Not my favorite, but I can appreciate it!

“Why then should I be concerned for human readers to hear my confessions? It is not they who are going to ‘heal my sicknesses’. The human race is inquisitive about other people’s lives, but negligent to correct their own.”

I was very excited to read this book; Confessions by St Augustine. Having been an inspiration to so many including John Calvin, Martin Luther and so many others. It is a memoir like few others. One of the first of its kind. In that fact alone my curiosity was peaked. To read of a life from so long ago pulled me. It is so much more than that. It is indeed a confession. I laying out of all his early life filled with doubt and various ideas of the age he grew up in. It is also a great study of philosophy and theology. The result of this work laid out much of the thought of the reformation leading to the protestant faith.

It is broken in to thirteen books. Starting with a pouring out of his self and leading us through his earliest memories growing up in North Africa in the 300’s. His relationship with his parents and particularly to his mother’s faith as an early Christian is a big part of his growth. His sins and reflective disgust with his youthful dalliances are not white washed. Including his wanting of woman’s company in his bed.

“How stupid man is to be unable to restrain feelings in suffering the human lot! That was my state at that time. So I boiled with anger, sighed, wept, and was at my wits’ end. I found no calmness, no capacity for deliberation. I carried my lacerated and bloody soul when it was unwilling to be carried by me. I found no place where I could put it down. There was no rest in pleasant groves, nor in games or songs, nor in sweet-scented places, nor in exquisite feasts, nor in the pleasures of the bedroom and bed, nor, finally, in books and poetry.”

The first half of the book is more or less a memory of his early life into his late 20’s and early 30’s. His relationships with woman and birth of his son out of wedlock, his friends, mentors, and his mother Monica leading to his conversion. The second part of the book get more into philosophical discussions.

His discussion on time is both interesting and honestly confusing to me. I found many of his discussions long and winding roads that lead us to his understanding of time. It was at times difficult to follow yet fascinating.

His argument for the existence of God who is good and how evil can exist simultaneously is here and all of it is written beautifully. The entire novel is readable and enjoyable regardless if you are a believer or not. There is much here to mine. It is a novel that could be read several times and probably should be to fully grasp all that is in it.

I have no doubt most would read and be startled to know how relatable it is to our own individual doubts on the existence of God. The fact that this Saint could have many of the same doubts in his life as me gave me pause. As he lays out many streams of thought I caught myself wondering why I had not thought of that myself. And then there were times I read his thoughts and was lost and found myself rereading parts to try to grasp it all.

The entire confession is eye opening and revealing that we are all human. The titles of Bishop and Saint matter not. We all struggle with the same issues.

“Give me chastity and continence, but not just yet”

I gave it 4 stars only because I enjoyed the first part far more than the second. I struggled with many of the concepts but the writing was beautiful. However I think many would read the second half or the last three of four books and enjoy these pieces more than I.
There is much in here to enjoy and think about.

This experience sufficiently illuminates the truth that free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion.
- Augustine, Confessions



Sublime and Original

I can’t believe it has taken me so long to read Augustine’s Confessions. I might not agree with some of his conclusions (my Christian framework, Mormon*, would be considered a heresy by Augustine), but his influence on Christianity, philosophy, and the West can’t be ignored. I read this book in little bits on Sunday during Church (specifically Mormon church, more specifically Sacrament meeting).

You may notice the math doesn't work I've spent nearly half of the year reading Augustine on Sundays (52/2 = 26; 26x20 = 520; and Confessions is NOT 520 pages). That is easily explained. I have two friends a six-year-old (Cohen) and a ten-year-old (Wes) with autism. They often sit with me when they struggle with the pews at Church and end up being more than their parents can handle. I must confess, I can do amazing things on Sunday with Wes or Cohen (mints or candy help), but Wes + Cohen + Augustine never seems to work out well for Augustine. Thus, my progress has been slowed. I think both God and Augustine would/will understand.

I must also confess that I liked the Confessions part of the book, more than the expositions (the last 4 books).

* my Mormon framework, Zen Mormon, would also be considered a heresy by most Mormons. :)

I've waited too long to read Old Gus.

I had read an eclectic collection of his political writings during my college days, but only with my post-college burgeoning of interest in Christianity have I returned to him to approach the main body of his work. What a world this man's mind was! How compelling his personality, how sublime his intellect, how regal and incisive his prose! His life and spirit straddled so many worlds, mundane and divine, and this I think is what gives his writings so much of their timelessness. He wrote with a pilgrim's sense of listlessness and vulnerability, God-intoxicated, blurring the lines of social and intellectual categories.

The Confessions have been approached through so many different lenses; as autobiography, spiritual memoir, psychological self-evaluation, theological treatise, and, of course, as a great work of Latin literature, to be esteemed alongside that of Virgil, whom the young Augustine so admired.

