Augustine’s Confessions: A Simplified Reading (in 13 Points and a Bonus)

The Confessions is a peculiar work. Every time you try to say what it is, it seems to escape your categorization. People most readily characterize it as an autobiography. True, maybe, if you are used to teaching only Books 1-10. But then there are those awkward last three books. What are they doing there? They each take up in their turn verses from the Hexameron, the narrative of the six days of creation in Genesis 1:1-2:1. Looking backward from these books, the Confessions looks like an exegetical work with a long existential prologue. So what is it really, and how does it hold together?

I want to take a stab at saying how it does hold together, without claiming this is the only way to do it. The Confessions will always outlive and overawe any attempt to replace its own unique voice with one’s own.[1] Still, one wants at very least to offer students a way through. One wants a way to evoke its greatness, to name it, to present it, somehow to participate in it and invite others to engage it. To that end, I want to offer a simple reading of the whole in thirteen points, with an added bonus point on the meaning of life. For if nothing else, Confessions makes a claim about that. What a shame it would be to miss it while we were arguing about how to categorize the text!

1. The first point is the first line of the text: Magnus es Domine, et laudabilis valde: You are great, O Lord, and greatly worthy of praise (Conf. 1.1.1).[2] If you ever worry about what the Confessions is about, just go back to this very first line. Augustine tells you what it is about. Autobiography, exegetical work, both or something else: it is ultimately about God, who is great, and correspondingly greatly, indeed exceedingly, worthy of praise.

2. But how do we praise God who is great and greatly worthy of our praise, we who are prideful? How do we praise God in the measure in which his praise is due? How is it possible and what would it look like? This question is introduced in the next few sentences, which contain what is possibly the most famous line in the whole work:

Your power is immense, your wisdom beyond reckoning. And so we humans, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you—we who carry our mortality about with us, the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you thwart the proud. Yet these humans, due part of creation as we are, still do long to praise you. You stir us up, so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you (ibid.).

If the first line of the text introduces the subject of Confessions, God and his praiseworthy greatness, the next few sentences of the Prologue lead us into the problem of the Confessions: How? How do we praise God in a way worthy of his great worth? How do we who are prideful admit, and give in, to our deepest longings and break into the unfettered, unstinting praise due the God who is laudabilis valde?

3. Continuing, the Prologue makes a couple of tentative forays at answering. Quid es, Domine: What are you, Lord? (1.4.4), Augustine asks. Good question! Maybe answering it will provide the requisite praise. It is a philosophical question, and Augustine expends all the rhetorical power he has at his disposal—and it is considerable—answering it. Starting from the seemingly simple question of “in-voking” God in prayer, he wonders how could one ever call God in to oneself (1.2.2). Can God fit into us? Or do we rather fit into God? But where is God? Does God fill heaven and earth with some of him left that overflows somewhere else? A cascade of brilliant rhetorical questions intended to evoke awe ends on a brilliant, if circumspect, note:

Should we suppose, then, that because all things are incapable of containing the whole of you, they hold only a part of you, and all of them the same part? Or does each thing hold a different part—greater things larger parts and lesser things smaller parts? Does it even make sense to speak of larger or smaller parts of you? Are you not everywhere in your whole being? (1.3.3).

That last part is a quote from Plotinus. Plotinus had the insight that God is “everywhere whole at once,” something impossible to picture. Augustine has brought us to the brink of language and thought in twenty-odd easy questions, though circumspectly—he has not named Plotinus or even relied on his authority by saying, “as a certain philosopher once said.” But otherwise it is a bravura performance. It does evoke awe. But of whom? Augustine has praised God. Everything he said is true. But is our restless heart satisfied? Or rather is the awe elicited equal parts for God and for the brilliant rhetor with his showy display of wisdom, namely, Augustine? We, due parts of creation, yet who bear about with us the evidence that we are proud, are tempted to stint on God’s praise by having his glory reflect back more on us than on him. Yeah, I’m Augustine, I’m kind of smart; I can talk about God and all the paradoxes of God’s omnipresence, and even use the proper understatement when mentioning my philosophical authority.

You see the temptation for someone who is mortal and prideful? Augustine hurries on to another answer to “Quid es, Domine? What are you, Lord?” He turns to Scripture to offer what we would call a theological answer.

What are you, then, my God? What are you, I ask, but the Lord God? For who else is lord except the Lord, or who is god if not our God? You are most high, excellent, most powerful, omnipotent, supremely merciful and supremely just, most hidden yet intimately present, infinitely beautiful and infinitely strong, steadfast yet elusive, unchanging yourself though you control the change in all things, never new, never old, renewing all things yet wearing down the proud though they know it not (1.4.4).

