Confessions

by Augustine of Hippo

Genres: Philosophy, Classics, Theology, Religion, Christian, Nonfiction, Biography

Paperback

Published January 1, 1961

About the author

Early church father and philosopher Saint Augustine served from 396 as the bishop of Hippo in present-day Algeria and through such writings as the autobiographical Confessions in 397 and the voluminous City of God from 413 to 426 profoundly influenced Christianity, argued against Manichaeism and Donatism, and helped to establish the doctrine of original sin.

An Augustinian follows the principles and doctrines of Saint Augustine.

People also know Aurelius Augustinus in English of Regius (Annaba). From the Africa province of the Roman Empire, people generally consider this Latin theologian of the greatest thinkers of all times. He very developed the west. According to Jerome, a contemporary, Augustine renewed "the ancient Faith."

The Neo-Platonism of Plotinus afterward heavily weighed his years. After conversion and his baptism in 387, Augustine developed his own approach to theology and accommodated a variety of methods and different perspectives. He believed in the indispensable grace to human freedom and framed the concept of just war. When the Western Roman Empire started to disintegrate from the material earth, Augustine developed the concept of the distinct Catholic spirituality in a book of the same name. He thought the medieval worldview. Augustine closely identified with the community that worshiped the Trinity. The Catholics and the Anglican communion revere this preeminent doctor. Many Protestants, especially Calvinists, consider his due teaching on salvation and divine grace of the theology of the Reformation. The Eastern Orthodox also consider him. He carries the additional title of blessed. The Orthodox call him "Blessed Augustine" or "Saint Augustine the Blessed."

Santo Agostinho

Reviews

[Samuel Lee]

The highs were high and the lows were really really low…

Probably would’ve been a five star if I was a better reader…might revisit the book when I’m older and smarter!

[Peter Murphy]

I enjoyed this book and it gave me a lot to think about. Augustine made me think about things I’d never considered which is what made it a five star book to me. This is a book best focused on or read physically not listened to while doing other things (like I did). I plan to reread the last sections as I don’t feel like I understood them as well as I should.

[Jamie Woods]

very philosophical, didn't get a lot of it because i 'sped' through it rather than dwelling on the hard bits. Keeps drawing us back to the Lord in prayer, some great insights and good to read so I know where to go to keep thinking about other stuff when it arises

[Emma R. Pilcher]

Rereading because I skimmed this in middle school :(

[Ethan Oberst]

This book is a classic for a reason! I loved the way Augustine writes. He writes everything as a prayer written to the Lord.
It inspired me how he tells his testimony and engages in Philosophy and Theology before the Lord.
He lost me a little bit when he started interpreting Genesis 1. It was VERY allegorical. I can see how some aspects of covenant theology were influenced by his work.

My favorite quote of Augustine’s is his prayer, “Give me the grace to do what You command and command what You will.”

[Steven Schultz]

Worth returning to in some capacity every year both personally and pastorally. Books 8-10 were my favorite

[Gabe Cowley]

One of the best books I have ever, ever read. Much of what Augustine wrote here felt eerily relatable in a way I had never experienced. You feel the power of Augustine’s vulnerability to the reader. The sense of his struggle with sin and his deep desire for, yet aversion to, God runs through so much of this book. A taste of the quality of his thoughts, so succinct yet profound, is “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” No one knew this better than Augustine.

I am so thankful that Augustine shared his testament with us. An immensely interesting aspect of this book is how it is more like a prayer that Augustine is offering to God, which we readers are listening in on.

I would highly recommend the translation by Maria Boulding, which seems to portray the beauty of Augustine’s Latin (he was an orator, by trade) for us English speakers to enjoy as his original audience may have. This book is, with the Brothers Karamazov, the most personally influential book I have read.

[Noah Bounds]

Confessions by Saint Augustine was from the very beginning, more than just an autobiography, it was a one-of-a-kind solution to the mysteries of the universe and cause of suffering. Nothing like it had ever been created before, and this work of genius lays the groundwork for modern theology and a lot of current beliefs.
In the book we are taken through the life of a confused and desperate young man living in a society divided between indulgent worldly desires and the Christian revival of 4th century Rome. He shares his story of religious and intellectual confusion, then later his struggle to overcome lust, pride, and more sin, while searching for deeper truth. Throughout Confessions, he reflects on the reasons behind human suffering, temptation, and the restless search for meaning. While writing the Confessions he puts everything on full display, from the nature of society around him, to his own inner thoughts and failures. Because of this honesty, the story remains relatable even centuries later. I found it a very unique and inspiring experience to see Augustine's development into the great man he became.
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in theology as it is probably one of the best historical works you can read. Augustine paved the way for many theologians from Thomas Aquinas, to Martin Luther, to even Kierkegaard. Augustine's work shaped centuries of Christian theology, philosophy and personal spirituality. I would say it is a great place to start for anyone getting into theology, religious studies, and philosophy. However, even if you are not interested in getting into all that, it is still a great read for any Christians looking to understand themselves better and looking get a more introspective and personal view on faith.