Augustine transcends not only intellectual lines, but political and temporal ones as well. He wrote as the classical paganism of the Roman Empire was decaying and the brave new world of Christendom was suffering its birth pangs. Born in what is now eastern Algeria, he spent his formative years on the periphery of empire, and some have said that he applied a sort of tribal, Berber approach to sociality to the high theology and neo-platonic philosophy he studied at Milan. So Augustine never writes in the narrow veins of personal experience or academic tract. For him, the personal and political, the spiritual and intellectual, the social and psychological, are always bound up with one another. This brilliant sense of relationality may itself constitute Augustine's greatest contribution to western thought.

One thing is made clear when one reads the Confessions: Augustine knew his own mind incredibly well. He was brilliant at recognizing the psychological traps he set for himself; he knew the difference between reasoning and merely rationalizing. He suffered much because he knew of his weaknesses. He was captivating in his honesty. We see him stealing pears with his friends as a teenager, and bragging about sexual experiences he had never had in order to fit in. What teenaged boy hasn't had that experience? We see him scorning the piety of his mother, only to trudge back to it like the Prodigal Son after years of reflection. We see his struggles with his sexual appetite, his horror at the thought of giving up wives and concubines to seek a fulfillment beyond bodily gratification. We see him breaking down in a quiet Milan garden, lamenting over his wretchedness, how his unacted learning made him more wretched than the more simple believers whom he had spent his life viewing with condescension.

We see a man in the throes of the Christian project; a man learning to be a human being.

I can’t really rate this one but it was certainly interesting... not my favorite though.

I don’t have words to express how deeply this book moved me.

Confesiunile sunt spectacolul frământărilor eului, angrenat într-o stare interogativă permanentă: cine sunt, care este rațiunea existenței mele, de unde vin și unde trebuie să ajung sunt întrebările implicite ale unui discurs în aparență monologic, dar care este un dialog cu Dumnezeu. Ceea ce vrea Augustin să-i facă să înțeleagă pe semenii săi este proiectul Providenței în ceea ce-l privește.

,,Mare ești, Doamne, și cu adevărat vrednic de laudă! Mare este puterea Ta, iar înțelepciunea Ta nu poate fi măsurată. Și totuși, un om, o neînsemnată frântură din zidirea Ta, vrea să Te slăvească! Un om purtând asupra sa datul morții, purtând mărturia că Tu te împotrivești celor trufași. Și totuși, un om, o neînsemnată frântură din zidirea Ta, vrea să Te slăvească. Tu l-ai îndemnat să-și afle bucuria lăudându-Te pe Tine, căci pentru Tine ne-ai zidit, iar inima noastră este neliniștită până să-și afle odihna în Tine.”

Written during the waning of the Roman Empire around 400AD, this account of the early life of a seminal theologian of the Catholic church is a personal perspective on what he regards as his sinful life leading up to his conversion. His writing is surprisingly accessible, almost modern in its approach to weighing the factors that contribute to growing up. His mother was a Christian, but he took a long time to come around. He excelled in school and hungered to elucidate abstract knowledge, eventually becoming a master of rhetoric, like his hero Cicero. Yet from his youth, he cherished sexual and other worldly pleasures while paradoxically aligning himself with the Manicheeism theology that condemned the Christian tenet of a human Christ for not being spiritual enough.

His explorations of how he worked his way toward conversion represents an early advance in psychology. He covers well how his character was shaped by maternal nurturing, paternal discipline, peer relations, early loves, positive role models, and personal tragedies. His reflections on the relationship of sensory perception to knowledge, the relativity of perception and emotions, the prime role of memory to consciousness, and constructive capacity of language are refreshing precursors to current perspective. He tries to make sense of the issue of human free will vs. God being part of everything, but doesn't have a compelling solution to me. I enjoyed his musings on the nature of time, logically concluding past, present, and future are all meaningful only from a present perspective (with "now" ultimately infinitesimally short). His struggle to account for creation having a beginning with God existing outside time (and the meaning of the pre-creation "ithout form and void"version of matter) resembles to me the challenge for modern physics of what existed before the Big Bang.

On the downside for a non-religious person reading this book today is that he obviously couldn't escape the worldview of dualism between matter/body and spirit/mind/soul. Yet he doesn't come to cast worldly experiences and pleasures as meaningless or evil or speak much of the devil or Hell. For him, the origin of evil lies in being out of God's light or in willful ignorance, not from a separate source. It's a shame that this worldly Christian thinker didn't evolve more to the mystical view of God really being in the world, following the example of Christ for the "Word made flesh".

„Ce ești tu, Doamne, pentru mine? Îndură-te de mine ca să pot spune!”

