The first book of the Confessions is devoted primarily to an analysis of Augustine's life as a child, from his infancy (which he cannot recall and must reconstruct) up through his days as a schoolboy in Thagaste (in Eastern Algeria). Wasting no time in getting to the philosophical content of his autobiography, Augustine's account of his early years leads him to reflect on human origin, will and desire, language, and memory.

[I.1-3] Augustine begins each Book of the Confessions with a prayer in praise of God, but Book I has a particularly extensive invocation. The first question raised in this invocation concerns how one can seek God without yet knowing what he is. In other words, how can we look for something if we don't know exactly what we're looking for? The imperfect answer, at least for now, is simply to have faith--if we seek God at all, he will reveal himself to us.

[I.4-6] Nonetheless, Augustine launches immediately into a highly rhetorical (and relatively brief) discussion of God's attributes. Asking God to "come into me," Augustine then questions what that phrase could possibly mean when addressed to God. The heart of this dilemma, which will turn out later to be one of the final stumbling blocks to Augustine's conversion (see Books VI and VII), is that God seems both to transcend everything and to be within everything. In either case, it doesn't make precise sense to ask him to "come into" Augustine.God cannot be contained by what he created, so he can't "come to" Augustine in any literal sense. At the same time, God is the necessary condition for the existence of anything, so he's "within" Augustine already (so again it makes no sense to ask him to "come into me"). Further, God is not "in" everything in amounts or proportions--small pieces of the world don't have any less of God than big ones.Having hurriedly discredited the idea of God as any sort of bounded, mobile, or divisible being, Augustine sums up for now with a deeply Neoplatonic statement on the question of "where" God is: "In filling all things, you fill them all with the whole of yourself."Augustine then rephrases his question about God's nature, asking "who are you then, my God?" This rather direct approach generates a litany of metaphors concerning God, taken partly from scripture and partly from Augustine's own considerations. Examples include: "most high...deeply hidden yet most intimately present...you are wrathful and remain tranquil...you pay off debts, though owing nothing to anyone...." This list is rhetorical rather than analytic, and develops no coherent argument about God--it just introduces the mysteries of the subject.

[I.7-8] Augustine now turns to the story of his childhood, beginning with his birth and earliest infancy. As he would continue to do throughout his life, Augustine here follows the Neoplatonists in refusing to speculate on how the soul joins the body to become an infant. "I do not know," he writes, "whence I came to be in this mortal life or...living death" (following Plato, Augustine leaves open the possibility that life is really a kind of death and that true "life" is enjoyed by the soul when it is not in this world).

With this question left up in the air, Augustine considers his infancy. He's extremely careful here, since he can't actually remember this period-- claims about it are explicitly justified with references to Augustine's later observations of infants. Infancy, it seems, turns out to be a fairly miserable state. All desires are internal, since infants have only "a small number of signs" to express their wants and also no physical power to fulfill them. Thoughtless and already sinful, the tiny Augustine made demands on everyone, thanked no one, and revenged himself on his caretakers with obnoxious weeping.

[I.9-10] There is a brief interlude here while Augustine asks again what he was before birth, and again the question goes unanswered. He only knows that at birth he had both being and life. He also points out here that God is the most extreme instantiation of both being and life, and that God is responsible for uniting these two qualities in new humans.

[I.11-12] Returning to brutish infancy, Augustine considers to what extent he was sinning at that age. He's harsh on himself for the nasty attitude mentioned above, but concludes with a dismissal of responsibility for those times, of which he "can recall not a single trace."

[I.13-16] Soon, however, the infant Augustine began to exercise his memory, particularly in the service of learning to communicate through language (in Roman North Africa, this language was Latin). As always, Augustine is ambivalent about this skill, and here he notes that with it he "entered more deeply into the stormy society of human life." Particularly disturbing to Augustine is the way language was used and taught at school--he regrets that he was taught to speak and write for corrupted purposes, namely in the service of gaining future honor and wealth. Using a term he will return to often, he refers to the use of this flashy language of public oratory (which emphasizes form over content) as "loquacity."In fact, Augustine continues, the whole scholastic system concentrated on "follies," punishing the students for boyish games in order to train them for equally misguided adult ones (such as business or politics).

[I.17-18] Another issue Augustine has to consider here is his early religious status. Born to a devoutly Catholic mother (Monica) and a pagan father (Patrick), Augustine's baptism is deferred until he's older. This was a common practice, meant to leave the cleansing of sin until after the hazards of youth and so to get the most out of the ritual when it was finally performed.

[I.19-29] Meanwhile, the folly of school continues. Most of the remaining sections of Book I are devoted to the errors of Augustine's early teachers, who meant well but were ignorant of the proper purposes of education. Of central concern here are the classical texts the young, unhappy Augustine was forced to read and, more broadly, the high-flown rhetorical language he was supposed to learn from them. Augustine particularly

disapproves of fiction, which he sees as a misleading waste of time. It is sinful, he argues, to read of other people's sins while remaining ignorant of one's own.Overall, Augustine gives his boyhood teachers credit only for giving him the most basic tools for potentially good reading and writing--his "primary education." All the rest was simply a matter of learning perverted human custom rather than truth or morality (which are, in any case, more deep-seated than the "conventions" of language).

[I.30-31] Book I closes with a very brief list of Augustine's selfish sins as a little boy, which he claims were "shocking even to the worldly set." He sees these as smaller, less significant versions of the sins of a worldly adult life. He admits, however, that there were some good things about him as well. These, though, were due entirely to God. The sins, on the other hand, were due to a "misdirection" of Augustine's gifts away from God and toward the material, created world.This "misdirection" is a reference to a key idea in Neoplatonism that informs most of Augustine's work, namely that God's creation has turned away from his eternal unity and toward the changing multiplicity of the created world.

With the onset of adolescence in Book II, Augustine enters what he seems to consider the most lurid and sinful period of his life. He "ran wild," he writes, "in the jungle of erotic adventures...and became putrid in [God's] sight." In addition to his first sexual escapades, Augustine is also quite concerned with an incident in which he and some friends stole pears from a neighborhood orchard. Augustine deeply regrets both of these sins, and offers a few brief insights as to how and why he committed them.

[II.1-4] Though sinful in acting out his erotic desires, Augustine gives himself some credit, writing "the single desire that dominated my search for delight was simply to love and be loved." Again, God has given Augustine only good properties, and it is his own fault for misdirecting those properties. In this case, the problem was that his love had "no restraint imposed [on it] by the exchange of mind with mind." Hence, pure love was perverted by its misdirection toward worldly things (bodies). Ideally, according to Augustine, sex is used only for procreation, and even then only in a relationship focused not on lust but on a loving, rational partnership (as he sees Adam and Eve relating before their fall).

[II.5-8] Having finished grade school at this point, Augustine was preparing to leave for Carthage for further study. His father Patrick had managed to raise funds for this, and Augustine praises him for trying so hard to educate his son. Still, he notes, his father had no proper moral concern for him--as was the overwhelming custom, education was seen simply as a means to worldly success."But in my mother's heart," writes Augustine, "you had already begun your temple." The Catholic Monica often admonished young Augustine against fornication, and he now recognizes that God was speaking through her. At the time, however, her warnings seemed "womanish advice which I would have blushed to take the least notice of."

Eventually, Monica tends to lets Augustine do as he will, fearing that a proper wife at this stage would impede his chances for a good career.

[II.9-14] Augustine considers the theft of the pears next. What particularly disturbs him about this teenage prank is that he did it out of no other motive than a desire to do wrong. "I loved my fall [into sin]," he writes. The pears were not stolen for their beauty, their taste, or their nourishment (there were better pears at home), but out of sheer mischief.Investigating this point further, Augustine again concludes that his actions simply represent a human perversion of his God-given goodness. In fact, each thing he sought to gain from stealing the pears (and everything humans desire in sinning) turns out to be a twisted version of one of God's attributes. In a remarkable rhetorical feat, Augustine matches each sinful desire with a desire to be like God: pride seeks loftiness (and God is the highest), perverse curiosity desires knowledge (and God knows all), idleness is really aiming at "quietude" (and God is unchanging in his eternal repose), and so on.The underlying theme here is, again, Neoplatonic. For the Neoplatonists, all creation (the material world) has "turned away" from God's perfection, becoming scattered into a chaotic state of mutability, temporality, and multiplicity. God remains unchangeable, eternal, and unified, and creation always seeks (whether it realizes it or not) to return to God. Here, Augustine has argued that even sin itself fundamentally aims at a return to God.