[Mason McDonald]

This is officially the greatest book that I have ever read outside of the Bible. It was such a page turner and had so many points of intrigue… I wrote down a huge list of quotes that I'll share here if anyone is interested… This is the most beautiful blend of theology and Philosophy that I have laid my eyes upon apart from scripture. My love for philosophy helped lead me into my faith 5 years ago because I considered the teachings of Christ and all of scripture as the greatest philosophy that I had ever experienced… and so this book just felt like a pillar in my life… I felt just like Augustine, I was once twisted in vein philosophies , searching for meaning and pridefully believing that through my knowledge of Philosophy, I had no need for a relationship with God or a need for agape love. Finally the gospel humbled me and after soul searching I ended up as Christian… Christ saved me and restored me. I now have joy as Augustine was so fervent about. I won't explain too in depth on each Augustine quote, just go read them and meditate on each one, they are all so good.
Personal relationship with God;
“O You, God omnipotent, who so care for every person as though You had only the one to look out for. You look at all humans as if each were one.”

Questioning beauty;

"Do we love anything but the beautiful?" I asked my friends. "What then is the beautiful? What is beauty?
What is it that attracts and wins us to the things we love?

Blame shifting our sin;

“I maintained that the unchangeable substance of God erred in not stopping the introduction of sin. I refused to admit that it was my own human changeable substance that had gone astray.
I had decided myself to sin, and now my punishment lay in holding on to error.”

God is the only context for God;

“I wanted to subject Your greatness and beauty to the same categories that can be used to fit our own bodies. The truth is that the best we can do is relate the things of material reality to You. You are the only subject, in which all things have their being.
Your greatness and beauty has no context except for You. No human being is magnificent or beautiful in its own bodiness. If it were less perfect in form or beauty, it would still be a body.”

Augustine’s desire for truth;

“I wanted to be as sure of spiritual realities as I was that seven and three are ten.”


Augustine expressing how the cult he was in had hurt him, now he was nervous about pursuing Christianity;

“someone who has been hurt by a bad physician is not so quick to trust a good one. I had learned that the health of my soul could not be healed by believing just anything. I was afraid I would come to believe more falsehoods. I refused the remedy and resisted Your therapy, even though You had prepared real medicines of faith. Your prescription had ministered to the diseases of the whole world with the power to heal.”

Reason;

“I examined my thoughts, why it was that I admired the natural beauty of things in the heavens and on earth.
What standard helped me accurately judge the changing things of creation and declare, "This is reasonable; that is not"? What was it that made me judge, because I obviously did judge? I had found an unchangeable eternal truth that existed apart from my changeable mind.”

The goodness we carry;

“Unless we knew it, we could not want it. I don't know how, but all have some sort of knowledge of goodness. I am mystified as to whether it is built into the memory.
Could it be that we have a shared human memory from he who was truly happy before he first sinned? In the sin of that first man we all died. From that man we inherited our birth into misery; I only ask whether it is possible that the same person passed to us the memory of what it means to have a happy life.”

The truth regardless of external validation;

“If I had a choice between a lie and being settled in a truth that would turn all people against me, I know how Iwould choose. I am of an opinion that the approbation of another should not increase my joy at doing what is right. Yet I admit that praise does give me joy and criticism diminishes my happiness. And when I am troubled of mind by the desire for praise, it occurs to me that this desire is excusable, for whatever that is worth. You know, God, for I am not certain.”


Our mediator;

“But the true Mediator appeared between mortal sinners and the immortal, Just One.' He is come in a secret mercy that You have showed to the humble. He was sent that by His example we might learn that same humility. There is one Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus. He is mortal with men. He is just with God. Because the wages of righteousness are life and peace, His righteousness conjoined with God makes void that death of sinners, now made righteous.”

Beautifully put phrasing of Christs victory and sacrifice;

“He alone moved free among the dead.
He only had power to lay down His life.
He only had power to take it again.
Victor and Victim, and so Victor because Victim.
Priest and Sacrifice, and so Priest because Sacrifice.
Making of servants, sons, by being born of You and serving us.”


Gods “now”;

“For eternity by definition is fixed and cannot be compared to the moments we experience, which are never fixed. How do we know that a long time has become long? We sense the passing by of many motions and changes. Were there no motions or changes, there would be no length of movements to call "time." In the eternal realm the whole must be present. In our minds, we cannot imagine time in that totality now. For us, all time past is driven on by time to come, and all to come follows upon the past. But in God's timetable of creation, all past and future are one design, flowing out of one now.”

