 in Paul’s letters and felt his doubt vanish. Scholars discuss whether it should be read as literal history, literary shaping or both.

What is the main theme of the line about the restless heart?

The line says that human beings were made for God and cannot find lasting peace in anything less. Augustine reads his own life through it: ambition, pleasure, philosophy and Manichaeism each gave partial satisfaction but could not bring rest.

What is the topic of Book 11?

Book 11 is a meditation on time. Augustine says he knows what time is until he is asked to explain it. He concludes that past, present and future exist in the mind as memory, attention and expectation. The reflection is part of his prayer and prepares his reading of Genesis.

Think it through

  1. What would it take for you to write honestly about your own failings in the form of a prayer?
  2. Why might gratitude be a better frame for a life story than achievement?
  3. What do you think of the idea that every good thing a person wants points beyond itself?
  4. How does knowing the author was a bishop in later life change how you read the youth he describes?

Independent assignment

Reading Book 8 closely

Read Book 8, chapters 7 to 12, of the Confessions. In your notebook, write a summary of the garden scene in 250 words. Then list three details that seem to be there for a reason beyond narrative, and say what they might mean. Close with a paragraph of 100 words on whether you read the scene as plain history, literary shaping or both, and why. Aim for 450 to 600 words.

Further study