The Confessions

"That’s amazing! But in a way, that helps explain why I’ve picked it. It is an endlessly capacious, inventive, stimulating book. I won’t say it has something for everyone but it has, for its sheer blend of different approaches, a great deal for a great number of people. The fact that the whole thing is presented as a conversation with God, for a start. And Augustine is remarkably self-exposing and self-disclosing. It’s an extraordinary book for someone who’s just been ordained as a bishop to write. The Confessions had to be on this list and it is most people’s way into Augustine. It is this unbelievably pliant and fruitful work. Every time you read it, you notice new things. There are hints of the circumstances of his life, of what it felt like to grow up in North Africa in the 360s, that I think, for a certain cast of mind, are mesmerising. But then there are the incredibly sophisticated reflections on time, and on memory. These reflections can, on the one hand, help to draw together the work as a retrospective of his life under the sight of God. But they can also stand alone and have become the starting point for so many further reflections on these themes. Then there’s all the material which is so often ignored, particularly books 12 and 13, on biblical interpretation. And this goes beyond just biblical interpretation. It’s about how to read; how do we find meaning in a text? And then as he writes, he’s illustrating how we weave that text, in this case the Bible, into our own writing. When you’re reading the Confessions in Latin, it’s incredibly hard to know, at times, where Augustine ends and where biblical quotation begins. He has so exquisitely internalised that language, which he tells us he found completely rebarbative when he first encountered it. I chose Maria Boulding’s translation because I think her translation, out of all the ones out there—and there are some other excellent ones—is the one that best captures this phenomenon of his language. That’s an excellent question. One part of it is just wrong. There’s no way you can call it the first autobiography, whether or not you call it autobiography. If you take autobiography as systematic self-narration, then that is already an established tradition. There are hints of it already in pre-Christian contexts, but I think it really comes to the surface in martyr narratives. People come to trial, they are called to account for being Christian, they are asked if they are Christian, and they say Christianus sum or Christiana sum . And they start to think, ‘Well, what does it actually mean to say I’m a Christian? What are the bits of my life that make that so?’ That’s why I would actually say the first developed autobiography is the one by Perpetua that she wrote in prison when she was waiting to be martyred in 203 CE in Carthage. So, the Confessions is definitely not the first autobiography. The degree to which it is autobiography ignores the other incredibly important elements to which I’ve already referred. It ignores the hugely important element of prayer and of thought, more generally, about the relation of the self to God. It’s not that that doesn’t necessarily belong in an autobiography, but it’s not generally taken as part of the autobiographical project. That’s taken to be the narration of the events of a life. Those are there in the Confessions . But in some ways, I think you could argue they are the least important elements there, except that they are the elements that keep people fascinated and keep people reading on a first time through. In terms of the intellectual structure of the Confessions , I think you can make a strong argument that all these biographical details, certainly the ones about himself, are there to illuminate the deeper philosophical and theological points in the framework he’s making. “There’s no way you can call the Confessions the first autobiography, whether or not you call it autobiography” Why I say the details about himself is because, to this day, it’s not quite clear to me what he’s doing either with the little biography of his mother Monica, before her death, in book nine, or with the little biography of his friend Alypius, which is in book six. I’ve never really understood exactly what purpose those extended vignettes are serving. But when Augustine narrates himself, it’s always at the service of this larger vision. Funnily enough, that’s an easy one. And it also explains why I’ve chosen the one piece of secondary literature that I have on this list. It’s the material on time. I just find it mind-blowing. And the way in which he explains the passage of time through the singing of a hymn. I find it endlessly fascinating. Tied in with that is his acknowledgement that his greatest temptation as he tries to live an ascetic life is not food, drink, or sex. It is music. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I find it so powerful that he worries when he’s in church, listening to the singing, listening to the Psalms, that he’s focusing more on the music than on the words. And I think one needs to read his observations on time in the light of that. There’s this whole notion that all one knows is the present instant. And everything else is either the memory of the past in the present instant, or the anticipation of the future in the present instant. He explains that extraordinarily complex concept with the type of attention —that’s the word he uses, attentio — that you need when you’re singing something from memory. You have the focus on the present moment but, in fact, the entire song is held in your brain. So that’s, that’s my absolutely favourite bit. I just find it so exciting every time I read it."