What is a moment…;

“If an instant of time be conceived, which cannot be divided into the smallest particles of moments, that alone is what can properly be called present. Instants fly by at such speed from future to past that one of them cannot be long enough that we are aware of it. For if a moment was long enough to be contemplated, it would be long enough to divide into past and future. The present truly has no space between what was and what will be.”

Miracles;

“The soul no longer needs to wander about seeking after miracles or other wonderful things to believe in.
For true faith is not like that. It doesn't need a steady diet of signs and wonders in order to believe, now that the faithful earth is separated from the waters that were bitter with infidelity. Tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not.”

[04130307]

I'm not rating this. I CRAWLED my way through the last few books. I would say I didn't understand his metaphysical arguments as an excuse, but I actually did, I just don't know why he's so upset about them. sometimes you just gotta admit it's not in human understanding. geeze.

[kealy :)]

why are we the same person

[Zemeira Walker]

I am so glad I read this book slowly, over the last year! Augustine is a resource I have often heard and seen cited, so I had to read some of his works for myself. I will always keep a copy of this on my shelf.

[Marcel Grau]

Same bro

[Lorelei Katcher]

i think augustine maybe has some daddy issues?? his teacher also beat him which HAS to do with the religious guilt.. he rlly just needed a therapist rip augustine

[Dominic Strevett]

Saint Augustine of Hippo is a writer a millennium ahead of every other thinker. His ideas surpass the Aristotelian form of premises and conclusions. They are a type that only poetry, metaphor, allusion, and narrative can contain. Even his successor, Aquinas, who wrote 800 years after Augustine, can barely compete. He is too systematic, too rigid, too Hegelian. Augustine acts as his foil, a Kierkegaard before Kierkegaard. He conveys extreme skepticism towards Aristotle’s approach to categorization of the world, expressing a view much akin to Wittgenstein’s in which language fails to fully describe the world. Instead, he understands that the great truths of life can only be expressed as events within life itself. This formulation, an autobiography as philosophical insight, necessitates the reader to involve himself in interpretation and analysis in a similar form as he must with Nietzsche. This works, as unlike Descartes or his acolytes, Augustine understands people as not beings of pure reason, and he uses his understanding of psychology to transmit ideas that cannot be plainly said.

The central thesis of this book is sin as unchaste love; evil as a malformation of the good. Boethius would later take this theory of privation and bastardize it beyond recognition, but in this book, we see the clear picture of what Augustine means. Within us is a deep longing for Christ, yet our wills are not in union with his, and so we search for Christ where he is not. We build false gods and worship them, because they better fit our picture of a perfect God. In this, we commit blasphemy, arguing that God should change to be made in our image. What could this be but the great sin of pride, which caused the beautiful Morningstar to fall. Love without chastity is lust, and Augustine claims to have been in the boiling pot of it, both in the carnal acts and in the greater sense that he set up in The Free Choice of the Will, that being lust as a love for the temporal and a rejection of the eternal. To love God is to love the eternal, and thus, to reject God is to love the temporary. Everything in this world is lust: knowledge and ignorance, strength and weakness, complexity and simplicity; all of these are grand displays of love without direction, an attempt to separate God’s attributes from God himself. The non-believer loves pieces of God, but he cannot love the whole, and so he lives in turmoil, longing for something he will not let himself have.

Everything I’ve written thus far is merely a kindergartener’s analysis of this text. There are several more steps one must take to understand everything Augustine means to convey. I take great pride in completing pre-K, but I stare in awe at those who mean to work through elementary, middle school, high school, undergraduate, master’s, and doctorate. I’ve written 10,000 words analyzing this book, and I fear I’ve only begun to understand. My book is a mess of highlights and underlines, and the cracked spine reveals the many hours I’ve spent rereading it. The beauty of this book is Augustine’s ability to interweave biblical verses into the events of his life, and his talent is made all the more clear in the last three books of Confessions, where he analyzes the first chapter of Genesis to its very breaking point. The last chapter, Book XIII, feels like the climax of Confessions, as if all the interpretations, all the entendres, all the recontextualizations only exist to prepare the reader for the contents of this chapter. But Augustine has overestimated the reader’s ability, and this jump from XII to XIII is the gap between Aesop’s fables and Thus Spake Zarathustra. Each page is equivalent to a book, each passage its own essay. Augustine outright denies interpreting Gensis chapter one as a literal event, and demands his readers connect every verse to some larger metaphor about Christianity. To say this is disorienting is putting it mildly, and I was satisfied if I comprehended a singular sentence from each paragraph. Still, I have just finished today, and I already feel the calling to pick it up again.

[CK]

I wish I could download this into my heart. I don’t think it got the reading it deserved, given that St. Augustine’s creaturely dependence is so richly expressed here that I found myself underlining entire pages and being forced to keep reading lest I spend all year in one chapter.

