He who makes the truth comes to the light.'  The truth that
Augustine made in the Confessions had eluded him for years.  It
appears before us as a trophy torn from the grip of the unsayable
after a prolonged struggle on the frontier between speech and
silence.  What was at stake was more than words.  The `truth' of
which Augustine spoke was not merely a quality of a verbal formula,
but veracity itself, a quality of a living human person. 
Augustine `made the truth'��in this sense, became himself
truthful��when he found a pattern of words to say the true thing
well.  But both the `truth' that Augustine made and the `light' to
which it led were for him scripturally guaranteed epithets of
Christ, the pre-existent second person of the trinity.  For
Augustine to write a book, then, that purported to make truth and
seek light was not merely a reflection upon the actions of his life
but pure act itself, thought and writing become the enactment of
ideas.
     Behind this fundamental act of the self lay powerful and
evident anxieties��evident on every page.  Augustine is urgently
concerned with the right use of language, longing to say the right
thing in the right way.  The first page of the text is a tissue of
uncertainty in that vein, for to use language wrongly is to find
oneself praising a god who is not God.  The anxiety is intensified
by a vertiginous loss of privacy.  Even as he discovers that he
possesses an interior world cut off from other people, he realizes
that he lies open before God:  there is nowhere to hide, nowhere to
flee.
     Anxiety so pervades the Confessions that even the implicit
narrative structure is undermined.  When on the first page we hear
that our heart is restless until there is repose in God, the
reasonable expectation is that the text will move from restlessness
to rest, from anxiety to tranquility.  In some ways that is true: 
on baptism care flies away, and the last page looks forward to the
tranquility of endless praise in heaven.  But the conversion story
leaves the Augustine of this text far more uneasy than we might
have expected.  The proper culmination for an optimistic
Confessions would be mystic vision as fruit of conversion (see
preceding 10.�1.�1).  But instead the last half of Bk. 10 and the
whole of Bks. 11 to 13��not incidentally the parts of the work that
have most baffled modern attempts to reduce the text to a coherent
pattern��defy the expected movement from turmoil to sedation and
show an Augustine still anxious over matters large and small.  It
is unclear at what date it became possible, or necessary, for
Augustine to endure that continuing tension.  At the time of the
events narrated in the first nine books, he surely expected more
repose for his troubles.
     The book runs even deeper than that.  Augustine believes that
human beings are opaque to themselves no less than to others.  We
are not who we think we are.  One of the things Augustine had to
confess was that he was and had been himself sharply different from
who he thought he was.  Not only was this true of his wastrel youth
(to hear him tell it), but it remained true at the time of
confessing��he did not know to what temptation he might next submit
(10.�5.�7).  We are presented throughout the text with a character
we want to call `Augustine', but we are at the same time in the
presence of an author (whom we want to call `Augustine') who tells
us repeatedly that his own view of his own past is only valid if
another authority, his God, intervenes to guarantee the truth of
what he says.  Even the self is known, and a fortiori other people
are known, only through knowing God.  So Augustine appears before
us winning self-knowledge as a consequence of knowledge of God; but
his God he searches for and finds only in his own mind.
     His God is timelessly eternal, without time's distention and
hence anxiety, but also without the keen anticipations and rich
satisfactions, of humankind; his God is perfection of language
incarnate, without the ambages, and thus without the cunning
texture and irony, of human discourse; his God is pure spirit,
without the limitations, and thus without the opportunities, of
fleshliness.  That God is in every way utterly inhuman; and yet
(here we approach the greatest mystery of this book) humankind is
created in the image and likeness of that God��a resemblance that
Augustine prizes highly, and in which he finds the way to knowledge
both of self and of God.

 ******

     All of us who read Augustine fail him in many ways.  Our
characteristic reading is hopelessly incoherent.  Denying him our
full cooperation, (1) we choose to ignore some of what he says
that we deny but find non-threatening; (2) we grow heatedly
indignant at some of what he says that we deny and find
threatening; (3) we ignore rafts of things he says that we find
naive, or uninteresting, or conventional (thereby displaying that
in our taste which is itself naive, uninteresting, and
conventional); (4) we patronize what we find interesting but
flawed and primitive (e.�g., on time and memory); (5) we admire
superficially the odd purple patch; (6) we assimilate whatever
pleases us to the minimalist religion of our own time, finding in
him ironies he never intended; (7) we extract and highlight
whatever he says that we find useful for a predetermined thesis
(which may be historical, psychological, philosophical, or
doctrinal, e.g., just war, immaculate conception,
abortion)��while not noticing that we ignore many other ideas
that differ only in failing to command our enthusiasm.  So when,
for example, Augustine relies on the proposition that all truth
is a function of Truth, and that Truth is identical with the
second person of the trinity, and that Jesus the carpenter's son
is identical with that same person��we offer at most a notional
assent, but are compelled to interpret the idea to ourselves,
rather than grasp it directly.  Just when we are best at
explaining Augustine, we are then perhaps furthest from his
thought.
     A formal commentary on the text is one way to subvert our
impulses to misreading.  The text itself enforces a discipline on
the commentator, drawing attention back to the business at hand,
which is mainly the exegesis of the most important layers of
discernible meaning in the text.  The commentator is obliged to
take stands on controverted issues, but also has a responsibility
to present views other than his own.  And even when the
commentator presses a tentative and idiosyncratic line of
interpretation, he should at the same time present the evidence
in a way that not only does not preclude but actually facilitates
disagreement.  And the commentator must have a respect for
ambiguity verging on reverence.
     The prolegomena presented here, therefore, fall into three
parts.  (1)  An essay on the history of the interpretation of the
text and the methods that have proved fruitful in pursuing
Augustine's meanings to their various lairs.  (2)  A concise
exposition of the main lines of interpretation emphasized in this
commentary, gathering material that would otherwise be scattered
through dozens of notes in the commentary.  (3)  Some technical
information to facilitate use of the text and commentary printed
here.