"It’s better to read this in parallel texts even if you don’t know Latin , because it reminds you that he’s one of the first great writers of Christian prose in Latin. St Augustine reinvented Christianity , as perhaps all these great thinkers do. He went back to St Paul, and he took, as the starting point, the absolute necessity of grace. A lot of people think being a Christian or becoming a Christian is a decision you make. St Augustine doesn’t really think that: he thinks that it’s God coming to catch you. St Paul says similar things, but that’s the line of St Augustine. For one thing, he is shockingly, by modern standards, impenitent about all the things that we would think were scandalous about him. We wouldn’t think the sex was scandalous. We would think dumping the woman—who was his common-law wife for a long time—and his son was a scandalous thing. She then died. I think most people in the Western world, reading the story, would think he had behaved wrongly. It is one of the most widely disseminated Christian texts. As far as the West is concerned, it’s the beginning of mysticism. A lot of his work is philosophical, particularly The City of God . It’s an account that he wrote after the destruction of Rome. He was thinking to himself that this absolutely confirmed all his scepticism about the political, material set-up. When he was a lecturer in rhetoric before he became a Christian, he was very close to being a Manichee or Neoplatonist. What he was converted to by St Ambrose, philosophically speaking, was the belief that nature had been redeemed by Grace. So, in other words, it is wrong. Again, people associate him very much with fear of the flesh or fear of sex, in particular. In fact, what it is is the story of being converted into a belief in the incarnation, i.e. that all matter is sanctified because of the incarnation. Officially, it has and once you’ve made something into the religion of the empire, it spreads all over the Mediterranean. Obviously, what St Augustine and friends would call heresies were springing up everywhere. One of the things he did, as the Bishop of Hippo, a place in North Africa, was to thunderously defend the idea of unity of the Western Church — particularly against the heretics called the Donatists. What they were saying was it didn’t really matter, belonging to a universal church. They said that Christianity flourishes in little groups all on their own. St Augustine had this great doctrine of “Securus judicat orbis terrarum”, or “the world judges right”, and that Christian truth must be held onto by church unity. “By the time you get to the 4th-5th century, there isn’t really any intellectual defence of paganism on the market, and Christianity wins the debate.” Why I like the Confessions is it’s the direct confrontation between him and God, and it is a mystic work. I think perhaps all the things I’ve chosen are, in a way, by mystics. One of the things that held him back from conversion was the idea that Christianity was a crude, unlettered, peasant religion or a slave religion. He was an intellectual snob. That’s one of the things he confesses to. That’s a much bigger barrier than the sex, which is what makes the book famous. He doesn’t go into the sex at all in the book. Everyone thinks — if they hadn’t read it — that it’s sex confessions. 12 out of the 13 books have nothing to do with this. He was far from the first. Ambrose was an intellectual. Cyprian of Carthage was an intellectual. Lots of the Greeks were. I would maintain at least five of the writers in the New Testament were intellectuals. But he is a philosopher. That’s one of the interesting things about him. He’s the first person who is a professional rhetorician and philosopher who writes about Christianity. He certainly does because he went back and took over the Roman town of Hippo and stayed there for the rest of his life. You mentioned the conversion of the Roman Empire: one thing worth saying is that the reason the bishops wear purple is that, in places like North Africa and Gaul, they were, in effect, taking over from the old Roman magisterium. So they were powerful people. They were magistrates as well as being church leaders. Now we think of bishops practically as joke characters, but they weren’t then. Highly sophisticated. What St Augustine reminds you of is the fact that Christianity is a pretty extraordinary intellectual and literary exercise from the beginning. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Things like the Letters to the Hebrews and the four gospels are absolutely extraordinary. If you think what they’re writing about: the public execution of a wandering preacher. They’ve managed to translate this, within however many years, into a total rewrite of all the Jewish scriptures and a cosmic understanding of the universe in terms of this death. Yes. By the time you get to the 4th-5th century, there isn’t really any intellectual defence of paganism on the market, and Christianity wins the debate. The only thing which could have gone on was Platonism. That was the only other option going. St Augustine was really a bit like Mrs May stealing all of the best bits of the Labour Party and the Lib Dems and UKIP. He took all the good bits out of Plato . That’s why Plato, in a way, is the first Christian writer, as far as the history of the religion goes."

"The Confessions is the first real autobiography ever written and it has a very strong philosophical and psychological dimension. One of his obsessions in the book is looking at memory. He tries to remember his past life and to figure out how it is that the past and present and future are related, and especially how the past stays in his memory even though it has ceased to be. And this struggle leads him to the question of eternity – how it is that we are somehow already in eternity. But we only experience it sequentially one little bit at a time. Augustine is the very first person to try to dissect time and in one chapter he comes up with the insight that the present really doesn’t exist because the present is ever moving and by the time you say the word now and get to the last letter it is no longer now. So his take on it as a philosopher, and also by that time as a Christian theologian, is that the only real time is eternity. For human beings our minds and wills, every part of us is programmed not to live eternally, and time for him ends up being a great disappointment."

