Confessions of St Augustine: Youth and Adolescence, Original Sin and Nature of God, Books 1 and 2

Why should we reflect on the beginning books of the
Confessions by St Augustine?
What moral lessons can we learn from reflecting on the
youth of St Augustine?
Why are the Confessions so relevant to modern seekers of
virtue?
Why are the Confessions central to the Western Tradition,
not only to Christian thinking, but also to psychology,
philosophy, and the sciences?

Please, we welcome interesting questions in the
comments. Let us learn and reflect together!
At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources
used for this video. Feel free to follow along in the
PowerPoint script we uploaded to SlideShare.

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How can we describe the Confessions by St Augustine?
The Confessions is a testimonial, St Augustine tells us how he embraced Christianity
after he was active in the Manichean sect, which was the New Age belief system of
his day. Manicheism was briefly a serious competing faith before the rise of Islam,
they had a dualistic system where good and evil competed more or less evenly, and
where Jesus was totally divine without a trace of mortality. Most of the surviving
documents, iconography, and paintings depicting Manicheism are from China.
St Augustine had many of the same questions that we hear atheists and agnostics
raise today, such as: How can intelligent and sophisticated men believe in
superstitions about an Almighty God? How can God be Almighty when sin has such
a hold in the world? What is the nature of evil?
St Augustine also confesses how sin came to control his life, he confesses famously
that he prayed to God for chastity, but not quite yet.

14th-century illustration of the execution of Mani / Icon of Mani on hanging scroll, southern China, 1400’s

The Confessions are more a spiritual autobiography than an
historical autobiography, St Augustine retells his life story as a
parable teaching us moral lessons. The Confessions are truly a
confession, a confession of sins and a confession of faith, not two
confessions but the same confession, for only when we confess
our sins and are truly repentant, only then can we make a
genuine confession of faith, hope, and love.
The Confessions is also a psychological work, as St Augustine
explores his innermost thoughts and desires, examining his
hidden emotions and motivations. And likewise, it is also a
philosophical work.

Lamentation with Sts Augustine and Nicholas of Tolentino, Gregorio Martínez, 1590’s

Keep in mind, each page was bulkier since it was
manually copied, so the ancient books relate to
modern chapters, and the ancient chapters are the
modern sections of chapters. In the ancient world
the Confessions would literally be a collection of
thirteen bound books. We will primarily use the Pine-
Coffin translation, but we will quote Gary Willis’
translation on occasion.

The Confessions is written in a remarkable style,
St Augustine begins:
“Can any praise be worthy of the Lord’s majesty?
How magnificent his strength!” Gary Willis
translates this as: “Vast are you, Lord, and as vast
should be your praise!” St Augustine continues,
“How inscrutable his wisdom! Man is one of your
creatures, and his instinct is to praise you. He
bears about him the mark of death, the sign of his
own sin, to remind him that you thwart the proud.
But still, since he is a part of your creation, he
wishes to praise you. The thought of you stirs him
so deeply that he cannot be content unless he
praises you, because you made us for yourself, and
our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”
St Augustine in Ecstasy. Gaspar de Crayer,
painted, 1638

The Confessions reads like the Psalms, and indeed, it melds into
the text snippets of the Psalms and other Bible verses. In the days
before the printing press, when books had to be copied by hand
on parchment pages of animal skins, books were precious, and
the time spent reading books was precious, and men sought to
memorize what they read, as they did not know whether they
could read that book again. Scripture memorized was
internalized, and ancient preachers could recite verses off the
cuff from memory in sermons, and in books dictated to
secretaries, and likely the Confessions was the rare ancient book
that was edited extensively.

