Augustine’s Confessions is the story of how a brilliant, restless, sensual young man from North Africa became a Christian, told by the man himself to God, in the form of a prayer. It was written around the year 397, when Augustine was in his early forties and newly a bishop, and it is usually called the first true autobiography in Western literature. But it is not really about Augustine. It is about the God who was looking for him the whole time he thought he was looking for God.
This guide explains what the book is, walks through its thirteen books, says why the last four take a turn that surprises every first-time reader, gathers its famous lines, and suggests how to read it now. The full text, in Pusey’s translation, is free in the Ochorus library.
What kind of book it is
The Latin title, Confessiones, carries two meanings that English has split apart: to confess sin, and to confess praise. Augustine means both at once. Every page admits what he was, and every page thanks God for what he has become. That is why the whole book is addressed to “Thou.” He is not telling us his story; he is telling God his story, and letting us listen.
The first paragraph contains the sentence the book is known for, and it is the key to everything that follows:
Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.
Augustine, Confessions
Everything Augustine did in his first thirty-two years — the ambition, the women, the philosophy, the sect he joined, the career he chased — was that restlessness. The Confessions is an anatomy of a heart that wanted God and kept reaching for other things, which is Psalm 42:1 written out at length: as the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee.
Books One to Nine: the story
Book One covers infancy and boyhood in Thagaste, a small town in what is now Algeria. Augustine looks at babies and sees the same self-will he found in himself as a man; he remembers hating Greek and loving Virgil, and being beaten at school. Already he is asking where sin comes from, and already Psalm 51:5 is behind the question: in sin did my mother conceive me.
Book Two is the famous pear tree. At sixteen, with a gang of friends, he stole pears from a neighbour’s tree — not because he was hungry, since they threw them to the pigs, but for the pleasure of stealing. Augustine spends a whole book on this trivial theft, because it puzzled him more than his larger sins. He did wrong for no reason except that it was wrong. That, he decided, is what sin is at bottom: not a mistaken pursuit of good, but a love of one’s own will for its own sake.
Book Three takes him to Carthage as a student, where, in his own phrase, a cauldron of unholy loves sang around him. He took a mistress, who bore him a son. He read Cicero’s Hortensius, which set him on fire for wisdom, and then tried the Bible and found it crude beside Cicero. So he joined the Manichees, a sect that explained evil as a second god at war with the good one, which meant that when Augustine sinned it was not really Augustine’s fault. His mother, Monica, wept for him, and was told by a bishop that the son of such tears could not perish.
Books Four and Five follow his career as a teacher of rhetoric, the death of a close friend that shattered him, his growing doubts about the Manichees, and his meeting with their celebrated teacher Faustus, who turned out to be charming and shallow. He sailed for Rome, slipping away from Monica at the harbour, and then won a post as professor of rhetoric in Milan, the imperial capital. There he went to hear the bishop, Ambrose, to study his style, and stayed for the content.
Books Six and Seven are the intellectual conversion. Ambrose showed him that the Old Testament could be read spiritually and not only literally, which removed his old objection. Monica arrived in Milan and arranged a marriage; the mistress of fifteen years was sent back to Africa, leaving Augustine, as he admits, wounded and then promptly taking another. Then he read the Platonists, and they gave him a way to think of God as spirit rather than as a fine kind of matter, and of evil as an absence rather than a substance. But Platonism could tell him what the goal was and not how to get there. Only in John 1:14 did he find that the Word became flesh.
Book Eight is the conversion of the will, and one of the great scenes in Christian literature. Augustine now believed everything and could not move. His famous prayer from those years was:
Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.
Augustine, Confessions
He describes the divided will with a precision no one had managed before him: two wills in one man, one wanting God and one wanting what it had always wanted, so that Romans 7:19 became his own sentence — the good that I would I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do. In a garden in Milan, weeping under a fig tree, he heard a child’s voice from a nearby house chanting, “Take up and read; Take up and read.” He opened the letters of Paul at Romans 13:13–14 — not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ — and, as he says, a light of serenity poured into his heart and every shadow of doubt fled. He was thirty-two.