"For several reasons, actually. One is that it really established a form. Augustine gave us the genre of the conversion narrative, and the idea of conversion is central to the idea of wrongness. It’s one thing to realise your hotel is over there when you thought it over here, but it’s another thing entirely to realise: ‘The whole foundation of my life has been ripped away.’ Augustine gave us a model for telling that kind of story – stories about the complete shattering and replacement of a world view. And then there’s the fact that he’s just such an amazing writer and thinker. He’s like Freud meets Chomsky meets Gerard Manley Hopkins meets the Pope. He’s such a patient archaeologist of his own mind, and he’s so deeply engaged with trying to understand how we can be so opaque even to ourselves – how we can be wrong about our own inner universe. He’s incredibly eloquent on the subject of mystifying himself. There’s a beautiful passage that gets at the impossibility of recognising our wrongness in advance, of knowing in the present what we will know and believe – and feel – in the future. Augustine starts out as a zealous adherent of Manichaeism, which was this Iranian Gnostic religion that at the time was one of the most widespread religions in the world. And then he undergoes this massive conversion and rejects it utterly for Catholicism. I should say that, like many converts, he then spends as much energy rejecting Gnosticism as he does embracing Catholicism, which is interesting in itself. It’s fascinating to listen to him describing himself before his conversion. He says something like: ‘I had placed myself behind my own back.’ That’s a physical impossibility, of course, and I love how it gets at an emotional impossibility as well – the impossibility of knowing in the moment which of our beliefs will come to seem like errors in the future."

"This is a very complex book. It’s actually a book about God more than it is about Augustine himself. Only about 60% of the book is what we think of as the Confessions, the autobiographical part. The rest of the book contains meditations about time and eternity, and about how to read the first verses of the Book of Genesis. But if you can look through or put aside all the fourth-century philosophy, Confessions still has this bright thread of amazing autobiographical reflection running through it. The author is a man in early middle age who looks back on his life and narrates his story to God – who, of course, knows all about it already. For the reader it’s somewhat like crashing a session of classic psychoanalytic therapy: Augustine speaks, God just listens, and we overhear. Augustine brilliantly describes the dynamics of hindsight. When he was young he thought he was doing one thing, now that he looks back he realises that something else entirely was actually at stake. At the time he thought he knew what he was doing, but now he is baffled by his own lack of understanding. As a young professor he made a choice to go from Carthage, where his appointment was, to Rome and then to Milan. At the time he thought he was doing it for his career. In retrospect, he understands, as he puts it, that God was pulling him closer to Himself – to that moment of conversion in Milan. He explores the idea that we are opaque even to ourselves, and that we only really understand ourselves long afterwards, retrospectively. His ideas are still fresh all these centuries later. Yes, there’s a remarkable scene, very deftly sketched. He talks about stealing pears as a boy. He says that the fruit wasn’t particularly good, that it didn’t taste very good, and that none of them, this gang of young adolescent boys, really wanted the pears. They end up throwing the stolen fruit to pigs. But what Augustine focuses on is teenage male gang psychology: “If I were alone,” he says, “I never would have done this.” It was just the opportunity to do something together that they all knew was wrong, and that they were therefore all irresistibly drawn to. They would have been ashamed in front of each other not to do it. Augustine goes on to wonder what is it about human society that makes us want to sin when we are part of a social group, even though we know it’s wrong. He also says that he sinned knowingly simply for the pleasure of sinning – itself a frightening thought."

"First of all, outside the New Testament, St Augustine is the most influential person in Western Christianity by far. He is not so influential in the East but both Protestantism and Catholicism in the West owe almost everything to him, from outside the New Testament. Secondly, he was a wonderful, wonderful writer and a deeply passionate man. He was very sensual. Peter Brown in his biography of Augustine says that his works are filled with the sights and sounds of North Africa. This is St Augustine of Hippo in North Africa, which is now in Algeria. He lived from 354 to 430 so at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century. He is not to be confused with St Augustine of Canterbury who is one of the first English Bishops. St Augustine of Hippo wrote a huge amount and he went on a great spiritual pilgrimage from Manichaeism to Platonism and eventually found his way into Christianity. Confessions is a wonderfully personal book, but not in a lurid sense like a modern confession. The whole thing is an almost agonised prayer to God on this kind of search. One of the great things about St Augustine, like so many Christians then, but less now, is that he had a great sense of God as the source of all beauty, as well the source of goodness and truth. There is this wonderful phrase, “Oh thou Beauty so ancient and so fresh”. I think that through The Confessions you get an insight into a passionate mind on a spiritual journey. It is because he was engaged in a lot of the controversies at the time. His position eventually became the received orthodox one, so he was influential from that point of view. And also he wrote a huge amount and he wrote very well and so that also explains why he was so influential and why his writings have survived."

