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Augustine’s Confessions, the story of his journey to adult Christian faith
On 28th August we celebrate the feast of St Augustine of Hippo. Saint Augustine of Hippo was a Roman African, early Christian theologian and philosopher from Numidia. Saint Augustine of Hippo is just one of twenty Christians that Rowan Williams reflects upon in his new book Luminaries. In this extract we learn about 'Augustine's Confessions' the story of his journey to adult Christian faith.
Augustine’s Confessions, the story of his journey to adult Christian faith, is rightly considered the first literary work in Western culture to look systematically at how memory works. Augustine is fascinated by the fact that we are not transparent to ourselves: I don’t know what I know; there are things I’ve learned that are somewhere in my mind, but I can’t ‘access’ them. So I never know what is bearing down on me at any given moment. My choices and my acts are technically free (this mattered enormously to him), yet I can never fully grasp my motivation. To be a person at all is to be in search of myself, to be caught up in the continuous process of asking about myself, wondering about myself. It’s this that makes human beings such an oddity in the universe.
So far, a modern reader might feel very enthusiastic. Yes, we say, our selfhood is compellingly interesting, and we need to spend plenty of time getting in touch with our inner questioning and understanding how we work. But Augustine will not let us get away with that. Certainly, our endless self-questioning is fascinating; but the whole point is that it can never arrive at a resolution. I am always incomplete; at the end of my self-searching lies a basic need and emptiness, and only when I make contact with that does change occur.
Most of the time, my innate restlessness makes me look for things to fill the gap, things that will tell me once and for all that I have arrived and that I’m safe. When I’ve attained that goal, acquired that thing or that person, I shall be whole. But the very idea that I could get to such a point is the fundamental error human beings make. And we can make it in the realm of the spiritual as much as in the realm of the material: Augustine’s Confessions records how he looked for a solution first in the comprehensive theory of the universe offered by the Manichaean sect, then, more sensibly but still mistakenly, in the mystical experience of oneness that arose from Neoplatonic philosophy. But neither theory nor experience seemed to touch the real centre of his willing and acting; his love wasn’t transformed.
How change came about for Augustine is a long story, but in his record of it he points to two things. Only when he realized that he couldn’t by himself make a unity of his life, that he couldn’t tell the full true story of who he was, only when he faced the deepest vulnerability in himself, could the truth get through. And the fact that triggered and made sense of this was the fact of Jesus. Christian faith claims that the eternal truth and wisdom of God spoke most completely in a single human life and death. God spoke the language of time. To receive his truth is neither to acquire a theory about the universe nor to escape from time into a reconciled eternity, but to embrace the struggle to be faithful within the limits of being a creature with a body and a biography.
Starting in the first century with St Paul and ending in the twentieth with St Oscar Romero, Rowan Williams invites you to reflect with him on the lives and legacies of twenty great Christians – saints, martyrs, poets, theologians and social reformers.
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