Nimic nu pare mai evident şi, totodată, mai obscur decît adevăratul destinatar al Confesiunilor sfîntului Augustin. Dumnezeu este invocat la tot pasul şi, totuşi, Dumnezeu fiind omniscient prin definiţie nu are nevoie să-i asculte mărturisirea. Știe deja ce va rosti autorul. Și atunci care e semnificația titlului?

Titlul anunță, evident, o mărturisire a lui Dumnezeu (destinatarul prim al ei): „Pe Tine, Doamne te mărturisesc și te slăvesc ca pe unicul meu Stăpîn”. La fel de evident, al doilea destinatar al acestei mărturisiri este turma de păcătoși. Augustin îl mărturisește pe Dumnezeu și îl ia ca garant suprem al sincerității sale. Dumnezeu e o dovadă a veracității narațiunii: „Povestea convertirii mele este adevărată, fiindcă, iată, îl iau ca martor pe însuși Dumnezeu”.

Probabil că nu ar fi cu totul inutil să recapitulez semnificaţiile principale ale verbului confiteor. El semnifică a face cunoscut, a vădi, a revela, a destăinui, a arăta, a recunoaște un adevăr interior (unui confessor). În al doilea rînd, cum am sugerat deasupra „confiteor” semnifică a-l slăvi, a-l preamări pe Dumnezeu. Și, în al treilea rînd, el introduce mărturisirea de credință: „Cred... Sînt unul dintre creștini...”.

„Fiindcă vorbesc înaintea ta, Doamne, aș vrea să spun întregul adevăr” (XIII: 27).

I tried this book once before in the Great Books series and found it extremely difficult. I wondered, if one was going to bother to translate it from Augustine's Latin, why leave it so difficult to read? Whether from a few years maturity or the clarity of Henry Chadwick's translation, I really enjoyed Confessions this time. The warmth of the author's passion and remorse really came across as though he were not dressing it up for a scholarly presentation to impress people. For a deep thinking Latin father, he is actually a master of the sound bite as demonstrated by some of the quotes I picked up. Yes, at times he seems to wander onto a trail that only he is following or at least is passionate about, as when he spent an entire book talking about the passage of time. But most of the time, the things Augustine grapples with our things that we have grappled with for many centuries since. With so many good books to read, I seldom think about rereading one regularly, but this is one that could merit that consideration.

I'm reading this for our Catholic women's book club ... it's the November selection so if I begin now I should finish on time.

I have tried reading this book twice before and always gotten bogged down in Augustine's complaints about being beaten by his tutor. This time I am going to just skim or skip those complaints in the interest of seeing what I DO like about the book rather than letting road bumps throw me off track.

It's kind of ironic that Augustine is one of my earliest saint "friends" who I became attracted to after reading Restless Til We Rest in You, a wonderful daily meditation book focusing on his writing in digestible chunks. Now, I will go for the whole enchilada!

UPDATE 1
I'm actually benefiting quite a bit from having read Restless Flame, Louis De Wohl's bio of St. Augustine. Augustine intersperses his life story with asides to God, expressions of his innermost feelings and spiritual understanding as it were. This helps me pick out the source material for his life, as seen in the context of his Christian understanding.

UPDATE 2
Picked it back up because it is time for our book club to discuss Books V - IX. I am enjoying the middle of the book much more than the first part, which is a relief. I have to say that I can see why people who aren't Catholic, or even Christian, are drawn to this book. Augustine works his formidable brain to a nubbin examining what God must be like and how evil can exist if God is all good.

This is a book that any thoughtful searcher can relate to. It is also the book that makes me realize just how lazy those people are who toss out, "Can't believe in God because evil exists" and leave it at that after a cursory examination of the subject. It is clear that Augustine wanted the truth and nothing but the Truth, as it were.

Restless seekers of complete truth find a kindred soul here. People who want the truth dropped in their laps are shown up as slackers, whether back in Augustine's day or right here and now.

UPDATE 3
Picked it up again since we'll be discussing the final third of the book next week. I was not crazy about the first third and LOVED the second third ... now this last third seems completely different so far. And I'm not loving it. But I'm leaving the door open for Augustine to wow me since there is about 80 pages left to go.

FINAL
Thank the Lord (literally) that I am finally done. I enjoyed the middle third of the book but the first third was not that interesting to me and the final third was like trying to read metaphysics ... which, to be fair, was an interesting insight into how Augustine would puzzle his way through scripture and matters of God, but which I did not connect with that much.

Am I glad I read it? Not that much. But now I suppose I can say that I have.

While I have read FROM Augustine widely, I have never read a complete work all the way through until now. It seemed appropriate to begin reading Augustine in full with this timeless classic. I greatly enjoyed it, and highly recommend it. I only give it 3 stars for the fact that after describing Augustine's "conversion" (arguably, that moment in the garden describes a different moment as he already believed in God and the truth of Christianity though he did not fully surrender to Christ until this moment), it seems to wander into an extensive, out of place meditation on the first chapters of Genesis.