This chapter takes up the language-learning passage from Confessions 1.8.13, which Wittgenstein quoted at the beginning of his Philosophical Investigations. “Where Wittgenstein notices an impossible kind of foreignness in Augustine’s confessional account of first language-learning,” it observes, “Augustine negotiates the mystery of the soul’s alienation from God.” Here is another kind of foreignness, and that chapter aims at inducing a kind of perplexity in our consideration of Augustine’s superficially straightforward account of language-learning. Drawing on Augustine’s dialogue On the Teacher, it invites us to puzzle over Augustine’s insistence that language is for teaching – apparently to the exclusion of learning – only to find him concluding that no human being is ever a teacher. The only teacher is the Inner Teacher, the Word, who teaches not by signs but by the realities themselves, with an intimacy and interiority that the infant Augustine longed for but never captured. The Word’s teaching overcomes both the foreignness and the alienation with which Augustine began, though this resolution poses the temptation “to render the whole of the earth, indeed even creation itself, into a place of unlikeness.”

This chapter examines Augustine’s relationship to earlier biblical exegesis. It emphasizes three distinctive preoccupations of Augustine’s exegesis: “the constraints of language, the limits of the human mind’s capacity to know God or the author’s intention, and the habits of the flesh to follow the desires of its senses.” After elucidating Augustine’s approach to these issues – which in itself sets him somewhat apart from his predecessors and contemporaries – the chapter presents two informative case studies. The first concerns Genesis, the topic of Confessions 11–13. Augustine’s exegesis of Genesis is informed from the beginning by his determination to reject the Manichaean dismissal of that book as silly and anthropomorphic, but his engagement with Genesis matures over time: his earliest discussions are far more indebted to Ambrose than his later, more distinctive, exegesis. The second case study concerns the Song of Songs. Here Augustine insists upon the goodness, beauty, and order of the material world, redeeming the five senses as intimations of the divine.

This chapter gives fruitful attention to the role of the sacraments in the Confessions. It delineates the ways in which the sacrament of baptism structures the autobiographical books, with baptism foregrounded in the first book (Augustine’s baptism postponed), the central or hinge book (Book 5, in which Augustine’s baptism is again deferred), and the climactic book (Book 9, in which Augustine’s baptism is recounted, along with many other baptisms, quite a few of which did not take place within the chronological scope of Book 9). The Eucharist, which was for Augustine the other sacrament of initiation and for which baptism itself was a prerequisite, comes into clear view at the end of Book 9 and in Book 10. The exegetical books then treat Genesis as “a model for all of Christian life, and especially that of the church,” a life inaugurated in baptism and sustained by the Eucharist. Contrary to the view of some scholars, who see very few Eucharistic allusions in the Confessions, the chapter shows that many of Augustine’s images – especially of food and of milk – have Eucharistic overtones.

This chapter explores the many uses of Scripture in the Confessions. Augustine draws words, images, and themes from Scripture; he tells the story of his own successive (and sometimes unsuccessful) encounters with Scripture; he invites his readers into a lively relationship with Scripture. Augustine presents himself as living out the stories of Biblical characters – Adam, the prodigal son, Moses, the Apostle Paul – and as speaking the words of Scripture in his own voice, as his own words. Augustine’s extensive appropriation of the Psalms is of particular importance: “The Psalms do more than stage or frame Augustine’s narrative; they shape its presentation and supply its substance.” Scripture proves to be central both for Augustine’s self-dispossession, his casting away of the old life, and for his self-conception, his understanding and inhabiting of the new.

Grace and providence, much like the sacraments (which are instruments of grace), are pervasive in the Confessions. Yet we learn about them, not from any explicit theorizing or argumentation on Augustine’s part, but by examining their role in the dual narrative: the personal narrative of Augustine’s life and the cosmic narrative of creation and redemption. This chapter considers how grace (God’s unmerited favor) and providence (God’s directing of the course of events in the service of his own ends) shape, but do not determine, Augustine’s life. Although there is no explicit consideration in the Confessions of the relationship between grace and free choice, the overwhelming message of the work seems to be that grace is indispensable but not irresistible: God makes Augustine into the kind of person who can accept grace, but not someone who cannot help but accept it.

Chapter 5 discusses the relationship between Christians and classical education, and the emergence of Church schools in monasteries and episcopal households. It argues that while the Church never set out to consciously replace or compete with the classical schools, nor to destroy classical literary culture, the Church neither taught classical grammar and rhetoric, nor did it expect such high educational attainments for membership or promotion within its hierarchies. At the same time, the presence of new learning and career opportunities within the clergy, and the increasing rise of asceticism or monasticism indirectly contributed to the marginalisation of traditional classical educational institutions and the disappearance of schools of grammar and rhetoric from public life by the early sixth century.

