About the Author: Anastasia graduated with an Honours BSc and an MA in political thought from the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her thesis described the theologico-political justifications given by the French State in the nationalisation of the Catholic Church during the French Revolution. She has also written on the topics of secularism, urbanism, and political philosophy. Anastasia works as a teacher of French in Ottawa, where she also volunteers in offering formation sessions in the city’s Anglicanorum Coetibus parish, the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She is also the female voice of Tradition Magazine.
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This article is dedicated to the Holy Father Pope Leo XIV, who, upon his election to the Chair of Peter, spoke of himself as “a son of Saint Augustine.”
Saint Augustine’s Confessions is the first and likely the most significant autobiography produced in recorded history. Its style and subject bridge antiquity and modernity: long before the historiographical changes of the 19th and 20th centuries, Augustine described his life in terms understandable by a soul of every generation. Here we face a man of the ancient days who has lived a life relatable to all: a spiritually divided family, a distant father, a youth full of angst and ambition, a loss of friends and loved ones, a dissatisfaction of career, and finally a cathartic surrender to the Truth that waited for him patiently against his own inconstancy.
Yet anyone who has tried to approach the autobiography itself knows that it isn’t without its quirks. Comprising 13 chapters traditionally entitled “books,” Confessions is divisible into two unequal parts: a biographical part of Books I–IX, and a philosophical portion of Books X–XIII. And while the former is what defines the book, the latter is what often puzzles modern audiences.
Book X of Confessions represents a rapid shift in both style and substance. Instead of discussing people and events, Augustine passes to concepts and ideas, and the work that felt extremely relatable to the point of veering into the shocking suddenly becomes barely comprehensible as the author painstakingly dissects our understanding of memory, mind, and time. This extremely unusual change of pace is only augmented in its intensity by the fact that Book X is noticeably longer than the ones that precede or follow it, creating a real conundrum for dumbfounded readers. Courses covering Confessions would sometimes omit explaining the philosophical part, and there are even copies published entirely without it.
This difficulty gives much ground to speculation why Augustine would have conceived the book this way. R.S. Pine-Coffin, a Catholic priest and the author of likely the most common English translation of Confessions published through Penguin Classics, suggested that Books X–XIII could have been produced later and tagged on for a different purpose, and that it might have originated from a different one of Augustine’s works. However, Henry Chadwick, an Anglican minister and a figure of Anglican-Catholic rapprochement of the 20th century, among his many other feats, suggested a different reading. Oxford Press’ A Very Short Introduction to Augustine, compiled from Chadwick’s various works on the saint’s writings, offers a summarized presentation of a view why we should consider Confessions as a unity rather than a patchwork—a continuity might be hard to trace, but it definitely is there. According to Chadwick, Confessions is to be read as a progression from specific to general, commencing with very particular details of his own life from infancy into adulthood, and then progressing into the discussion of greater truths that can only be accessed through contemplation—a journey towards a kind of Platonic forms understood with the personal Triune God as their summit. He writes that “the last four books actually carry the clue to the whole.” In this reading of Confessions, the perplexing Book X serves a very special role of transitioning from particular truths of experience into larger and higher truths of contemplation. It is thus an intriguing challenge to examine the many pearls of this seemingly difficult piece of writing.
It is important to note that the significance of Book X shines more clearly in the context of what precedes it, which is the biographical portion of Confessions. Book IX, detailing Augustine’s life after his conversion and Saint Monica’s death, ends without any proper conclusion; Augustine very vividly describes his experience of both joy and grief. Yet all that is offered in the end of Book IX is a request to pray for his late parents, Monica and Patricius. Isolate the biographical portion from what follows, and all you are left with is a heartfelt but striking collection of occasionally stunning facts without any attempt to offer proper closure to the reader. But Confessions isn’t meant to be a sensational account of former adventures abandoned; no, it is a twofold admission of past faults and the profession of Augustine’s faith, hence the name that signifies both: a confession. Augustine is also not the kind of author to leave important truths unexamined or unattended. As he would prove many times before and later, like in the behemoth that is The City of God, Augustine’s mind is a timeless tool for the glory of God, including in marvelling at His creation—of which mind itself is one. This marvel of creation is the focus of Book X, connecting the biographical and the philosophical parts.
The book begins with a series of questions addressed by Augustine to God, one of which being, why would the general populace, “an inquisitive race,” even believe the account of his prior life, seeing that they are so eager to examine the lives of others without paying proper attention to their own conduct. Later, contemplating God who has brought him into the light, Augustine poetically looks around, seeking to find God somewhere within the created world—a big theme in the beginning of Confessions—yet eventually he understands that God is the one who made the world, but is not the creation itself. Then, turning towards his own person, Augustine acknowledges the superiority of what he calls the “inner self” over the “outer self” who so unsuccessfully tried to find God in created things. But another reason for the superiority of the inner self is that the outer self, whose faculties are the senses, ultimately reports to the inner self, who in turn is the one who processes the world around the person. In his fascination, Augustine marvels at the capacity of memory, which he does not distinguish from the mind, to recall various sensations without reexperiencing them. Thence another term for the memory, “the stomach of the mind,” an analogy, though imperfect, which Augustine uses to explain how memory contains experiences without them being felt directly, just like a stomach contains food without tasting it. We could all benefit from this analogy, since memory, much like a stomach, receives impressions and then turns them into something else, and, though it contains extraordinary spaces within itself, it is highly likely that they wouldn’t be unaltered copies of witnessed events, much like food in a stomach, chewed and digested, is very different from meals on plates.