"St Augustine is, in some ways, misunderstood and misappropriated in modern scholarship and popular perception. I can understand why, because reading him can be a bit of a hard slog to begin with. His Confessions can seem unfashionably self-hating, and the drama that’s being played out, the way he makes a first-person address towards this God figure, feels a bit artificial and it can put people off. But if you work out what’s going on, what his motivation is, and what the context is, what he’s making is an incredibly modern, intimate, psychological diagnosis of the human condition. People can identify with it. They might not recognise it—because of where it’s coming from—but a kind of journey of self-exploration is what I hope people might get from it. St Augustine is often thought of as the inventor of ‘original sin.’ He’s all about birching ourselves and feeling guilty—all the things we might popularly associate with (medieval) Catholicism. It’s contrasted with modern, Enlightenment lineages of human dignity, of free will, individuality, human rights etc. He’s often also seen as a misogynist and not a big fan of sex either, although for much of his adult life he was pretty far from celibate. Some more sophisticated philosophical critics in the 20th century also see him as being soft on authority and authoritarianism. By emphasising humanity’s default sinfulness, he offers little grounds upon which we can make a calibration of relative moral goodness. He doesn’t give us the apparatus by which we can identify, critique, and challenge something like fascism or Nazism. Hannah Arendt—who is a particular critic of Augustine—sees this as a big fault. She says he has nothing to offer her by way of identifying the evil of certain forms of authoritarian political institutions. So that’s the indictment against him. But I think more thoughtful readings of this particular work, and the intellectual context it was written in, really bring out what he’s trying to do. It’s quite subtle, wise and practical, and makes him a thinker relevant to all ages. St Augustine is writing in an autobiographical form that has classical origins. There’s nothing particularly Christian about this literary form—although Christians are beginning to experiment with it. For Christianity, a large part of the 4th century was spent trying to capture the loyalties—the emotional commitment and the material resources—of the late Roman aristocratic and ruling elite. They were the oligarchs of that period; they are sitting on huge amounts of money, land and patronage, but they see the Bible as intellectually inferior. Making Christianity respectable to these people is one of the tasks of educated Christian converts. So, it’s the classical canon of literature and philosophy that Christians really need to infiltrate. They need to take it on, reframe it and then present it back to these people to gain some respectability on behalf of Christianity. They need to make them take it seriously. This is a book that is doing just that. Augustine is, himself, partly from that elite, pagan philosophical background, though his mother was already a Christian convert. He has a conversion experience after trying other variants of religion, such as Manichaeism. His journey provided him with the literary, intellectual and philosophical means to do the job. An important aspect of his achievement is in offering a synthesis of Biblical wisdom and Neoplatonism; he brings the two together in this very intimate, personal account of the progression of an individual towards something. That something is a transcendent, divine, oneness. Augustine also builds on traditions of stoicism, the self-mastery of body and of mind in the honing of a compelling ethical personhood. Stoicism was not just the philosophical affectation of elite men. It was actually also the way that politics was played out. It’s the way that powerful men competed for power by demonstrating their fitness for public office. “The things we often associate with saints are pilgrimage, veneration at a shrine and relics. All of that…is pretty much a product of the 4th century” The philosopher Martha Nussbaum says that Augustine injects a dose of emotion into classical moral philosphy. He’s trying to demonstrate how this idea—of the mastery of the self—is a farce. He introduces the idea of the parody of the self-fashioning man. In some ways, Augustine’s notion of original sin is about changing the ground upon which these figures are allowed to assert their authority. He does so by placing God in the picture. We should look inwards—in good Neoplatonic fashion—but we’re looking for our souls and for God. The soul is an alienated part of the godhead that is trying to get back home to God. So it’s a radical decentring of the old techniques. Peter Brown describes it as a kind of self-therapy. It’s not about achieving mastery because we never achieve mastery. It’s about learning through a degree of humility. To me, it speaks to a very modern, 20th century way of thinking about the human brain and body. There is a kind of ‘lizard impulse’ that we all have that generates these libidinous, greedy, damaging habits and thoughts. Augustine is playing with and thinking through this with his meshing of Neoplatonism and the Bible and the voice of the Psalms, though which he conducts, in the Confessions , an extended conversation with God. And there are these beautiful little vignettes that you come across from time to time. He goes around with a gang in his youth—he’s about 12 years old, he’s running around, damaging property, stealing pears and throwing them at pigs. He’s just running riot. He talks about his concubine, his conversion, his relationship with his mother. The title of the book is ‘ Confessions .’ There’s a real rolling around in the dirt of his own shame. But it’s not a shame of greed: it’s the shame of pride. Turning and orienting this painful experience towards God achieves consolation for him and allows him to get beyond his shame at what he did. I’m not sure he’s against sex. Sex, in the late antique world, is about power and control. It’s about male mastery of one’s sexual urges. If you have concubines, if you’re adulterous behind your wife’s back, it means that you’re not fit to be a person of public authority because you’ve demonstrated your weakness. You’re not stoical. Augustine’s point is not that women are evil or that they tempt us or that sexual desire is bad. Rather, it is that pride is bad, in thinking that we can control our sexual urges. And this is not just a critique of these elite Roman men, it’s also a critique of some of the nuttier ascetics who are around at the time, doing virtuoso performances of bodily discipline. In another book, The City of God , he says that these people are no better than jesters in the marketplace who fart tunes or swallow objects and regurgitate them. These are just cheap tricks, gimmicks. Augustine is often seen as the champion of asceticism but, actually, he’s advocating for a kind of moderate asceticism. He’s warning against the dangerous distraction that ascetic practices can pose. I think so. Without being particularly religious myself, I do wonder sometimes whether libertarian and economistic concepts of ‘the individual’ that dominate today might not be very healthy for individuals . Augustine shows us why this might be so and offers us different grounds for exploring our identity, purpose, and perhaps, self-worth. Definitely. Asceticism is almost the ‘new technology’ of the 3rd and 4th centuries. It’s been going since the 2nd century but it’s becoming more widespread and prevalent. It’s spread through people visiting St Anthony, writing and translating his life and disseminating his practices and monasticism into the West—places like Gaul or France—and to the East as well, to the Eastern church."

"St. Augustine is probably the most important father of the church. He is the person who most forcefully articulated the concept of free will when coupled with an all-powerful God, a philosophy which makes man solely responsible for bad things, and God and God’s grace solely responsible for everything good. Because there is also this argument that runs through Christianity historically about grace and what enables people to overcome their bad human instincts. In Augustine’s philosophy, which is the philosophy of the Catholic church and much of Christianity for a long time, it is only the grace of God. In other words the good things are attributable to God’s grace, the bad things are not God’s fault. That’s basically it. There were all kinds of early Christians who were later dismissed as heretics who didn’t believe in free will in the sense that Augustine did. This also meant they didn’t believe in an all-powerful God and it’s very understandable why they were called heretics. Yes, it’s one of those books that everybody talks about but nobody has actually read. It’s also a good book on abnormal psychology. When you read it, you realize Augustine was a brilliant, crazy person. It’s written in the form of a letter to God and where the personal narrative of Confessions ends is in a crazy place: Augustine is still very disturbed that although he’s taken a vow of celibacy (which he didn’t have to to be a Christian, at that point you didn’t even have to do that to be a priest) he still has wet dreams about women at night. One interesting thing is that Augustine also describes curiosity as the greatest of sins, but he’s curious himself. He’s very interested in the science of his day. So he comes up with quite a correct observation that your self-control when you’re asleep is not exactly what it is while you’re awake. Sleep puts a man’s mind into a different state, and he hopes that he’ll have enough grace from God eventually so he won’t even have these wet dreams while he’s asleep. That’s the note of hope he ends on. If you don’t think this is a little bit nutty for a man in the 4th century, a case of an overdeveloped conscience… The father of the church, one of the most important figures in founding Christianity, is really also a psychological case. And a brilliant man too. This crazy passage is preceded by a brilliant passage on memory in which he is asking some of the same questions that neuroscientists are asking today, but then he goes off on this tangent. Augustine was a psychologically disturbed person as well as a brilliant mind, which is, after all, not an unknown combination. The Confessions is a book that everybody should read. It is seminal, if you can excuse the expression."