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Saint Augustine is, arguably, the second most important interpreter of the Christian faith after St. Paul. His literary contribution so affected the church in the West that we scarcely recognize his fingerprints on our lives anymore. No one in the western world can even think in such crucial fields as the nature of God, the soul, the church, the state, or even “religion” as such without (now usually unacknowledged) reference to Augustine. If his intellectual stature is indeed this great, then we can say that his Confessions is the most important Christian text outside the Bible itself. For it is Augustine’s greatest work, his most lasting contribution to both the church and western society more generally, the one without which even self-avowedly non-religious people would experience the world quite differently than they now do.1 If the Confessions feels familiar to us, it is because Augustine has so deeply affected the ways we think about the world—and more importantly, about God.

That is not to say that Confessions is read as often or as deeply now as it deserves. We contemporary Christians tend to try to satisfy our spiritual and intellectual palates with such coarse fare as may be offered at the local Christian bookstore, or on the “religion” shelf at the chain book outlet, all the while neglecting the vast bounty in our own churchly heritage that would supply far more in the way of solid food for the mature. I myself write as and for “evangelicals”—not the barbarians lampooned in the media—but more properly defined as those who cherish a deep respect for scripture and hold that the gospel must be preached to the ends of the earth. I also write as and for those who hold a “catholic”2 trust that God’s presence is mediated to us through quite material means: the flesh of Christ, bread, wine, water, liturgy, scripture, and, above all, the church. For me these concerns do not conflict with one another, but rather jointly push me toward a lifelong project of helping rediscover the riches of the ancient church’s heritage. Nor in these tenets am I alone. There seems to be a movement afoot among young Christians generally to draw deeply from the long-neglected wells of the “church fathers,” those Christian teachers much closer in years and in thought to the world of the bible than we. You have perhaps taken up this study guide because of similar beliefs (or through coercion by others who find them amenable!). My hope is that reading Confessions through the lenses offered in these short pages will both deepen your evangelical and catholic instincts, and challenge them through unfamiliar teaching that will both stretch and sustain you in surprising ways. For this has been my own experience with the fathers: they have made me more evangelical, more catholic, and just so, more deeply devoted to Jesus.

What sort of book is the Confessions? Augustine uses the word “confession” in at least two ways in the work. Obviously he means in these pages to confess the sins of his youth, committed as he made his way through his training as a Roman rhetorician, through his years as a Manichaean heretic, to his conversion to Platonist philosophy, and finally to the Catholic Church. More importantly though, he means here to “confess” the truth of God revealed in Jesus Christ. A “confession” is finally a note of praise, both for past sins forgiven, and more importantly for God’s patient, yet adamant, guiding of Augustine back from the far country of sin to his father’s house. Protestants have often made the mistake of reading Confessions as the story of a single conversion, which comes at the end of Book VIII. Such a reading overlooks the series of several “conversions” throughout Augustine’s life: one toward “philosophy,” another away from Manichaeanism, and so on. Further, it ignores the fact that Confessions continues on well past Book VIII, into matters that seem to us esoteric, but were crucial to Augustine’s mind. Other important misreadings to avoid include an overly Freudian one that sees in Augustine’s mistreatment by his father and complicated relationship with his mother the true rationale for his religious and sexual angst. Such modern categories were foreign to his thought, and fail to provide sufficient explanatory insight into the text. Another misreading would be to see this as a sort of universally applicable “religious” text, one that could apply to any spiritual seeker in any culture, so that Augustine’s final goal of a specifically Christian adherence then need not weigh in to our appraisal of the work. Again, such an approach to the text smacks of modern notions rather than Augustinian ones, and Augustine himself insisted that his “restless heart” could only be satisfied by the quite material truth of the incarnation and the church.

Current scholarship on the Confessions suggests that we be attentive to the liturgical elements in this work, that is, those having to do with Christian worship: baptism, the Lord’s Supper, preaching, scripture, and so on.3 Augustine, at the time of this writing in the late 400s, was a preacher—a bishop of a port town in north Africa called Hippo Regius. As any good preacher is inclined to do, Augustine is here working on us, his hearers, trying to lure us into the truth of God, mediated as this is by the church’s worship. As such there is a fiercely adamant moral stridency to this text. Ancient Christians did not submit to baptism if not convinced they could live genuinely holy lives. One dare not return to a life of sin after baptism, for the refusal of a grace once given was worse than never having received baptism at all.4 Augustine himself delayed his approach to the baptismal font out of fear he could not remain chaste, for example. Now, on the far side of baptism and indeed from a bishop’s chair, Augustine wants to convince us to do other than he did: to embrace the truth of Christ immediately, with all the moral difficulty, stridency, and indeed, joy, that such an embrace entails.

This study guide is designed to be read simultaneously with the text of Confessions. This has proved difficult since the key themes of the work are so tightly intertwined as to be all but impossible to examine individually. Hopefully particular themes can be examined here without the coherence of the entire work unraveling. Like any great text, Confessions will stretch you at points, especially toward the end. Know that masterful intellects have spent lifetimes on this work, only to begin to discover its depths after years of study. All the same, you have much from which to benefit even on a cursory first reading. The questions here are designed to guide your intellectual perusal of the text, but more importantly to shape your spiritual life in Augustinian ways. For if that does not take place, then Augustine’s deepest purpose in Confessions has failed.

1 Henry Chadwick, in a very fine introduction to Augustine, nicely details the ways all of western thought and experience is affected by Augustinian categories. See his Augustine: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

2 I use the words “evangelical” and “catholic” with lower case letters intentionally—I do not mean to signal specific institutional affiliation by them, but rather to suggest a broad sense of each word. My own Methodist heritage itself is marked by a certain “evangelical catholicity.”

3 I refer especially here to the magisterial work of James J. O’Donnell, whose three-volume commentary on Confessions will remain the foundational scholarly treatment on this work for generations. See O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). The introduction to the work in volume I would be most helpful to beginners. Much of the rest of the work requires a high degree of Latin proficiency.

4 There was intense debate in the church before Augustine’s day whether one could sin at all after baptism and still be saved! Generally post-baptismal sin required serious and difficult public penance to be absolved. It was only later that a complex system of confession, penance, and absolution developed in the church to respond to this problem. Notice there is in Confessions little sense that Augustine might sin at all after his baptism. This does not represent any foolish confidence in his own power—far from it—but rather an extraordinary confidence in God’s ability to reshape life in the church, to make it holy. Later Augustine grew impatient with claims to permanent sinlessness after baptism. Robert Markus describes Augustine’s insistence on the continuing struggle with sin after baptism as “a vindication of Christian mediocrity”; The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 53.