Book I
The first book of the Confessions is devoted primarily to an analysis of
Augustine's life as a child, from his infancy (which he cannot recall and must
reconstruct) up through his days as a schoolboy in Thagaste (in Eastern
Algeria). Wasting no time in getting to the philosophical content of his
autobiography, Augustine's account of his early years leads him to reflect on
human origin, will and desire, language, and memory.
[I.1-3] Augustine begins each Book of the Confessions with a
prayer in praise of God, but Book I has a particularly extensive invocation.
The first question raised in this invocation concerns how one can seek God
without yet knowing what he is. In other words, how can we look for something
if we don't know exactly what we're looking for? The imperfect answer, at least
for now, is simply to have faith--if we seek God at all, he will reveal himself
to us.
[I.4-6] Nonetheless, Augustine launches immediately into a highly
rhetorical (and relatively brief) discussion of God's attributes. Asking God to
"come into me," Augustine then questions what that phrase could possibly mean
when addressed to God. The heart of this dilemma, which will turn out later to
be one of the final stumbling blocks to Augustine's conversion (see Books VI and
VII), is that God seems both to transcend everything and to be within
everything. In either case, it doesn't make precise sense to ask him to "come
into" Augustine.
God cannot be contained by what he created, so he can't "come to" Augustine in
any literal sense. At the same time, God is the necessary condition for the
existence of anything, so he's "within" Augustine already (so again it makes no
sense to ask him to "come into me"). Further, God is not "in" everything in
amounts or proportions--small pieces of the world don't have any less of God
than big ones.
Having hurriedly discredited the idea of God as any sort of bounded, mobile,
or divisible being, Augustine sums up for now with a deeply Neoplatonic
statement on the question of "where" God is: "In filling all things, you fill
them all with the whole of yourself."
Augustine then rephrases his question about God's nature, asking "who are
you then, my God?" This rather direct approach generates a litany of metaphors
concerning God, taken partly from scripture and partly from Augustine's own
considerations. Examples include: "most high...deeply hidden yet most
intimately present...you are wrathful and remain tranquil...you pay off debts,
though owing nothing to anyone...." This list is rhetorical rather than
analytic, and develops no coherent argument about God--it just introduces
the mysteries of the subject.
[I.7-8] Augustine now turns to the story of his childhood, beginning
with his birth and earliest infancy. As he would continue to do throughout his
life, Augustine here follows the Neoplatonists in refusing to speculate on
how the soul joins the body to become an infant. "I do not know," he
writes, "whence I came to be in this mortal life or...living death" (following
Plato, Augustine leaves open the possibility that life is really a kind of death
and that true "life" is enjoyed by the soul when it is not in this world).
With this question left up in the air, Augustine considers his infancy.
He's extremely careful here, since he can't actually remember this period--
claims about it are explicitly justified with references to Augustine's later
observations of infants. Infancy, it seems, turns out to be a fairly miserable
state. All desires are internal, since infants have only "a small number of
signs" to express their wants and also no physical power to fulfill them.
Thoughtless and already sinful, the tiny Augustine made demands on everyone,
thanked no one, and revenged himself on his caretakers with obnoxious weeping.
[I.9-10] There is a brief interlude here while Augustine asks again what
he was before birth, and again the question goes unanswered. He only knows that
at birth he had both being and life. He also points out here that God is the
most extreme instantiation of both being and life, and that God is responsible
for uniting these two qualities in new humans.
[I.11-12] Returning to brutish infancy, Augustine considers to what
extent he was sinning at that age. He's harsh on himself for the nasty attitude
mentioned above, but concludes with a dismissal of responsibility for those
times, of which he "can recall not a single trace."
[I.13-16] Soon, however, the infant Augustine began to exercise his
memory, particularly in the service of learning to communicate through language
(in Roman North Africa, this language was Latin). As always, Augustine is
ambivalent about this skill, and here he notes that with it he "entered more
deeply into the stormy society of human life." Particularly disturbing to
Augustine is the way language was used and taught at school--he regrets that he
was taught to speak and write for corrupted purposes, namely in the
service of gaining future honor and wealth. Using a term he will return to
often, he refers to the use of this flashy language of public oratory (which
emphasizes form over content) as "loquacity."
In fact, Augustine continues, the whole scholastic system concentrated on
"follies," punishing the students for boyish games in order to train them for
equally misguided adult ones (such as business or politics).
[I.17-18] Another issue Augustine has to consider here is his early
religious status. Born to a devoutly Catholic mother (Monica) and a pagan
father (Patrick), Augustine's baptism is deferred until he's older. This was a
common practice, meant to leave the cleansing of sin until after the hazards of
youth and so to get the most out of the ritual when it was finally performed.
[I.19-29] Meanwhile, the folly of school continues. Most of the
remaining sections of Book I are devoted to the errors of Augustine's early
teachers, who meant well but were ignorant of the proper purposes of education.
Of central concern here are the classical texts the young, unhappy Augustine was
forced to read and, more broadly, the high-flown rhetorical language he was
supposed to learn from them. Augustine particularly disapproves of fiction,
which he sees as a misleading waste of time. It is sinful, he argues, to read
of other people's sins while remaining ignorant of one's own.
Overall, Augustine gives his boyhood teachers credit only for giving him the
most basic tools for potentially good reading and writing--his "primary
education." All the rest was simply a matter of learning perverted human custom
rather than truth or morality (which are, in any case, more deep-seated than the
"conventions" of language).
[I.30-31] Book I closes with a very brief list of Augustine's selfish
sins as a little boy, which he claims were "shocking even to the worldly set."
He sees these as smaller, less significant versions of the sins of a worldly
adult life. He admits, however, that there were some good things about him as
well. These, though, were due entirely to God. The sins, on the other hand,
were due to a "misdirection" of Augustine's gifts away from God and toward the
material, created world.
This "misdirection" is a reference to a key idea in Neoplatonism that
informs most of Augustine's work, namely that God's creation has turned away
from his eternal unity and toward the changing multiplicity of the created
world.