I.  Hearing Confessions


A Century of Scholarship

     A hundred years ago, it is safe to say, everyone knew what
the Confessions were about.  The main outline of the
autobiographical narrative that is part of the first nine books
was clear enough, and the garden scene at the end of Bk. 8 was a
clich� (and furnished the illustration for the title page of many
editions and translations��the voice bidding to `take up and
read' doing double duty, addressed to Augustine and to the devout
reader).  The story was one of conversion, and the trajectory
from plight to piety an unbroken one.  But that assurance was
shattered by the great disturbing question (for which it is
conventional to divide the credit):  was the story true?  As told
in the Confessions did it not conflict in important ways with
what we learn of the same period from other works, works written
closer to the date of the events recounted?  Had piety and
literature neglected the truth?
     The consequent quest for biographical fact and its
appropriate assessment has driven scholarship ever since.  This
movement was at first horizontal, ranging throughout Augustine's
oeuvre for evidence to marshal.  The classic works are those of
Alfaric and Boyer.  A counter-movement began in articles in the
1940s and reached its classic expression in 1950 with the
publication of Pierre Courcelle's magisterial Recherches.  That
book worked a Copernican revolution in Augustine scholarship. 
Courcelle's book turned from the horizontal to the vertical, to
weigh and assess each piece of evidence more carefully, and to
look beneath innocent texts not hitherto canvassed for
indications of the intellectual and emotional currents that had
buffeted Augustine.  In particular, Courcelle took further than
anyone else before him the investigation of the mechanism of
Platonic influence on the young Augustine, and pursued his quarry
with rigor and sobriety.  The demonstration of the Platonic
permeation of Christian intellectual discussion around Ambrose at
Milan was Courcelle's greatest achievement.
     Courcelle's revolution had, however, more lasting effect on
the study of Augustine's life than on the study of the
Confessions.  The lively discussion and fertile investigations to
which he gave impetus concentrated increasingly on reconstructing
the history of Augustine's readings and opinions (chiefly in the
period before his ordination), at the expense of detailed studies
of the rhetorical and exegetical strategies of the Confessions
themselves.  Some common features of this generation's work can
be extracted from the mass of publications to help orient the
present work.
     First, the scholarship mirrored its own times.  The
abundance of post-Courcelle work dates from the fifties and
sixties; the `galloping' bibliography (the epithet was applied by
A. Mandouze) has slowed to a more dignified pace.  One
characteristic of that period, here as in so many other areas of
scholarship, was an optimistic positivism.  Scholars labored to
construct large hypothetical schemas (embracing, e.�g., the books
Augustine read and the people he knew) to make possible positive
and permanent advances in the study of the text.
     Second, what was achieved was something whose essential
quality becomes visible only at a generous distance.  The reading
we have been given of Augustine is an essentially gnostic one. 
This is no surprise, for we have been living through an
increasingly gnostic age.  The emphasis has been on the secret,
hidden, inner lore (Augustine's borrowings from lost Platonic
texts), accessible only to the cognoscenti.
     Third, for the first time, Augustine has been fitted out
with a new intellectual position.  We see him now not merely as a
provincial bishop, theologizing down the party line, but as a man
constantly in dialogue with the wider world of the non�Christian
thought of his time, accepting its excellences, quarreling
selectively with its errors, sharing a common ground of debate
and discussion.  That is exactly the position that Christians of
every stripe, but especially Catholics, were moving towards
during the period in which these scholarly investigations were
carried out.  Augustine turned out to be our contemporary��to
have been waiting for us to catch up with him.
     To characterize the scholarly work of these last decades in
this way may seem unduly harsh.  But the sum total of all that
has been accomplished in the last forty years weighs up to less
than half what Courcelle accomplished in his one book.  New lines
of inquiry and new questions have not been risked.  The issues
have remained those that Courcelle defined, and the techniques
remain his; infertility is the obvious fate of such debates.
     Two works from outside the mainstream deserve special
attention, as harbingers of ways to move ahead.  In 1955, G.�N.
Knauer published his Hamburg dissertation Psalmenzitate in
Augustins Konfessionen.  This is the best modern study of the
Confessions as literary artefact.  At about the same time, a
Leipzig Habilitation was submitted by Horst Kusch, on the
structure of the Confessions.  The full work was never published,
and repeated inquiries have failed to unearth a copy.  Kusch
published a long article, valuable especially for two ideas: 
first, that the structure of the last books of the Confessions
reflects the trinitarian and triadic patterns that obsessed
Augustine elsewhere; and second, that the three temptations of 1
Jn. 2.�16 both reflect those triadic patterns further and are
significant for the structure of the early books of the
Confessions.  In matters of detail, Kusch must be argued with,
but his instincts were sound.  His work has been appreciated by
some demanding judges, but did not succeed in reorienting
debate.
     But we have still not appreciated the Confessions purely as
a work of literature.  The narrative of past sins and pious
amendments fills little more than half the pages of the work. 
What are the last four books doing there?  The last catalogue of
efforts to answer that question is two decades old and books
and articles continue to appear addressing it in one form or
another.  Some of the ideas they propose have merit, but none has
been presented in a way to compel, or even very strongly to
encourage, assent.  One prevailing weakness of many of these
efforts has been the assumption that there lies somewhere
unnoticed about the Confessions a neglected key to unlock all
mysteries.  But for a text as multilayered and subtle as the
Confessions, any attempt to find one, or even a few, keys is
pointless.  Augustine says himself that he meant to stir our
souls, not test our ingenuity as lock-picks.
     We may also mistrust readers who insist, or who insist on
denying, that the work is perfect and beyond reproach.  That form
of idolatry, like the complementary iconoclasm with which it long
disputed, has had its day.  Better to heed an early reader of
T.�E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom:  `it seems to me that
an attempted work of art may be so much more splendid for its
very broken imperfection revealing the man so intimately.'  If
we can hope to read on those terms, expecting little, grateful
for every fragmentary beauty, some further reflections may be in
order.