[II.15-18] Book II ends with a consideration of the peer pressure on which Augustine partly blames the theft of the pears. The main lesson he takes from this is that "friendship can be a dangerous enemy, a seduction of the mind." Like love, it must be subjected to reason if it is to be truly good.

Analysis

Augustine titled his deeply philosophical and theological autobiography Confessions to implicate two aspects of the form the work would take. To confess, in Augustine's time, meant both to give an account of one's faults to God and to praise God (to speak one's love for God). These two aims come together in the Confessions in an elegant but complex sense: Augustine narrates his ascent from sinfulness to faithfulness not simply for the practical edification of his readers, but also because he believes that narrative to be itself a story of God's greatness and of the fundamental love all things have for Him. Thus, in the Confessions form equals content to a large degree—the natural form for Augustine's story of redemption to take would be a direct address to God, since it is God who must be thanked for such redemption. (That said, a direct address to God was a highly original form for Augustine to have used at the time).

This idea should also help us understand the apparently lopsided and unusual structure of the text. The first nine Books of the Confessions are devoted to the story of

Augustine's life up to his mother's death, but the last four Books make a sudden, lengthy departure into pure theology and philosophy. This shift should be understood in the same context as the double meaning of 'confessions'—for Augustine, the story of his sinful life and redemption is in fact a profoundly philosophical and religious matter, since his story is only one example of the way all imperfect creation yearns to return to God. Thus, the story of the return to God is set out first as an autobiography, and then in conceptual terms.This idea of the return also serves as a good access to the philosophical and theological context in which Augustine is thinking and writing. The most important influence here (besides the Bible) is Neoplatonism, a few major texts of which Augustine read shortly before his conversion. The Neoplatonist universe is hierarchical, but things lower on the scale of being cannot be said to be bad or evil. Everything is good in so far as it exists, but things lower on the scale have a less complete and perfect Being. In contrast to God, who is eternal, unchanging, and unified, the lower levels of being involved what we know as the visible universe—a universe of matter in constant flux, in a vast multiplicity, and caught up in the ravages of time.

Augustine's lasting influence lies largely in his success in combining this Neoplatonic worldview with the Christian one. In Augustine's hybrid system, the idea that all creation is good in as much as it exists means that all creation, no matter how nasty or ugly, has its existence only in God. Because of this, all creation seeks to return to God, who is the purest and most perfected form of the compromised being enjoyed by individual things. Again, then, any story of an individual's return to God is also a statement about the relationship between God and the created universe: namely, everything tends back toward God, its constant source and ideal form.

A question to which much of the last four Books of the Confessions are devoted is how this relationship between an eternal God and a temporal creation could exist. How could the return to God be a process that takes place over time, if God is an eternal essence to which we already owe our very existence? How did God create the world (and 'when' could this have happened) if God is eternal and unchanging? The solution, for Augustine, involves a deep understanding of the simultaneity of eternity and time. Time, he argues, does not really exist—it is more of an illusion we generate for ourselves for unclear reasons (fundamentally, we fall into time because of our distance from God's perfection). Past and future exist only in our present constructions of them. From God's point of view, all of time exists at once--nothing comes 'before' or 'after' anything else temporally. God created the universe not 'at' a specific time, but rather creates it constantly and always, in one eternal act.This idea puts the both the Neoplatonic worldview and Augustine's own act of 'confessing' in a new perspective. There no longer needs to be any conflict between the idea of a return to God over 'time' (as with the young and sinful Augustine) on the one hand and everything's constant existence in God on the other. Since time is simply an illusion of the lower hierarchy, it means the same thing to wander and return to God as

it does to owe one's existence to God at every moment—these are just two aspects of the same thing, one aspect told as a story and the other told in religious and philosophical terms.

Thus, again, Augustine's text is remarkably and complexly coherent, despite its apparent eccentricities and shifts in content. He is laying out the story of his life, opening himself as completely as possible to God and to his readers. In so doing, he is praising God for his salvation. Further, he is illustrating, with a temporal example, a specific view of the universe as unified across all time in an unchanging God.We have left Christ out of this discussion, largely because the most challenging aspects of Augustine's thought often concern his use of the Neoplatonic system. Nonetheless, Christ is crucial to Augustine, although he has no place in Neoplatonism. Christ is the mechanism by which the return to God is affected. It is through Christ that a human can come to know his or her existence in God, since Christ is God made human. Augustine suggests that Christ is also wisdom itself, since wisdom too is a kind of intermediary between God and the lower levels of creation. It is in this wisdom, in the context of this 'Christ,' that God created the universe, and it is through this wisdom, Christ, that the universe can return to Him.

Thagaste  - Augustine's hometown in Eastern Algeria (then part of the Roman empire). After growing up and attending primary school in Thagaste, Augustine left the city for Carthage for further studies. He returned to Thagaste afterward to begin his teaching career, leaving again for good after the death of a close friend there made the city unbearable.

Monica  - Augustine's Catholic mother. She accompanied him on many of his moves from city to city, spending time with him not only in Thagaste but also in Carthage, Milan, and Ostia. Augustine gives great credit to Monica for being God's instrument for his own salvation; although she postponed his baptism as a child (feeling he wasn't ready), she never stopped encouraging him to convert to Catholicism. A number of visions are associated with Monica in the Confessions. The most significant is the vision of "eternal wisdom" that she and Augustine share in Ostia (Book IX).

Carthage  - Augustine moved to Carthage twice: once for further studies in rhetoric after finishing grade school in Thagaste, and once after the death of his close friend (again in Thagaste) left him too stricken with grief to stay in his hometown. On neither occasion is the city a good experience for Augustine (at least in retrospect). The first time he goes, he describes it as a "cauldron of illicit loves." The second time, he finds his students too rowdy and decamps for Rome.

Neoplatonism  - Neoplatonism infuses Augustine's entire conception of God and God's creation. Plotinus founded the school, which views God as a spiritual substance inherent in all things; as Augustine puts it, "in filling all things, you [God] fill them all with the

whole of yourself" (Book I). In the Neoplatonist view, all things (including souls) have this infinite, timeless, and unchangeable God as the cause of their existence--everything exists only to the extent to which it participates in God. The Neoplatonist account of evil is also extremely important to Augustine. According to this doctrine, evil has no actual existence--things are "evil" or "wicked" according to a hierarchy of being in which some things are closer to God's supreme and infinite being than others. Evil arises only as a relative quality: things further down in the hierarchy have less complete being than things higher up, and so are imperfect or "evil" by comparison. This view, in which the goodness of individual things varies but everything is part of a whole from God's point of view, allows Augustine to answer Manichee challenges about the source of evil.

Manicheism  - Augustine comes across the Manichee sect in Carthage, when he goes there for his studies. He ends up believing strongly in Manichee doctrine for nearly ten years, until rational philosophy and astronomy persuade him that the colorful Manichee cosmology is false. The self-declared prophet Mani claimed that God was not omnipotent and struggled against the opposing substance of evil. The Manicheans also believed that the human soul was of the same substance of God. The opposition of these views is one of the main themes of the Confessions. Manichee doctrines depended heavily on visualization of the concepts of God and evil, and this dependence greatly delayed Augustine from coming to know God without imagining him.

Time / Temporality  - Time is the subject of Book XI of the Confessions, in which Augustine explores the relationship between God's timelessness and his creation's experience of time. Augustine emphasizes the view that God's creation of the universe did not occur at any point in time, since time only came into being with creation: there was no "before." God has nothing to do with time, and in his eyes all time is present as one unified moment. His creation, however, experiences time (which Augustine sees as a painful quality). Augustine argues that, although we assume there is a past and a future, neither have any existence. Even the present instant has no dimension or duration. Thus, "time cannot be said to exist." Augustine suggests that time may be a kind of "distension," a stretching of the soul (as opposed to a quality of the outside world). This is a sign of distance from God--creation has fallen away from God's eternity into successive time.

Multiplicity  - If creation turns away from God's eternity to become mired in temporality, it also turns away from God's unity to become scattered into multiplicity. Augustine follows the Neoplatonist view of multiplicity as a marker of flawed being, or distance from God.

