Confessions of a Sinner

Editor’s Note: This is the seventeenth in a series of articles on St. Augustine, one of the greatest of Church Fathers, and how his writings still apply today.

Not the least of the many astonishing things to be said about Augustine is the fact that it should have taken him nine years before he finally broke free of the Manichean chains that bound him. No less astonishing, of course, is the fact that it took less than a minute after hearing the singsong voice of the little child telling him to “Take it and read, take it and read” to turn his life completely around for the sake of Christ and His Church. That so much wonderment should flow from both ends of a life is the stuff of high drama. In fact, so replete are The Confessions with intense, riveting drama that it may take an accountant to keep track of all the examples. The reader, meanwhile, is given a bird’s-eye view to witness the whole story as it unfolds frame by thrilling frame.

There can be little doubt that of the nine books set down to describe Augustine’s life, Book VIII is everyone’s favorite. It is the centerpiece of the story, the necessary hinge on which all the action turns. 

How does it begin? Not with bells and whistles, although there will be time for fireworks in a bit. It begins with Augustine’s simple acknowledgment that a) it was God who unshackled him from sin and error; b) that in return for saving his life he will make a sacrifice of praise to God; and c) that by telling his story he hopes others will be moved to do the same.

What other story is there to tell when an author, stricken by a life of sin, sits down to write a book titled Confessions? In a moving little piece by the late Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete called “Secrets of the Confessional,” he nails it beautifully. “Confession,” he writes, “is not therapy, nor is it moral accounting. At its best, it is the affirmation that the ultimate truth of our interior life is our absolute poverty, our radical dependence, our unquenchable thirst, our desperate need to be loved.” “Confession,” he writes, “is not therapy, nor is it moral accounting. At its best, it is the affirmation that the ultimate truth of our interior life is our absolute poverty.Tweet This

As St. Augustine knew so well, confession is ultimately about praise. 

In the opening chapter, Augustine tells God that it was not certainty of proof he sought but, rather, a steadfast heart completely wedded to Him. Meanwhile, everything had gone wrong. “In my worldly life all was confusion. My heart had still to be rid of the leaven which remained over,” he confesses, quoting 1 Corinthians 5:7. “I should have been glad to follow the right road, to follow our Savior himself, but still I could not make up my mind to venture along the narrow path.”

Seeing Augustine thus caught in the vise of a near fatal vacillation, what does God do? Straightaway, He sends him to an old and trusted Christian by the name of Simplicianus, who is Spiritual Father to Ambrose. Just tell him everything, the message seems to be. Who, by way of encouragement, will tell Augustine the story of the famous Victorinus, an old man of redoubtable reputation whom Simplicianus had known in Rome. 

So esteemed was Victorinus among the pagans that there was even a statue of him in the forum. Long accustomed to the worship of the false gods, he nevertheless converted, “seized by the fear that Christ,” whom he had come at least privately to profess, “might deny him before the holy angels if he was too faint-hearted to acknowledge Christ before men.” And so, screwing up his courage, he tells his friend, “Let us go to the church. I want to be made a Christian…and soon afterwards, to the wonder of Rome and the joy of the Church, he gave in his name to be reborn through baptism.” 

Augustine is deeply shaken by the story, especially having himself hung fire for so long, owing to a life of sin he cannot quite bring himself to abandon. 

I was held fast, not in fetters clamped upon by another, but by my own will, which had the strength of iron chains. For my will was perverse and lust had grown from it, and when I gave in to lust habit was born, and when I did not resist the habit it became a necessity… 

It’s an old story, to be sure, and Augustine is not the first to tell it, even as he feels firsthand its deadening effects. Consisting of a most fearful lassitude of the soul, it plunges its victim into a deadly torpor from which there may be no escape. The mind, struggling to turn its attention back to God will, “like the efforts of a man who tries to wake but cannot,” finds itself falling, over and over, “into the depths of slumber.” It is never enough that we only know the right course of action; unless we own what we know by an act of the will, it hardly matters what we know. 

In other words, enslavement to sin will not end without outside intervention. It is the action of God that Augustine requires, not copybook maxims about doing the right thing. “The question is not so much about rules to be followed,” to quote a line from St. John Paul II’s stupendous encyclical on the moral life, Veritatis Splendor, “but about the meaning of life.” What will it finally be for Augustine? Will the meaning of his life be centered upon God or his genitals? There is no third way. Thus will he cry out in the words of the Apostle Paul: 

Pitiable creature that I was, who was to set me free from a nature thus doomed to death? Nothing else than the grace of God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

So, how exactly will God rescue Augustine? How does He propose to enable him finally to overcome a divided self, a soul torn in two by forces it cannot master on its own? It is not insight that Augustine requires, not the knowledge of good and evil; he has often enough examined layer upon layer of his misery. “As a youth I had been woefully at fault,” he will concede. 

I had prayed to you for chastity and said, “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” For I was afraid that you would answer my prayer at once and cure me too soon of the disease of lust, which I wanted satisfied, not quelled.

But, then, a life of duplicity hasn’t worked out too well for him, has it? And now, by his own if belated admission, he stands naked before his own eyes, pitilessly exposed by the importunities of his own conscience: 

Am I to be silent? Did you not always say that you would not discard your load of vanity for the sake of a truth that was not proved? Now you know that the truth is proved, but the load is still on your shoulders. Yet here are others who have exchanged their load for wings, although they did not wear themselves out in the search for truth or spend ten years or more in making up their minds.

Such is the state of Augustine’s sickness, leaving him to writhe in the most acute spiritual distress. And quite suddenly, amid all that wreckage of seeing a life strewn about with “mere trifles, the most paltry inanities,” Augustine is overcome with shame. Why must he be, he asks, “still listening to the futile mutterings of my lower self, still hanging in suspense”? Why can he not just love God, then do what he will? It is at this point that a storm erupts from within, “bringing with it a great deluge of tears…and in my misery I kept crying, ‘How long shall I go on saying ‘tomorrow, tomorrow’? Why not make an end of my ugly sins at this moment?’”

It is at this moment that he hears the voice of the child, repeating its mysterious refrain: “Take it and read, take it and read.” Which he at once does, reaching for his book of Scripture, his eyes falling upon the first passage he sees. It is from St. Paul: “Not in revelling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites” (Romans 13:13-14).

“I had no wish to read more,” he concludes, “and no need to do so. For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.”