Avenues of Approach 

     Every major modern book on the Confessions has been written
by a Catholic or a Parisian, or both.  To think of Alfaric,
Boyer, Courcelle, Guardini, Henry, Le Blond, O'Connell,
O'Meara, Pellegrino, Solignac, and Verheijen is to come very
close to exhausting the arsenal of large-scale studies of this
text.  The names of those who have done the most important work
in adjacent areas of research (e.�g., Augustine's theological
development��Pincherle, du Roy��or his intellectual
equipage��Marrou) follow the same law.  There is even an
important article by one scholar who has gone on to become
Cardinal Prefect of what is no longer the Holy Office.   The
exceptions are few and illuminating.  There are Knauer's
Psalmenzitate (but that work has been praised but neglected by
the Catholic/French establishment), Theiler's Porphyrios und
Augustin (another book with few followers), and N�rregard's
Augustins Bekehrung (rarely cited since 1950).  J. Burnaby's
Amor Dei is neither French nor Romanist, but Burnaby was an
Anglican clergyman and Cambridge don, whose book was written
directly against the most outspokenly Protestant criticism of
Augustine in this century, A. Nygren's Agape and Eros.  Gibb and
Montgomery's edition and notes likewise came from two Cambridge
dons.  Finally, P. Brown's biography is donnish and Oxonian, but
written by one who began life in Catholic Dublin and who has
become in the years since the Augustine book an honorary Parisian
of a modern sort.  His book is the least preoccupied by the
controversies that have surrounded this text for the last
century.  Another honorable exception is E. TeSelle's Augustine
the Theologian (New York, 1970), a marvel of eirenic Protestant
scholarship.
     Now Catholics, former Catholics, and Parisians need not be
the only readers to take an interest in this text.  Augustine
himself has had a checkered history in Roman Catholic modernity,
somehow suspect for having given aid and comfort, if not to the
Reformers, at least to Baius, Jansen, and their descendants. 
Leaving aside the quarrels of the first part of this century,
whose partisans have accepted `the constitution of silence and
are folded in a single party' (Eliot), we should not forget how
much patristic scholarship owed to the discovery of liberal
Catholics that such study did not bring them in conflict with
Thomistic orthodoxy but offered a vocabulary and a range of
reference broader and more flexible than what Roman catechisms
had to offer.  That movement, whose founding patron was Joseph De
Ghellinck, S.J., culminated in the postwar establishment of the
Corpus Christianorum series, the luxuriance of the �tudes
Augustiniennes establishment in Paris, and a host of specialized
projects in the field.  Vatican II crowned the aspirations of
those two generations of scholars with gratifying success and at
the same time undermined their rationale.  The generation of
Catholic scholars that has flourished since the Council has no
need of the mild subterfuge of patristic reference to clothe
their ideas; accordingly, the great projects have seen a slow
seepage of manpower to age, laicization, and more fashionable
studies.  Worse in some ways, Catholicism has lost many of its
enemies, or at least the most learned of them, in eirenic,
ecumenical times, and it is no longer possible to rely on
anticlerical French scholars coming to work in these areas with
the vigor with which they once sought evidence that the one,
holy, catholic, and Roman church had not always been as it is
today.  The history of Christianity has ceased to be a vital
concern for Christians and non-Christians alike, and the great
and urgent question that formed the subtext of so many historical
debates of the last century, `was hei�t Christentum?', has lost
its savor:  and that marks a watershed in the history of our
culture.  There remains, to be sure, an element of anxiety on all
sides, a sense that a figure like Augustine must either be
defended or attacked, that large and immediate issues are at
stake��in a way they are not at stake, for example, among readers
of Silius Italicus or Notker Balbulus.  If we could forget for a
moment that he was a Christian, and even forget for a moment that
he was Augustine, he would probably appear very different; but in
those matters, memory's hold is unshakeable, and we cannot forget
at will.
     All this needs to be said by way of preface to some brief
remarks about specific issues of interpretation that arise.  The
focus of modern discussion of this text has been the place of
neo-Platonism in Augustine's life and writings.  The polemic has
moved between two poles:  the attack on the plaster saint,
beginning with the observation that his `Christianity' was, at
least for an important period in his life, very like a specific
non-Christian philosophy, and the defense, surrendering much of
the plaster but insisting on the authentic Christian essence. 
All parties seem to have agreed unthinkingly on the principle
that `Christianity' is in the first instance a body of
intellectual propositions about God and his creatures and about
particular events in the history of the relations between God and
his creatures.  On that view, movement into and out of
`Christianity' is a matter of intellectual discussion and
assessment, ending in assent or disagreement.  If you believe in
the Virgin Birth, you are Christian in a way that someone who
offers liberal quibbles is not.  Arguments for and against the
existence of God are essential, and philosophy is the handmaid of
theology.  To argue then that philosophy has dictated to theology
tends to undermine the authenticity of theology.
     In this network of assumptions, Augustine's dealings with
the Platonists call his theology into question.  For one period
of Augustine's life, from his public conversion to Christianity
in 386/7 to his ordination as a Christian cleric in 391, the
evidence viewed on those assumptions could be described in ways
disturbing to traditionalists, who��sharing those fundamental
assumptions about the nature of Christianity��were in a weak
position to respond.  Augustine's views appear so neo-Platonic as
to be Christian in name only.  Was Christianity for Augustine
only a convenient dress in which to present ideas that were in
origin non-Christian?  To make that case (as Alfaric did) was to
subvert the self-consciousness of the Latin Catholic tradition: 
if Augustine is not a Christian, then who is?  If Augustine's
version of Christianity is tainted, then whose is not?  It is no
wonder that the attempt raised heated defense.  Boyer's orthodox
book in response was sober, well-considered, and soundly argued,
but it was not at its strongest when it came to awkward
historical facts.  Courcelle's book found middle ground: 
allowing plenty of room for Christianity, but insisting on the
Platonic disposition of that Christianity.  Further, Courcelle
widened the net to include Ambrose and show that Platonized
Christianity was the order of the day in imperial Milan of the
380s.  The reorientation Courcelle effected has not been
seriously challenged.
     The drawbacks of the traditional assumptions are evident
even on their own terms.  What sort of thing is Christianity? 
When is it compromised by admixture from `outside'?  The view
that `Christianity' is something unadmixed can itself be a
Christian doctrine, but that `Christianity' requires a rather
specialized definition to be useful as a historical category.  If
Augustine uses neo-Platonic terms to describe Christian
teachings, and even if he professes to see no distinction between
a neo-Platonic teaching and a Christian one, and even more, if he
adopts a neo-Platonic principle out of a vacuum and makes it part
of his `Christianity', observers could think that the integrity
and authenticity of his Christianity were at risk.  But if those
principles happen not to conflict with any express Christian
doctrine `necessary for salvation', and if Augustine then turns
and flatly denies some principle or other of neo-Platonism on no
other grounds than that it conflicts with something that
scripture or church policy states, has he compromised himself? 
Where does he get the confidence and authority to make such
distinctions?  And if some other thinker, no less respected than
Augustine among Christians, should contradict Augustine on one of
these points, who is to judge between them?
     But does anyone think that Christianity is a thing of the
mind only?  Perhaps in Paris, but surely not semper, ubique, ab
omnibus.  By way of thought experiment, consider only an orthodox
Reformed view of the matter.  The question for that view is
whether and when Augustine acquired the theological faith that is
the substance of salvation.  Such a view might be sympathetic to
the most anti-Catholic parts of the French debate (surely the
dalliance with the platonicorum libri is not where we should see
Augustine becoming a Christian), but would be more inclined to
accept the paradigmatic conversion of the Milan garden scene as
authentic.  But do the Platonic doctrines then entertained and
held for years afterwards in some way compromise the integrity of
that theological faith?  On available evidence, no clear judgment
is possible.
     The defects of both Protestant and Catholic modern views of
Augustine and of this text encourages us to look for
alternatives.  That which has proved most useful in the present
work is easily stated.  For Augustine, and for late antique men
and women generally, religion is cult��or, to use the word we use
when we approve of a particular cult, religion is liturgy. 
Anti-clerical Parisians and Protestants may agree that
priestcraft is dangerous stuff, but Augustine would not concur
with them.  The central decision he makes in the period narrated
in the Confessions is not to believe the doctrines of the
Catholic Christians (that is important, but preliminary), but to
present himself for cult initiation��and the threshold there is a
matter not of doctrine but of morals.  Bk. 8, the vivid narrative
of hesitation and decision, depicts Augustine agonizing over
whether he could and would live up to the arduous standards he
thought required of one who would accept full initiation into the
Christian cult.  His decision to seek that initiation, taken
provisionally in August 386, carried out on the night of 24�5
April 387, was the centerpiece of his conversion.
     Why do we downplay cult initiation for Augustine?  There are
several reasons, beginning with our own prejudices.  Few modern
scholars (indeed, few moderns of any stripe, including the most
ardent proponents of a traditional doctrine of
transubstantiation) hold a view of the importance and efficacy of
cult acts that even remotely approaches the visceral reverence
for cult that all late antique men and women felt.  We like to
believe that there were serene and cultless philosophers in that
age, not exactly anticlerical but certainly not superstitiously
devoted to ritual and ceremony.  Whether there were such people
is perhaps irrelevant to the immediate case of Augustine, for it
is clear that he did not believe that such people existed.
     A further evidentiary problem obtrudes to cut the cult-life
of late antiquity off from our view.  Virtually all late antique
cults, and Christianity was emphatically no exception, kept the
secrets of their rites closely held.  Until 25 April 387,
Augustine himself had never seen what Americans may see on
television any Sunday and every Christmas Eve��the rituals of the
Roman eucharistic liturgy.  As a catechumen, he had been admitted
to the church to hear scripture readings, hymns, prayers, and
sermons, but then he had been politely shown the door when the
central cult act was about to begin.  In all the years after his
baptism and ordination, in all the five million surviving words
of his works, Augustine never describes or discusses the cult act
that was the center of his ordained ministry.  Liturgical texts
from late antiquity are few and terse, and late antique
commentary on liturgy itself even rarer.  Much can be
reconstructed, but there is an inevitable disproportion. 
Augustine is verbose about doctrine, close-mouthed about ritual. 
He appears to us as a man of doctrine exclusively, though he
himself tells us in explicit enough terms otherwise.  There is
a proportion to be redressed, and no accurate guide to the
correct balance.  Augustine's Christianity was not 100% doctrine,
0% ritual, nor even 80%-20%; but was it 20% doctrine, 80% ritual? 
That is possible, but on balance unlikely.  We are left to wander
between the extremes, following our hunches.  What is clear is
that cult was decisive for him:  without cult, no Christianity. 
But he was prepared to be very lenient on matters of doctrine;
error alone has rarely been sufficient for excommunication:  it
is contumacy that draws anathema.  He surely admitted to full
church membership many ordinary citizens of Hippo for whom
halting recital from memory of the apostle's creed and lord's
prayer marked the upper limits of their capacity to master the
verbal formulae of their new cult.
     To take such a view of Augustine's religion is perhaps only
possible for a post-modern reader, one who has learned afresh
from the most recent generation of Parisians that the map is not
the territory, that the narrative is not the event, that a text
is not a life.  There are important blanks in the Confessions: 
God is present but silent, Augustine's past life is over (`dead'
he says of his infancy at 1.�6.�9), and his present life extends
beyond the pages he writes in many ways, cult activity not least
of them.  From his earliest writings, Augustine's program as
writer aspired to knowledge of God and knowledge of self.  But
God and Augustine we learn about only indirectly and at a
rhetorical distance in the Confessions.  To remember that is to
begin to understand better the text as text, and there is perhaps
the key to seeing the most vital feature of this particular text.
     A text is not a life:  so far, so good.  To narrate one's
past life and deeds is to put a pattern of words next to a life
(by nature patternless, full of event and incident) and to
declare that the words and the life have something to do with
each other.  `Something' is probably the right word.  Later in
these prolegomena, we will see how the pattern of words that
appears in the Confessions had been taking shape in Augustine's
texts for years before this text was actually written.  The
Confessions offer no unedited transcript, but a careful
rhetorical presentation.  But the writing of this text was itself
part of Augustine's life.  `Confession' for Augustine, that act
of `making the truth', was itself an important part of his
religion, somewhere between doctrinal disputation and cult
act��perhaps even forming a link between the two.  The life about
which Augustine tells us in his text finally slips beyond our
grasp, and the cult-life about which he tells us little or
nothing is even more remote.  But the life of this particular act
of `confession', the writing of this text by a man
self-consciously turning from youth to middle age, is as present
to us on the page as our own lives��indeed, becomes as we read it
a part of our own lives.  It is that fragment of the `life' of
Augustine that is most accessible to us.
     The purpose of this commentary, for all the technical
apparatus, is to bring that part of Augustine's life into the
life of the reader.  Philological scholarship takes its departure
from one text and generates another, and the movement is all too
often away from the object of the researches to the investigating
subject; it is not optical illusion to think that modern
scholarship has been increasingly at risk from a narcissism in
which the object disappears from view and the scholarly subject
takes center stage.  That is a reason to write commentary rather
than interpretive essay:  to facilitate the movement past the
commentator's words once again to Augustine's words��to
Augustine's life.