Scribe working on a
manuscript, surrounded
by his research material,
by Jean Le Tavernier,
circa 1400's

(REPEAT) St Augustine prays, “Grant me, Lord, to know and understand whether a
man is first to pray to you for help or to praise you, and whether he must know you
before he can call you to his aid. If he does not know you, how can he pray to you?
For he may call for some other help, mistaking it for yours.”
St Augustine is here praying to God to teach him how to pray, and he is also asking
the same question that Feuerbach would ask many centuries later: When we pray to
God, are we praying to the terrifying Almighty God, or are we praying to a more
comfortable God we have constructed in our own souls, the God that justifies our
wayward behavior?
In Gary Willis’ translation, St Augustine laments, “My soul is too cramped for you to
enter, O God, widen it out. My soul is in disrepair, restore it. It is filthy in your sign, I
admit and recognize this, but who can sanitize it?”

St Augustine prays, “Grant me, Lord, to know
and understand whether a man is first to pray to
you for help or to praise you, and whether he
must know you before he can call you to his aid.
If he does not know you, how can he pray to
you? For he may call for some other help,
mistaking it for yours.”
In Gary Willis’ translation, St Augustine laments,
“My soul is too cramped for you to enter, O God,
widen it out. My soul is in disrepair, restore it. It
is filthy in your sight, I admit and recognize this,
but who can sanitize it?”
St Augustine's Baptism, Benozzo Gozzoli, 1465

Confessions: Spiritual Autobiography
Tiffany Window of St Augustine - Lightner Museum

The Confessions is a spiritual and intellectual
autobiography, the purpose of St Augustine is to
share the evolution in his thoughts, and for St
Augustine, the intellectual is the spiritual, what
you believe and what you think is the wellspring of
your spiritual life. His conception of the nature of
God Himself is so central that he reflects on this in
the opening chapters of his Confessions.

St Augustine prays to God, asking him:
“Do heaven and earth, then, contain the
whole of you, since you fill them? Or,
when once you have filled them, is some
part of you left over because they are
too small to hold you? If this is so, when
you have filled heaven and earth, does
that part of you which remains flow into
some other place? Or is it that you have
no need to be contained in anything,
because you contain all things in yourself
and fill them by reason of the very fact
that you contain them?”
Triumph of St Augustine, by Claudio Coello, 1664

St Augustine continues his prayer:
“For the things which you fill by
containing them do not sustain and
support you as a water-vessel supports
the liquid which fills it. Even if they
were broken to pieces, you would not
flow out of them and away. When you
pour yourself out over us, you are not
drawn down to us but draw us up to
yourself: you are not scattered away,
but you gather us together.”
Virgin Mary, St Jerome, and St Augustine, by Perugino

Here St Augustine is both philosopher and theologian,
we must not forget that the divorce between
philosophy and theology did not occur until the
Enlightenment, which was a reaction to the Protestant
Reformation. Here St Augustine describes God as being
indescribable and inexhaustible, the true God who
cannot be contained. Although God is so unimaginably
expansive, yet God seeks to gather and lift up even the
humblest of men to be adopted sons of His Father.

St. Augustine in His Study, painted 1502 by Vittore Carpaccio

The Creation of Adam, by Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel ceiling Edit, 1511

Above all, the Almighty God seeks for all of
us to return to Him. St Augustine describes
God’s Love for us as he prays to God:
“You love your creatures, but with a gentle
love. You treasure them, but without
apprehension. You grieve for wrong but
suffer no pain. You can be angry and yet
serene. Your works are varied, but your
purpose is one and the same. You
welcome all who come to you, though you
never lost them.”
St Augustine, by Peter Paul Rubens, 1638

Why would the Almighty God need
our worship? St Augustine comments
on the paradox:
“You are never in need yet are glad to
gain, never covetous yet you exact a
return for your gifts. We give
abundantly to you so that we may
deserve a reward; yet which of us has
anything that does not come from
you? You repay us what we deserve,
and yet we owe you nothing thereby.” St. Augustine Freeing A Prisoner, Michael
Pacher, painted 1482

What is the significance of his Son
assuming flesh, dying for our sins, so
that we may become adopted sons of
His Father? St Augustine continues,
“You release us from our debts, but you
lose nothing thereby. You are my God,
my Life, my holy Delight, but is this
enough to say of you? Can any man say
enough when he speaks of you? Yet woe
betide are those who are silent about
you! For even those who are most gifted
with speech cannot find words to
describe you.”
Resurrection of Jesus, Maerten de Vos, painted 1564

Augustine Describes His Youth
St Augustine and Monica, Time Magazine
St Augustine discusses how everyone, even
babies, inherit the original sin from Adam:
“Who can recall to me the sins I committed
as a baby? For in your sight no man is free
from sin, not even a child who has lived only
one day on earth.” St Augustine remarks on
how children sometimes want to lash out:
“If babies are innocent, it is not for lack of
will do to harm, but for lack of strength.”

Original Sin is the Christian doctrine that teaches us
that all men inherit the proclivity towards sin from
Adam and Eve from their Original Sin of eating the
forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

Fall of Adam and Eve, by Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel ceiling Edit, 1511

St Augustine’s extreme position on Original Sin was in reaction to
his battles with the Pelagian heresy, which we will explore in later
lectures. The doctrine of Original Sin means mortal men can only
be saved with the assistance of the grace of God. However,
Pelagius taught that man could choose to live a godly life simply
by exercising his free will without needing assistance of the grace
of God.
Some scholars note that the writings of Pelagius have not
survived, so we do not know how extreme his teachings actually
were. Christians disagree on whether mortal men have the free
will to cooperate with God’s grace, choosing to accept or deny it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagius

St Augustine observes that babies often show
jealousy at attention shown to their siblings. Ever the
scientist, he speculates on how infants learn
language from observing facial expressions and
gestures, which he terms a universal language,
notions that the modern scholar Noam Chomsky
would elaborate on in his theories of how infants are
born with a universal grammar that are essential in
learning language.

Adam and Eve with the
Infants Cain and Abel,
by Nicola Vaccaro,
1709

The Madonna
and the Infant
Jesus with a
Female Saint and
the Infant Saint
John the Baptist,
by Titian, 1530

The Infants Jesus
and St John the
Baptist, by Jan
Wildens, 1615

St Augustine always questioned
whether current church practice
furthered the two-fold Love of God and
neighbor, and if they did not, he sought
to change the practice. As a bishop he
remembers how his mother Monica,
after he had recovered from a severe
illness during his youth, “postponed my
washing in the waters of baptism” for
fear that he would if he were baptized
too soon, he “would defile himself again
with sin,” and “the guilt of pollution
would be greater and more dangerous.”
St Augustine Taken to School by St Monica,
by Niccolò di Pietro, 1415

In the early days of the church penance was much more severe than it is
today. Ancient Christians required penance that was so severe for serious
mortal sins that believers delayed their baptism until mature adulthood.
Notably Emperor Constantine was baptized on his deathbed, since as a
monarch he would be compelled to wage war, thus committing great sins
while protecting the empire.
But St Augustine regrets that early baptism would have provided “healing
at once,” ensuring that his “soul would receive salvation,” leading the
church to adopt infant baptism rather than delaying baptism until the
Christian was a responsible adult. His views on original sin influenced the
Church to baptize children sooner rather than later.

St Augustine Baptizes the Cathechumens, Girolamo Genga, painting 1518

St Augustine was born less than a century after
Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, and
during his lifetime the Roman Empire became more
of a Christian empire, though there were still
prominent pagans in his lifetime.

The Baptism of Constantine, by School of Raphael, around 1500

His schooling was the classical training in Latin and
Greek literature, complaining how his teachers
coerced him with punishment to learn Greek, noting
how students “learn better in a free spirit of curiosity
than under fear and compulsion.” He would later
learn how to read Greek with difficulty, but as a
bishop he did not need to become fluent in Greek.

Olympus: The Fall of the Giants, by Francisco Bayeu y Subías, 1764

Olympus: The Fall of the Giants, by Francisco Bayeu y Subías, 1764
St Augustine notes that students
“learn better in a free spirit of curiosity
than under fear and compulsion.”