Inwardness  - Inwardness is the method by which Augustine attains his clearest views of God. First reading in the Neoplatonists the advice to look inward for the truth, this idea will become central to what Augustine sees as the path to God. External things, for Augustine, simply scatter the mind into multiplicity and dependence on transient things.

Turning away from these things and looking inward, Augustine searches for God. This practice leads to two ecstatic visions of God, the first while he is reading the Neoplatonists and the second with Monica in Ostia. In both cases, Augustine ascends by moving up through the levels of himself (such as body, senses, memory, or mind) until only God is higher. In Book X, Augustine answers the problem of how to seek God without knowing what he looks like by arguing that God is simply that which is higher than the highest in himself. By knowing himself inwardly, he can find God.

Mind / Soul  - The mind or soul (the terms are somewhat interchangeable in Augustine) is the element that animates human beings. It is the "life of the body," commanding the body, receiving and storing sensory input, and using concepts and ideas. It is not, however, God or some kind of piece of God. The Manicheans made the mistake of identifying the soul with God, an opinion that Augustine now strongly rebukes. The soul or mind is also the site of Augustine's search for God, which he pursues by looking inward to find the truth that transcends the soul. This process leads to the extended investigation of memory (which is a feature of the mind) in Book X.

Cicero  - Cicero is the author of the Hortensius, a treatise in defense of the pursuit of philosophy. Reading the work at age eighteen, Augustine gets his first urges to give up his indulgent lifestyle and devote himself to the pursuit of truth (although this will take quite a while).

Spiritual Substance  - A spiritual substance is a substance that exists without any spatial qualities at all, and it is the substance of God. The understanding of spiritual substance is one of the final steps Augustine makes before his conversion to Catholicism. Partly due to the influence of Manichee images of God as an immense body of light, Augustine has difficulty conceiving of God without resorting to any visualization whatsoever. Spiritual substance, however, cannot be visualized, because it has nothing to do with space--it is both everywhere and nowhere. Augustine tells us in Book XII that spiritual substance is the substance of the heaven of heavens, the order of near-perfect creation, whose counterpart is formless matter (of which the firmament and the earth were made).

Evil  - Evil is a major theme in the Confessions, particularly in regard to its origin. Like the Manicheans, the young Augustine could not understand how evil could exist if God was omnipotent. The Manichee answer is that evil is a separate substance against which God is constantly battling. Augustine harshly criticizes this view for its arrogance--wickedness is attributed to a weakness in God rather than a weakness in human will. Augustine now replies to the Manichean challenge on evil with a Neoplatonic view: evil has no existence of its own, but is entirely a product of the contrast between greater and lesser goods. All of creation is part of a perfect whole in God, but individual things may be closer to or further from God's perfection--the things furthest from God appear

evil or wicked by comparison. Human free will can turn toward these lower things, and it is in this sense that evil stems not from God but from a "perversion" of human will.

Book of Genesis  - Genesis is the first book of the Christian Bible, and Augustine devotes a good deal of writing to its interpretation toward the end of the Confessions. Augustine's early encounters with the Book of Genesis were negative. The Manichee doctrines he followed attacked Genesis, and much of its simple language about God "making" the heavens and the earth or speaking his "word" initially struck Augustine as extremely flawed. His opinion began to change rapidly upon hearing Bishop Ambrose's interpretations, which read the words in a highly spiritual, metaphorical sense. Genesis spurs the discussion of time and eternity in Book XI, as well as providing the material for a consideration of "the creation" in Book XII. Book XIII is an exegesis of Genesis as an instruction on finding the church and living in God.

Justice  - Though this is not a primary theme of the Confessions, Augustine sees all the events of his life as divinely just; he sinned, suffered, and was saved all according to God's perfect justice. There is very little sense of cause and effect in this idea of justice, since sinning is largely its own punishment (Augustine speaks of his early sexual adventures as a "hell of lust"). Following the Neoplatonists, Augustine suggests that a disordered mind or perverted will is punished by its own miserable state and by its attachment to transient things. The only true reward is the return to the stability of God.