  *****

     One line of interpretation has been largely neglected here: 
inquiry into Augustine's psychological makeup and history.  The
appeal of such an interpretation is great and its lack
regrettable, but there are compelling reasons for abstaining from
the attempt.  (1)  Judged purely by the standards of modern
psychoanalysis, the Confessions do not provide us with evidence
of the quantity and quality necessary to make a well-founded
assessment.  (2)  Because there are either no ancient or medieval
figures, or very, very few, for whom such evidence is available,
it is far from clear whether it is possible to use the patterns
detected by scientific investigators in the personalities of
modern men and women in assessing those long dead.  Even assuming
that the patterns detected by science are universal, making the
necessary adjustments for the different circumstances of ancient
public and private life is, flatly impossible.  (3) In
particular, it often seems on reading psychological
interpretations of Augustine that the moderns too easily yield to
Augustine's own insistence on the importance of his own
conversion, as recorded in Bk. 8 of the Confessions.  (4) Any
reading, especially a psychoanalytical reading, of a text such as
this should not be judged according to the simplicity it imposes
but according to the complexity it reveals.  So, to take only one
example, it is obvious that Augustine's father and mother had
very different effects on their son, but having made the
observation, there is little left to do but speculate, on purely
a priori grounds, what deeds and traits of Augustine's known life
may have been influenced by family relations.