These are all contrasts or rhetorical “antitheses” created from Scripture. How can they all be true when they are opposites? As the passage develops, the seemingly opposite features of God, all drawn from Scripture, are choreographed so as to accentuate their contrast by the rhetorical skill of Augustine. It brings us to the point of awe once again, awe at the power of Scripture to paint a picture of an utterly, uniquely powerful God who has a name and who can and does act, unlike the philosophical God, and yet remains transcendent.

Yes, and awe at the exegete’s power as well! Apparently, even theology can be twisted, so that even as it says things that are absolutely true and truly invoke Scripture’s sense of the mighty deeds of God, it can end up glorifying the theologian, and to that extent sending a double message and leaving the heart restless. Meanwhile, God is slipping away, becoming, in a sense, a credential on the theologian’s CV, evidence that he carries about the penalty of original sin, which is pride. “Pride” in the Augustinian sense is the desire to replace God with oneself. One is not stupid enough to think consciously that I can replace God, but by praising God in such a way that, in effect, I am actually praising myself, I am using the truth of God’s greatness to add to my own prestige. Nor does Augustine explicitly say something like, “Hey, I have all these articles about God—how’s that, what do you have to show for yourself?” That is not how pride works, actually or in rhetorical representation, and we have to be on our toes to see it displayed. As Book One continues beyond the Prologue, the tendency to use rhetorical power to gain prestige, and leave virtues like truth and justice behind, is exhibited more fully as Augustine narrates his boyhood education.

If we return to the Prologue for one more moment, we find Augustine hurrying farther on, his restless heart unsatisfied—along with ours, who could perhaps be excused for not wanting to hear philosophical or theological lectures for all eternity. Augustine presses his questioning:

After saying all that, what have we said, my God, my life, my holy sweetness? What does anyone who speaks of you really say? Yet woe betide those who fail to speak, while the chatterboxes go on saying nothing.

Who will grant me to find peace in you? Who will grant me this grace, that you would come into my heart and inebriate it, enabling me to forget the evils that beset me and embrace you, my only good? What are you to me? (1, 4-5).

Augustine has added one small word to his original question, “quid es,” “what are you?” He now asks, “quid es mihi” — “what are you to me?” And he continues,

Have mercy on me so I may tell. Say to my soul, I am your salvation. . . . Say it so I can hear it . . .

This new question is much harder to answer in a way that draws attention to oneself at God’s expense, because in order to answer the question, “what are you to me?” you cannot take refuge in your knowledge of philosophy or theology. You have to tell a story. You have to tell a story about what God is to you. Further, you will need God’s grace and mercy in order to fully give into the longing to praise God, because it will be a story that can be summed up as, “You are my salvation, Lord!” That is the answer to the question of how we praise God adequately.

At least it is the start of an answer. You have to tell a story, and it will cost you to tell this story if you, by God’s grace, tell it truthfully. That is exactly what Augustine proceeds to do. The Confessions tells a story, at very least, something like this, to preview it: You gave me myself, a perfect gift of life and intelligence and love (see 1.20.31); in response, I threw myself away, utterly and entirely, like the Prodigal Son (see 2.10.18), all for the sake of prestige, for praise, for success (see 1.18.28-29), searching for a professorship, ultimately an imperial professorship (5.13.23; 6.6.9-10). I threw everything away, even my family, in the service of ambition. I sent my common law wife, whom I loved dearly, away (see 6.13.23; 6.15.25), broke up my family, gave myself over to lust while awaiting an advantageous liaison which had to be delayed, meanwhile fornicating with another woman. I threw away your inestimable gift to me of myself, it turns out, for absolutely nothing. Yet you gave it back, recreated as though from nothing! You restored the gift! Thank you so much! Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you!

This kind of story is really hard to brag about because you have to admit that you screwed up, and not just a little bit but totally, and in pursuit of smoke and mirrors, nothing, instead of God. And yet, “You gave it back to me, you gave myself back to me, and along with it the ability to tell the story truly, even though it will cost me.” That is confession. Confession of my sin and confession of God’s mercy, unto praise: “You are my salvation, Lord!”

4. But even with grace, how does one tell a story like that? In Book Two, Augustine lays out what I would call the narrative problem of Confessions. How do you tell a story about a descent into meaninglessness, a descent into futility, a descent into self-destruction, a descent which is wholly irrational? How do you tell a story about something that is completely irrational without, by the very narration, providing a connective logic, making the irrational seem rational? To tell a story about something implies narrative coherence, a kind of rationality. And not only does narration make the story of descent into self-destruction seem rational, such narration would thereby be self-justifying. You are saying, implicitly, that it was not so bad, I did not fall so far, it is understandable, there was rhyme or reason to it.

Augustine introduces Book Two this way:

Now I want to call to mind the foul deeds I committed, those sins of the flesh that corrupted my soul, not in order to love them, but to love you, my God. Out of love for loving you I do this, recalling my most wicked ways and thinking over the past with bitterness so that you may grow ever sweeter to me; for you are a sweetness that deceives not, a sweetness blissful and serene. I will try now to give a coherent account of my disintegrated self, for when I turned away from you, the one God, and pursued a multitude of things, I went to pieces (2.1.1).