We noted how the Stoic philosophers referred to God
and Zeus interchangeably as though he were a
monotheistic god, thought the proper term is
henotheistic since Zeus, known to the Romans as
Jupiter, is seen as the personification of all the gods.

https://youtu.be/m4mcP2F9c4w
https://youtu.be/Dhd543kov-E
https://youtu.be/0qHpReZYhv4
https://youtu.be/zAAal5p8AX8

The Council of Gods, Raphael, painted 1518
But St Augustine notes the incompatibility between the notion
that Jupiter is a moral god with the myths:
“The traditional education taught me that Jupiter punishes the
wicked with his thunderbolts and yet commits adultery himself.”

Copy after the Painting by Rubens, The Council of Gods, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1861
St Augustine quotes Cicero, “Homer invented
these stories and attributed human sins to the
gods. He would have done better to provide
men with examples of divine goodness.”

St Augustine compares the profligacy of
his youth to the parable of the “prodigal
son who went to live in a distant land to
waste in dissipation all the wealth his
father has given him.” He prays to the
Lord: “For you were the Father who gave
him riches. You loved him when he set
out and you love him still more when he
came home without a penny. But he set
his heart on pleasure and his soul was
blinded, and this blindness was the
measure of the distance he travelled
away from you, so that he could not see
your face.”
Return of the Prodigal Son, by Julie Ribault, 1800's

This is not a standard autobiography, there are
occasional references that reveal he has siblings, but
we know little about them, not even their names. St
Augustine tells us about his evolving inner life, he is
less concerned about the outer life, and tells us little
about events in his childhood.

The vision of
St Augustine,
by Ascanio
Luciano, 1691

St Augustine tells us in the end of the first book,
“My sin was this, that as a boy I looked for
pleasure, beauty, and truth not in God but in
myself and his other creatures, and the search
led me instead to pain, confusion, and error.”
He later teaches us that true happiness comes
from Loving God and loving our neighbor.
St Augustine then prays to God, “I thank you for
your gifts and beg you to preserve and keep
them for me. Keep me, too, and so your gifts
will grow and reach perfection and I shall be
with you myself, for I should not even exist if it
were not by your gift.” St Augustine, by Tomás Giner, 1458

Augustine as an Adolescent
As a bishop, St Augustine remembers his adolescence:
“I cared for nothing but to love and be loved. But my
love went beyond the affection of one mind for
another, beyond the arc of the bright beam of
friendship. Bodily desire, like a morass, and
adolescent sex welling up with me exuded mists
which clouded over and obscured my heart, so that I
could not distinguish the clear light of true love from
the murk of lust. Love and lust together seethed
within me. In my tender youth, they swept me away
over the precipice of my body’s appetites and plunged
me into the whirlpool of sin.”

Here St Augustine is discussing concupiscence, a topic he
examined in several works that are quoted in the Catholic
Catechism. Concupiscence is not something that only afflicts men
before marriage, concupiscence is seeking pleasure or gain from
your neighbor without truly caring for your neighbor, seeing our
neighbors as objects or servants, not treating our neighbors with
compassion, not respecting their dignity as persons. Although his
teachings appear on concupiscence appear harsh to modern
ears, they were less extreme than the views of Musonius Rufus, a
leading Stoic philosopher.

The ancient world’s views on concupiscence and their supposed
Victorian views on intimacy was a consequence of how different
the ancient world was from the modern world. Childbirth is
totally safe in modern hospitals, but in the ancient world it was
so deadly that aristocratic Roman women updated their wills
when they became pregnant, as dying in childbirth was common.
Also, the infant mortality rate was sky-high, only half of all
children survived childhood, and only ten percent survived to a
ripe old age.

Although his mother was a Christian, his father was a pagan. St
Augustine is grateful that his father supported his education. His
parents recognized his brilliance and potential and sacrificed to
ensure him a good education in rhetoric, which was the path to a
professional career in the early Roman Empire. However, looking
back as a bishop, St Augustine remembered that his father cared
little for his godliness or chastity, only caring whether he exceled
in his rhetorical studies. He remembered how his father
embarrassed him when noticed his young son’s erection at the
public bath, he excitedly told his mother Monica, Now we can
look forward to grandchildren!