  *****

     Augustine should have the last word, his own advice to
Paulinus of Nola on how to read him:  ep. 27.�4, `sed tu cum
legis, mi sancte Pauline, non te ita rapiant quae per nostram
infirmitatem veritas loquitur, ut ea quae ipse loquor minus
diligenter advertas, ne dum avidus hauris bona et recta quae data
ministro, non ores pro peccatis et erratis quae ipse committo. 
in his enim quae tibi recte, si adverteris, displicebunt, ego
ipse conspicior, in his autem quae per donum spiritus quod
accepisti recte tibi placent in libris meis, ille amandus, ille
praedicandus est apud quem est fons vitae, et in cuius lumine
videbimus lumen sine aenigmate et facie ad faciem, nunc autem in
aenigmate videmus.  in his ergo quae ipse de veteri fermento
eructavi, cum ea legens agnosco, me iudico cum dolore; in his
vero quae de azymo sinceritatis et veritatis dono dei dixi,
exulto cum tremore.  quid enim habemus quod non accepimus?  at
enim melior est qui maioribus et pluribus quam qui minoribus et
paucioribus donis dei dives est:  quis negat?  sed rursus melius
est, vel de parvo dei dono gratias ipsi agere quam sibi agi velle
de magno.  haec ut ex animo semper confitear meumque cor a lingua
mea non dissonet, ora pro me, frater; ora, obsecro, ut non
laudari volens, sed laudans invocem dominum, et ab inimicis meis
salvus ero.'



II.  A Reading of the Confessions

     The Confessions are a single work in thirteen books, written
in AD 397.  The first nine books contain much autobiographical
reminiscence covering the years AD 354�87; the last three books
contain an allegorical exposition of the first chapter of
Genesis, and Bk. 11 in particular contains a long discussion of
the nature of time.  Bk. 10 is known mainly for its long
discussion of the nature of memory and for a disturbingly
scrupulous examination of conscience.  There is no evidence that
the work ever circulated in a form other than the one we have,
but some scholars believe that Bk. 10 is the fruit of second
thoughts, added after the other twelve books were complete.� 
Translators have sometimes abridged the work by omitting part or
all of Bks. 11�13.
     The reading of this work presented here is loosely arranged
according to the structure of a scholastic quaestio.  That
structure helps make explicit the received views, the
difficulties that present themselves, a resolution of the
difficulties with whatever new contribution is possible, and, in
many ways most important, a final discussion that does justice to
the merits of the received views while resituating them in the
light of new ideas.  The presentation under Videtur is itself a
reading of other scholars' readings, and contains elements of new
interpretation, and what appears under Respondeo does not pretend
to be entirely new or original.

     Videtur:  The work as a whole is an intellectual
autobiography, tracing the movement of Augustine's opinions on
matters of a philosophic and religious nature from his earliest
youth to the time of writing.  The principal stages of this
ascent from ignorance to illumination are precisely identified: 
the two `tentatives d'extases plotiniennes' of Bk. 7 and the
vision of Ostia in Bk. 9.  But other passages may be interpreted
in the same context.  For example, the description of the
contents of the de pulchro et apto in Bk. 4 presents that work as
though it were a doomed first attempt to ascend in the mind to
the summum bonum.  It suggests two reasons for the failure of
that ascent, ignorance of the nature of God and ignorance of the
nature of created things.  In that context, the first
`tentative' of Bk. 7 occurs after Augustine has been shown to
have renewed his understanding of the divine nature in the first
pages of Bk. 7, culminating in the reading of the platonicorum
libri.  But that `tentative' fails; the paragraphs that follow
reveal decisively Augustine's mature view of the nature, that is
to say (under Plotinus' tutelage) the non-nature, of evil:  in
other words, his discovery at that time of the essential goodness
of created things.  In the wake of that discovery, the second
`tentative' of Bk. 7 is, on Plotinian terms as Augustine
understood them, a complete success.  It is not that the
Plotinian method did not work for Augustine; it worked, but it
was not enough.  It left him disappointed and hungry for
something different, perhaps richer, perhaps more permanent,
perhaps merely something more congruent with the realities of
everyday life.  That is achieved in Bk. 9 at Ostia.  The report
of that vision begins with the most explicit Plotinian allusion
in the whole work, but goes far beyond that Plotinian form to
an explicitly Christian, scriptural, and eschatological ending. 
The vision of Ostia anticipates the beatific vision.  That new
post-Plotinian ascent to vision becomes the organizing pattern
for the first half of Bk. 10, in which Augustine, in the presence
of the reader, does what he learned to do at Ostia.  Similar
patterns of discourse keyed to the ascent of the mind to God, and
marked particularly by recurrence of the significant quotation of
Phil. 3.�13, occur throughout Bks. 11�13.  (The pattern of
successive visions from Bk. 4 to Bk. 7 to Bk. 9 also matches a
theory about three types of vision that Augustine had expounded
several years before writing the Confessions and returned to in
detail in the commentary de Genesi ad litteram years later; the
vision of Ostia thus matches the highest type of `vision'
possible in this life.)

     Sed contra:  But all attempts to depict the Confessions as
essentially or mainly a story of the ascent of the mind to God
encounter great difficulties��one extrinsic and one intrinsic. 
Extrinsically, it is a priori difficult to accept that the mature
work of a Christian bishop, who will later express grave
reservations about the worth of Platonic philosophy (notably in
civ.) would be itself a frank manifestation of that style of
thought and doctrine.  Intrinsically, the difficulty is that
not all that is in the Confessions is included in an explanation
that focuses on the ascent of the mind to God.  Noticeably
missing from the summary in the previous paragraph is the
obviously crucial Bk. 8; but the real scandal of the work that
overthrows such an unilinear attempt at interpretation is the
central Bk. 10 itself.  If the work were an attempt to depict the
ascent pure and simple, then the memorable `sero te amavi'
paragraph (10.�27.�38) would have served perfectly well for the
last paragraph of the work as a whole.  Not only do Bks. 11�13
obtrude, but the last half of Bk. 10, an affront to our disdain
for such scrupulosity, makes nonsense of any attempt at so
limited a reading.  But that depiction of the present state of
Augustine's soul as a victim of the three temptations of 1 Jn.
2.�16 must be taken seriously; indeed, taken seriously enough, it
opens another line of sight into the organization of the earlier
books of the work.  A pattern of conduct can be traced through
Bks. 2�4 according to which Augustine sins first according to the
concupiscence of the flesh (both the sexual sins of adolescence
and the symbolic re-enactment of the fall implied by the incident
of the pear tree), next according to concupiscence of the eyes
(described mainly in Bk. 3, where he falls prey to one sort of
curiositas in his mania for the spectacula of Carthage and to
another in his allegiance to the Manichees), and finally
according to ambitio saeculi (which is most lightly touched on at
this stage��see on 4.�7.�12).  The moral rise of Augustine,
that parallels but does not duplicate the ascent of the mind,
follows a reverse order:  his zeal for his public career fades
first at Milan, then his adhesion to the spirit of curiosity
that had led him to the Manichees, and only last his
enslavement to the desires of the flesh.  It is that liberation
that comes between the Milan and Ostia visions and makes possible
the higher vision that he comes to at Ostia and in Bks. 10 and
following.