See the narrative problem? How do you give a “coherent account” of a disintegration, a coherent account of a disintegrated person? Something that is disintegrated has no coherence. So how do you give a coherent account of a descent into disintegration? There is no rhyme or reason to such a thing, and the narrative problem is that, if I try to give an account of it, I am trying to show you that it was not as bad as it was, as though it were a little bit rational, and you can see why I did it.

Augustine begins to solve this problem in Book 2 by telling a little parable, the famous story of the theft of pears, of going out in the night with a bunch of maybe fifteen-year-old guys, and sneaking around to steal some pears from some landowner while he is asleep, not even to keep the pears, but just to do something evil with impunity. He examines this memory minutely. Many commentators, including Nietzsche, have decided that Augustine was overblowing it, psychologizing it, or turning it into an act of show-off rhetoric.[3] All these strategies are mistaken. What is he trying to do by examining this incident? It is a small sin, but for that reason he can put sin in general under his analytical microscope. The key point is that he did it for nothing.

So why did he do it? I had a lot better pears at home, he says; we did not keep the pears, we just threw them to the pigs; we tasted one, but it was just so we could taste our own evil deed. He says, in other words, that they did the evil because it was evil, because it was forbidden. They got nothing out of it. It is a small sin, but it allows a little bit of a window into the essence of sin. The essence of sin is irrational. There is no rational explanation for the origin of sin. That is why it is hard to give an account of a fall into sin. Reflecting further, Augustine poses the narrative problem very pointedly:

Look upon my heart, O God, look upon this heart of mine, on which you took pity in its abysmal depths. Enable my heart to tell you now what it was seeking in this action which made me bad for no reason, in which there was no motive for my malice except malice. The malice was loathsome, and I loved it. I was in love with my own ruin, in love with decay [amavi perire] (2.4.9).

To all philosophers who think that we pursue something evil because there is some good to be gained, Augustine seems to say, What good was I seeking here? That I “loved my own ruin?” That is simply a statement of the narrative problem, not of a possible good. Loving your own ruin is irrational. How do you tell a story about loving your own destruction without making it seem like a good in disguise, without making it seem rational to love even your own destruction by the very telling of the story?

Augustine starts to solve the problem in Book Two. He helps us recall—who else sins with fruit? Augustine evokes the story of Adam and Eve: “How like that servant of yours that fled and hid in the shadows?” (2.6.14), referring to Adam.

Augustine has another thought before he closes this book: he would not have done it alone, as he remembers (2.9.17). He did it because he was too ashamed, too embarrassed to say “No!” when one of the guys proposed the theft: “Let the others only say, ‘Come on, let’s go and do it!’ and I am ashamed to hold back from the shameless act” (ibid.). Like Adam and Eve, these boys tried to set up their own terms for existence. Adam is created by God; God gives him the terms for being Adam, a human, and he, in effect, just says, “Thanks, but no thanks! I’ll go at it alone and create my own terms.” This is what these guys are doing. They are creating their own rules, their own sphere of meaning, their own little society in defiance of society. They want praise on their own terms. They are creating a shadowy parody of omnipotence (2.6.14), a lie, a deception, as they could only do it at night when no one was watching.

How does Augustine manage the narrative problem here? He does it by saying that you can only tell a story about your own fall into decadence and disintegration without making it seem rational by telling it as part of a larger story, one which contains within it the principles of its own coherence, and does not depend upon another story.

You can look at the problem this way: how can something made from nothing tell a story, without depending on a bigger story? I am made from nothing, and if I try to tell a story about myself just from myself, it is like nothing trying to create out of nothing. The temptation of us prideful nothings, created out of nothing, is to try, like God but without God, to make something out of nothing, to tell a story in which we are our own principle, which has coherence on terms it creates for itself, and to hide the incoherence of such storytelling.

If you look back at Book One, as Augustine talks about his education, he shows us the kind of culture which tries fully to create the terms of its own coherence, of its own story, attempting to relativize anything, like beauty, which might be a rival principle of coherence. Augustine learned what beauty was partly by studying the “finely wrought, precious vessels” (1.16.26) of the words of the Aeneid, but he also learned from his teachers that what matters most is the prestige of speaking beautifully about such matters, especially when it accentuates the immorality of the characters involved as if that were a laudable end in itself. The conventional terms that define brilliant rhetoric replace the natural terms of coherence such as beauty and justice until one reaches the point where one is more embarrassed to mispronounce a word while arguing for the death of a defendant in court, while not being embarrassed at all in arguing, justly or unjustly, for the death of a fellow human being (1.18.29). Looking back from the end of Book Two, Augustine seems to comment, You know what such a culture looks like? It looks like a bunch of guys who went out at midnight to steal somebody’s pears and thought they were doing something wonderful, setting up the terms for a mutual admiration society while dismissing the larger terms of a just social order.