The Four Doctors of
the Western Church,
Saint Augustine of
Hippo, by Gerard
Seghers, 1600's

Young Augustine and Friends Steal Pears
Conversion of St Augustine, by Fra Angelico, 1435

St Augustine, as a bishop, remembers one
incident in detail, how he and his friends stole
pears from a neighbor’s orchard. Many modern
readers read this and ask, Why does he dwell so
deeply on such childish mischief? What children
don’t get into minor trouble occasionally? This
hardly seems like delinquent behavior.

As a bishop, St Augustine is using this
minor incident as an allegory to teach us a
greater lesson. St. Augustine starts Book 2:
“I must now carry my thoughts back to the
abominable things I did in these days, the
sins of the flesh which defiled my soul. I do
this, my God, not because I love these sins,
but so that I may Love You. For love of your
love, I shall retrace my wicked ways. The
memory is bitter, but it will help me to
savor your sweetness, the sweetness that
does not deceive but brings real joy and
never fails.”
St Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, British School, late 1500's

St. Augustine always had friends; he saw true
friendship as a mirror of our Love for God.
Indeed, his early Confessions were
confessions about his friendships. But
friendships are only desirable when they
enhance in our heart our Love of God. St
Augustine teaches us that “friendship among
men is a delightful bond, uniting many souls
in one.” But friendship can lead us to sin
when we are tempted to abandon God’s
truth and law, and God Himself. Earthly
friendships “can give joy, though not such joy
as my God, who made them all, can give.”
St Augustine, Nuremberg Chronicle, 1514

This concept that close friendships are only desirable
when they increase in us our Love of God was also
taught by St John of the Cross in his Dark Night of
the Soul.

Conversion
of St
Augustine,
by Fra
Angelico,
1435

What does St Augustine remember
about the pear-stealing incident?
“For of what I stole I already had
plenty,” “and I had no wish to enjoy
the things I coveted by stealing, but
only to enjoy the theft itself and the
sin.” “We took away an enormous
quantity of pears, not to eat them
ourselves, but simply to throw them
to the pigs. Perhaps we ate some of
them, but our real pleasure
consisted of doing something that
was forbidden.”

St. Augustine continues, “The
evil in me was foul, but I loved
it. I loved my own perdition and
my own faults, not the things
for which I committed wrong,
but the wrong itself. My soul
was vicious and broke away
from your safekeeping to seek
its own destruction, looking for
no profit in disgrace but only
for disgrace itself.”

Is this allegory comparable to when the rebellious angels
were thrown out of heaven? Obviously, the stealing of the
pears is a replaying of the original sin of the eating of the
forbidden apple in the garden, and the memory of this
theft obviously bothered St. Augustine deeply, this theft
bothered him that night, this theft bothered him for the
decades following, this theft was a haunted memory after
his conversion, and this theft caused his soul to groan
when he writes about it in his Confessions.

Fall of Rebel
Angels, by Luca
Giordano, 1665
The Sons of God
Saw the Daughters
of Men That They
Were Fair, by Daniel
Chester French,
1923

Peer pressure was also part of the ancient world.
St Augustine remembers from his teen years,
“I was so blind to the truth that among my
companions I was ashamed to be less dissolute
than they were. For I heard them bragging of
their depravity, and the greater the sin the more
they glorified in it, so that I took pleasure in the
same vices not only for the enjoyment of what I
did, but also for the applause that I won.”
The Prophet Elisha curses the children who
mocked him, by Willem Willemsz van den Bundel

The best and perhaps only example of a childish prank in the
Bible was when a gang of youngsters mock Elisha, and in
response he ordered a bear to attack the delinquents. Some
commentators point out that the Hebrew text likely did not mean
young children, as in the painting, but perhaps young men in
their twenties or early thirties. What few commentators mention
is that Elisha was the last prophet endowed with these divine
powers, perhaps the Almighty was uncomfortable with this
incident, though the Scriptures themselves do not suggest this,
but often the Old Testament is understated and leaves itself open
to such interpretations.