     Respondeo:  The garden scene is indeed central to the work: 
but in what way?  It is in the garden that Christ enters
Augustine's life.  The want felt and described at 7.�18.�24 is
now filled.  A restrictive reading of the place of Christ in
the Confessions, such as that of M. Lods, insists that the
words of Rom. 13.�13�14, particularly, as Augustine hears them at
8.�12.�29, do not satisfy our expectation of what the place of
Christ in a conversion should be.  But the action of Christ in
8.�12.�29 is redemptive, salvific, and decisive.  For Augustine,
after all, it is incarnation pre-eminently that redeems, and to
come to understand that incarnation accurately and to acquire in
his life a pattern of conduct that he thought required by an
understanding of that incarnation��that, for Augustine, is a very
Christian, and Christ-centered, conversion.
     The literal sense of the text of Rom. 13.�14 cannot be
pressed too hard here:  `sed induimini dominum Iesum Christum'. 
Christ is many things to Augustine (via, veritas, vita,
sapientia, verbum dei) and all of those things Christ is to
Augustine in the garden.  The encounter with a scriptural text
throws into new light the parallel line of ascent that Augustine
has been unwittingly following from his earliest life, an ascent
mediated to fallen humanity through the medicine of the
scriptures (which offer one of the incarnations of the Word). 
The ascent of the mind, as Plotinus had preached it, had run to a
dead end.  Instead, an alternate path (via) proved to be the
true way to the goal Augustine sought.  Whatever is incomplete
about this encounter with Christ is brought to fulfillment in Bk.
9, through baptism (9.�6.�14), and culminates at the end of Bk.
10, where Augustine closes the central book of the work with a
passage of such dense eucharistic imagery that it may best be
thought of as perhaps the only place in our literature where a
Christian receives the eucharist in the literary text itself.
     This view adds emphasis and shading to the Augustine's
preoccupation with the issue of continence.  The struggle to
decide whether to lead a completely celibate life is the one
feature of the conversion narrative that ought to come as a
surprise.  If it were only a matter of finding the answers to
deep questions, Bk. 7 would be the end of the narrative.  That
the issue of continence arose and became central to the decision
in the Milan garden that we call Augustine's conversion, this was
not part of what Augustine had bargained for when he set out to
search for wisdom, nor was it what most people approaching
Christianity in this period were worrying about.  There was no
reason why Augustine could not have been baptized and still made
that good marriage Monnica arranged.  
     To understand the issue's place in the Confessions, we must
pay attention to a lost work of Ambrose's, written while
Augustine was in Milan.  The title is arresting:  de sacramento
regenerationis sive de philosophia; paraphrased, that would be
`On Baptism; or, Concerning Philosophy.'  The argument is
straightforward enough:  The way of the philosophers is not the
true way, it is not enough to know the truth, one must have in
addition sacramental membership in the Christian church.  Phrased
that way, the relevance to Augustine's position is clear.  What
is of greater interest, however, is that in that treatise,
Ambrose found it polemically necessary and useful to counter the
claims of the philosophers to have achieved a higher standard of
moral life by their chastity; `continence is the pedestal on
which right worship rests,' says Ambrose.  That was the
challenge Augustine accepted:  to become not merely Christian,
but a Christian who outdoes the philosophers in all their
excellences.  In order to present himself for baptism, Augustine
felt that he had to have achieved a degree of moral self-control
that assured him of a lifetime of continence.  His holiday that
autumn of 386 at Cassiciacum was, inter alia, a time to test his
resolve away from the presumed temptations of court and city
living.

     Ad primum:  What then of the apparent pattern of the work as
a whole, the depiction of the ascent of the mind?  Though
Augustine in the years after the Confessions will drift away from
the ascent-vocabulary of his youth, he certainly adhered to that
way of speaking throughout his literary works of 386�97 and in
the Confessions themselves.  It must also be recognized that the
substance of the ascent remains central to Augustine's activity. 
What is presented to us in the Confessions is the transformation
of the traditional philosopher's ascent of the mind to the summum
bonum into a uniquely Christian ascent that combines the two
paths that Augustine had followed in his own life.  The exegesis
of a chapter of scripture that fills the last three books itself
displays the union of the intellectual and exegetic, the Platonic
and Christian, approaches to God, setting a pattern that becomes
the center of Augustine's life's work, to be fulfilled only
eschatologically��a goal anticipated but not reached on the last
page of this text.  The form is exegetical, the content
apparently philosophical; but on closer examination the content
turns out to be more theology than philosophy.  He sees traces of
God the creator in Bk. 11 in the juxtaposition of time with
eternity and understands himself as separated from God by his own
position in time.  He sees God the Son in the Word of revelation,
and understands his own relation to that revelation by unraveling
in Bk. 12 the perplexities and imperfections of human attempts to
expound the divine word through human mechanisms of
interpretation.  God the spirit animating history emerges in Bk.
13 as Augustine pursues his allegory of the first chapter of
Genesis along lines deliberately chosen to juxtapose creation
history with church history, and to understand his own role as a
member of, and guide in, that church.

     The Confessions, then, present themselves to us a book about
God, and about Augustine:  more Augustine at the beginning, more
God at the end.  But Augustine does not disappear in this work. 
Properly speaking, Augustine is redeemed, and insofar as he is
redeemed and reformed according to the image and likeness of God,
he becomes representative of all humankind.  The work begins with
a cry of exultant praise, `magnus es domine et laudabilis valde'
(1.�1.�1), voiced by Augustine.  When the same line (a scriptural
text) is brought back at the beginning of Bk. 11, it is
introduced `ut dicamus omnes' (11.�1.�1).  The reader is expected
to share the last three books, for if all persons are created no
less in the image and likeness of God than Augustine, and if his
readers are bound to Augustine through God in caritas, the image
(to use the right word) of Augustine in these last three books is
at one and the same time an image of what his readers are
themselves.  In this way the work is both itself an act of
confession, and at the same time a model and pattern for other
acts of confession, by Augustine and by his readers, at other
times and places.  There is no paradox in suggesting that this
intricate interplay of images and patterns is both the
culmination of Augustine's theological meditations and at the
same time a feat possible in the fourth century only for someone
who had read Plotinus, and read him very well.