5. The fifth point is the solution of the problem, which was the fourth point. In order to provide narrative coherence to an inherently incoherent, irrational event without making it seem rational, you have to include it in a larger story that has fully within it the terms of its own coherence. The only one that qualifies is the biblical story of creation. Only in this story can the terms of the intrinsic incoherence of evil be revealed for what it is, namely, the irrational rejection of the terms of one’s own existence, which is one hundred percent a gift. There is a hint here in Book Two as to why the last books of Confessions take up the biblical creation story. What is it about this story that makes it cohere without reference to another story, and therefore makes a possibility for other stories to cohere, to be real stories, instead of just the accounts of nothing stammering self-justifying nothings?

6. In Books 3-7, we find counter-stories, stories which seem to offer coherent backing to narrations of evil. Augustine points out their inadequacy. Point six raises up one of these, namely, Manichaean myth. Augustine embraces Manichaeism in Book Three and does not entirely relinquish it until Book Six or even, one could argue, Book Seven. Manichaeism tells a story about where evil came from. The Manichees teach that God is good and evil is evil, two enduringly existing principles that constitute a dualistic cosmology. For all intents and purposes, this is a cosmology of perpetual conflict, the origin of which is beyond remembering and the future resolution indefinitely postponed, a mythological dream.[4] Does that work? Does the myth of Manichaeism, the story it tells, give all other stories ultimate coherence? Augustine discovers the hard way that it does not. Because what kind of story is permanent conflict? It is not really a story at all. But it does make it so I can justify my own evil doing as the outworking of a cosmic principle, the evil principle at work in my body that is not really “me.” And certainly to confess that God is somehow not as “great” as we had thought, and is limited eternally by an opposite principle, does not seem to be the praise of God we are looking to offer through our stories.

7. Point seven—what about philosophy? Very famously, when we get to Book Seven, Augustine narrates his encounter with Neoplatonic philosophy. It helps him overcome Manichaeism because it helps him “ascend” to an awareness of something truly incorporeal, something that is indeed “everywhere whole at once.” God is that being; he cannot be limited by evil. As we saw previewed in the Prologue, Platonic philosophy helps you ascend to a kind of contemplative state where you are beyond language and corporeal “picture-thinking.” Thus, it freed Augustine from the false story on offer in Manichaean myth (see 7.7.11-7.10.16).

But still, what about philosophy? Philosophy, one could say, is the claim to transcend story—period. I can ascend to a point where I have left stories behind. I come to realize that my essence is not bodily and historical, does not have to do with change; and in some sense is God. So the person who has achieved philosophical wisdom, to the extent that one can, has transcended all stories, or at least stories with any ultimate stake in history, though there may be philosophical stories, myths that symbolically express various aspects of the ascent to the incorporeal wisdom that leaves behind the body that acts in history.

How is that for the solution? Is that the way to make all stories with a stake in historical reality coherent? Or, is this just a way of proclaiming that one has transcended the body and all stories invested in historical reality as though history were not mere becoming but could have ultimate meaning? In fact, because it does not work in securing the story, philosophy, you could say, as the greatest cultural achievement, the greatest achievement of human wisdom, presents an unbearable temptation to the fallen person. After all, what is not to like about such a contemplative vision of God? Plotinus ascended to this contemplative vision of God, and Augustine claims that he succeeds also in making this ascent. Even though he could not cling to the vision, it is still an amazing accomplishment to have seen That Which Is, being itself. He could be tempted to say, “Listen, I have made the ascent to God. I have seen God. Have you? Now come and learn from me (for I am meek and humble of heart—not)!” The temptation is more unbearable the closer you get, the more perfected you seem to become, the temptation, then, to claim wisdom for oneself, as one’s own achievement, to say, “I am wise—listen to me, look at me, come learn from me!” We were offered a fleeting glimpse of that temptation in the Prologue, where Augustine tried out a philosophical way of praising God. This temptation is narrated more explicitly in Book Seven. This was a foretaste of what happens in Book 7:

All other things I saw to have their being from you, and for this I needed but one unassailable proof—the fact that they exist. On these points I was quite certain, but I was far too weak to enjoy you. Yet I readily chattered as though skilled in the subject, and had I not been seeking your way in Christ our Savior I would more probably have been killed than skilled. For I had already begun to covet a reputation for wisdom (7.20.26).

But since Augustine wanted a more stable contemplative vision than he had hitherto been able to achieve, he kept seeking and in doing so, a story crept in which got past his philosophical defenses:

Accordingly I looked for a way to gain the strength I needed to enjoy you, but I did not find it until I embraced the mediator between God and humankind, the man Christ Jesus, who is also God. . . . [F]or the Word became flesh so that your Wisdom, through whom you created all things, might become for us the milk adapted to our infancy. . . . In these lower regions he has built himself a humble dwelling from our clay, and used it to cast down from their pretentious selves those who do not bow before him, and make a bridge to bring them to himself. He heals their swollen pride and nourishes their love . . . as they see before their feet the Godhead grown weak by sharing our garments of skin, and wearily fling themselves down upon him, so that he may arise and lift them up (7.18.24).

