182 Augustine, Saint
gious and philosophical movements, most of which
carry him further from God. Much of Confessions’s
narrative is marked by Augustine’s regret over his
youthful sinfulness. As a middle-aged Christian
writing Confessions, he knows the moral standard
he should have adhered to, and he laments that he
had previously ignored God in favor of the fleeting
pleasures of sex, vanity, and lawlessness. The climax
of the narrative books is Augustine’s conversion to
Christianity, which occurs dramatically in a Milan
garden.
The final four books are more directly philosoph-
ical and theological. In them, Augustine explores the
nature of time and memory, and he interprets the
biblical book of Genesis, which itself provided so
much of the literary and theological inspiration for
the Confessions. Augustine characterizes himself as a
seeker, as expressed in Confessions’s first paragraph,
where he says to God, “You have made us for your-
self, and our heart is restless till it rests in you.” To
read Confessions is to enter a world of thought more
complex and fascinating than nearly any other.
Jonathan Malesic
cHildHOOd in The Confessions of St.
Augustine
A person’s memories are the richest source of mate-
rial for an autobiography, and so we should expect
an autobiographer to have the least to say about his
or her birth and infancy. Not so for the exceedingly
inquisitive Augustine. He devotes the first book of
Confessions to searching for knowledge about his
birth, infancy, and childhood, using his experiences
in those stages to demonstrate to the reader the
problem of human sin.
Augustine even wants to know if he had a life
prior to his birth. He finds no answer but trusts
that God has one. In describing his character as an
infant, Augustine relies partly on his observations of
other infants. He sees that they greedily want milk
all the time and cry when that desire is not immedi-
ately satisfied. Augustine assumes that he, too, must
have been a greedy baby.
Augustine is keen to the power of words
throughout his life, and he devotes several pages of
book 1 to his learning to speak. At first, he could
only wail incoherently to indicate his desires. By
imitating adults and, later, with formal schooling,
Augustine becomes more adept at using language,
but he says that he mostly did so for immoral pur-
poses. In his final assessment of these early years,
Augustine describes himself as “so tiny a child, so
great a sinner.”
Augustine’s view of childhood is thus very dif-
ferent from our contemporary notion that children
are innocent and naturally generous. Augustine sees
himself as a sinful child because he believes that all
human beings are inherently sinful at birth and need
to be saved from that sin. This doctrine, known as
original sin, has roots in the biblical story of Adam
and Eve. According to Genesis 2 and 3, the first
human beings were sinless, but they disobeyed God
when they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of
good and evil after Eve was tempted to do so by the
serpent. This act of disobedience was the first sin. As
a consequence, Adam and Eve must one day die, and
so must all of their descendants, the entire human
race, because the guilt from that first sin is passed
down through generations.
Thus, Augustine portrays his own infancy and
childhood as reflecting the biblical account of the
infancy and childhood of the human race. This
theme carries through book 2, in which Augus-
tine recounts a period in his adolescence, the cusp
between childhood and adulthood.
Perhaps the most famous episode in Confessions
is the theft of pears that Augustine and his adoles-
cent friends commit in book 2. The episode is cast as
a reflection of the fall of Adam and Eve: Not only is
taking from a fruit tree at the heart of the story, but
like Adam, Augustine steals mainly for companion-
ship’s sake. As he admits at the end of book 2, “alone
I would not have done it.” He sees his yielding to
peer pressure as not merely the action of a foolish
youth but a malicious act against the will of God.
He blames only himself for his spiritual immaturity.
Augustine’s conversion to Christianity in the
Milan garden (recounted in book 8) is followed in
book 9 by his baptism, which makes him a member
of the Catholic Church. This baptism is like a sec-
ond birth to him. In Christian theology, the person
who is baptized “dies to sin” and is born to new life.
The newborn Christian Augustine loses his voice
for much of book 9 because of a series of illnesses.