Confessions Of Augustine Books 1-2
Book I
1. Opening Praise and Acknowledgment of God
Augustine does not begin by telling his life story, but by speaking directly to God:
“You are great, Lord, and greatly to be praised.”
He immediately recognizes the paradox of prayer: human beings are only a tiny part of creation, yet they desire to praise their Creator. He asks whether one must first know God in order to call upon him or call upon God in order to know him. Thus, from the first page, the Confessions is both prayer and inquiry (I.1).
Augustine also asks where God can be found. Since God made heaven and earth, neither can contain him. God is present everywhere yet cannot be enclosed anywhere (I.2–4).
2. The Restless Heart
Augustine’s famous declaration comes at the very beginning:
“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (I.1).
The rest of the Confessions illustrates this principle. Augustine will seek happiness in learning, friendship, sexual pleasure, reputation and intellectual speculation. Each brings some satisfaction, but none gives rest.
The restlessness is therefore not merely emotional unhappiness. It is the movement of a creature who has come from God and can find complete fulfilment only by returning to God.
3. Reflections on Infancy
Augustine admits that he cannot remember his own infancy. He reconstructs it by observing other infants (I.6).
He notices that an infant cries when its wishes are not satisfied and becomes angry with adults who do not obey it, even though they may be refusing something harmful. He also describes a baby looking jealously at another child being fed:
“It was not yet able to speak, but it looked pale and bitterly at its foster-brother” (I.7).
Augustine is not claiming that infants possess adult moral responsibility. He is showing that disordered desire and self-centredness appear before a child can reason or speak.
4. Childhood and the Beginnings of Moral Confusion
In Book I, Augustine is still chiefly describing childhood rather than full adolescence. He admits that he sometimes disobeyed his parents and teachers because he preferred games and entertainments (I.10).
He cheated in competitions and became angry when other children cheated him. He stole food from his parents’ table either to satisfy his own appetite or to exchange it with other boys for toys and games (I.19).
His childhood faults already display patterns that become more serious in adolescence: the desire to win, fear of humiliation, love of praise and resentment when his will is frustrated.
5. The Allure of Peer Influence
At school, Augustine desired the approval of his companions. He wanted to excel in games and feared being laughed at or considered inferior (I.9–10).
He speaks of being attracted to theatrical stories, especially the story of Dido’s death in Virgil’s Aeneid. He wept for Dido while remaining unmoved by his own spiritual separation from God (I.13). His teachers and society praised this literary sensitivity, although no one taught him to grieve over the condition of his own soul.
The influence of companions becomes still clearer in the pear theft of Book II, where Augustine says that he probably would not have committed the act alone.
6. Inner Turmoil and Restlessness
As a boy, Augustine feared being beaten at school and prayed earnestly that God would spare him. When his prayer was not answered, adults laughed at his fear, although Augustine remarks that the punishments were very real to a child (I.9).
He also suffered when forced to study subjects he disliked. Nevertheless, he later recognized that God used even this painful discipline to teach him skills that would eventually serve the truth (I.12).
Another sign of inner disorder is his sorrow over fictional suffering. He wept for Dido but did not weep for himself, though he was “dying” by living apart from God (I.13).
7. Desire and the Beginnings of Bondage
The fuller treatment of lust belongs to Book II, but its beginnings appear near the end of Book I. Augustine describes the arrival of puberty as a time when the “thorns of lust” began to rise within him (I.11).
As a child, however, he also displays other forms of uncontrolled desire: his passion for games, his anger when defeated, his attraction to theatrical stories and his desire for praise.
These experiences prepare for his later insight that bondage does not begin simply with outward acts. It begins when desire ceases to be ordered by truth and love.
8. Parental Influence and Independence
Monica had Augustine marked with the sign of the cross and seasoned with blessed salt while he was still a child (I.11). When he became dangerously ill, he asked for baptism. Monica prepared for it, but when he recovered, baptism was postponed according to a common practice of the time.
Augustine contrasts Monica’s faith with his father’s ambitions. Patricius was pleased when he saw signs that Augustine was becoming sexually mature, because he hoped for descendants. Monica, however, feared that uncontrolled desire would endanger her son’s soul (II.3).
Both parents made sacrifices for Augustine’s education, but his father was especially concerned that Augustine should become a successful rhetorician. Monica’s deeper concern was that he should belong to Christ.
9. The Search for Love in the Wrong Places
Augustine’s love for beautiful language provides an early example. He was deeply moved by the story of Dido and Aeneas, but he loved the emotional experience more than the truth (I.13).
He also pursued approval through academic success. He was praised when he delivered an imaginative speech in the character of Juno. Looking back, he asks what value there was in receiving praise for a performance that encouraged vanity (I.17).
The problem was not that literature, friendship or achievement were evil. Augustine loved created goods without referring them to their Creator. He wanted the gifts while forgetting the Giver.
10. God’s Patience and Providence
Augustine recognizes that God was active even in the experiences he misunderstood. God gave him life, bodily senses, the ability to communicate and the love shown to him by those who cared for him (I.6).
Although Augustine disliked his studies, God used them to teach him reading and language. These abilities later enabled him to read Scripture, preach the Gospel and write the Confessions (I.12–15).
He also sees Monica’s faith as an instrument of providence. God was already claiming Augustine through his mother’s prayers and example, even while Augustine was moving away from him.
