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AUGUSTINE CONFESSIONS Translated, with Introduction and Notes, by Thomas Williams Augustine CONFESSIONS DSHPC077-Augustine.indd 1 12/20/18 10:13 AM DSHPC077-Augustine.indd 2 12/20/18 10:13 AM Augustine CONFESSIONS Translated, with Introduction and Notes, by Thomas Williams Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Indianapolis/Cambridge DSHPC077-Augustine.indd 3 12/20/18 10:13 AM Copyright © 2019 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 19 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 For further information, please address Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. P.O. Box 44937 Indianapolis, Indiana 46244-0937 www.hackettpublishing.com Cover design by Brian Rak Interior design by Elizabeth L. Wilson Composition by Aptara, Inc. Cataloging-in-Publication data can be accessed via the Library of Congress Online Catalog. ISBN-13: 978-1-62466-783-1 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-1-62466-782-4 (pbk) Adobe PDF ebook ISBN: 978-1-62466-784-8 Contents Introduction vii 1. Augustine’s life, thought, and influence viii 2. Putting together Augustine’s Confessions xi 3. Intertextuality and Augustine’s use of Scripture xvii Essential Scriptures xxv Notes on the Latin Text xxviii Notes on the Translation xxx Abbreviations xxxiii Suggestions for Further Reading xxxiv Book One 1 Book Two 19 Book Three 29 Book Four 43 Book Five 61 Book Six 78 Book Seven 98 Book Eight 119 Book Nine 139 Book Ten 163 Book Eleven 202 Book Twelve 224 Book Thirteen 249 Appendix A: Psalm 4 279 Appendix B: Psalm 41 280 Appendix C: Psalm 100 281 Appendix D: Reconsiderations, Book 2, Chapter 6 282 Topical Index 283 Scriptural Index 289 v DSHPC077-Augustine.indd 5 12/20/18 10:13 AM DSHPC077-Augustine.indd 6 12/20/18 10:13 AM Introduction The Confessions is a prayer: a prayer of avowal, a prayer of thanksgiving and praise, and a prayer of repentance. For these are the three meanings of the Latin verb con- fiteor, of which confessio is the noun form. To confess is to avow or acknowledge, as in the hymn Te Deum laudamus, “We praise thee, O God: we acknowledge (confitemur) thee to be the Lord,” and the Nicene Creed, “We acknowledge (confitemur) one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” To confess is to offer thanks and praise, a usage very frequent in Augustine’s Psalter: for example, “Give thanks (confitemini) to the Lord, for he is good, for his mercy endures for ever” (Psalm 117:1). And to confess is to admit to one’s own sin, as in 1 John 1:9: “If we confess (confiteamur) our sins, God, who is faithful and just, will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” In some ways, the last aspect of confession is the least important of the three in the Confessions, a disappointment for those who go to the work expecting lurid tales of past sin and find instead something rather different. And confession of sin is, in any event, not separable in Augustine’s mind from avowal and thanksgiving: for to acknowledge our faults is to acknowledge the goodness of the nature that God has given us—“it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves”1—and to give thanks that we are no longer what we once were; it is to acknowledge that “we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves”2 and to give thanks that God is making us what we long to be. Accordingly, the Confessions is also the history of a life: a life granted by God, desperately mismanaged by Augustine, and then brought into order by the God who was always present even as Augustine, like the prodigal son in the parable of which he is so fond, ran away from God into a “far-off country,” a “land of unlikeness.” It is three histories, really, because the story of Augustine’s own life opens up into the story of creation, given being, form, and order by the same God who made and then remade Augustine’s life, and the story of creation in turn opens up into an allegory of the life of the Church. The complexity of these three interwoven histories requires some elucidation, and that is what I attempt to provide in this Introduction. I begin with a brief account of Augustine’s life and then turn to a reading of the Confessions that attempts to illu- minate its structure and provide a framework in which to make sense of its diverse themes. I conclude with a discussion of Augustine’s use of Scripture, the most impor- tant unifying feature of the Confessions. 1. Psalm 100:2 in the Coverdale Psalter. 2. Collect for the Third Sunday in Lent, Book of Common Prayer (1979), 167. vii DSHPC077-Augustine.indd 7 12/20/18 10:13 AM viii Augustine: Confessions 1. Augustine’s life, thought, and influence By the time Augustine started writing the Confessions in 397 AD, he had been a priest at Hippo Regius (now Annaba in Algeria) for six years and bishop for one or two. He had not sought ordination, preferring a quiet life of ascetic discipline and philosophi- cal contemplation; but ordination was forced on him, and he found himself not only a teacher, preacher, and minister of the sacraments, but also (especially as bishop) a judge, public figure, and controversialist. The prodigiousness of Augustine’s liter- ary output—two hundred years later, Isidore of Seville would say that anyone who claims to have read all of Augustine must be a liar—is all the more remarkable when we consider how busy he was, how many claims there were on his time. Augustine was born on 13 November 354 in Thagaste (modern Souk Ahras), about sixty miles south of Hippo Regius. His father, Patrick,3 was a landowner of modest means, probably of Roman descent. His