Confessions

1.Augustine observes that even as an infant he was envious — "it could not speak, yet it turned pale and looked bitterly on its foster-brother." Why does he bother examining sins he cannot even remember? What is he trying to establish about human nature from the very beginning of life?

1.Augustine describes his sixteenth year as a time when "the madness of lust took the rule over me, and I resigned myself wholly to it." He also says his father was delighted by signs of his son's developing manhood, while his mother was filled with holy dread. What does this contrast between his parents reveal about two very different visions of human flourishing?

1.Augustine opens Book III with one of his most striking lines: "To Carthage I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love." What does it mean to "love to love" — to be addicted to the feeling of desire itself? Do you recognize this in yourself or in contemporary culture?

1.Augustine describes the nine years of his Manichaean period as "living seduced and seducing, deceived and deceiving." He was a respected rhetoric teacher and devoted companion, yet spiritually lost. How does outward respectability coexist with inward darkness, both in Augustine's life and in our own?

1.Augustine had waited nine years for Faustus, the great Manichaean teacher, expecting him to resolve all his doubts. When Faustus finally arrives, Augustine admires his eloquence but finds his knowledge shallow. He observes: "Mine ears were already cloyed with the like, nor did they seem to me therefore better, because better said; nor therefore true, because eloquent." What had God already taught him that enabled him to make this distinction? And why is this lesson — that eloquence is not the same as truth — still urgently needed?

1.Monica arrives in Milan and discovers her son is no longer a Manichaean — but not yet a Christian. Rather than overjoyed, she is "not overjoyed... because she was now assured concerning that part of my misery... as being assured, that Thou, Who hadst promised the whole, wouldest one day give the rest." What does Monica's response model about how to hold our hopes for others — neither despairing nor demanding?

1.Augustine has been unable to conceive of God as anything other than a vast material body spread through space. He knows intellectually that God must be incorporeal, but cannot imagine what that means. How does this limitation distort his entire search for truth? Have you ever found that a wrong mental image of God distorted your relationship with Him?

1.Augustine visits Simplicianus, who tells him the story of the great orator Victorinus — how this proudly pagan intellectual, famous throughout Rome, eventually could not bear to deny Christ before His angels. When publicly invited to profess his faith quietly, in private, to spare his embarrassment, Victorinus insists on doing it before the whole congregation. What does this detail reveal about what genuine conversion does to pride?

1.Immediately after his conversion, Augustine experiences a new relationship with the Psalms: "How did I cry unto Thee, my God, when I read the Psalms of David... I trembled for joy and trembled for sorrow." Why do the Psalms — with their raw grief and soaring praise — become so alive to him now, when they had not reached him before? What had changed?

1.Looking back over the nine books, identify three moments where God's hand is clearly at work in Augustine's life — but Augustine himself could not see it at the time. What does this pattern suggest about how God typically works in a human life?

1.When you began this study, what did you expect from the Confessions? How did your expectations compare to what you actually found? Was Augustine different from who you imagined him to be?