The Confessions of St. Augustine

Translated by Edward E. Pusey

Contents

Introductory Note

The First Book

Confessions of the greatness and unsearchableness of God, of God’s mercies in infancy and boyhood, and human wilfulness; of his own sins of idleness, abuse of his studies, and of God’s gifts up to his fifteenth year.

The Second Book

Object of these Confessions. Further ills of idleness developed in his sixteenth year. Evils of ill society, which betrayed him into theft.

The Third Book

His residence at Carthage from his seventeenth to his nineteenth year. Source of his disorders. Love of shows. Advance in studies, and love of wisdom. Distaste for Scripture. Led astray to the Manichæans. Refutation of some of their tenets. Grief of his mother Monnica at his heresy, and prayers for his conversion. Her vision from God, and answer through a Bishop.

The Fourth Book

Augustine’s life from nineteen to eight-and-twenty; himself a Manichæan, and seducing others to the same heresy; partial obedience amidst vanity and sin, consulting astrologers, only partially shaken herein; loss of an early friend, who is converted by being baptised when in a swoon; reflections on grief, on real and unreal friendship, and love of fame; writes on “the fair and fit,” yet cannot rightly, though God had given him great talents, since he entertained wrong notions of God; and so even his knowledge he applied ill.

The Fifth Book

St. Augustine’s twenty-ninth year. Faustus, a snare of Satan to many, made an instrument of deliverance to St. Augustine, by showing the ignorance of the Manichees on those things wherein they professed to have divine knowledge. Augustine gives up all thought of going further among the Manichees: is guided to Rome and Milan, where he hears St. Ambrose, leaves the Manichees, and becomes again a Catechumen in the Church Catholic.

The Sixth Book

Arrival of Monnica at Milan; her obedience to St. Ambrose, and his value for her; St. Ambrose’s habits; Augustine’s gradual abandonment of error; finds that he has blamed the Church Catholic wrongly; desire of absolute certainty, but struck with the contrary analogy of God’s natural Providence; how shaken in his worldly pursuits; God’s guidance of his friend Alypius; Augustine debates with himself and his friends about their mode of life; his inveterate sins, and dread of judgment.

The Seventh Book

Augustine’s thirty-first year; gradually extricated from his errors, but still with material conceptions of God; much aided by an argument of Nebridius; sees that the cause of sin lies in free-will, rejects the Manichæan heresy, but can not altogether embrace the doctrine of the Church; recovered from the belief in Astrology, but miserably perplexed about the origin of evil; is led to find in the Platonists the seeds of the doctrine of the Divinity of the Word, but not of His humiliation; hence he obtains clearer notions of God’s majesty, but, not knowing Christ to be the Mediator, remains estranged from Him; all his doubts removed by the study of Holy Scripture, especially St. Paul.

The Eighth Book

Augustine’s thirty-second year. He consults Simplicianus: from him hears the history of the conversion of Victorinus, and longs to devote himself entirely to God, but is mastered by his old habits; is still further roused by the history of St. Antony, and the conversion of two courtiers; during a severe struggle hears a voice from heaven, opens Scripture, and is converted, with his friend Alypius. His mother’s vision fulfilled.

The Ninth Book

Augustine determines to devote his life to God, and to abandon his profession of Rhetoric, quietly however; retires to the country to prepare himself to receive the grace of Baptism, and is baptised with Alypius, and his son Adeodatus. At Ostia, in his way to Africa, his mother Monnica dies, in her fifty-sixth year, the thirty-third of Augustine. Her life and character.

The Tenth Book

Having in the former books spoken of himself before his receiving the grace of Baptism, in this Augustine confesses what he then was. But first, he enquires by what faculty we can know God at all, whence he enlarges on the mysterious character of the memory, wherein God, being made known, dwells, but which could not discover Him. Then he examines his own trials under the triple division of temptation, “lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and pride”; what Christian continency prescribes as to each. On Christ the Only Mediator, who heals and will heal all infirmities.