The Prophet Elisha curses the children who
mocked him, by Willem Willemsz van den Bundel

St Augustine remembers, “Nothing
deserves to be despised more than
vice; yet I gave in more and more to
vice simply in order not to be
despised. If I had not sinned enough
to rival other sinners, I used to
pretend that I had done things I had
not done at all, because I was afraid
that innocence would be taken for
cowardice and chastity for
weakness.” Saint Augustine, by Philippe de
Champaigne, painted 1650

The sin of the theft of the pears are like all the sins
all of us sin. What motivates us to sin? St. Augustine
confesses,
“It was not the pears that my unhappy soul desired.
I had plenty of my own, better than those, and I only
picked them so that I might steal. For no sooner had
I picked them than I threw them away, and tasted
nothing in them but my own sin, which I relished
and enjoyed. If any part of one of those pears
passed my lips, it was the sin that gave it flavor.”
“For the sake of a laugh, a little sport, I was glad to
do harm and anxious to damage another; and that
without thought of profit for myself or retaliation for
injuries received!”
Earliest known portrait of St Augustine
in a 6th-century fresco, Lateran, Rome

In the garden with the forbidden fruit in the first book of
his Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis writes how the wicked
white witch greedily ate of the forbidden fruit, grabbing
and biting into pear after pear, most of these pears bitten
only once and disrespectfully and disdainfully tossed on
the ground, the witch laughing and drooling black blood
and spit as she savored the sin of the meat of the fruit that
would damn her soul.

The Garden of
Eden with the
Fall of Man, by
Peter Paul
Rubens and
Jan Brueghel
the Elder,
1615

In this story the good lion Aslan offers this same fruit
to a boy whose mother is dying, but he hesitates to
take this healing fruit, for he saw what happened to
the wicked white witch. But Aslan bid the boy to
take the fruit, for the fruit that is given by God to eat
is healing fruit, and it was sweet to the taste and
healing to the soul and body.

So it is with sin, sin steals away that which it
promises, while the Lord gives to his beloved in
abundance. St. Augustine gives us many examples:
“The lustful use caresses to win the love they crave
for, yet no caress is sweeter than Your Love, O God,
and no love is more rewarding that the love of Your
truth, which shines in beauty above all else.” “The
covetous want many possessions for themselves:
but You, O Lord, possess all. The envious struggle
for preferment: but what is to be preferred before
You, O God?” “Anger demands revenge: but what
vengeance is as just as Yours, O God?” “Cruelty is
the weapon of the powerful, used make others fear
them: yet no one is to be feared but God alone.”
St Augustine of Hippo

St Augustine continues, “So, the soul defiles with
unchaste love when it turns away from You and
looks elsewhere for things which it cannot find
pure and unsullied except by returning to You, O
Lord.”
Sinfulness brings us misery rather than happiness.
The bishop Augustine remembers that his theft of
the pears “brought me no happiness, for what
harvest did I reap from acts which now make me
blush?” “I loved nothing in it except the thieving,
although I cannot truly speak of it as something I
could love, and I was only the more miserable
because of it.”
Saint Augustine, by Antonio Rodríguez,
1636-1691

May we pray as St. Augustine prays,
“Grant my prayer, O Lord, and do not
allow my soul to wilt under the
discipline which you prescribe. Let me
not tire of thanking you for your mercy
in rescuing me from all my wicked ways,
so that you may be sweeter to me than
all the joys which used to tempt me; so
that I may love you most intensely and
clasp your hand with all the power of my
devotion; so that you may save me from
all temptation until the end of my days.”
Saint Augustine, by Carlo Cignani, 1600’a