The story that sneaks into Augustine’s heart is the story of Incarnation. Augustine hopes that as we read, it sneaks past the reader’s defenses too. He pictures a cultured person, seeking praise for all the items on his CV, praise for mastering the knowledge he has, which includes the highest knowledge, namely, of God, trying to impress whomever he can. Perhaps the story of the Incarnation reaches him and he glances down from the mental heights, as it were, and realizes, “Woah, you’re down there? Wisdom? How’d you get there?” Well, the story says he bent down, that’s how; he bent down in humility, all the way to the very flesh the Platonists try to flee, the flesh with all its jumble of stories. Such a person might just be tempted to venture a surreptitious “Thank-you!”

8. If point seven was that philosophy is not the solution, point eight tracks Book Eight, which takes an alternative tack. Book Eight is a low-prestige book, in comparison to the high-prestige, philosophical Book Seven. Book Eight is just a bunch of stories. The first one is about the conversion of the illustrious philosopher Marius Victorinus, who tells the bishop Simplicianus that, after studying the Scriptures, he is already a Christian. Simplicianus says he will not believe it until he sees him in church. Victorinus asks him if it is the four walls, then, that make a Christian (8.2.4). He was afraid to publicly break ranks with the cultured pagan elite:

But later he drank in courage from his avid reading and came to fear that he might be disowned by Christ before his holy angels if he feared to confess him before men and women (ibid. see Mark 8:38).

Under the influence of grace (see 8.4.9), Victorinus goes to church and publicly receives baptism with a whole lot of common, uneducated folk, but he no longer cares; he just does it, self-forgetfully. As he is baptized, everyone in Church is clapping; they know how prestigious he is, and yet there he is with the ordinary folk of the Church, bending humbly down like the Word Incarnate (8.2.5).

Book Eight is a series of conversion stories. At the heart of all of them is, one way or another, the Incarnation, the story that steals into one’s heart in the mysterious, undetectable, and therefore unclaimable way that is grace. Finally, we get Augustine’s own story, prepared for by all the previous stories, all of which are much like the stories we tell each other even now—“This is what happened to me! This is how I came to believe!” “This is how I returned to the faith!” “This is what God means to me.” Augustine tells us how, having reached a point of broken-heartedness and desolation and running away even from his friend Alypius, he cries his heart out. Such desperation is hardly the stuff of prestige. Nor was the moment of conversion. It was not an intellectual achievement, a hard-won insight or an idea, but rather a low-prestige, seemingly accidental, trivial event. Augustine heard some kid singing, interpreted it as a sign to pick up the Bible, and applied the first passage he lit on to himself (8.12.29). This is not something he can brag about or claim to his credit or praise in any way. No, his newfound freedom was called forth by God’s grace in an instant (see 9.1.1). And it was all stories such as these that prompted his conversion, all stories bearing witness to God’s saving greatness.

9. The ninth point is that Augustine’s conversion terminates ecclesially, in Baptism. In Book Nine we have another collection of “low prestige” stories, stories of the lives and deaths of friends and family members all intertwined with a larger story of Augustine’s newfound ecclesial life, his Baptism with son Adeodatus and friend Alypius (9.6.14), his experience of individual prayer (9.4.8-11), miracles (9.4.12; 9.7.16), and hymn-singing at liturgy (9.7.15), and finally of Monica’s life, death, and Eucharistic practice (9.13.36). There is also an account of a conversation between Monica and Augustine, shortly before Monica’s death, at the port city of Ostia (9.10.23-26). Augustine and Monica are talking about what heaven might be like. In their conversation they famously “ascend” to a brief glimpse of Wisdom incorporeal and eternal. The narrative is patterned after the ascent to vision Augustine reported in Book Seven.

The vision is only fleeting, as before, but there is a difference. Augustine and Monica experienced this vision together, and not in silent contemplation but while they were talking. The vision comes out of the self-forgetfulness, the humility, that permits this implausible conversation to happen, implausible because Augustine and Monica are so different, one a man, highly educated and young, the other a woman, barely educated and older. Augustine could hold out for more prestigious company in which to share most eloquently his glittering philosophical insights and Monica could very well hold back in deference—but they are so absorbed in the price of our redemption, the innocent blood of Christ so precious it could never be reimbursed (see 9.13.36)— that they forget all considerations of status and speak unabashedly with each other out of their ardent love. It is the conversation that is visionary. It is not a contemplative vision achieved in interior isolation apart from the life of the Church, but a conversation animated directly out of the ecclesial bonds of communion in which they are now both joined. Vision terminates, in this life, in the Church. The Church generates a culture of storytelling, of witnessing, of confessing and hearing confession, of remembering, and of expectation grounded in remembering the great bending down in compassion of the Word made flesh. It is this low-prestige, simple ecclesial culture that is vision-bearing, not isolated moments “above” these stories, which leave behind the story of Christ’s most precious blood shed for us as something to be outgrown.

