Confessions, a short review
December 30, 2024
I read Augustine’s Confessions as part of a Catherine Project class. The book was repeatedly cited by Martin Hägglund in This Life, a book I had quite enjoyed reading a few years before, and he emphasized the nuance in understanding Augustine, so I chose to do a guided reading.
Confessions is an autobiographical work, recounting Augustine’s youth and his conversion to Christianity. It is one of the foundational texts in Christianity, dealing with personal responsibility, free will, and sin. It’s influence is clear in the the Western worldviews we inherited. The Chadwick translation’s introduction comments on Augustine’s fascination with words, and his attention to the trouble we have communicating with one another, which he calls the semantic problem. The book opens with a vignette about Augustine learning to speak as a child, and then on him learning Greek and Latin. I immediately latched onto this language theme, which echoes through the book. Communication requires, by definition, a shared understanding of reality. Religious texts, however, tend to point us in the opposite direction, assuming that without sharing a single objective truth or dogma there can’t be real understanding. His argument distinguishing the mechanics of learning by studying from learning by doing or experiencing felt very modern. Throughout the book I was surprised by the deep similarity between his descriptions of his life, and how we experience ours 1600 years later.
As someone who’s not religious and who has little depth in Christian ideas, I read through the lens of good/evil and right/wrong, more than sin specifically. Not coincidentally, Augustine often invokes Manichaeism, a philosophy centered on this duality, as a contrast to his position that both good and bad come from the same source. The reading group struggled with this distinction: Our acts bring about changes in the physical world, and since those can be harmful they can be evil. Maybe, doing nothing doesn’t bring about change, so we can’t be responsible for what we don’t do? But then, are we responsible for not stopping things from happening? Is it a sin for a bystander to stop a group of teenagers from stealing some fruit, and taking away their pleasure, or is that a positive for society? An objective morality seems prerequisite to this discussion, but Augustine just assumes it.
At times, especially when discussing memory, forgetfulness, images, and memories about memories, Augustine reads almost like Wittgenstein or Douglas Hofstadter. Book X is where this line is clearest. He discusses forecasting, and questions whether one can even be certain that that world we seem to be in exists and, if so, whether it has some discernible pattern we can "learn" through our own existence. It made me wonder, what does Augustine make of imagination and creativity? How does he think about human capacity to extrapolate to what might happen, our actions and their consequences?
There’s another angle to the objectivity problem around what’s real versus what’s imagined that our group discussed. What would Augustine think about our Catherine Project classes over Zoom, and our virtual worlds, and the very rich life that XXI humans can build online? Are those better than the physical? Can you sin in the metaverse? Naturally, we landed in questions of free will.
While the book has many emotional scenes of grief and family drama, the most striking to me was Augustine recounting his time in Milan, and his encounter with a drunken beggar while on his way to deliver a speech. Augustine contrasts his position with the drunkard’s, prompting him to question his ambitions and the nature of true happiness.
For what he had gained with a few coins, obtained by begging, that is the cheerfulness of temporal felicity, I was going about to reach by painfully twisted and roundabout ways. True joy he had not. But my quest to fulfill my ambitions was much falser. There was no question that he was happy and I racked with anxiety. He had no worries; I was frenetic, and if anyone had asked me if I would prefer to be merry or to be racked with fear, I would have answered "to be merry". Yet if he asked whether I would prefer to be a beggar like that man or the kind of person I then was, I would have chosen to be myself, a bundle of anxieties and fears. What an absurd choice! Surely it could not be the right one.
Much like the discussion on language I mentioned earlier, this passage could easily be a thought that someone like me could have walking the streets of San Francisco in the 2020s. The scene highlights the contrast between temporal pleasures and eternal joy, a theme that runs throughout the Confessions. The beggar’s joy is fleeting and superficial, while Augustine searches for “true” joy and glory, which he believes can only be found in God. This realization leads him to renounce his worldly ambitions and embrace a life of faith and devotion. If only things were that easy.
The book is deeply introspective, but only offers incomplete answers. I am glad I got to read it with a group, as I’m not sure I would have gotten as much out of it on my own.
Photo: Sagrada Familia, by me. Previously posted on Barcelona, 2024.
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