mother, Monnica, may have been of Berber stock; the name, at any rate, suggests Berber heritage. (The Berbers are the indigenous people of North Africa west of the Nile.) Whatever exactly Augustine’s ethnicity, his education was thoroughly Roman, though he retained a North African accent, which was a professional liability for him.4 The profession in question was rhetoric. All his education was meant to make him into a successful rhetorician: a “salesman of words” (9.5.13), as he describes it dismissively from the perspective of someone whose life has been radically reoriented around quite different aims. And he did succeed, accent or no, before he gave up his career and turned to the life of Christian philosophical contemplation that he was not destined to enjoy for very long. The story of Augustine’s life as we have it in the Confessions is the story of how he pursued that career, and along the way pursued other things—sensual gratification, knowledge, influence—until at last he gave in to the God who had been pursuing him, and who became his one true and enduring love. That part of the story I do not need to retell here, because you have it before you in the Confessions. But Augustine would live another thirty-three years after he began to tell that story,5 and I do want to offer a brief overview of the rest of his life before turning to the much more important question of Augustine’s endur- ing influence. Though there is, somewhat surprisingly, no trace of the dispute in 3. There is no good reason to call Augustine’s father “Patricius” that is not also a good reason to call his bishop “Ambrosius,” and there is no good reason to call his bishop “Ambrosius.” 4. De ordine 2.17.45. 5. I am being careful in the way I formulate this. The date of the composition of the Confessions is conventionally given as 397–401, and I have seen a period as long as 397–403 suggested; but to my mind the thematic and structural unity of the work suggests a shorter and more continuously sustained period of composition, and there is nothing to prevent one from supposing that the whole work dates from 397. On the issues here, see James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography (HarperCollins, 2005), 33–34, 141–142. DSHPC077-Augustine.indd 8 12/20/18 10:13 AM Introduction ix the Confessions, there were two rival Christian factions in North Africa, thanks to a controversial ordination in 311. One of the bishops participating in the conse- cration of Caecilianus, bishop of Carthage, had handed over sacred books to the imperial authorities when the church in North Africa was under persecution. One faction argued that no such traditor (from the Latin for “hand over,” the root of our word “traitor”) could participate in a valid consecration; the purity of the Church would be compromised. So they rejected Caecilianus and started their own rival line of episcopal succession. The purist party, known as Donatists after their sec- ond bishop, Donatus the Great, was much larger; Augustine was bishop of the smaller group, the Caecilianists, or, as he would have us call them, the catholics.6 Much of his work as bishop involved the defense and support of his catholic flock and polemic against the Donatists. He gradually came to prominence as an able defender of the catholic position, and his arguments carried the day at a conference held in Carthage in 411 to settle the dispute (though Augustine himself did not speak much there).7 411 would prove to be a consequential year in other ways. The connections he made at the conference made him aware of ideas and debates that would shape much of the rest of his career. He heard from the imperial commissioner, Marcellinus, that some Roman aristocrats were blaming Christians and their God for the decline of Rome, which had been sacked by the Visigoths the year before. Augustine worked on his response for the next fifteen years. He called it On the City of God against the Pagans; we generally know it simply as The City of God. Next to the Confessions it is Augustine’s most widely read work. There are two cities, he says, founded on two loves: the city of God, founded on love for God to the point of contempt for self, and the city of the devil, founded on love for self to the point of contempt for God. The city of God is not the Church, and the city of the devil is not the state: there are people within the visible Church who do not belong to the city of God, and the state can be an instrument of God’s providential governance, though no earthly authority—not even the great and glorious Rome—is anything more than a tem- porary arrangement, destined, as all things this side of eternal peace are destined, to pass away. Marcellinus also made Augustine aware of the ideas of Pelagius and his disciple Caelestius. At least as Augustine understood the matter (a qualification I introduce in order to sidestep historical arguments about the exact character of Pelagian teaching), Pelagians taught that human beings retain the free will necessary to lead a morally good life without any need for divine grace. Adam’s fall damaged only himself; it was not transmitted to the rest of the human race, except insofar as Adam set a bad example. There is therefore no such thing as original sin, and infants are born in the same state Adam was in before the fall; infant baptism is accordingly unnecessary. 6. For the lowercase “c” in “catholic,” see Notes on the Translation. 7. O’Donnell writes most engagingly about the conference in Augustine: A New Biography, 234–243. DSHPC077-Augustine.indd 9 12/20/18 10:13 AM
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