10. All the stories in Books Eight and Nine are acts of remembering. In Book Ten, Augustine attempts to give an account of memory as the principle of the coherence of all these stories and of his own. Perhaps, contemplating memory, he will “ascend” to an awareness of a capacity of the mind itself which bears the presence of a memory of God that transcends all stories and is simply eternally present if, as Plato thought, “forgotten,” a memory that transcends these stories with all their turmoil. “Ascending” once again (10.6.8-7.11) Augustine does arrive “in the fields and vast mansions of memory” (10.8.12), a capacity of the mind that is “exceedingly great” (10.8.15), in fact it is no less than the mind itself (10.14.21). Can I ascend past my mind (10.17.26) to a memory of a happy life I have lost in Adam?, Augustine asks. No, but he does find an awareness of Truth in his mind, without which there could be no thought at all, and God is Truth (10.24.35), above his mind, where he learned to know him (10.24.35) and is therefore now “in” his memory, though in a way transcending space (reminiscent of 1.2.2-3.3). God is not “in” a place, even an interior space. “Late have I loved you, Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! Lo, you were within but I outside, seeking there for you!” (10.37.38). God is not safely enclosed in an “inside” space called memory or any “outside” space either, nor conveniently located as something stored up inside from the past. Memory is “nothing other than my very self” (10.17.26), it is self-awareness. Awareness of God “in” the mind or memory is awareness of oneself in truth, self-awareness in truth, and that means in regret (Late have I loved thee!) and in the struggle of ongoing conversion (10.28.39). It means awareness of incompleteness, of continually falling short, in truth a load of misery (10.43.70).[5]

Augustine does not find in his own remembering a stable principle of coherence, but rather finds himself desperately seeking for one, for a memory, a remembering, that can bring coherence to memory itself, to his remembering, to self-awareness, which even in confession is tempted to border on obsession:

Filled with terror by my sins and my load of misery I had been turning over in my mind a plan to flee into solitude, but you forbade me, and strengthened me by your words. “To this end Christ died for all,” you reminded me, “that they who are alive might not live for themselves, but for him who died for them” (2 Cor 5:15, 10.43.70).

He was not told to seek a “place” transcending stories, but to remember one, the price of his redemption, the never reimbursable precious blood of Christ, revealing irreducibly God’s mercy, and he obeys. Obsession becomes confession remembering that Your only Son, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Col 2:3), has redeemed me with his blood . . . I am mindful of my ransom. I eat of it, I drink it, and I dispense it to others (ibid.). It is the Eucharist, the efficacious making present of a story from the past, the price of our redemption, that is the deepest remembering available to us. Eating it and drinking it shapes the coherence of our own self-awareness (our “memory”), so that the stories we tell cohere as confession of God’s mercy, his greatly praiseworthy greatness. We are most truly self-aware in such confession.

11. What about Books 11-13? From the Eucharist as in a way our most archaic (ever ancient) and yet most present (ever new) memory, underwriting the coherence of remembering itself, we can move on to the story behind all true stories, the story of creation, the story that is by definition “earlier,” or at least deeper, than any of our memories could naturally reach. It must be revealed. In a way, it is the essence of pride to think we can remember our own creation. We try to impose on the story of creation terms of coherence of our own making. In exploring the terms of coherence of the creation story as revealed in Genesis 1:1-2:3, Augustine is travelling as it were to the root and presupposition of the ability to tell any story which can claim objective meaning and truth, including his own, as opposed to bootlegged stories invested in one way or another in self-creation and self-justification amounting to no more than the nothing they came from.

Augustine begins his exploration of Gen. 1:1-2:3 from the perspective of Eucharistic remembering established in Book Ten.[6] How do we read it from that perspective? Is it an account of something in the past?

Book 11 takes up that very question. What does Gen. 1:1 mean when it says, “In the beginning?” Does it mean that this story of creation has coherence because of time, because it started at some point and so hangs together temporally, in the same manner that our stories do? Augustine’s answer is No, for the more you consider time, the more you realize the past does not exist, the future does not exist yet, and the present is only a vanishing moment of passing from the non-existence of the future to the non-existence of the past (11.14.17). The more one contemplates time, the more one realizes it can provide no ultimate principle of coherence. Dependence on time is dependence on vanishing from non-existence into non-existence. Whatever depends on time is essentially nothing, unless God makes it something. So we cannot impose time on the narrative of creation as that which makes it cohere as a story. The word “beginning” is actually a reference to God’s Word, his Son, his eternal Wisdom in which, timelessly, is the beginning of time itself (11.9.11). It is this Wisdom in which the story of creation has coherence.

12. What about space? Could that be the principle of coherence of the creation story? In Book Twelve, Augustine gets only through verse 2: In the beginning God made heaven and earth,” where one could conceive heaven and earth as spatial terms, because the earth was invisible and unorganized and darkness lured over the abyss (Gen 1:1-2). Yet it turns out that these are entirely non-spatial terms. Heaven refers to the incorporeal intellectual beings, the angels, who contemplate God unwaveringly and timelessly. They are the heaven of heaven, the heaven “above” the earthly heavens (see Ps. 113:16; 12.2.2), while earth, invisible and unorganized, is the unformed matter from which the physical heaven and earth were formed by God (12.12.15). Unformed matter, “the absolute privation of form” (ibid.) is basically pure potential (see 12.19.28), which is more than nothing since there is no potential in nothing, but since it is formless, it is changeless and so outside of time and cannot be imagined spatially. It serves as a substrate for myths such as the Manichees devise, founding stories of an eternally existing challenge to God (see 12.6.6 which presents this distorted view of unformed matter). There is no “space” for such a challenge.

Neither space nor time can provide the principles of coherence of the story of creation. From Book 11 we already know it is Divine Wisdom in which the story coheres. In Book 12, the heaven of heavens is not Divine Wisdom, but is a kind of wisdom, created wisdom, the intellectual order of being which by contemplating the Light becomes light itself . . . the first of all creatures (12.15.20), the heavenly Jerusalem. Created wisdom is wise by participation in Divine Wisdom. It exists outside of time, as a kind of unflinching eternal sacrifice, a sacrifice of praise, a kind of eternal confession, timelessly resisting the temptation to embrace a prideful narrative of self-creation. We humans are on pilgrimage (12.11.13) to this city.

13. Finally, Book 13, where Augustine does something that could seem completely implausible. He narrates the story of the six days of creation as though it were the story of redemption. Put differently, he treats it as an allegory for the story of redemption, and specifically for its goal, the creation of the Church (13.12.13).

When I first read the Confessions I thought, that is just absolutely ridiculous; there is no way that story of creation in Gen. 1:1-2:3 “means” the story of the Church. This kind of eisegesis is what gives patristic interpretation of the Bible a bad name! But is it really so implausible? To narrate the story of redemption though narration of the story of creation means the story of redemption is in some way the story of creation, and vice versa. Whatever makes the story of redemption cohere, reveals what makes the story of creation cohere. Even more strongly, the claim is that it is only from the perspective of redemption that we can truly understand the story of creation, see it stripped of all the ways we try to re-narrate it to suit our own pride.

Let there be light! (Gen 1:3) is literally God’s command, yet outside of time and space, that the newly created spiritual creation as yet unformed, turn to their Beginning in the Word and Wisdom of God, and become formed as created light in the contemplation of God’s wisdom. From the “moment” of that command, they give themselves over in obedience (13.3.4; 13.8.9). Their creation as light is coincident with their own (graced) self-gift in response to the Word.

But can that command, uttered outside of time, be heard now? Or must we try to “remember” it—as though it were in the past, and as though we were unfallen and could “remember” such a thing? That is the temptation of pride. But, because the “Beginning” in which it was timelessly uttered, God’s Word, enters time with the Incarnation, we can “remember,” in fact we can hear it. Though we had plunged ourselves into the dark abyss of sin,

. . . your mercy did not forsake us in our misery, for your Spirit hovered over the water; and you said, Let there be light; repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, repent, and let there be light (Gen 1:3, Matt 3:2; 4:17). And because our souls were deeply disquieted within themselves we remembered you, O Lord, from our muddy Jordan; we called you to mind in that mountain which, though lofty as yourself, was brought low for us (Ps. 41.6-7). Disgusted with our darkness, we were converted to you, and light dawned. See now, we who once were darkness are now light in the Lord (see Eph 5:8; 2 Cor 4:6; 13.12.13).

We hear the command Let there be light in the preaching of the Gospel of repentance by the Incarnate Word. His mercy speaks to us. This is not a different command than the “original.” It is that very command. The Church is, as it were, the sacrament of that command. We may try to picture the “original,” but all we will succeed in doing is imagining something that flatters our pride, that re-narrates the “original” story as though we had written it in categories of our own making, thus cutting down the “original” to our size and liking, “presumption” instead of “confession” (7.20.26).

We readers have seen what that looks like as Augustine confessed his attempt to “create” himself through seeking praise and prestige. But the Spirit hovers over the waters of our (self-imposed) formless state in the waters of Baptism. He enables us to hear the command Let there be light as the proclamation of God’s mercy in the unmerited condescension of the Incarnation.

