Confessions

In Book VI Augustine provides a host of new reasons for his preference of Christianity over Manicheism and other belief systems. Augustine emphasizes the power of Ambrose’s assertions that certain passages of the Bible, including many that had previously troubled Augustine, were meant to be taken figuratively, “a principle on which [Ambrose] must insist emphatically, The letter is death-dealing, but the spirit gives life” (99). This principle, based on a line from Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians (2 Cor 3:6), establishes the power of those who are possessed by the Holy Spirit to interpret scripture.

This idea of possession by the Holy Spirit is a compelling one, even if it defies logic. Like Ambrose, Monica seems to have had some sense of this. When agitating for the marriage of her son, she had some suggestive dreams, but, unlike the dream from Book III that had convinced her to maintain relationships with Augustine after he became a Manichee, Monica confidently classified these as “the activity of her own human spirit” (112). Augustine relates, “She claimed that by something akin to the sense of taste, a faculty she could not explain in words, she was able to distinguish between your revelations to her and the fantasies of her own dreaming soul” (112). While Augustine never speaks of harboring such a power himself, the passion and sincerity of his writing suggest that he may have felt such a force working within him. Consequently, it is his confessions themselves that constitute the most satisfactory evidence of his genuine belief in and relationship with God.

Still, he does provide a few reasons for his softening toward Christianity that may be more satisfactory even for the skeptical reader, chief among which is his recognition that many secular matters require some level of faith as well. He credits God for making him:

[…] reflect on how innumerable were the things I believed and held to be true, though I had neither seen them nor been present when they happened. How many truths there were of this kind, such as events of world history, or facts about places and cities I had never seen (99-100).

Of course, these sorts of beliefs are generally more verifiable than religious convictions, or they can at least be shown to be within the realm of scientific possibility, but Augustine’s recognition that “unless we did believe them we should be unable to do anything in this life” establishes a powerful parallel with the utility of becoming a Christian at this stage of history (100). With Theodosius recently having banned all other religions and Christianity spreading like wildfire, becoming a Christian was becoming a sure way of increasing one’s social standing and mobility. This is not to suggest that Augustine converted simply out of convenience, but it is noteworthy how deeply impressed he was that Christianity had been “established with such authority throughout almost all nations” (100).

Loopholes like these are invariable in any attempt to rationalize religious preference since religion is fundamentally a matter of faith despite logic. Modern readers who find themselves particularly beholden to logic and the scientific method may find this period of Augustine’s life, after Manicheism but before Christianity, as the one with which they can best identify. After all, the philosophy with which Augustine most identifies here, that of the Academics, is strikingly similar to agnosticism, the idea that humans are incapable of understanding anything beyond their personal experiences. While this idea is increasingly satisfactory for many in the modern age, it was not enough for Augustine, his departure from this mindset made clear in a conversation he presents with himself: “Fine fellows, you Academics! So nothing that we need for living our lives can be known with certainty? Nonsense! Let us seek energetically and not give up hope” (108). Despite his love of reason and rhetoric, a life without spiritual truth and belonging is not a life worth living for Augustine.

Similarly important to Augustine are the bonds of friendship and romance between human beings, but the mystery of these only increases in Book VI. Augustine spends much time talking about his friends, especially Alypius. Generally, they seem to be good influences on one another, working together to pursue truth and meaning. These friendships stand in stark contrast to those that led him to steal pears in his adolescence and are a model of camaraderie being used for good instead of ill. However, they are complex and certainly not perfect. Alypius’s childhood sexual trauma prevented him from experiencing the romantic dimension of life. Likely, this was an experience he needed to work through, but instead Augustine brashly encouraged his friend to seek marriage, advice Augustine characterizes as “the serpent […] speaking through me” (111). Even the role Augustine played in releasing Alypius from his addiction to circus games was unintentional. Augustine knew he should help his friend but never did “because it slipped my memory” (103). Instead, Alypius happened to stop in to one of Augustine’s lectures in which he made an analogy to the circus, and Alypius “took the illustration to himself” (111). These experiences raise the question of whether even the good influences these men had on one another were intentional and thus praiseworthy. Perhaps they, too, were little more than accidents arising from fondness for one another and the mutual pursuit of self-interest.

Alypius’s romantic problems probably would not have been solved by marriage, and the same may well be true of Augustine’s. As far as can be ascertained, the extramarital affair he maintained for over a decade with an unnamed woman was a loving, gratifying relationship. It even produced a child, therefore satisfying the goal of Christian marriage as Augustine earlier defined it (59). If there were other issues, Augustine certainly does not mention them. However, because their love was not sanctified by the Christian church, Augustine ended it. Although there can be no question that he is satisfied with the direction his life took, this satisfaction is in spite of the heartbreak he experienced when he sent her away: “The wound inflicted on me […] did not heal […]. After the fever and the acute pain had dulled, it putrefied, and the pain became a cold despair” (113). In the end, neither Alypius nor Augustine married as they became monks and then clergymen, a move that might be interpreted as a retreat from sexual troubles.

Again, the mysteries of love and friendship seem to transcend the boundaries of Augustine’s conception of Christian doctrine. Despite the central role friendship played in his life and his high esteem for it, the moral implications of his relationships are never clear. On the romantic side, Augustine presents sinful extramarital relationships, like his promiscuous behavior in adolescence, and allegedly sinful ones that seem in fact to bring great joy and meaning, such as his relationship with the mother of his son. As far as marriage is concerned, the only relationship he discusses is that of his mother and father, a relationship with no evidence of affection and positive evidence of abuse (171). Furthermore, it is overwhelming a marriage between a devout Christian and an arrogant pagan, which can hardly be said to serve Augustine’s idea of divine purpose.

Conspicuously, Augustine speaks passively of the events that led up to his planned marriage. Rather than identify the person who arranged his marriage, he writes, “the pressure on me was kept up, and an offer for a certain girl was made on my behalf” (112). Instead of naming the person who forced his lover to leave, he writes that she “was ripped from my side, being regarded as an obstacle to my marriage” (113). Since Augustine makes it clear that his mother did not approve of his extramarital affair and that she was agitating for his marriage, it is reasonable to infer that she was the unnamed agent, an inference that Boulding speaks of as a certainty in her introduction (11). Augustine’s failure to attribute these acts to Monica may be a manifestation, conscious or not, of the fact that his heart remained broken—that even if Monica was acting in the supposed interests of God and her son’s salvation, something within Augustine never believed that the love he felt for this unnamed woman was wrong.

One final note of interest from Book VI concerns Ambrose’s reading habit. Augustine describes how Ambrose’s “eyes would travel across the pages and his mind would explore the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent” (97). To a modern reader, this manner of reading is completely unremarkable, so unremarkable in fact that to take such specific note of it seems odd. Many critics and historians over the years have taken this as an indication that silent reading was a novelty for Augustine, something that may not have existed prior to his time. While it is true that most early writing was meant to be read aloud, there is evidence that silent reading existed long before Augustine described it in Confessions, although it may have been uncommon (Fenton, James. “Read My Lips.” The Guardian, 29 Jul. 2006). Even if the academic community is far from consensus on the matter, Augustine’s description positions Ambrose as an uncommonly sedate and contemplative scholar.