Saint Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions

Saint Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions (398 C.E.) is a theological autobiography, what we would call today a conversion story. The book is an apologia, which means it is both a confession of faith as well as an account of a life. It is meant to be a testimony of faith and a defense of Christian doctrine. The book is not a biography in our modern sense of the term. The book is about the birth of faith. This is the heart of the book. Through the telling of his own life story -- the indiscretions of his youth, his experiment with Manichaeism, the birth of a child out of wedlock, his father Patrick who converted to Christianity only at his death bed, the persistent hope of his Christian mother Monica to convert, and so forth -- Augustine maps out one of Christianity’s most enduring testaments of faith. Augustine grapples with the paradox of knowing God while yet remaining a finite creature who can scarcely comprehend the infinite. The book opens with a quote from the book of Psalms and Saint Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, accentuating the idea of the greatness of God, “highly to be praised,” as compared to feeble humanity, “a little piece of creation” who bears “his mortality with him” (p. 64). Augustine begins the book with a humble invocation to God taken from the psalmist David: “Grant me Lord to know and understand” (p. 64). With this spirit of wanting to know and to understand, I will explicate in this essay Augustine’s unique contribution to the Christian understanding of God as a journey from childhood to a childhood of faith as it is articulated in the first nine books of the Confessions.

Augustine’s conception of God is first a comment about the nature of childhood inquiry. There is a legend about Augustine that is ...

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...fs and became a believer in Christianity’s precepts of unity of body and soul. At the moment of despair, when Augustine heard the voice of children saying “take up and read.” (p. 402), he took a book of the Bible and read this passage from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts’ (Rom. 13: 13–14).” The words released Augustine from his anxiety. He was immediately converted. The heart is restless until it rests in God.

Works Cited

Augustine, & Chadwick, H. (1991). Confessions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Augustine, Kelley, J. T., & Augustinian Heritage Institute. (2010). Selections from

Confessions and other essential writings: Annotated and explained. Woodstock, Vt:

SkyLight Paths Pub.