1We now need to look at the Confessions from a religious angle, which means we focus on how the soul returns to God. This requires us to focus on the role of Christ incarnate (the end of book 7), the indispensability of the Church (book 8), the shape of the Christian life (book 10), the meaning and interpretation of the Scriptures (book 12) and what Christians really mean by “going to heaven” (book 13). In particular, Augustine’s famous conversion comes under consideration here as a discovery about the indispensability of the Church, brought on by a recognition of the inadequacy of the Platonist vision, the weakness of human will, and the insufficiency of mere private belief.
Objectives:
1. Explain the role of Christ incarnate in Augustine’s account of the soul’s return to God.
2. Discuss the motives and meaning of Augustine’s conversion.
3. Explain Augustine’s concept of inner conflict.
4. Describe the role of books and reading in Augustine’s conversion.
5. Summarize Augustine’s view of the three basic forms of temptation.
6. Explain Augustine’s famous saying, “My will is my weight.”
Outline
I. Where Christ comes in (Confessions 7:18.24-21-27).
A. As God, Christ is the Goal, as man he is the Way.
B. A momentary glimpse of God is not enough: we need a way home.
C. The Incarnation is the humility of God stooping to show us the way out of our sin and pride.
D. Christ can only be found in His body, the Church.
E. The Augustinian theme of Reason and Authority—what we understand without minds and what we believe by faith in the divine and authoritative teachings of the Church.
II. Augustine’s conversion (Confessions 8)
A. A growing sense of crisis leads to Augustine’s conversion.
1. Temporary skepticism: no longer a Manichaean but not yet a Catholic, young Augustine adopts a position of skepticism (5:14.25).
2. Many years of delay: it has been about a dozen years since reading the Hortensius, and he still has not dedicated his life to seek wisdom! (6: 11.18).
3. The need for free time: how can he pursue philosophy when he has no time to read and think but has to spend his time teaching rhetoric----merely empty words! (6:11.18).
4. No more excuses: his present mode of life comes to seem increasingly untenable and inexcusable.
5. The key obstacle: he is engaged to be married, has sent away his concubine, but can’t give up sex–and so takes another concubine while he is waiting to marry an underage Christian heiress (6:13.23-15.25).
B. Do walls make a Christian? Augustine hears the story of Victorinus, a rhetorician and philosopher who converted to the Christian faith and discovered that private belief was not enough: he needs to enter the walls of the Church and be baptized (8:2.3-5)1
C. The Problem of Will
1. The will in self-conflict: Augustine wants to dedicate his whole heart to the pursuit of wisdom, but he can’t give up his sexual habit. He dramatizes this problem as an inner conflict between two competing wills (8:8.19-9.21).
2. His famous half-hearted prayer at the time was: “Lord, give me continence, but not yet!” (8:7.17).
3. The chain of habit: it is as if his own will had made of itself a chain with which to bind itself (8:5.10).
4. I but not I: his new, good will was true self, but it was not strong enough to overcome habits of his old will—which was his own fault.
D. Stories about books: Pontitianus tells Augustine about how reading a Christian book changed his life (8:6.13-15).
E. “Take and read”: in the famous scene in the garden of Milan, Augustine hears a voice tell him “take and read”; he snatches up the writings of the apostle Paul, reads the first passage he lays eyes on, and suddenly he is converted.
F. The results
1. He tastes the sweetness of grace: suddenly it is easy and sweet to will what is right, and the chains of old habit drop.
2. He quits his teaching job to go into full time research.
3. He envisions a new future as a full-time seeker of truth.
4. He is finally ready to get baptized.
5. He has discovered the way back to the vision of God, a way consisting of Christ, Church and Scriptures: the inner vision of our heavenly home has been supplemented with an external way to take on our journey home.
III. Augustine on his present situation (Confessions 10)
A. The memory of God.
1. Having caught a glimpse of God with his mind’s eye, (in Confessions 7) he can now love the real God, instead of a figment of his imagination (10:6.8).
2. Augustine’s love for God is based on a memory of that vision: hence he launches into a long inquiry into the nature of memory, asking how it is that we can remember God (10:7.11-26.37).
3. His conclusion is that we all remember the happy life we once had with God, presumably before our souls were in this body (10:20.29-24.35)2
B. The hinge on which the whole Confessions turn comes in the middle of book 10: “Late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new. For behold, you were within, but I was without” (10: 27.38).
C. After this point, Augustine looks forward to the rest of his life on earth as a journey full of temptations and spends the second half of book 10 discussing the temptations of this mortal life (following the formula of 1st John 2:16).
1. “The lust of the flesh”: each of the five senses offers it own temptations.
2. “The lust of the eyes”: idle curiosity.
3. “The pride of life”: pride as the deepest sin of all.
D. At the end of book 10, Augustine again focuses on Christ (10:48.68).
1. His humility counters our pride
2. In his humility he shares our mortality.
3. His righteousness counters our sin.
4. In his humility he shares his righteousness with us sinners.
5. Hence the end of book 10 echoes the “hinge”: “How you have loved us, O Father, who spared not your only Son but gave him up for us sinners—how you have loved us!” (10:47.68).
IV. Interpreting Genesis (Confessions 11-13)
A. Why interpret Genesis?
1. To understand God’s Creation (versus the Manichaean view that earthly existence is evil).
2. To understand the cosmos in which our soul’s journey takes place
3. To understand the beginning helps us understand the end: our goal is related to our origin, our end is related to our beginning.
B. Our heavenly home
1. Augustine discovers hints of our heavenly home (the “heaven of heavens”) in Genesis 12:1.1-16.23).
2. Augustine’s famous saying, “My will is my weight” (13:9.10), is meant to explain how our loves drive us in whatever direction we go—up to heaven or down to earth.
3. Our will comes to rest in what makes us ultimately happy. Our hearts are restless until that happens—i.e., until we rest in God (1:1.1)!
Must Read:
Augustine, Confessions, books 8 and 10.
Brown, Augustine of Hippo, chapter 16
Other Reading
Augustine, Confessions, books 11-13
O’Connell, Sounding in St. Augustine’s Imagination, chapters 1-3 (images of coming home in Augustine).
O’Connell, Augustine, chapter 5 (particularly good on Confessions, books 10 and 11-13).
O’Meara, Young Augustine, chapters 11 and 12 (a study of Augustine’s conversion).
And a Couple of Questions?
1. Have you ever tried to do something wholeheartedly and failed? What happened? Does Augustine’s description of self-conflict explain it?
2. What would it be like, really, to love God? Does Augustine help us understand that?
1Once again, this was before the invention of infant baptism or as some modern religions advocate, no baptism at all.
2It then becomes unavoidable to think anything other than Augustine believed in some form of reincarnation. Probably inherited from his Platonic thought.