The Confessions of St. Augustine 183The only way he can communicate the joy he feels
over his conversion is through crying, just as he
communicated as a child. The crying, however, has
been transformed from an expression of sinful greed
to one of pure happiness with God.
In Latin, the language in which Augustine wrote,
the word infans literally means “unable to speak.” In
his baptism, he gains a second infancy and child-
hood, but this time, the grace of God and the care
of his new Christian “family” (the church) will help
him to avoid the sinful selfishness that characterized
his first infancy. Sin for Augustine is a problem as
universal as infancy, but it has a solution in becom-
ing a child of God via membership in the church.
Jonathan Malesic
lOve in The Confessions of St. Augustine
In Augustine’s outlook, love is most basically desire:
desire to possess an object, desire to be with a partic-
ular person, desire for knowledge or goodness. But
not all desires get to be called by the name love. It is
possible to desire the wrong things, or to desire good
things in the wrong way. Much of the plot of the
Confessions is driven by the conflict between genuine
love and the disordered form of desire known as lust.
To Augustine, human beings are defined largely by
their loves: They are good to the extent that they
love the right things in the right way, and they are
sinful when their desires are disordered.
Augustine says that as an adolescent, his great-
est desire “was simply to love and to be loved.” This
desire in itself is good, but Augustine goes about ful-
filling it the wrong way, causing him to sin and to be
miserable. When Augustine goes away to Carthage
to study, he has many friends and lovers. But these
were no more than “illicit loves,” because rather
than enjoying real friendship with these people, he
sought carnal pleasures with them, casting himself
into “the hell of lust.” Looking back on those times,
Augustine determines that he was never truly in love
with anyone. In fact he “was in love with love,” the
feeling he got when he was falling in love. Because
he did not yet know what real love was, the mistake
was easy to make. Augustine continues to give lust
a large role in his life, as he takes up with a woman
and has a child with her out of wedlock. Their “love
is a matter of physical sex,” not real partnership.
Even Augustine’s friendships at this stage exhibit
improper love. In book 4, Augustine tells about
a close friendship he shared with a childhood
acquaintance. They shared many interests, and at
the time Augustine “felt that my soul and his were
‘one soul in two bodies.’ ” But even this love was
ultimately improper, because Augustine loved this
friend disproportionately. This unnamed friend falls
ill and eventually dies, causing Augustine no end of
misery.
The closeness of the relationship is exactly what
makes the end of the relationship so painful. Look-
ing back on this episode, Augustine realizes that he
loved this friend “as a substitute for” God. Augus-
tine’s lesson here is that someone should never
treat another as “half [one’s] soul.” Human beings
are mortal and finite and thus should not receive
such strong devotion. God alone must be loved so
strongly, and because God is infinite and immortal,
loving him will never be a disappointment.
In subsequent books, Augustine gains new
friends and loves them more appropriately. In book
6, he writes much about Alypius and Nebridius, with
whom Augustine lives and shares many intellectual
interests. The love these friends show Augustine
helps make him a better person. Alypius’s honesty,
which he shows by refusing to take bribes while he
held a government job, seems to rub off on the sinful
Augustine, who says that these two “friends I loved
indeed for their own sake; and I felt that in return
they loved me for my sake.”
The love among Augustine, Alypius, and
Nebridius is good partly because it eventually leads
beyond itself and toward love for God. Augustine
does not convert to Christianity alone but with
these two friends, as they continue to exert a positive
moral influence on him. After Augustine’s conver-
sion and baptism, his desire for God only grows. He
asks himself “what I love when I love my God,” and
he knows that in loving God, he does not love the
physical beauty and the pleasure he loves in material
things, because God is not a physical thing.
Still, God grants Augustine spiritual pleasures
beyond any physical ones, leading him to write what
amounts to a love hymn to God, saying, “Late have
I loved you, beauty so old and so new,” and extolling