Book II
1. The Pear Tree Incident
At about sixteen, Augustine joined a group of companions in stealing pears from a neighbour’s tree (II.4). The boys shook down a large quantity of fruit and carried it away.
They did not steal because they were hungry. Augustine says that they had better pears of their own. They tasted only a few and threw most of the stolen fruit to pigs.
What attracted Augustine was the theft itself:
“I loved my own undoing; I loved my error—not that for which I erred, but the error itself.”
The incident becomes important precisely because it was so trivial. It allows Augustine to study sin almost in its pure form.
2. Reflection on the Nature of Sin
Augustine asks what he found attractive in the theft. The pears were neither especially beautiful nor necessary. He concludes that the forbidden character of the act helped make it attractive (II.4).
He compares his action with other crimes. Normally a person commits a crime to obtain some apparent good—money, security, revenge, pleasure or honour. In stealing the pears, however, Augustine gained almost nothing (II.5).
He therefore confronts the mysterious possibility that the will can delight in rejecting the good simply because it wishes to assert its own independence.
3. The Concept of “Perverse Imitation”
Augustine argues that sin often imitates something belonging properly to God (II.6):
Pride imitates God’s exalted majesty.
Ambition seeks honour and glory, although true glory belongs to God.
Cruelty tries to make others fear us, while God alone possesses ultimate power.
Curiosity imitates divine knowledge.
Laziness seeks rest, though true rest is found only in God.
Wastefulness imitates abundance, although God is the inexhaustible source of all good.
In the pear theft, Augustine experienced a counterfeit freedom. He pretended to be independent of God’s law, but this apparent freedom was actually slavery to disordered desire.
4. Adolescence as a Period of Moral Confusion
At sixteen, Augustine’s education was interrupted because his family lacked the money to send him immediately to Carthage. He spent an idle year at home in Thagaste (II.3).
During this period, his sexual desires intensified. He describes himself as being carried away by the “torrent” of human custom and passion.
The absence of disciplined study, clear direction and mature guidance helped create the conditions in which his desires became increasingly disordered.
5. The Allure of Peer Influence
Augustine says that he would not have stolen the pears alone:
“Alone I would not have committed that theft” (II.9).
He enjoyed not merely the crime but committing it with others. Their laughter and mutual encouragement increased the attraction of wrongdoing.
He even pretended to have done things worse than those he had actually committed because he feared appearing less corrupt than his companions (II.3). He was ashamed of innocence and wanted a reputation for vice.
This is one of Augustine’s clearest descriptions of the moral power of a group: companionship can make an act attractive that would seem pointless to an individual acting alone.
6. Inner Turmoil and Restlessness
Augustine opens Book II by looking back upon the “crooked ways” of his adolescence. He says that he became dispersed among many created things because he had turned away from the one God (II.1).
His pursuit of pleasure did not bring unity or peace. Instead, his heart became fragmented by competing desires.
He speaks of God as being silent while he wandered farther from him. Yet that divine silence was not absence: Augustine now understands that God remained present and was allowing him eventually to discover the bitterness of life lived away from its true centre.
7. Lust and the Struggle with Desire
Augustine describes the “mists of lust” rising from his bodily desires and obscuring his heart (II.2). He could no longer distinguish clearly between the serenity of genuine love and the darkness of uncontrolled desire.
He says:
“I loved to love.”
He was searching for love, but sexual passion became detached from fidelity, responsibility and communion with God. He wanted the experience of being in love more than he wanted the true good of another person.
No one in his family seriously directed him toward a disciplined Christian understanding of sexuality. Marriage was discussed largely in terms of its possible interference with his career.
8. Parental Influence and Independence
Patricius saw Augustine at the public baths and noticed that he had reached sexual maturity. He reacted with pleasure and spoke enthusiastically to Monica about the possibility of grandchildren (II.3).
Monica was alarmed. She warned Augustine against fornication and especially against adultery. Augustine admits that he was embarrassed by her advice and dismissed it as merely a woman’s counsel.
At the same time, Monica did not arrange an early marriage for him because the family feared that marriage would obstruct his education and career. Augustine sees in this a divided set of priorities: professional ambition was allowed to outweigh moral formation.
9. The Search for Love in the Wrong Places
Augustine’s statement “I loved to love” is the clearest example (II.2). His desire for love was not itself evil; what was disordered was the way he sought to satisfy it.
The pear theft also involved a distorted search for communion. Augustine did not truly love the pears, but he delighted in belonging to the group committing the theft. He sought fellowship through shared wrongdoing rather than through shared goodness (II.8–9).
He later addresses God as the true beauty and true satisfaction secretly desired beneath all his false loves. Every created attraction contained some reflection of God, but Augustine stopped at the reflection and neglected its source.
10. God’s Patience and Providence
Looking back, Augustine acknowledges that God did not abandon him during his adolescent wandering. God was present even when Augustine did not recognize him.
He interprets the consequences of sin as a form of mercy. God allows sinful pleasures to become bitter so that the sinner may learn not to seek happiness apart from him (II.2).
Augustine ends the book by thanking God for forgiving both the sins he committed and those he might have committed but was prevented from committing. Consequently, no one who has been preserved from serious sin should despise the person who has fallen. Both depend upon the same mercy: one is healed by God, while another is protected by God (II.7).