The next bombshell that Meconi imagines the teenage Augustine dropping on his devout Catholic mother is also all too familiar. He informs her that he has stopped going to the Catholic Church and is now a follower of a new age dualistic sect, which in his day was known as Manichaeism but in our day goes by other names. Plus ça change …
Augustine is “a perennial figure,” writes Meconi, “no different from most young people of each age.”* Like young people of all ages, Augustine has a “restless heart,” seeking pleasure in all the wrong places. He is different from some, though mercifully not all, in that he finally finds rest and real happiness in the only place it can truly be found, in the Presence of God.
Like Meconi, I have also perceived a striking similarity between my own “restless heart” as a young man and the restless heart of Augustine, a similarity which I discuss in my own conversion story — my own “confessions” — Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love (Saint Benedict Press, 2013). I will quote the whole passage that connects my twentieth-century childhood with Augustine’s childhood sixteen hundred years earlier, because it serves as an evocative example of the accessibility and applicability of the Confessions to our own day:
Summer and autumn was scrumping season, during which we descended like a band of brigands or pirates on the neighbouring orchards, pillaging plums, pears, apples and strawberries as each fruit ripened, or often before they ripened. The ensuing stomach aches were attributed by my mother to the gluttonous quantity of fruit that we had consumed or the fact that it was not yet ripe, but I fancy that it may also have been due to the ingestion of the noxious chemicals that farmers by the 1960s were beginning to spray on their crops. Needless to say, we ate as we plucked and never thought about washing the fruit before consuming it.
It is odd that we gained such pleasure from this theft of the farmers’ crops. There was a thrill to be had in climbing the fence into the orchard, in trespassing on someone else’s property, in the risk of being caught, in the plucking of the forbidden fruit, in the eating of it. I am reminded in adulthood of St. Augustine’s conscience-driven memory, recounted in his Confessions, of his own scrumping expedition as a child. He recalls “a pear tree laden with fruit” near his childhood home and the nighttime raids that he and his friends made upon it. “We took enormous quantities, not to feast on ourselves but perhaps to throw to the pigs; we did eat a few, but that was not our motive: we derived pleasure from the deed simply because it was forbidden.”†
St. Augustine’s timely and timeless musings on the presence of concupiscence in the heart of youth serves to remind us that the innocence of childhood is not synonymous with the absence of sin. The arcadia in which we resided was not Eden. Although we lived in blissful ignorance of the nature and magnitude of the adult sins that surrounded us, we could indulge in our own childish forms of them and did so with devilish delight. As sons of Adam we were willing apprentices in the antediluvian art of sin and became more adept in our practice of it as we got older but no wiser. It is for this reason that fairytales play such a healthy part in childhood. It is necessary for children to know that fairyland contains dragons, giants and wicked witches because the real world contains grownup versions of these evil creatures of which children need to have at least an inkling.
Apart from the parallels between my own “restless” journey through the dark wood of sin and error, and that of Augustine, I am aware that my own telling of the story is in some senses a re-telling of the story that he had already told so much better. All such “confessions,” all such conversion stories, are merely types of Augustine’s archetype. Even Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, perhaps the greatest autobiographical conversion memoir ever written, except for the Confessions itself, is but a formal reflection of Augustine’s original “apologia.” The eminent Victorian’s apology for his life merely follows in Augustine’s venerable footsteps and the confessional trail he had already blazed. The same could be said of R. H. Benson’s Confessions of a Convert and Monsignor Ronald Knox’s A Spiritual Aeneid. All great confessional literature and all great conversion stories take their lead and their cue from Augustine’s magisterial original. Plus ça change …
This somewhat rambling preamble to Augustine’s Confessions has barely scratched the surface of all that the Confessions has to offer. It has not discussed Augustine’s philosophical and theological engagement with the Neo-platonists, or with the Manichaeans; nor has it discussed his rational and psychological grappling with grief and the meaning of mortality; nor has it so much as mentioned Augustine’s relationship with his mentor, Saint Ambrose, a neglectful fact which is truly a sin of omission. And yet, when all is said and done, the most potent and important reason for anyone to read the Confessions is the insights it gives into one of the greatest minds in history. Why would we not want to spend time in the company of one of the greatest men who ever lived and in the presence of one of the greatest minds that God has ever loved?
All of the multifarious aspects of the Confessions that have not been discussed in this briefest of introductions will be revealed in the wonderful confessions that follow. What will be revealed is truly a revelation in the fullest understanding of the word. It is nothing less than a shining forth of a mind baptized in the blessedness of faith and reason, and a heart basking in the love of God, no longer restless because it is resting in him.
* All quotes from Father Meconi are taken from his introduction to the Ignatius Critical Edition of The Confessions: St. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012).
† Saint Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions, op. cit., p. 41.
Augustine’s Testimony Concerning the Confessions
I. The Retractations, II, 6 (A.D. 427)
1. My Confessions, in thirteen books, praise the righteous and good God as they speak either of my evil or good, and they are meant to excite men’s minds and affections toward him. At least as far as I am concerned, this is what they did for me when I was writing them and they still do this when read. What some people think of them is their own affair [ipse viderint]; but I do know that they have given pleasure to many of my brothers and sisters in Christ — and still do. I wrote the first through the tenth books about myself; the other three are about Holy Scripture, from what is written there, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gn 1:1), even as far as the reference to the Sabbath rest (Gn 2:2).
2. In Book IV, when I confessed my soul’s misery over the death of a friend and said that our soul had somehow been made one out of two souls — “But it may have been that I was afraid to die, lest he should then die wholly whom I had so greatly loved” (Ch. VI, 11) — this now seems to be more a trivial declamation than a serious confession, although this inept expression may be tempered somewhat by the “may have been” [forte] that I added. And in Book XIII, my statement that the firmament of heaven was made between the higher (and superior) waters and the lower (and inferior) waters — was said without sufficient thought. In any case, the matter is very obscure.
This work begins thus: “Great are you, O Lord.”
II. De Dono Perseverantiae, XX, 53 (A.D. 428)
Which of my shorter works has been more