St Augustine prays this prayer near the end of Book 2:
“I will Love you Lord, and thank You, and praise Your
Name, because You have forgiven me such great sins
and such wicked deeds. I acknowledge that it was by
your grace and mercy that you melted away my sins
like ice. I acknowledge, too, that by your grace I was
preserved from whatever sins I did not commit, for
there was no knowing what I might have done, since I
loved evil even if it served no purpose. I avow that you
have forgiven me all, both the sins which I committed
of my own accord and those which by your guidance I
was spared from committing.”
St Augustine in His Study,
by Sandro Botticelli, 1494

We plan to continue our reviews of St Augustine’s
Confessions, next we plan to reviews Books 3, 4, and
5, describing his wayward years distracted by the
Manichean heresy, the prayers of his mother Monica
for his conversion back to Christianity, and the
attractions of Neoplatonic philosophy, which
prepared the way for his conversion.

We have also reflected on another of St Augustine’s
key work, On Christian Doctrine, aka On Christian
Teaching, where he teaches that a biblical
interpretation is proper only if it increases in our
hearts our Love for God and our love for our
neighbor.

We have already reflected on many of his works as
we encounter references to them in the Catholic
Catechism, starting with the Ten Commandments.
We have reflected on St Augustine’s commentary on
the Beatitudes, in the future we will follow with
reflections on the rest of the Sermon on the Mount,
and also On Faith and the Creed, Catechizing the
Uninstructed, and On Lying.

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St Augustine was an excellent orator and writer, but
the Confessions is the most beautifully crafted and
closely edited of his works, and there are many
translations. The RS Pine-Coffin translation is the
main translation I used, but I also consulted Gary
Willis’ translation, which has a reputation for
originality and elegance. Henry Chadwick also
translated the Confessions; I am sure his translation
is also excellent.

The translation of the Confessions in the Nicene and Post-
Nicene Fathers is dated, though we have found this
translation to be acceptable for his minor works, and we
like to scan the footnotes, and it summarizes the contents
of each book in the table of contents. This version is useful
because the applicable sections in his Retractions, in which
St Augustine offers comments and corrections to his major
works near the end of his life, is included before the
Confessions. In his Retractions, he notes that the
Confessions have benefited many Christians of his day.

St Augustine notes in his
Retractions that his
“Confessions, whether they
refer to my evil or good,
praise the just and good God,
and stimulate the heart and
mind of man to approach the
Loving God.”
Four doctors of the Church represented with attributes of
the Four Evangelists: St Augustine with an eagle, St Gregory
the Great with a bull, St Hieronymus with an angel, St
Ambrose with a winged lion, by Pier Francesco Sacchi, 1516

There are hundreds of medieval manuscripts of the
Confessions that have survived, and nine surviving
Carolingian minuscule manuscripts from the ninth and
tenth centuries.
Professor Philip Cary of the Teaching Company has a
lecture series on Augustine: Philosopher and Saint, this is
one of my favorite sets of lectures. Back in the day, he was
one of the most popular Teaching Company lecturers. It
has not been transferred to Wondrium, perhaps for health
reasons.

https://amzn.to/3ZvQ7g5
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/augustine-philosopher-and-saint

Professors Cook and Herzman also recorded lectures
on the Confessions, his lectures are on Wondrium.
These are basic lectures, derived from lectures for
the undergraduate student who has no background
in ancient history.

https://amzn.to/3l7FZuU
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/st-augustine-s-confessions

Professor Dorsey Armstrong’s Great Courses, also
Wondrium, lectures on the Great Minds of the
Medieval World begin with St Augustine, then cover
St Ambrose, who converted him back to Christianity,
then Gregory the Great and many other subsequent
medieval minds, who built on the works of St
Augustine.

https://amzn.to/3YBgZdf
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/great-minds-of-the-medieval-world

To find the source of any direct
quotes in this blog, please type in
the phrase to the search box in
my blog to see the referenced
footnote.
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Confessions of St Augustine: Youth and Adolescence, Original Sin and Nature of God, Books 1 and 2

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