Book Nine is baptism and death. He resigned his post, was baptised by Ambrose at Easter 387 along with his son Adeodatus and his friend Alypius, and set out for Africa with Monica. At Ostia, waiting for a ship, mother and son stood at a window and talked about eternal life until, for a moment, they seemed to touch it. A few days later she fell ill and died. Augustine’s account of her life and death, and of his tears at her grave, is the tenderest thing he wrote, and the reason that Monica has been remembered as the patron of every parent who has prayed for a child and waited.
Books Ten to Thirteen: the turn
Here first-time readers put the book down, and this guide exists partly to ask you not to. The story ends with Book Nine. Book Ten is about memory. Books Eleven to Thirteen are a commentary on the first chapter of Genesis. What happened?
What happened is that Augustine did not think the story was the point. Having told God what he was, he now tells God what he is: a man still tempted, still forgetful, still finding his way. Book Ten searches his present self through the vast halls of memory, asking where in all that stored experience God can be found, and arrives at another of the book’s great sentences:
Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! too late I loved Thee!
Augustine, Confessions
Then he examines his temptations one by one, honestly and at length, so that no one can think the bishop is finished with the struggle.
Book Eleven asks what time is, because a man whose whole story has been about time wants to know what it was he was living in. His answer, that the past is memory, the future is expectation, and only the present is, and that God stands outside all three, has occupied philosophers ever since. Books Twelve and Thirteen read Genesis 1, because the creation of the world and the re-creation of a soul are, for Augustine, the same act of the same God. The book that began with a restless heart ends with the Sabbath rest of God, and with a prayer that we may enter it. The structure is the argument. My story, he is saying, is a small case of the story of everything.
The themes that matter most
Grace. This is a book about a man who did not find God, but was found. Every turn in the story that looks like Augustine’s decision turns out, on his telling, to be God’s prior work. Luke 15:20 is the picture: while the son was yet a great way off, the father ran. Augustine read his life as the far country and the running father.
The disordered heart. His account of sin is not that people love bad things but that they love good things in the wrong order — pleasure above the giver of pleasure, friendship above the friend who gave friends. Rightly ordered love is his whole ethics, and it is why he could later say that the one who loves God may do as they please, because what they please will be love.
Honesty. Nobody before Augustine had written about himself like this — the pears, the mistress, the divided will, the tears he was ashamed of. He could do it because he was writing to someone who already knew, which is Psalm 139:1–4: thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising. Confession to God is the one place where pretending is pointless, and Augustine had taken 1 Timothy 1:15 as his own: Christ came to save sinners, of whom I am chief.
The praying mother. Monica is the quiet hero of the book. She prayed for a son for over thirty years, followed him across the sea, and lived just long enough to see him baptised. Augustine gives her the tribute of a whole chapter, and every parent who has read it has taken it as a promise.
How to read it today
Read Books One to Nine first, as a story. They move fast, and they are about a person you will recognise, because he is honest about the things everybody hides.
Then read Book Ten slowly. It is the hinge, and the most searching examination of a Christian conscience ever set down. Give it a week.
Leave Eleven to Thirteen for the second reading. They reward it, but they are philosophy and commentary, and no one should be made to feel that they failed the Confessions because they stalled at the nature of time.
Read it as prayer. It is addressed to God; read it that way. When Augustine says “Thou,” let it be your Thou.
Keep a Bible open. Augustine quotes Scripture in almost every paragraph, usually the Psalms, and the older translations keep the echoes audible.
Read Grace Abounding after it. Bunyan’s conversion story, thirteen centuries later, is the same story in an English tinker: the long resistance, the divided will, the sudden light. Put beside each other they show how little the road has changed.
Jeremiah 29:13 promises that you will seek God and find him when you search with all your heart. Augustine’s Confessions is the record of a man who searched with half a heart for thirty years, and was found anyway. That is why people are still reading it. The restless heart is not a fifth-century condition; it is the human one. So is the rest.