III.  The Confessions in Augustine's Life


     The date of writing has been repeatedly canvassed and
consensus achieved.  Argument from the retractationes places the
work between 397 and 401, while the way Augustine refers to
Ambrose and Simplicianus makes us think that he had not yet heard
at the time of writing of Ambrose's death and Simplicianus'
succession to the see of Milan in April 397.  Rhetorical and
stylistic unity and the intensity that runs through the book like
an electric current make it easiest to read as a work written
entirely in 397.  Those who emphasize the disparity of the
parts of the Confessions and find plausible the arguments for a
double redaction or for the later insertion of Bk. 10 also find
arguments for extending composition down to 401.  In view of
the available evidence, it is not possible to press the matter to
any firm resolution of these remaining disagreements.
     Few proponents of Christian humility have obtruded
themselves on the attention of their public with the insistence
(to say nothing of the effectiveness) that marks this work.  For
a man who felt acutely the pressure of others' eyes and
thoughts, Augustine was often unable to refrain from calling
attention to himself.  What his flock thought, for example, of
the long, magnificent sermon he once gave on the anniversary of
his own episcopal ordination is impossible to recover at this
distance.  It is not that Augustine was unaware of the irony and
room for self-contradiction that his habit of confessio gave��far
from it��but he was unable to refrain.  His best defence is in
the idiosyncratic notion of confessio that he uses to explain and
guide his own words. 
     `Confession' in Augustine's way of understanding it��a
special divinely authorized speech that establishes authentic
identity for the speaker��is the true and proper end of mortal
life.  He had struggled to find voice for this speech all his
life.  The corpus of his earlier writings, seen in this light,
offers a picture of development that is hardly a linear
progression.  The conversions of Augustine were many, and they
did not end in the garden in Milan.
     It is conventional to think that 391 marked an important
turning, with formal affiliation to the ecclesiastical hierarchy
through ordination.  That moment brought a real shock to
Augustine and opened a difficult and frustrating period of his
life, when one literary project after another fell to pieces in
his hands as a desperate writers' block settled on him.  The
first thing he wrote in that period was the dreadful util.
cred.��unconvincing, lamely argued, poorly organized��and he
managed to complete only his commentaries on the sermon on the
mount and on Galatians (while throwing up his hands at giving
Romans a similar treatment).
     Two events of the mid-390s conspired to worsen the crisis
and propel it toward resolution:  his new reading of Paul at the
urging of Simplicianus, which included a rediscovery of the
importance he would attribute to Paul in telling the story of his
Milan conversion, and his ordination as bishop.  His writer's
block claims its last victim in the unfinished torso of de
doctrina christiana, apparently intended as an authoritative
episcopal guide to Christian exegesis and preaching.  What
freed his pen for the prolific career and the masterworks we know
was the writing of the Confessions themselves.  He discovered at
length how to make `confession' in his special sense come to life
through his writing.  After the highly personal Confessions
began the torrent of his great works, including, significantly, a
series of works re-beginning and then completing triumphantly
projects that had come to nothing in the years before the
Confessions.  Whether that new-found facility was achieved at
the price of sacrificing some of the unrelenting zeal for inquiry
is a question that deserves further examination.  One work
stands out in the post-Confessions years as a deliberate
continuation of the same enterprise in the same spirit:  the de
trinitate.  That is the only one of Augustine's major works
that is not either polemical or a scriptural commentary, and in
it we can see the trajectory of Bks. 11�13 carried to its logical
conclusion, albeit not without difficulties and course changes. 
The farther we get from the writing of the Confessions the harder
it is to plot that trajectory as a constant purpose, but the
ideas and obsessions of his youth remain vivid for the aged
Augustine.  It is a little observed fact that what may be the
last words we have from his pen, the last surviving lines of his
incomplete opus imperfectum contra Julianum do not attack
Pelagianism, the bug-bear of his old age, but Manicheism, the
phantasm of his youth.
     Other lines converge on the Confessions.  One additional
element requires comment and emphasis.
     The commentary on 7.�9.�13 discusses the evidence for the
history of Augustine's readings in neo-Platonic, and specifically
Porphyrian, philosophy.  Augustine's readings at Milan included
Porphyry, but in a non-threatening way.  He found there a
Platonism that led him towards Christianity and that he would
criticize mainly for not going far enough in that direction.  By
no later than the time of the de consensu evangelistarum (399/400
or after), he had on the other hand read enough Porphyry to
discover how hostile neo-Platonism could be to Christianity.  The
de consensu evangelistarum and the de civitate dei, and to some
extent the de trinitate and de Genesi ad litteram as well, show
Augustine working out his `Christian Platonism' (or better,
`Augustinianism') in a way that no longer minimizes the
separation.  The achievement is a subtle one, for his reading of
Rom. 1.�20ff provided him with an instrument for claiming that
while there was much true doctrine among the Platonists, there
was error of a crippling kind in that they did not worship God as
they ought.  It was courageous of Augustine to cling to the
truths he thought he had found in Platonism at this point, and
not merely to reject the whole package of Plato, Plotinus, and
Porphyry.  Augustine's signal contribution to Christian thought
lies in the success of the great works in which he achieved his
own synthesis.
     Doubt remains just when and how he came to reassess his
Platonic authors, but the Confessions are intimately bound up in
this process.  The last work of Augustine before the Confessions
to address the position of Christianity vis-�-vis Platonism was
the vera religione that shortly preceded his priestly ordination
of 391.  He turned away more or less completely from the concerns
and expressions of his Platonic period in the years after
ordination, as he struggled to find ways to write as a Christian
clergyman ought to write.  With the Confessions he returned to
his Platonic period and put a whole new reading on it.  The
Augustine of the Confessions has drawn a clear line separating
him from the Platonists.  The `ascents' of Milan are different in
kind from that of Ostia and from that which is presented in Bk.
10 of the Confessions.  In that difference, to say nothing of the
content of Bks. 11�13, lies the germ of the mature Augustine's
Christian Platonism, almost as full of admiration as ever for the
accomplishments of the Platonists, but with a new reserve and new
boundaries.  Cause and effect here are not to be traced, and
matters are confused by the ambiguities of the evidence (see on
7.�9.�13) for the discovery of Porphyry's hostility to
Christianity.  If that occurred in the early 400s, i.�e., very
shortly after the Confessions, then no evidence from after that
discovery may be taken confidently to throw light on the attitude
to Platonism in the Confessions.  What is clear is that already
the Confessions mark a step away from the Christian Platonism of
Milan, and of Augustine's works from 386 to 391.  His
presentation of Platonism in the Confessions is marked by his
later discoveries, and the Platonism he found at Milan is
criticized in the Confessions on terms that were only possible
after leaving Milan.  That revision of his understanding of who
he had been entailed a revision of his understanding of who he
now was, and that achievement in self-knowledge seems to have
been essential to the liberation he now found, refreshing old
lines of inquiry and freeing his pen to write the books that were
to come.  The Confessions shows Augustine in the act of
re-integrating elements of his thought and life that had begun to
come apart for him, and it is that re-integration that is the
foundation of his mature achievement.  Without the `conversion'
c. 397 that begat the Confessions, it is unlikely that Augustine
would have become the towering figure that he is.
     The motif of confession itself was importantly adumbrated in
Augustine's earlier works in various ways.  Two particular cases
require comment here.
     One of the first works Augustine wrote at Cassiciacum (Nov.
386/Jan. 387) was the book to which he gave a title of his own
coinage:  soliloquia.  The work is a meditation on the
circumstances of Augustine's life, without autobiographical
reflection in the main  The approach is `anagogic' and at the
same time self-reflective.  The most striking parallel to the
Confessions is one of style and tone and overall approach.  The
opening paragraphs (sol. 1.�1.�2�1.�1.�6) consist of prayer,
praise, and invocation of a sort that could often be mistaken for
what appears a decade later in the Confessions.  There is not
the abundance of scriptural language, but the similarities are
considerable.  The soliloquia lack the power and assurance of the
Confessions, and they have accordingly found little modern
audience.
     If the form of `confession' was emerging in Augustine's mind
as early as 386, the substance of the narrative books was taking
shape as well.  We all tell our life stories in formulaic ways,
repeating ourselves with minor variations to different hearers. 
We are fortunate in having one passage from before the
Confessions that shows Augustine doing exactly that��recounting
his life story, howbeit briefly, and howbeit veiled as a
hypothetical case.  The veil indeed is so heavy that the passage
has not been noticed by earlier students of the Confessions, but
once the pattern is detected it cannot be ignored.  The text in
question is lib. arb. 1.�11.�22:  

