Confessions

What It Is

Thirteen books of Latin, written between about AD 397 and 400, when Augustine was in his mid-forties and newly a bishop in a provincial North African town, under pressure to account for a past his enemies were happy to keep raising.

What he produced is not a memoir, and readers who expect one are disoriented within a page. The whole book is a prayer. Augustine is talking to God throughout, and the reader is not the addressee but a bystander who happens to be in the room. The Latin word confessio carries both meanings the book needs at once: the admission of sin, and the profession of praise.

The first nine books look back over a life. The last four change register entirely, and turn to memory, to time, and to scripture. The shape of the book is deliberate, and it is the thing most first-time readers are not warned about.

Why It Matters

Augustine invented the inside of the head as a subject for literature. Before him, nobody in the West had written like this about their own mind: the will divided against itself, the motive under the motive, memory as a vast building you can walk around in and get lost. Ancient autobiography records deeds. This records the moment before the deed, and finds it far more interesting.

Everything downstream depends on it. Rousseau took the title and the method and dropped the God. Montaigne, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Proust, Freud and the entire modern memoir industry are all working in a space Augustine opened, whether they know it or not. So is every reader who has ever asked why they did something they had already decided not to do.

He is also the most influential theologian in Western Christianity, and the ideas that made him so are worked out here in the first person. But the simplest reason to read him is this: he cares more about why he did a thing than about the thing itself, and the effect is unnerving. A fourth-century North African turns out to know more about your evasions than you would like him to.

Before You Read

Three hundred pages, ten to twelve hours, and it should be slow. The sentences are not difficult. The thinking is, and it will not be hurried.

The last four books are where most first-time readers give up, because the life story stops and the philosophy starts. Do not skip them, but do not grind either: read Book 10, on memory, and Book 11, on time, which is one of the finest pieces of philosophical writing in existence, then move lightly through 12 and 13 and come back another year.

Two things help. Knowing roughly what the Manichees taught and what the Neoplatonists meant by the immaterial, which any decent introduction supplies. And knowing that Augustine quotes the Psalms constantly, half-consciously, the way a musician quotes tunes. Once you hear it, the prose changes.

Which Translation to Read

• Henry Chadwick (Oxford World's Classics, 1991) — recommended. The best all-round Confessions in English. Chadwick was a historian of the early church and an Anglican priest, and he is unmatched on what Augustine is actually claiming and who he is arguing with; his notes catch the scriptural echoes other editions let pass. The cost: Chadwick is cool. He is slightly wordy, and where Augustine burns, Chadwick explains. View on Amazon →
• Maria Boulding (New City Press, 1997; also Vintage Spiritual Classics). The warmest version, and the one that best catches the fact that the book is a prayer. Read aloud, it is superb. The cost: the register is devotional, which will suit some readers and put others off, and the popular printing is light on scholarly apparatus.
• Sarah Ruden (Modern Library, 2017). The boldest. Ruden refuses the churchy English of four centuries of translation, rendering dominus as master and restoring the noise and physicality of Augustine's Latin. It will shake you out of any familiarity you thought you had. The cost: idiosyncratic enough that it works better as a second reading than a first.

Take Chadwick to understand the book, Boulding to be moved by it, Ruden to be unsettled by it. F. J. Sheed's version of 1942, reissued by Hackett with an introduction by Peter Brown, still turns the best phrases of any of them.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it aloud, at least in parts. It was written by a professional rhetorician who taught public speaking for a living, and the rhythm is not decoration; the arguments are built into the cadence.

Hold on to the fact that you are eavesdropping. When Augustine asks a question, he is not asking you, and he is not asking rhetorically. He genuinely does not know, and he is putting the question to someone he believes is listening. Read it that way and the strangeness of the book, which is its whole power, stays intact.

Read Chadwick's introduction afterwards; it takes the entire work in view. Then read Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo, one of the great biographies in English, which will send you straight back into this one.