- Length
- 384 pagesChadwick, Confessions, Oxford World's Classics, 1991
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Confessions
The first book in which someone examines their own mind as a philosophical subject and finds it strange. Augustine invented a form to do it in, and the account of time in the eleventh book is still the starting point for the problem it addresses.
- Date
- 397-400
- Author
- Augustine of Hippo
- Region
- Hippo Regius, Roman North Africa
- Language
- Latin
- 1620 English, Tobie Matthew First complete English version Consensus
- 1838 English, E. B. Pusey Public domain; still widely reprinted Attested
- 1991 English, Henry Chadwick The current standard; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Opens — Starts a line of argument nothing before it was answering
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
Copied without interruption from the fifth century onward and never out of circulation; one of the very few classical works that survived the collapse of the Western empire entirely intact.
What the book says
Thirteen books addressed to God rather than to a reader, of which the first nine tell a life and the last four do something else entirely. The life is told as a sequence of misdirected wantings. As a boy he steals pears he does not want and cannot eat, and spends pages on why - because the theft was shared, because it was forbidden, because the wrongness was the point. As a student he is captivated by rhetoric, takes a mistress, has a son, and joins the Manichees, who offered an explanation of evil that let him off. He teaches in Carthage, then Rome, then Milan, where he hears Ambrose preach and reads certain books of the Platonists that show him how something might be real without being made of anything. The conversion in the garden follows: a voice from over the wall telling him to take up and read. His mother dies at Ostia shortly after, and book nine ends. Book ten then turns to memory, asking how a mind can contain what it is looking for. Book eleven asks what time is, and answers that he knows perfectly well until someone asks. The last two read the opening of Genesis. The join between the two halves is the book's oldest puzzle.
What it argues
That the self is not transparent to itself and that this is the beginning of the enquiry rather than an obstacle to it. Augustine keeps finding that he does not know why he did things, that he wants what he does not want, and that the mind cannot locate its own contents - the discussion of memory in book ten describes a vastness he cannot get to the bottom of and which is nevertheless him. The analysis of time follows the same shape: the past is not, the future is not, and the present has no duration, so time cannot be measured in the world and must be measured in the mind, as a distension of attention across expectation, attention and memory. What holds the halves together is the claim that a self is something that reaches beyond itself and is restless until it stops.
How it argues
By addressing God and letting the reader overhear, which solves a problem no other form solves. A first-person philosophical enquiry conducted for an audience invites performance; conducted as prayer, it can admit not knowing, can circle, and can put a question without having an answer ready. The prose moves between narrative, analysis and direct address within a paragraph, and the analytic passages - on the pear theft, on memory, on time - are embedded in the story rather than separated from it, which is itself the argument that a life and a mind are not two subjects.
The moment
The last decades of the Western empire, with Augustine a bishop in a North African port and Rome fifteen years from being sacked. He had been a professional rhetorician, a Manichee for nine years, and a reader of Neoplatonism - and the Confessions is written by a man settling accounts with all three. The Platonist books he mentions are almost certainly Plotinus in Latin translation, and the debt is acknowledged and bounded: they showed him the Word, he says, and not the Word made flesh.
How it travelled
Continuously and centrally. The Confessions was copied throughout the Middle Ages, was one of the books Petrarch carried, and shaped every subsequent European autobiography - Rousseau took the title in order to work against it. Its philosophical afterlife is separate and larger: the account of time is discussed by Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Ricoeur, and the discussion of the will and its division runs into modern work on weakness of will and on self-deception.
The strongest objection
That the narrative is shaped to fit the conclusion. Augustine is writing ten years after the events, as a bishop, about a young man whose errors are arranged to lead exactly where they led, and the pear theft is doing so much theological work that it strains as biography - the reader is invited to see original sin in a childhood scrump. The general form of the objection is that a retrospective account of a conversion is not evidence for the conversion, since the person writing has already accepted the framework that makes the events meaningful. Augustine's defenders answer that he says as much: the book is about how memory reconstructs, and the reconstruction is its subject rather than its flaw.
Why read it
Because it is direct, unguarded and much less pious than its reputation. Books one to nine read as narrative and can be taken on their own; book eleven, on time, is twenty pages and is one of the half-dozen most important pieces of philosophical writing in the Western tradition. Chadwick's translation is the one to use.
- First printed
- 1470
- First in English
- 1620
- Digitised
- Yes
The manuscript tradition is enormous and stable. Augustine reviewed the work himself late in life and left comments on it, which is unusual and useful.
Pusey's 1838 English is public domain and still widely reprinted. Chadwick, Boulding and Hammond are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live in three fields at once - as a religious classic, as the founding text of European autobiography, and as a philosophical work whose treatment of time, memory and the divided will is still cited in arguments that have nothing to do with its theology.
On quoting this book
The Latin is public domain and Pusey's Victorian English is too, but its register is remote from Augustine's and the accurate versions are in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How much the account of the conversion is shaped by the decade between event and writing is a standing question, and the relation between the Augustine of the Confessions and the Augustine of the letters written at the time of his conversion has been argued over since the nineteenth century. The unity of the thirteen books is disputed: proposals for why a life is followed by memory, time and Genesis range from a deliberate ascent through creation to a change of plan. The identity of the Platonist books is not certain, though Plotinus is the usual answer, and how far his Christianity is inflected by them is a live question.