‘Confessions’: A Search for Truth and Meaning
A review of ‘Confessions’, by St. Augustine; Penguin Books, 1961.
The philosopher Michael Oakeshott admired Augustine. He liked the way Augustine grappled with the messiness of human life and the tension between the time-bound and eternal. For he too doubted that the human being was perfectible; that reason could paint a complete picture of reality. Faced with such uncertainty, we are called to be humble, the two men thought and, to quote Wittgenstein, ‘that whereof we cannot speak we must pass over in silence.’
Augustine’s Confessions is part prayer, part spiritual memoir. Written in the fourth century, it deals with the author’s journey from wayward youth to faithful man. And like any good memoir, the many flaws of its author are on show. Augustine is torn by want and guilt, prone to sin. Thus his story speaks to us, reminding us that human beings at all times and places are, in the end, still human beings, with human traits. We are admirable in many ways, says Augustine, but also, as it were, fallen. Accepting the latter is the first step on the road to the former.
The boy Augustine is prideful. He steals pears from a tree not for ‘the object’ for which he has ‘fallen’, but ‘for the fall itself.’ He delights in the sin: it boosts his sense of self. But it drives him from God. So does his lust, to which he calls himself ‘a slave’, and which he has chance to indulge while studying in Carthage. He had ‘loved not yet, yet … loved to love,’ he writes. But still he knows he is, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, a ‘dependent rational animal’, reliant from infancy on others as much as God. Because ‘none is pure from sin’, one’s relation with God must be active. It does not take care of itself.
The boy Augustine is prideful.
Augustine takes a mistress and has a son. A friend dies, plunging him into existential crisis. His Manicheism, a dualistic religious scheme resting on a conflict between light and darkness, seems inadequate for explaining reality. Faustus, a leading devotee, does not inspire him. His words are ‘pleasant to the ear’, but do ‘not satisfy the heart’. For Augustine is a thinker who will not accept easy answers if they do not rest on solid intellectual ground. When he goes to Rome and Milan, he hears Ambrose preach the thinking man’s take on Christianity, and something stirs within him.
Augustine engages with Neoplatonism. He overcomes the materialist view of God still used as a strawman by the dying New Atheist movement. He is torn by rival thoughts and feelings, on the cusp of an earth-shattering moral, intellectual and spiritual conversion. He weeps in a garden in Milan ‘in the most bitter sorrow of [his] heart’. Then he hears a child chanting. ‘Take up and read,’ says the child. ‘Take up and read.’ And so Augustine opens the Bible, reads Paul’s epistle to the Romans, and becomes who he is.
Truth. This is a key theme of the Confessions. It is the basis of everything else. The truth-seeker wants certainties: firm, hard, facts, an independent standard to which she can point and say, ‘I am living in harmony with how things really are’. But it isn’t so easy. Augustine follows the path of Manicheism and finds it wanting. Truth exists; but it is a process that emerges from a dialogue, a dialogue with ourselves, with others, with the world. It must be governed by openness, patience and respect. Hamlet may be a story about mental breakdown in the wake of grief. It may be about a crisis of faith. It may just be a classical Elizabethan revenge tragedy. But it is not about peasant life in fourth-century Azerbaijan. ‘Truth,’ writes Rabbi Jacob Agus, ‘is a noun only to God; to men, truth is really best known as an adverb, “truly”.’
Truth exists; but it is a process that emerges from a dialogue.
The Confessions is also a kind of moral inventory. Those who enrol in Alcoholics Anonymous are asked to do this and, inasmuch as it is possible, make amends. Solzhenitsyn made a moral inventory in the Gulag, concluding that ‘the line separating good and evil passes … right through every human heart.’ Augustine does not hide his sins, big or small. He feels their weight. And he knows he cannot save himself. He must open himself to grace. His transformation from sinner to saint is not by his own hand but by God’s. His words, ‘I am nothing but a creature of Your grace’ is our proof.
In respect of style, rawness and depth prevail. Augustine, writing in Latin, says big things in simple ways. His prayers are pleading, desperate, thankful, needy, loving. ‘You called, and shouted, and burst my deafness,’ he writes. ‘You flashed, shone, and scattered my blindness.’ The writing flows between thought and prayer, guilt and joy, sin and hope, signifying transformation. His words cut deep because he means them. He writes as a man who has looked into his own black heart, for that is the only means by which we can open ourselves to change. Carl Rogers, the great humanistic psychologist and founder of person-centred therapy, noted the paradox that we can only change if we accept ourselves fully as we are.
But Confessions is not just a book about Augustine. It is about the soul’s journey to God. It is a look at the brokenness we share and the grace that makes us whole. Dante’s pilgrim goes into hell to understand sin; Augustine looks at his life and failings to do the same. Both reach upwards, striving in faith. And in the end, the divine hand reaches out to them. Augustine’s story, like Dante’s, is our story. It is not Christian esoterica. We want to be redeemed. We want to understand. We want meaning. ‘Our hearts are restless’, writes Augustine. But meaning is not to be found in concern for the self. Meaning springs from concerning ourselves with that which is over and above ourselves. The Confessions shows this. It is a concrete study of what it means to seek the truth, find meaning and reconcile ourselves to the world.
