Over the next months, our Into Theology podcast will be discussing Augustine’s Confessions. If you’d like to read along with us or just listen when you can, subscribe to the podcast and purchase your own copy of Augustine’s Confessions.
“When I turned away from You, the one God, and pursued a multitude of things, I fell to pieces.” While those words were penned over sixteen hundred years ago in a book titled simply Confessions, their compelling relevance has not diminished in the present. Confessions is one of the most absorbing, original, and interdisciplinary works of literature in the history of Western civilization. It has inspired countless Christians over many centuries.
Yet when my students read Confessions, what transfixes and transforms them is the way that its author conveys the restlessness of the human heart.
In this book, the great writer and pastor Augustine pens a narrative of his life as pridefully selfish, outwardly ambitious and secretly insecure, fragmented, and constantly seeking both self-realization and numbing distraction. We recognize this story: it is that of ourselves and of the world around us. Yet as we turn each page, we move from Augustine’s falsely-fulfilled, restless heart to the way he finds rest, peace, and elated wonder in a gracious God. Confessions seems at a glance to be about Augustine. Then, as we read, we find that it is about God… and our turn to Him, too.
Confessions is one of the most absorbing, original, and interdisciplinary works of literature in the history of Western civilization.
Indeed, Confessions is a text unlike any other.
Though it has been classified as a model of pastoral guidance, an exploration into the psychology of memory, a philosophical foray, a literary innovation by a master rhetorician, a grand theological illustration, an autobiographical reflection, and more, it defies categorization. As readers, we find ourselves immersed in contents that resist objective detachment because they are a continuous prayer in ink. That is, Augustine directs the words of this book straightforwardly to God. Composed as a deeply reflective yet public conversation, the Confessions speak to the One who is at once “deeply hidden and intimately present” (1.5). We listen, and we too are transformed.
Who is Augustine, and why might he publish such a prayer? Augustine was born in AD 354 in a Romanized, lush, and prosperous region of North Africa. He died in 430, which places his life precisely in the slow crumbling of the Roman Empire. He witnessed various stages of the empire’s collapse as well as strong cultural tensions between Christianity and old Roman paganism.
Public self-promotion, impatient self-absorption, financial panic, widespread cultural friction, and relativistic pragmatism were rampant (indeed, not unlike our own day). Augustine had a Christian mother but a non-Christian father; he spent the first three decades of his life chasing ambition, pleasure, and sham philosophical ‘enlightenment’. By the time he was thirty-one, he had found success with a high-paying, well-connected position as a professor in Milan. In the midst of great achievement, though, restlessness haunted him: “where could my heart flee to escape itself?” (4.12).
The first nine books of Confessions trace this life journey, leading up to the dramatic way Augustine finally turned to God in Milan and then the transformative two years after his conversion. These pages contain now-famous scenes such as childhood fruit-thievery, adolescent lustful quests that mask inner desolation, the tearful faith-filled prayers of his mother, and the words of a child’s song and wisdom of a Christian pastor that lead to Augustine’s turn. In all of this, his gratitude is clear: Augustine is foremost a recipient of God’s grace. “The One who made me is good…and in His Name I rejoice” (1.20).
The last four books of Confessions resituate the narrative away from Augustine’s life and into a much wider landscape. They move with humble awe from a profound exploration of human memory and the senses to a contemplation of a broken humanity’s place in a world created by a good God.
The narrative then broadens into a worshipful commentary on the first chapters of Genesis, because our lives only make sense in light of the grander Scriptural story. Augustine concludes with God’s rest in the seventh day of creation, turning our eyes to the restful peace that is eternity, when all hope is fulfilled.
This ending returns us to the leitmotif of the Confessions: rest for our restless hearts is only found in God. This is a wider process, incomplete until the eschaton, which is precisely why Augustine often speaks of his own “unfinished state” and also why the final word of the book is aperietur, ‘it will be opened.’ Even unto this last phrase, Augustine constantly proclaims that there is more to unfold in God’s world. In closing the Confessions, we are left with expectation – not of Augustine, but an expectation that looks to God with steadfast wonder.
In the decades after penning Confessions, Augustine continued in the demanding tasks of ministry, including various forms of writing. He had yet to write some of his more famous works, such as City of God, and to defend the Church against notorious schismatics like the Donatists. Years later, when reflecting back on Confessions, Augustine added nothing. The book timelessly acclaims the God whose goodness transforms: “Without You, what am I to myself but a guide to my own downfall?…You turn us back to Yourself in wonderous ways” (4.1, 4.31).
Augustine’s ability to call his readers to grace and truth through prayer is striking.
Like Augustine, we proclaim that goodness, wisdom, and peace can only be found in the marvelous God of Scripture who ever draws our fragmented lives unto Him. Like Augustine, we know that God’s work in us, in His Church, and in His world are ongoing – a truth which cultivates in us both hope and grit. The compelling relevance of Augustine’s Confessions have not diminished. May we, alongside Augustine, find wholeness and meaning only in the Triune God – in the God to whom we also can declare, “You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You” (1.1).
When you read the Confessions:
- Use a good translation, like M. Boulding (New City Press) or R.S. Pine-Coffin (Penguin Classics). Both provide helpful footnotes to Augustine’s numerous Scriptural references.
- Consider using a concise reading guide, like J. Byassee’s Reading Augustine: A Guide to the Confessions, with helpful commentary and discussion questions, or a brief book that gives context for Augustine’s life and writings, like Knowles and Penkett’s Augustine and His World.
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Originally published with The CCU Review and used with permission.
