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Vanity of vanities, the way we praise great books. Think of Coleridge and his famous "smack of Hamlet," or of some of the encomiums in this very series: When we seek to praise, we invoke the surprising modernity of a book from an age less advanced than our own. What makes Shakespeare, Cervantes and the rest so remarkable, really, is that they were genius enough to imagine us!
Few books are more frequently subject to such vain mirror-work than St. Augustine's Confessions. Enter enlightened wonder: At the end of the fourth century, a middle-aged North African wrote an account of himself that's self-conscious, questioning, searching and boldly honest; an account that never but roars with a lively literary voice; an account written after the author gave up a life of eloquent wind and elegant debauchery for a life committed to Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church. Thank ourselves we're such open-minded people. We can look past Augustine's getting the conversion experience backward because there's so much else in the Confessions that compels, endears, smacks.
As is the case in any autobiography, there are always two selves in contention in the Confessions, the self who acts and the self who has to account for those acts. The vitality of autobiography depends on their interplay, and on a writer's willingness and dexterity in resolving the space between these selves. For Augustine, who could famously beseech God for chastity, just not yet, this space was vast. Born to a pagan father and Christian mother in 354 AD, he spent his early adulthood seeking pleasure, position and higher purpose. He enjoyed some success in all three as he moved from North Africa to Rome to Milan; from loutish student to civil servant to professor of rhetoric; from free lover to cohabiting lover to conflicted lover and devoted father; and from hectored, unbelieving son to ambivalent Gnostic to argumentative Neo-Platonist.
None of it was inherent enough to abide by for good. At 32, he was reduced to weeping in a garden by years of searching and longing and resisting, when a child's voice told him to take up and read the Bible. There he found St. Paul's encouragement to "put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the desires of the flesh." Augustine's consequent conversion led to his becoming a priest, bishop and prolific writer. Following his death in 430, he was named a saint and a doctor of the church; thereafter he became a major figure of Western civilization whose foremost idea, invested with the felt knowledge of his own life, we find on the opening page of the Confessions, when Augustine tells God what God already knows: "Our heart is unquiet until it rests in you."
In a way, the rest of the book is a self-conscious testament to this singular insight; self-conscious because of the book's particular form and tiered audiences. Augustine is not telling his life to himself to work through some past trauma, nor is he dishing and sniping and shocking cheap-minded readers. He is confessing to God Almighty every dark deed and false light of his life, bringing all of it forward — I mean all of it, the tantrums and stolen pears and wreckful nights and lust upon lust for flesh and fame — with the firm if fearful conviction that he is placing his spotty record before this perfect Creator who already knows all, who judges and forgives and loves, who made him in His own image and makes of him only the hardest demands of any human life: humility and honest reckoning before a higher power.
There are, to be sure, earthly pressures upon the writer as well. Augustine's intense self-consciousness owes to his sense of confessing to God while various earthly audiences read on: fellow believers who might find in his effort an exemplar, the ambivalent who may be likewise moved, and his former cohort, who cannot but sip their wine and snicker at Augustine's wrong-way efforts.
The book's higher purposes and immediate pressures account for its unceasing honesty, force and unmatched comprehensiveness: the self-accusation and beseeching of God; the sometimes tortured, often heartfelt remembrances of lovers, friends, family; the extended metaphors and agile allusions and subtle play of recurrent images; the dense contemplations of memory, time and creation itself.
All of which proceeds from Augustine's seeking the fullness of life and finding God and then making sense of such discovery through writing. The result: a remarkable book, a confession of the demanding joy that is Christianity itself, of knowing that above and beyond our vain and vast and incomplete, inconstant selves, we are known for good, known and loved.
Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at Ryerson University and the author of "Governor of the Northern Province," a novel.
Next week: The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli
