The life of St. Augustine is one of the largest displays of grace in church history. Not only have so called ‘Augustinian’ thinkers such as Luther, Calvin and the like been influenced directly from his writings, but the work that he encapsulated in his Confessions are absolutely foundational to Christian living. Augustine was born in North Africa in 354 A.D. the son of a pagan father (who would convert in the twilight of his life) and an incredible Christian mother named Monica. The gifted Augustine would make his living by teaching homiletics to aspiring philosophers. His father set him on this task and afforded every advantage that he could along the way. A philosopher and a teacher, Augustine was intrigued by the Manichean religion and their dualistic cosmology. The only thing that held him back from joining and becoming ‘elect’ (a full-fledged card-carrying member of the Manicheans) was the fact that chastity and celibacy were understood to be necessary for the full carrying out of the idea that spirit and though are good and all flesh is evil. The ideal was impossible for Augustine to meet, as he was completely overtaken with sexual lust. Augustine had a son in this period of extreme sexual bondage when he was less than twenty years old who would live an abbreviated but holy life. It was not until his mid-thirties that he would finally throw away his affiliation with the Manicheans and embrace his mother’s God.
Augustine is well-known for the advance he made of the doctrine which would later become known as ‘Calvinism’. John Calvin himself quotes Augustine at length throughout the Institutes of the Christian Religion and it would be easy to see the amount of influence Augustine’s thought on his students throughout the annuls of history. When a monk named Pelagius set forth a denial of the doctrine of Original Sin, it was Augustine of Hippo, North Africa who would be the man to defend the Church against such a heresy that asserted the possibility of a natural man’s sinless life. Augustine wrote in defense of the sinfulness of man that renders man, by imputation of the sin of Adam, naturally unable to make a choice that would please God. Of course, the arguments won the day and Augustine’s views and understandings of sin are still absolutely vital and informative to the Church as they have been passed down and developed. The reasons that Augustine would fight hard for a doctrine such as the sinfulness of man can be readily seen as one purviews these journals of his and sees a man that was desperately bound and hopeless in his own sin. Looking back at the life of Augustine and matching his theology accordingly, it is clear to see that Augustine was a man who believed in his own sinfulness before anyone else. Not one to point fingers outward, the Confessions are filled with brutally honest reflections and affirmations of his absolute failures to please God apart from Christ. If what follows is a bit jumbled the reader would be helped to know that Augustine’s words resonate with my own in such a way that there is honestly a lot of sorting out left to do before a clear and structured presentation on Augustine’s theology and influence may be accomplished. With that caveat having been installed, a survey of Confessions will expose Augustine in a way that few theologians past or present allow themselves to be stripped absolutely bare and so this will be an exercise to examine his own soul.
The Confessions are broken up into thirteen books. In the first book Augustine reflects on what it means that God commands all to love him and all fail in the task that should be the most natural course of life. Man is created for God and we have so turned our backs on him that it we miss the very point of our lives. “The thought of you stirs (man) so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”[1] We are wandering souls that do not have the first idea of what it means to be content and stable in anything and the simple reason for that is our estrangement from God. Even the commands of God seem so obvious and clear that “(I)f I fail to love you, you are angry and threaten me with great sorrow, as if not to love you were not sorrow enough in itself.”[2] The reason Augustine writes in such a way is that he knows sin. So often as Christians we are plagued by the feelings of self-righteousness. Sin in the Church is swept under the rug of acceptance and the true repentance of sins and daily mortification of them is a lost art, sacrificed on the altar of pride. Augustine provides the remedy with book two. The famous ‘pear tree’ incident is one of the most obivious signs to St. Augustine that man is hopelessly fallen with no excuse. He speaks of when he was a boy and he plucked off of a tree: “But it was not the pears that my unhappy soul desired. I had plenty of my own, better than those, and I only picked them so that I might steal.”[3] Augustine comments on our sin: “Extravagance masquerades as fullness and abundance: but you are the full, unfailing store of never-dying sweetness.” Man desires evil simply because it is evil and the promise of satisfaction is there all along.