Calling to mind the humiliation of the Beginning, we see the Beginning, as he was “then.” But it is our pride that projects the creation story into our imaginations as a “then” and thinks of the Beginning as essentially “before” and “somewhere else,” safely different and distant from him as revealed in the Incarnation. In the Spirit, we are moved to stop projecting these words into an abyss of irrelevance. We are prompted to repentance. Becoming light in the Lord, our whole baptized being is saturated with the light of his mercy. We find our coherence as God’s creation.

Nor is the story of this mercy eventually to be displaced by something more “spiritual,” something “higher,” a story-less philosophical self-awareness. Instead, we are to eat it and drink it and serve it and in so doing, remember and confess, You are my salvation, Lord (see 1.5.5). There is no abstract mercy and no outgrowing God’s mercy. We learn to be willing to grow as “little ones,” nurtured in the ordinary life of the Church, on Scripture (13.15.16), the works of mercy (13.17.21-18.22), the preaching and miracle stories (13.20.26-28), and ultimately on the Eucharist (13.21-29), nourishment for the living soul and the human being made in God’s image and never to be set aside even by the most “spiritual” person (see 13.23.34).

Thus the allegory proceeds, along the path of spiritual growth in the Church, until it gets to Let us make man according to our image and likeness (Gen 1:26; 13.22.32). At this point, something extraordinary happens:

You, O God, did not say, “Let there be man, according to his kind,” but Let us make man according to our image and likeness (Gen 1:26), for you meant us to discern your will for ourselves. Such was your steward’s aim in urging, Allow yourselves to be reformed by the renewal of your minds, that you may be able to discern what is God’s will, what is good and pleasing to him and perfect (Rom. 12.2), for while he had begotten children through the gospel (see 1 Cor 4:15), he did not want them to remain forever babies whom he must feed on milk and care for like a nurse (see 1 Cor 3:1-2; 1 Thess 2:7; 13.22.32).

What is extraordinary about this passage is that at this point the story of creation and its allegory in the story of redemption coincide. There is no “space” between them. Of course, that is because there never was any in the first place. But thus it is evident that the whole point of the creation story is the creation of the maturely loving person, formed fully in the mercy of the Creator, able to judge out of gratitude for the free gift of ourselves (see 1.20.31), a good gift of creation and not, as the Manichees think, as a declension from the good. The whole point of the creation of man is the creation of the ecclesial person who has been as it were “eucharistized” permanently and can judge from the perspective of Eucharistic memory (see 13.23.34). For only from that perspective can we see the meaning of “God saw that it was exceedingly good” (see Gen 1:31; 13.28.43), and truly confess, against any competing story, that indeed all of creation is good. At that point, we are seeing creation through the eyes of the Spirit which had mercifully hovered over our waters (13.30.45-31.46), “because the love of God has been poured out into our [restless] hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom 5:5, 13.31.46, adjusted). We are only then truly able to judge without being judgmental.

And only then can we truly “rest” in the praise of God. For, when I look around all of creation, what do I see? I see the price of my redemption. Where did all of this come from? It came from the blood of Christ revealed as the price of creation. “Remembering” creation, seeing it from a Eucharistic perspective, I can see where everything came from, where I came from—God’s love. Everything we see around us came from God’s love, expressed as gratuitous mercy in the mountain brought low for us (13.12.13), all exceedingly good.

Now we can truly confess, magnus es domine et laudabilis valde, You are great, O Lord, and greatly worthy of praise! (1.1.1). Why? Because now when we look around, we see his blood, we see the price of redemption, and we want to say “Thank-you!” for everything, “Thank you for creating me! I hated myself for a long time trying not to accept myself as a gift from you, trying instead to be you, to re-narrate my creation as my own doing, committing myself to incoherence. But you rescued me from such self-hatred and I see now that I am your good gift!”

So many young people today are anxious because our culture peddles stories of self-creation in prestigious careers as what gives lives their coherence. They “learn” they are not worth much otherwise at school. O hellish river, human children clutching their fees are still pitched into you! (1.16.26). What the Confessions has to tell us is that cultural prestige is not what makes you worth something. It is the blood of Christ, poured out for you—for us—that makes us all worth something. We are able, first as nurslings but eventually as grown men and women, to see these proposed stories as bankrupt from the start, paths to incoherence and self-loathing. We learn what it is that enables there to be true stories, the Wisdom of God revealed as mercy and love underwriting the very possibility of storytelling.

And so we are able more and more to say “Thank you! Let there be light! Let me become light! Let me become one continuous ‘Thank-you,’ my very self-awareness an unending confession of grateful praise, and there let my grateful heart rest!”

And so we get to the meaning of life according to St. Augustine. It is nothing more—but nothing less—than learning to say “Thank-you!” better and better, more and more, always and everywhere, because this too is your gift to me—that I exist (1.20.31)!

EDITORIAL NOTE: An earlier version of this article was given as a lecture at the St. Irenaeus Institute in Milwaukee, WI.