Thus, much of Book X is dedicated to analyzing the connection between the memory, which Augustine does not separate from the mind, and the senses. As Augustine repeatedly marvels at the powers of the mind to evoke senses without experiencing them, allowing us a degree of detachment and analysis, he posits that forgetfulness is but a deprivation of memory—much like earlier in his reflections of the autobiography when he suggests, to thwart any Manichaean claims, that evil is a deprivation of good, like darkness is a deprivation of light, not a substance of its own. To experience forgetfulness, the conscious understanding that something escapes us in our recollection, then means to acknowledge that the memory was real, like the experience that produced it, thus it is possible for a memory to return—if not, the recollection of forgetfulness itself would not exist at all, wiping from the mind any trace of a given event from the mind. This could be seen as the primitive steps of development of what in the 20th century would become phenomenology, the philosophy of experiences.
In this vein of analyzing experiences, Augustine points out that we thus couldn’t seek out what we do not know; in order to pursue joy—what in his words most people equate with happiness—we must know what it is. But how come everyone looks for happiness without necessarily having experienced it? Does the perpetual pursuit of joy really rival the attainment of happiness? The concise answer from Augustine is that real happiness comes from the experience of truth, the truth being God. Everything that is good and true inevitably points to God, but He is more than His creation. This yearning for happiness is a swift reminder of our own “factory setting,” the reflection of us harkening back to our maker; yet, very often, out of inertia or willful resistance, says Augustine, we reject this genuine happiness for counterfeits chiefly concentrated in the senses. Understanding this unfortunate yet undeniable reality reminds us of the need for willing mortifications that remind us about the limitations of the senses and our ultimate end, Our Lord, whom we should not forget amid the joys of the senses.
Therein comes a “reverse side of the coin” in Augustine’s analysis of the human faculties, since the senses inevitably carry with themselves the temptations, the inclination to perceive the good things they present as “ends in themselves.” “For the senses are not content to take second place,” says Augustine—the analysis of the memory is inevitably intertwined with the experience of the senses and the various kinds of information that they perceive. Earlier Augustine admits that the greatness of the mind is contained in the ability to “objectify” the senses and the experiences they transmit. This is key for us to see Confessions as a continuity: the examples that Augustine provides illustrate that memory allows us to reexperience various moments of our lives with totally different reactions to them. What formerly brought us joy in retrospection brings us sorrow, and what formerly plunged us into disappointment in hindsight becomes transformed into a gateway to growth and satisfaction. Is this not a direct reference to what Augustine described in the biographical section of Confessions? What was formerly described in often shockingly precise details now becomes raised to a more general level that could be applied to various situations that ultimately point to the supernatural order: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.”
Existence of memory thus necessitates an existence of time. Dorothy Sayers explains that in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages time was treated as “a kind of change,” which in turn “is a kind of death.” So, the understanding of Augustine’s treatment of senses and human experience of them is ultimately a bridge to the further philosophical books of Confessions, notably treating time. In the City of God, much later in his life, Augustine makes a very important linguistic point: the word “present” derives from the Latin phrase prae sensibus—in front of the senses. Memory and, by extension, mind, thus offer a significant challenge to our understanding of time, since memory is not the same as the senses—and remembering is not the same as experiencing. How credible, then, is the objectivity of memory? While it can help us separate bad experiences from the marginal joys they bring us, how reliable is this recollection? If we return to Augustine’s analogy of the memory as a stomach of the mind, then we must inevitably conclude that our memory is good, but its goodness is quite limited. Its workings are often completely unknowable, and Augustine here points to what psychoanalysis of the late-19th century would call the subconscious. Henry Chadwick points out that Augustine suggested its existence long before Sigmund Freund. Augustine was the first to indicate its existence in experiences like dreams, admitting that in them we often find ourselves in situations from which we repented a long time ago. This points to a rather unsettling reality of human nature: though we repent, go through change, and die to our former selves, our mind retains our past experiences, often turning them into something else that may linger long after the external stimuli are gone. In a way, this regurgitation of our past reactions appearing in dreams without conscious input becomes its own experience—and what makes it or breaks it is what we do with it when we wake, since it is only then that we have control over them.
The “vast immeasurable sanctuary” that is the memory, the mind, is thus not a neoclassical palace of agreeable shapes and straight lines, but a gargantuan edifice of many styles, where some rooms are well-lit golden galleries, while others are Kafkaesque labyrinthine cellars, and the house blueprint keeps changing. But why do we so often treat it like the former? Augustine’s generation of Catholic scholars struggled with the same foe that became more apparent from the 18th century onwards: a kind of rationalism that reduced all of existence to what the mind can process. Undoubtedly, human rationality is great, just like Augustine described it, an extraordinary tool in helping us better navigate the world—yet how could we not admit its limitations, its foibles, its unknowability? For its many faults, postmodernism of the late 20th century accurately pointed out the limits of rationalism—something that the Catholic Church had always taught.
The intricate scientific dissections of Book X are thus not much different from the rest of Confessions, for it is also a form of prayer, like the rest of the autobiography. It is in looking at the work of the memory that we curiously observe how it ultimately points us to God. If we return to the difficult question explored in the beginning of our analysis, notably on the connection of Books X–XIII with the rest of Confessions—which inevitably leads to a practical question of how we are to read it without a kind of literary whiplash—we find ourselves agreeing with Henry Chadwick’s idea that Confessions is not a patchwork, but ultimately a continuity. Much like a child passes from extremely specific knowledge of the world around him, through experiences, eventually arriving at an abstract way of thinking—wherein, for example, one can think about a table without necessarily mentally referring to the table one has experienced directly—the human mind passes from specific instances to generalities. This is the trajectory with which a reader should approach Confessions: the same truths of sin, grace, human nature, and repentance are depicted from the personal examples of one’s own vice and conversion to the greater realities of human existence, ultimately always pointing us towards the supreme Truth, who can neither deceive nor be deceived.
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