He sees God, knows him, loves him; his prowess as a philosopher is completely overshadowed by the spiritual presence behind his words. God is not merely the foundation of Augustine’s intellectual system, he is the owner of all his affections. The narrative portion of the work, even in the midst of major life events, sounds a constant refrain: what does anything else matter? Why waste time on life’s troubled vanities instead of falling deeper in love with he who is eternal being? The culmination of all things is the return to one who made us, who is himself joy and meaning and is blessed forever.

A surprising but noteworthy pillar of his story is the heroic devotion of his mother. May we all be moved by St. Monica’s pure and unmoving faith which, even (perhaps especially) through tears, proves God’s great mercy in his beloved and empowers great hope!

This was long (and felt longer), but was such a blessed experience that prompted me to see how great God actually is and how deep his mercy reaches: the spiritual waters of man’s soul, dark and without form, burst into life and manifold shapes, colors, and sounds when he graces us with his triune presence. Hosanna in excelsis!

[David Clouse]

The first half of this book was largely beautiful, well written, and interesting. The next quarter of it was interesting or good. The final quarter was like drinking lemonade only to find out it was actually water. Philosophy can be extremely interesting to me or extremely boring and pointless. I found a lot of Augustine's final musings in this book similar to that but the account of his life and coming to faith was gripping and thought-provoking. I look forward to reading some other works by him, in particular the City of God, but wouldn't just outright recommend this work to anyone. I would recommend the first half to pretty much anyone though.

[Fyzioo]

genuinely nearly cried. this book did too much for me, ESPECIALLY after having read plato's republic. i don't think i truly understood the nature of christian faith until i read confessions- the philosophic backing it lends to both god and faith is precisely what i needed to finally make some connections. it's truly a wonderful read, regardless of how repetitive some of my peers find it.

[Mathew Dodge]

I was blown away at how interesting and compelling this book was. Truthfully, I did not read the study chapters (11-13) because I ran out of time and won’t be returning to this book for awhile, but his autobiography of chapters 1-10 were stunning.

[Clara Helm]

“Late have I love you, O beauty so ancient yet ever new! Late have I loved you! Behold, you were within and I was out abroad,searching there for you.”

“ Give me chastity and self-restraint, though not yet.” Lol

[Cam Erskine]

Some parts of this book were so great, thank the Lord for St Augustine. Books 8, 9, and 10 were remarkable. I am yet to read someone more pious.

It’s very interesting to read the hints of theosis throughout this book. I wonder what the history of the church would have been like if he would have just taken those darn Greek classes that he talks about neglecting early on in this.

If confessions was a movie and I was on letterboxd I would give it a 3.5/5. But because I’m trying to stick to the rating system as outlined in my bio, I gotta do this. Most of this was not my jam.

[Andrew Tucker]

Re read with undergrads

[Ashley]

model for Christian reflection

[Evan Jackson]

“Take up and read!”

[Caela]

I like it in the start with his story and conversion experience but when it turned abstract thoughts on genesis 1 I got bored fast still overall enjoyed

[Maria Papay]

3.5⭐️

[Dylan Rood]

Despite it being one of the shorter books I’ve read recently it took much longer to finish simply because of how dense it is. St Augustine requires not that you passively read but fully engage with his writings. This is a difficult read but I still recommend every Catholic read this.

[Vincent Park]

Nach etwa 2/3 gestoppt. Ein wunderschönes Buch, dass am besten auf deutsch gelesen werden sollte.

[Polly]

Dude was bonkers. An enjoyable read

[Jacob FitzRaymond]

Confessions
By Saint Augustine
Translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin

The book runs 326 pages, not including the introduction and list of dates.

The first nine books are Saint Augustine’s autobiography. These were the chapters I found most compelling. I found the writing style easy to follow and comprehend, and I found St. Augustine’s story very engaging and emotional.

St. Augustine’s story is very relatable, especially his struggle with sin and his breakdown over being torn between two opposing wills. There were times during this part of the book when my eyes began to water, specifically when he describes his conversion and the death of his mother, Saint Monica.

In the introduction, R. S. Pine-Coffin prepares the reader for the shift that takes place after Book Nine ends. For me, the last three books were the opposite of the first nine. I found them much more difficult to follow and comprehend.

These last three books feel as though they could be a completely separate work. St. Augustine fills them with his questions and reflections on topics such as memory, time, and the interpretation of the beginning of the Book of Genesis. St. Augustine was a very intelligent man, and he puts this intelligence, by the grace of God, on full display in these three books. Unfortunately, I am not on his level — and quite likely never will be — so I found these sections difficult and somewhat dry.

All in all, I found this book to be an extremely valuable read. It has inspired me to make changes in my life and in how I live out the Catholic faith. I would highly recommend it.