     `num ista ipsa poena parva existimanda est, quod ei [sc.
     menti] libido dominatur, expoliatamque virtutis opulentia
     per diversa inopem atque indigentem trahit, nunc falsa pro
     veris approbantem, nunc etiam defensitantem, nunc
     improbantem quae antea probavisset et nihilominus in alia
     falsa inruentem; nunc adsensionem suspendentem suam et
     plerumque perspicuas ratiocinationes formidantem; nunc
     desperantem de tota inventione veritatis et stultitiae
     tenebris penitus inhaerentem; nunc conantem in lucem
     intellegendi rursusque fatigatione decidentem:  cum
     interea cupiditatum illud regnum tyrannice saeviat, et
     variis contrariisque tempestatibus totum hominis animum
     vitamque perturbet, hinc timore inde desiderio, hinc
     anxietate inde inani falsaque laetitia, hinc cruciatu rei
     amissae quae diligebatur, inde ardore adipiscendae quae non
     habebatur, hinc acceptae iniuriae doloribus, inde facibus
     vindicandae .�.�.�?'

The passage may not antedate the Confessions by more than a
couple of years, but it reflects a rehearsed narrative that
would be developed more fully in the writing of the
Confessions.
     `Confession' thus came in Augustine's hands to be the
necessary and sufficient formal complement to the substance of
Augustine's early writing.  From Cassiciacum (or perhaps from the
writing of the de pulchro et apto:  see on 4.�13.�20),
Augustine's writings had been the record of the mind's ascent to
God.  There are places where Augustine writes about the idea of
the mind's ascent to God, and places where in his writings he is
himself clearly attempting an elevation of that sort:  so the
episodes recounted in Bks. 7 and 9.  The soliloquia are
themselves a conscious `ascent', while the Cassiciacum dialogues
both discuss the issues and attempt to exemplify the practice. 
Indeed, all the works Augustine wrote and published before the
Confessions take one of three forms:  `ascent', scriptural
exegesis, or anti-Manichean polemic.  As suggested above, later
works as well practice the `ascent', even though Augustine writes
about it much less frequently.  The success of the Confessions,
seen in those terms, is that the work integrated the private
intellectual and religious experience of Augustine with the
public responsibilities of the bishop.  To `confess' is to find
an authentic voice with which to express what is private in a way
that can be shared with a wider public.  How far the discipline
of the pulpit helped Augustine find this voice can only be a
matter of speculation.  How far Augustine felt the Confessions
a success is perhaps less a matter for speculation, given his
remarks in retr. 2.�6.�1, but the very existence of the
retractationes shows that the underlying urge to master life by
creating a text that provides the authoritative interpretation of
that life was not entirely assuaged.  
     The Confessions are the last product of Augustine's youth
and the first work of his maturity.  His familiar pattern of the
six ages of life (see on 1.�8.�13) shows that Augustine was
conscious of that himself.  His narrative of infantia, pueritia,
and adolescentia ends in the first years of iuventus with a
clarification and strengthening of will; the narrative was
written just on the cusp between iuventus and the variously named
fifth age.  All other impulses that gave rise to the Confessions
notwithstanding, it is not surprising that Augustine would have
found the years around his forty-fifth birthday congenial to
renewed introspection.

  *****

     It is impossible, then, to take the Confessions in a vacuum,
and it is impossible to give any single interpretation that will
satisfy.  Even these few paragraphs of summary give a misleading
impression of simplicity and directness, for a work that draws
its rare power from complexity, subtlety, and nuance.  In
uncovering one or another device of construction or suggestion
that Augustine employed, it may be that we do neither him nor his
intended readers��if there are many such yet with us��any favor. 
He was assuredly the heir of an ancient rhetorical tradition that
did not write to prove but to persuade, that knew that a work
must have its effect on a reader or hearer directly or it is
unlikely to have the desired effect at all.  To take the
Confessions apart piece by piece is to run the great risk that
when all the pieces are put back together the marvelous machine
will not run as it did before.  But that is the task of the
philologist:  to take texts already in danger of demise from
great age and remoteness, dismantle and study them, and then
reassemble them and set them ticking.  The only goal of
interpretation is reading:  exegesis leads to the Word, and not
the other way round.  If it often seems depressingly otherwise,
then a renewed attention to our greatest master of exegesis,
hermeneutic, reading��call it what you will��cannot fail to be
instructive, even (especially?) where it does not lead to
agreement and outright discipleship.