I recently returned to New Jersey from Orlando where my family—including three young kids—and I spent two weeks at Disney World. Somehow I’m still alive, though barely. I made a resolution that while I was away I would read through Augustine’s Confessions (written 397-400). I’ve read a lot of Augustine over the last few years, but I’d never read his most well-known book. While reading the entire book proved difficult for the duration of the time in Orlando, a final day stuck in an extended layover in Charlotte (long story) afforded me the extra time to finish.
For those unfamiliar, in Confessions Augustine, the great fourth and fifth century African church bishop whose influence over the global church is hard to overstate, outlines his conversion to Christianity from sinful youth to wise man. Here are my reflections, broken down book by book across Augustine’s work:
Books 1-2 Augustine’s pre-Christian days: Throughout his youth, while his mother Monica, a strong Christian, prayed for him, Augustine “ran from true rest” and “hated simple truth” (this is spelled out in Book 1). He indulged in wrongness bc it felt nice, especially sexual sin (Book 2).
-How telling is this? The non-Christian spends their whole lives running in circles trying to find rest and they can’t. Proof of their restlessness is their unwillingness to sit and think long and hard about simple truth. They’re bored by it, because it doesn’t excite. Further, the non-Christian sins on purpose because it makes them feel at home. And indeed, in their sinful flesh, they are right at home running from God (consider how Cain couldn’t repent of his pride, though God pursued him).
Books 3-5 Beginning process of coming to God in his 20s: Augustine struggled through Manichaeism, an ancient dualistic religion. As Augustine states in Book 3, for years he wrestled hard to stay away from the Lord, the fountain of life (Ps.36:9). But the Lord himself pursued Augustine. Augustine still lived in vanity, spiritually dead, though Christ, our very life (Jn.1:4, Col.3:4), had earlier come to the world to put away our death. Eventually Augustine, now a civic teacher of rhetoric, moved from Rome to Milan where bishop Ambrose showed him Christ in the Old Testament. It was here that Augustine began to understand the gospel.
-Note that just like in the Apostles’ preaching in Acts, Christ’s presence in and fulfillment of the Old Testament was instrumental for conversion. I often hear that evangelical churches need to preach the Old Testament more, and this is probably true. But Christ as the fulfillment, goal, and source of the Old Testament is the church’s gospel, such that the Old Testament is not preached unless Christ is preached. Once Christ is put on display, the Spirit of God shows him to believers as the fountain of life. Sinners, therefore, are invited by his call to “Come to me and drink” (Jn.7:37).
Books 6-7 Closer and closer to faith, cutting his teeth on the things of Lord over time, age 29 into his 30s: Augustine relays how he learned spiritual interpretation of Scripture, based on 2 Cor. 3:6 (“for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”) Note that “spiritual” is not opposite of “true,” but of mere grammatical-historical meaning, that is, human authorial and original reader intention. In other words, spiritual interpretation reads the historical meaning of a passage as a witness to the eternal being of Christ and his salvation worked out in time, as Augustine would later explain in the quadriga. Historical things point to eternal things, and thus both application and Christ connections have many possibilities. Finally, in this time Augustine made peace with the existence of evil in a good creation. He learned that in God’s creation all things are good but corruptible. And because of the fall, all things have been corrupted to one degree or another. But Jesus’ resurrection proves that corruption is not the end of the story.
-Note this hard question people still have: If God is good, why does evil exist? Only the Christian gospel can give a substantial answer that doesn’t make a bad guy of particular people groups, but locates the origin of sin in something that touches each of us and is, indeed, inside of each of us. Still, as in Augustine’s day, God leads sinners through this process, to truth and peace (Jn.6:45, Is.54:13).
Book 8 Augustine’s famous conversion: Amidst his wrestling he hears the children in a neighboring yard singing “tole lege” (“take and read”), prompting him to pick up his friends Romans codex, where he turns to Romans 13:14: “Put on the Lord Jesus, and make no opportunity for the flesh, to indulge its desires.” Augustine’s conversion is complete—he now believes. He further relays how he makes peace with his long period of wrestling which led to his salvation, describing what CS Lewis would later call undulation,* where in a fallen world good and evil go back and forth to produce good for us in the end. We have to experience downs so we can get to the ups, and the ups help us make peace with the downs.
-This explains Augustine’s affirmation of the sovereignty of God, preparing him for a literary and ecclesial battle he would wage the rest of his life.
Book 9 Augustine’s baby steps as a Christian, and Monica’s death: Now that Augustine’s come to faith, Monica is ready to die, and she does.
-Note the wisdom and purposes of God as well as his use of human means to accomplish his purposes: She lives only long enough to see her son come to faith, God using her prayers in his saving purposes. Then she goes home.
Book 10 Coming clearer on the battle with sin: Augustine learned that we are constantly pulled both up and down: Up toward God’s happiness, true beatitude with him the happy One (Matt. 5:3-12), and Down toward the world’s fleeting and perverted happiness, using God’s creation as ends in itself instead of means to ends of enjoying God. Augustine cites Paul’s words in Gal.5:17 about the inner battle between the flesh and the Spirit to describe our being pulled up and down.
Book 10 is a powerhouse of insightful quotations and reflections:
-Humans want to remain hidden from God while also possessing perfect knowledge of everything, whereby nothing is hidden to them. But the opposite is true: God fully knows us (Heb.4:12-13), and yet we ourselves know so little. I’m reminded of Peter Kreeft’s comment about Aquinas that though both his faith in God and his commitment to Christian dogma was so strong, yet the fact that he recognized how little we actually know (cf. 1Cor.13:12) moves him closer to agnosticism than to dogmatism! In other words, a moment’s reflection on God’s knowledge and our smallness shows us that there’s more we don’t know than we do know.
-Much of our temptation is not for pleasure but for curiosity—That is, we tend to think that all of our sin temptations are pleasure-oriented. But often it is out of simple curiosity: We want to do or experience something new, because we’re so unhappy with what we already possess. We just want to try new things, not land on and live in truth.
-Finally, Augustine despairs of perfectly knowing his own motives: “Am I not then quite uncertain of myself in this respect?”—That is, we’ll never know our hearts fully; our hearts deceive us (Jer.17:9). Introspection is good when it doesn’t go too far. You’re not your ultimate judge.**
Book 11 Time as an enigma: I’m going to skip this Book, as it will be confusing to the vast majority of those who would read this post. I find it challenging to understand too.
Books 12-13 Genesis and allegory: Here we find Augustine the believer learning to interpret the nature of the universe in light of how Genesis describes it. Anchoring himself in his (famous) conviction that interpretation can’t contradict the Lord’s “law of love” (“love the Lord…love your neighbor..”*^), he offers a spiritual interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis. According to Augustine, since the purpose of God’s creation is to produce a new creation, we can see in Genesis what he is doing in the world through the church:
a) God created by speaking the Word, and so now he sends his Word by his church throughout the world to produce a new creation.
b) God called Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiple, so now he calls his church to multiply by making disciples and discipling them (Matt.28:18-20).
c) God overcame peoples’ sin with sovereign grace (see Gen.19:16, 20:6, 50:20), and so now he does the same thing through the world, advancing his kingdom through the sinful acts of mankind, using even their evil for good.
Augustine wrote this book 1,625 years ago, and yet it is still such a penetrating picture of a man struggling through his native rebellion to God and how God patiently overcame the man’s rebellion and then caused that redemptive process to dominate the man’s framework for reality from that point forward. May it be the case today as well! “There’s nothing new under the sun” (Ecc.1:9).
