Confessions by Saint Augustine
Week 2: Book I — Boyhood and Its Sins
Read Book I of The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Key themes: infancy, schooling, the theft of learning, sin in childhood.
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Augustine refuses to romanticize childhood — he finds the seeds of adult sin already present in the infant's envy and the schoolboy's pride — and invites us to trace our own earliest patterns of turning away from God.
Discussion Questions
7 questions1.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?
2.Augustine hated school and preferred play, yet he confesses this as sin: "I sinned herein, O Lord God... I disobeyed, not from a better choice, but from love of play." He also notes that the adults who beat him for playing were themselves playing their own games. What is his larger point about how human society perpetuates its disordered loves?
3.He mourns that he wept for the fictional death of Dido in Virgil's Aeneid, but shed no tears over his own spiritual death: "I wept for Dido slain... myself seeking the while a worse extreme... having forsaken Thee, earth passing into the earth." What does this observation reveal about the danger of education or entertainment that forms our emotions around false loves?
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