Memory  - Memory is the subject of most of Book X. Augustine's idea of memory is infused with Plato's argument that learning is really a process of the soul remembering what it knew before birth. After investigating the contents of the "vast storehouse" of memory (which contains sensory images, skills, emotions, and ideas), Augustine argues that any recognition of truth is really a process of "assembling" scattered pieces of a kind of eternal memory of God. Memory is strange for Augustine because it contains images that can be re-experienced almost like the original. He wonders at his capacity to remember sights from long ago almost as if he were seeing them again, as well as his capacity to remember emotions without feeling them. Memory is also the place where Augustine finally locates time. Rather than an external phenomenon, measurable time exists solely in the mind (or soul)--the future is that which we imagine based on present signs, and the past exists only in our memory.

Adeodatus  - Augustine's son by his long-term concubine. Adeodatus dies at age seventeen, two years after he is baptized alongside his father and Alypius.

Rome  - Augustine moves to Rome from Carthage, hoping to find students who are less rowdy. The students in Rome turn out to be dishonest, however, and Augustine moves on to Milan after a short tenure.

Milan  - Milan is the last place Augustine lives in the Confessions, and it is the site of his final steps toward Christianity and of his conversion experience in the garden. Just prior to this experience, he and his friends Alypius and Nebridius live in close contact, ardently pursuing truth together.Skepticism (Academics)  - As he gradually becomes disillusioned with Manichee beliefs, Augustine comes close to this Greek school of total doubt that anything is certain. Referring to the skeptics as the Academics (the school began at Plato's Academy), Augustine says he found them to be "shrewder" than most other schools of thought. First Neoplatonism and then Catholicism would come to fill in the gap left in him by Manicheism, and Augustine eventually emphasizes faith more than the demand for absolute proof.

Faustus  - Augustine meets Faustus, a highly respected Manichee, during his time as a teacher in Carthage. Faustus impresses Augustine with his modesty, but disappoints him by using loquacious language and by failing to answer Augustine's challenges to the Manichee cosmology. The meeting pushes Augustine further from Manichee beliefs.

Ambrose  - Ambrose was the Catholic Bishop at Milan. He is, along with Monica, one of the people most directly responsible for Augustine's conversion. Ambrose's interpretation of the bible (particularly the Old Testament) had an immense influence on Augustine, who had previously been put off by its simple and apparently literal language. Ambrose interprets the scriptures in a much more abstract, spiritual sense--an approach that allowed Augustine to overcome Manichee objections to specific phrases in the text. Ambrose baptized Augustine alongside Adeodatus and Alypius.

Nebridius  - One of Augustine's close friends in Milan, Nebridius accompanies Augustine and Alypius in their philosophical struggles. He also joins Augustine in his decision to convert.

Alypius  - Augustine's closest friend and philosophical companion at Milan. It is during a conversation with Alypius that Augustine becomes enraged at himself, storms out into the garden, and has his conversion experience. Alypius joins him in conversion and in baptism.

Free Will  - According to Augustine, although their choices are ultimately part of God's plan, humans have the free will to choose to turn toward God or away from him toward the lower spectrum of the created order. Evil, though it ultimately has no existence of its own, appears due to this turning away from God. The concept of free will is important to Augustine in opposing the Manichee notion of evil as a dark substance in conflict with God. If this were the case, humans would have no responsibility for their wicked acts. Augustine's view maintains that evil (or what appears to be evil) is a misdirection of the human will.

Christ (the Word of God)  - For Christians, Christ is the only true access to God. Christ is "God made flesh," God as a human and so subject to death. As such, he represents God's infinite mercy, his promise to humanity that God is within reach. Christ for Augustine is also eternal, perfect wisdom itself, since such wisdom is both the nature of and the access to God. Christ is also referred to as the Word of God, that by which God made all of creation. This idea informs Augustine's reading of the statement in Genesis that "In the beginning was the Word." Since God cannot have anything to do with time, Augustine suggests a reading of "beginning'" as referring to God as the primary cause of existence. His "Word" is read as Christ, the eternal wisdom by which and in which the universe is created (rather than some kind of temporal speech).

Plato (Platonism)  - Plato's philosophy in the Meno and other dialogues influences Augustine's conception of memory. Plato believed that learning is a kind of remembering, in which the soul rediscovers a truth it knew before birth. Augustine's early insistence on philosophy as the most noble pursuit in life comes partly from Cicero, who is heavily influenced by Plato's similar claim. Augustine also follows Plato in refusing to claim to know how the soul is joined to the body at or before birth.