Confession as Praise

Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; and his greatness is unsearchable. PSALM 145:3

We use the word confession almost entirely for the admission of sin. Augustine used it in two senses, and his great book cannot be understood without both. To confess, in the Latin Bible he read, was to acknowledge the truth before God — the truth about ourselves, which is our sin, and the truth about God, which is His glory. Confession of sin and confession of praise were, for him, a single act seen from two sides. The Confessions is therefore not simply an autobiography, still less a scandalous memoir. It is a hymn in which a sinner tells the truth about himself in order to praise the God who saved him.

Speaking to God, not about Him

The first thing a reader notices is that the whole book is addressed to God. Augustine does not say, I did this, and then that happened. He says, Thou knowest, Lord, what I did; Thou wert there; Thou heardest my mother. It is a strange way to write a life, and it changes everything. A memoir invites the reader to admire or pity the writer. A confession addressed to God invites the reader to look past the writer to the One he is speaking to.

Augustine was well aware that God did not need the information. At the start of Book XI he asks the question himself. Since God is eternal and knows all things, why does he lay so many stories before Him? Not, he answers, so that God might learn them through him, but to stir up his own and his readers’ love for God, so that together they might all say, Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised. Confession is not a report. It is worship.

I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. PSALM 32:5

Why confess past sins

A reader might ask why a bishop, respected and forgiven, should rake over the sins of his youth in public. Augustine asks that question too, in Book X, and his answer is pastoral. Other people, he says, when they hear the story of past evils now forgiven, are not to marvel at the sinner but to take heart for themselves. Such confessions, read and heard, stir up the heart so that it does not sleep in despair and say, I cannot, but wakes in the love of God’s mercy and the sweetness of His grace. The purpose of telling the truth about sin is to make grace visible. A church in which no one confesses anything is a church in which no one can see what grace has done.

He was equally honest that his struggle was not over. Book X is the confession not of the young sinner but of the bishop, and it is a humbling list: the pleasure he still took in food, the snares of the eyes and ears, the love of praise that he could not wholly shake off. He prays there the prayer we met in an earlier chapter: give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt. The mature Christian, on Augustine’s showing, does not stop confessing. He only confesses more truly.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 JOHN 1:9

Knowing and being known

Behind the whole practice lies a simple conviction: God already knows. There is nothing to hide from Him, and therefore nothing to gain by hiding. Book X opens with a prayer taken from Paul. “Let me know Thee, O Lord, who knowest me: let me know Thee, as I am known.” The one who is fully known by God can dare to be honest, because the knowing is not a threat but a mercy.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 CORINTHIANS 13:12

This is liberating. Much of our spiritual exhaustion comes from managing appearances — before others, before ourselves, even, absurdly, before God. Augustine invites us to stop. He prays in Book I that God would enlarge the narrow house of his soul, repair its ruins, and forgive what in it offends His eyes: “Narrow is the mansion of my soul; enlarge Thou it, that Thou mayest enter in.” It is the prayer of a man who has given up pretending.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. PSALM 139:23–24

The Psalms as his school of prayer

Augustine learned this double confession from the Psalms, which are full of both. In the winter after his conversion, at the country house at Cassiciacum, he read them as a new believer, and he writes of the effect with unforgettable warmth. He read the fourth Psalm, he says, and it wrought upon him; he wished the Manichees could have been there to see his face and hear him.

Hear me when I call, O God of my righteousness: thou hast enlarged me when I was in distress; have mercy upon me, and hear my prayer. PSALM 4:1

He learned too from the singing of the church. At Milan, where Ambrose had lately brought in the singing of hymns and psalms by the whole congregation, he found himself overwhelmed. “How did I weep, in Thy Hymns and Canticles, touched to the quick by the voices of Thy sweet-attuned Church!” The truth, he says, distilled into his heart through his ears, and tears ran down, and he was happy in them.

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. COLOSSIANS 3:16

As a bishop he preached through the whole Psalter over many years, in the sermons now gathered as his Expositions of the Psalms. He taught his people to hear in the Psalms the voice of Christ — sometimes Christ the Head speaking to the Father, sometimes Christ speaking in and for His body, the church, in its sorrow and sin. And at the very end, as Possidius tells us, it was the penitential Psalms he had fixed to the wall of his sickroom. The man who began his great book with a verse of praise from the Psalms ended his life reading the Psalms of confession. The two had never been far apart.

If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared. PSALM 130:3–4

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Write a short account of one chapter of your life addressed to God rather than written about yourself, beginning with the words You knew, Lord, and notice how it changes.

2. Each time you confess a sin this week, follow it immediately with a sentence of praise for the God who forgives.

3. Consider whether there is a story of forgiven sin in your life that, told wisely, could encourage someone else not to despair.

4. Choose a Psalm and pray it every day for a week, letting it give you words for both confession and praise.

5. Sing this Sunday as though the words were your own prayer, not only the congregation’s.

A PRAYER

Great are You, Lord, and greatly to be praised. You know me better than I know myself.

I confess my sin to You, not to inform You, but because I no longer wish to hide.

Enlarge the narrow house of my soul, repair what is ruined, and come in.

Let every confession of my sin become a confession of Your mercy, until my whole life is praise. Amen.