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.Footnote ¹

Chapters 1–4 take up Augustine’s creative appropriation of the work of his predecessors in theology generally, in metaphysics, in philosophy as therapy for the soul, and in Scriptural exegesis. In Chapter 1 Mark Edwards 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 distill the unity of the Confessions, Edwards observes, “Augustine cannot give an account of his life that is not also an account of the work of God.”

In Confessions 8 Augustine tells us that one of the conversion stories related to him in the run-up to his own conversion was that of the philosopher and orator Marius Victorinus, who had translated the “books of the Platonists” that Augustine encountered in Book 7. What he does not tell us, however, is how important Victorinus was, not only as an exemplar of boldness in confessing Christ, but in shaping Augustine’s own reading of Plotinus. In Chapter 2 Sarah Byers compellingly lays out Victorinus’s influence on Augustine’s Trinitarian theology as expressed in a brief and bewildering passage in Book 13. She shows that wherever Augustine departs from Plotinus, he does so in a way that he found in Victorinus; Victorinus also taught Augustine distinctions and arguments from Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics that he could not have known from other Latin texts available to him. Through Augustine, then, Victorinus had a much larger influence on the history of metaphysics than has been appreciated up to now. Moreover, we find that “Augustine’s common designation as ‘Platonist’ would be more precise if it were revised to ‘Victorine Neoplatonist’.”

As Chapter 1 emphasizes narrative as a vehicle for theology, Chapter 3 emphasizes narrative as a vehicle for psychological analysis. Charlotte Köckert 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 (retr. 2.6.1). She 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.

Continuing the theme of Augustine’s creative engagement with the work of his predecessors, Bronwen Neil turns in Chapter 4 to an examination of Augustine’s relationship to earlier biblical exegesis. Neil 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 – Neil 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.

Chapters 5 and 6 also focus on Augustine’s approach to Scripture. In Chapter 5 Michael Cameron 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.

Scripture is also an object of study for Augustine: After all, we can’t make something our own if we don’t know it. And coming to know Scripture, to understand what the Spirit of God means to convey to us, is a challenging matter. In Chapter 6 Blake D. Dutton lays out two key tasks in reading Scripture that Augustine identifies in the Confessions, and especially in his exegesis of Genesis: “the task of grasping meaning” and “the task of grasping truth.” The first task is that of discerning authorial intention; the second is that of “seeing for oneself that what the author is saying is in fact the case.” The task of grasping meaning is difficult in part because of the peculiar character of the Scriptures; they are both accessible to all, using ordinary language (which is, accordingly, open to misinterpretation), and yet full of profundities that only the wisest and most careful readers can come to appreciate. It is also difficult because we cannot really know what is in another person’s mind, so any judgments about authorial intention are provisional at best, and only pride would claim to have identified the uniquely correct interpretation. The task of grasping truth is likewise difficult. When it comes to intelligible realities, Truth speaks inwardly, not outwardly (through any text, even that of Scripture). When it comes to historical realities, including the central truths about the life of the Incarnate Word, we cannot have knowledge in the fullest sense. We must accept those truths on the basis of faith.

Chapters 7–10 take up theological and philosophical themes that are pervasive in the Confessions: the sacraments, grace and providence, the virtues, and the spiritual senses (in particular, sight). In Chapter 7 Elizabeth Klein gives fruitful attention to the role of the sacraments in the Confessions. She 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, Klein shows that many of Augustine’s images – especially of food and of milk – have Eucharistic overtones.

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. In Chapter 8 I consider 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.

In Chapter 9 Andrew Pinsent argues that Augustine adopts a second-person perspective, which “is characterized by dialogical speech, shared awareness of shared focus with the second person, and an orientation to love that other person.” This perspective shapes his understanding of the moral life; it gives pride of place to second-person relations, whether in the virtuous love of God and neighbor or in the disordered friendship without which Augustine tells us he would not have stolen the pears. Examining three virtues – humility, mercy, and charity – Pinsent shows how each of them can be understood only in terms of proper relatedness to some other person. Since these virtues are prominent in the Confessions but altogether absent from the Nicomachean Ethics, a close look at them reveals the considerable differences between an Augustinian and an Aristotelian approach to the virtues. It also sheds light on how to read Thomas Aquinas. As Pinsent shows, Aquinas’s considerable inheritance from Augustine goes largely ignored by scholars focusing on Aquinas’s Aristotelianism. Attention to Augustine is accordingly crucial for a more balanced understanding of Aquinas; it also holds promise for future work in virtue ethics.

One fascinating feature of Pinsent’s work is the attention he gives to Augustine’s frequent appeals to looking at God’s face – “Your face, Lord, will I seek” – and the psychological importance of face recognition. Seeing God’s face is, of course, a matter of spiritual, not physical sight. In Chapter 10 Gerald Boersma investigates spiritual sight alongside the other spiritual senses, most notably hearing and touch. Drawing on the work of Hans Jonas, he 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? Boersma 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” (conf. 13.15.18/1 Jn. 3:2). But for now, touch and hearing are “means of arriving at this vision.”

Each of the two last chapters sheds light on a much-discussed but still poorly understood passage from the Confessions; both also situate the passages with respect to more recent philosophy. In Chapter 11 James Wetzel takes up the famous language-learning passage from Confessions 1.8.13, which Wittgenstein famously 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,” Wetzel observes, “Augustine negotiates the mystery of the soul’s alienation from God.” Here is another kind of foreignness, and Wetzel 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, he 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.”

In the final essay in this volume, Chapter 12, Tamer Nawar examines Augustine’s celebrated discussion of time in Book 11. The contrast between eternity, in which there is no succession or change, and time, which is (at it were) nothing but succession and change, is a crucial first step. Augustine uses this fundamental contrast to distinguish between ordinary utterances, which are extended through time and consist of parts, one succeeding another until the whole is finished and done with, and God’s creative Word, which is the coeternal Son, and by whom all things are created from nothing. Time is itself created, so there is no sense in asking what God was doing before he created, though (as Nawar shows) Augustine’s understanding of the relationship between time and eternity does raise difficult philosophical questions that Augustine himself does not address in any detail, though recent philosophers of religion have done so. Augustine appears to be a presentist, holding that only what is (temporally) present exists, though perhaps he shouldn’t be; he also argues that the present has no duration. The most contentious issue in interpreting Book 11 is whether Augustine holds a sort of subjectivist theory of time, and if so, what exactly that theory is. After canvasing the philosophical and textual merits of possible answers to that question, Nawar judiciously 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.” Such a reading may be disappointing to anyone looking for a definitive account of time, but it “construes Augustine’s discussion in such a way that it is entirely in keeping with his frequently open-ended and exploratory manner of philosophical investigation.”