The concluding chapter reflects upon how the themes and questions explored in the book speak to familiar concerns of families, communities, and societies across time. What is the purpose of education? What do we expect of our education, and in what ways does our pursuit of knowledge and our learning define who we are? The conclusion draws together the arguments from the preceding chapters, considering in what ways the ‘fall’ of Rome meant the end of the schools of grammar and rhetoric in Gaul. Without the superstructure of the Roman empire, the socio-political culture that valued literary education disappeared, and the schools soon followed suit; it was not primarily material changes caused by the political, cultural, and religious upheavals of the fifth century that led to the decline of the schools, but rather marked changes in the attitudes and mindset towards education and learning of the emerging power brokers of post-imperial Gaul – the barbarian kingdoms and the Church.

This chapter investigates spiritual sight alongside the other spiritual senses, most notably hearing and touch. Drawing on the work of Hans Jonas, it offers a taxonomy of the spiritual senses in the Confessions. Spiritual sight is the noblest of the spiritual senses, as literal sight is the noblest of the physical senses, and the language of sight pervades Augustine’s account of his mystical ascent in Book 7. Yet sight is dethroned in the vision at Ostia, which Augustine shares with his mother, Monnica; it gives way to hearing and touch. Why, if sight is the noblest of the senses, is it replaced in this way? The chapter argues convincingly that “the critique of sight in the conf. is expressive of Augustine’s mature theology of the vision of God, which is increasingly critical of Platonic theoria and its attempt to ascend to a vision of the divine apart from the temporal and material modality of grace.” Eschatologically, sight is prior: “When he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” But for now, touch and hearing are “means of arriving at this vision.”

This chapter examines Augustine’s discussion of time in Book 11. The contrast between eternity, in which there is no succession or change, and time, which is nothing but succession and change, is a crucial first step. Augustine uses this contrast to distinguish between ordinary utterances and God’s creative Word, the coeternal Son. Time is itself created, so there is no sense in asking what God was doing before he created, though Augustine’s understanding of the relationship between time and eternity raises difficult philosophical questions that Augustine himself does not address, though recent philosophers of religion have done so. Augustine appears to hold that only what is (temporally) present exists. The most contentious issue is whether Augustine holds a subjectivist theory of time, and if so, what exactly that theory is. After canvasing the merits of possible answers to that question, the chapter concludes that the most charitable reading is that Augustine “does not seem to offer an account of what time is but instead ‘merely’ offers an aporetic examination of certain puzzles concerning time and our experience of it.” This construal is "entirely in keeping with his frequently open-ended and exploratory manner of philosophical investigation.”

The present volume offers twelve new essays by leading scholars working from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives: theology, both systematic and historical; ancient history and early Christian history; and ancient and medieval philosophy. It is a fitting variety of approaches for a work that emphatically – and sometimes bewilderingly – is not just one thing. The Confessions is an autobiography, a prayer, a song; it is a treatise on God and his providential governance, both of one life and of the whole sweep of history; it is a meditation on Scripture. It is meant to inform, to perplex, but above all to “lift the human heart and mind to God” (retr. 2.6.1). Even the word confessio has multiple meanings: solemn avowal or acknowledgment, the offering of praise and thanksgiving, and the admitting of one’s own sins.

This chapter considers the ideological aspects of classical education, exploring how the shifting political and cultural landscapes of Gaul changed the way Gallo-Roman aristocrats practiced and perceived education, and how this is reflected in our sources from the fourth to sixth centuries. While in the fourth century classical education is valued mainly for its tangible rewards and is closely linked to imperial structures of power, throughout the fifth century Gallo-Romans increasingly highlight the personal and ideological uses of education in shaping and affirming their status and identity. Teachers of grammar and rhetoric are more closely linked to aristocratic literary circles, which goes hand in hand with an increased blurring of the distinctions between grammatical and rhetorical teaching and a narrowing of education and literary networks. These changing attitudes and practices of education reflect the underlying political and social transformations of fifth-century Gaul and Gallo-Roman aristocratic anxieties and responses to them.

This chapter elucidates the ways in which “narrative can serve as a tool for the orientation of consciousness.” The dual narrative of the Confessions – nine books of personal narrative, joined by a book on memory to a cosmic narrative of creation and redemption – conveys, and is intended to convey, theological truth. In his theological work Augustine draws on, amplifies, and corrects (as he sees it) such figures as Origen (though only at second hand), Basil of Caesarea, and Ambrose to articulate his own distinctive views on knowing and willing, the condition of the fallen human will, and the source and destiny of creation. In concluding remarks that elegantly distil the unity of the Confessions, that chapter observes that “Augustine cannot give an account of his life that is not also an account of the work of God.”

This chapter emphasizes narrative as a vehicle for psychological analysis. It begins by noting the prominence of emotion in the Confessions; Augustine himself tells us in the Reconsiderations that the work is meant to arouse not just the mind but also the heart toward God. It argues that the Confessions contributes to ancient philosophical debates about the character of the emotions and how they should be controlled and moderated. The work presents a “therapy of the emotions” that is sometimes aligned with, and sometimes in critical tension with, the philosophical spiritual exercises proposed by earlier writers. Augustine is, in certain respects, more hopeful about progress in virtue than his philosophical predecessors; he presents his therapy of the soul for everyone, not just those with fortunate natural proclivities. Yet he insists that such progress can be made only by God’s grace. The techniques of ancient philosophy are, in themselves, unavailing for moral transformation.