It is absolutely key to understand that in Augustine’s theology sin has a very specific definition. Evil, as it has come to be known, is a privation of the good. There are not equal forces in the universe, as though God had a true rival, but as Creator and as immutable God, the definition of sin cannot be a creation of his, and therefore, it cannot be a creation. “I did not know that evil is nothing but the removal of good until finally no good remains.”[4] Augustine comes to the conclusion that “(E)vil is not a substance and man’s mind is not the supreme good that does not vary.”[5] It was when Augustine met St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan that he began to have a Copernican shift of mind from his Manichean thoughts that placed the will and the agency of man at, essentially, the center of the universe, the definer of good and evil.
Augustine was racked by sin and it was becoming more and more unavoidable to him. He writes: “In your stern mercy you lashed me with the twin scourge of fear and shame in case I should give way once more and the worn and slender remnant of my chain should not be broken but gain new strength and bind me all the faster. In my heart I kept saying ‘let it be now, let it be now!’ and merely by saying this I was on the point of making the resolution.”[6] The most telling statement of where he stood on his own sin, in my opinion, reads this way: “My sorrows are evil and they are at strife with joys that are good, and I cannot tell which will gain the victory. Have pity on me, O Lord, in my misery! I do not hide my wounds from you. I am sick, and you are the physician. You are merciful: I have need of mercy.”[7] From utter helplessness the Christian is truly able to be satisfied, but how may this rest be attained? “O Charity, my God, set me on fire with your love! You command me to be continent. Give me the grace to do as you command, and command me to do what you will.”[8]
Confessions reads in a way that targets and roots out all of not only Augustine’s sin and utter hopelessness, but he truly speaks for all men. “I am poor and needy and I am better only when in sorrow of heart I detest myself and seek your mercy, until what is faulty in me is repaired and made whole and finally I come to see that state of peace which the eye of the proud cannot see. Yet in what others say about us and in what they know of our deeds there is grave danger of temptation. For our love of praise leads us to court the good opinion of others and hoard it for our personal glorification.”[9] Augustine is not addressing here the licentious lifestyle and temptations that he writes to so often about, but the dangers that awaited him as he praised. Nothing was safe when it came to Augustine’s life and actions. He checked everything he possibly could and he realized what many of us do not realize today, namely, that sin is of so pervasive a nature that no part of the human life and experience stands on the periphery. All that man does is tainted with sin, plagued by God-ward rebellion in such a way that even praise to God may be racked with a cold-hearted Pharisee simply enjoying the song that is sung.
The last three books are difficult to understand in the flow of the Confessions. He writes extensively about the human memory and about cosmology. The things he writes here are so foundational that it is very easy to miss the fact that he may have been the first to lay out the arguments that he does. He spends a generous amount of time in Genesis 1 explaining what it meant for God to create out of nothing and form the earth out of the clay which he made first. The question of time is one that inevitably is brought up and Augustine goes at understanding how God can create in a sequence without being bound by time. “My problem is to discover the fundamental nature of time and what power it has.”[10] While only a passing reference is made here, his dealings here are fundamental to the way we see God as the Maker of time and the one who operates outside of it as the only sovereign and blessed God.
I wish that I could linger in the last chapter but, realizing the time is short and the parameters are set, I will only mention one quote in closing. Augustine says; “What…is the secret of this great man’s (Paul’s) joy?...His nourishment was joy.”[11] What Augustine meant here is important today as it was when he wrote the same words. The secret of man’s lasting joy is to be nourished constantly with the joy that is found in God himself. Augustine looked in every place he could for love and satisfaction but it was not until he began to see God for who he really was that his life turned around. In the Confessions, we are provided with a window into the mind of one of the most influential thinkers in Western history and afforded the privilege of identifying with his struggles and striving to enter the same rest he found in God.
[1] Pg. 21
[2] Pg. 24
[3] Pg. 49
[4] Pg. 63
[5] Pg. 86
[6] Pg. 175
[7] Pg. 232
[8] Pg. 233
[9] Pg. 247
[10] Pg. 271
[11] Pp. 238-239
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