Augustine Confess

Augustine opens his spiritual biography with a magnificent flourish of praise to God. The opening paragraph contains one of Augustine’s most famous statements about humanity’s relationship with God: “You stir us to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (translation, Chadwyck). This pithy sentence summarizes a knotty proposition, one that is a major theme of Augustine’s works and one that the rest of the opening simply restates and amplifies: Human beings naturally long to “rest” in God, to know God and to harmonize their wills with God’s will. But because they are weak and sinful, humans can never hope to do this without God’s assistance. In fact, all human impulses toward God have their origin in God.

Augustine has earned criticism throughout the centuries for this difficult proposition, which places so much emphasis on human weakness. Many readers have felt that Augustine denied human freedom of the will by portraying humankind as utterly passive, dependent upon God even for the impulse to love God. If human beings are powerless even to choose God without God’s help, how can that choice have any moral value? Augustine, however, does not approach the problem in that way. Because Augustine’s God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, it is impossible for any part of the creation to exist outside of God. The nature of human sin, however, means that human beings can be blind to their dependency on God. This, in fact, is the story of Augustine’s conversion: He was blind to God’s truth, but God patiently drew him back toward that truth. This particular story is Augustine’s alone, but as he presents it, it can also express the story of all humanity, painfully separated from God and always struggling to return.

The intimacy of the relationship between God and humanity is reflected in the intimacy of Augustine’s narrative. In the Confessions, the conversation is always between “I,” meaning Augustine himself, and “You,” meaning God. In an important sense, Augustine’s first and most important reader, or audience, is his God. In this opening, Augustine addresses God directly, as he does throughout the Confessions, so much so that he sometimes seems to forget the presence of his human audience.

Augustine’s opening flourish of praise also reflects one of the three senses of “confession,” that of confession