Confessions (Augustine)

Confessions is a 397 autobiographical work by St. Augustine detailing his spiritual journey to convert to Christianity.

Summary
Augustine begins the work by describing his sins as a child. He says that, although he does not remember all of the sinfs of his childhood, he still needs to atone for them. When he is a teenager, he finds himself among "bad companions", leading him to commit more sins. Most significantly, he and his friends steal pears. Augustine reflects on this at great length, admitting that he never would have done it on its own and that he didn't even want the pears (he ended up throwing them away). He takes up studies in Carthage and converts to Manichaeism. As a scholar of rhetoric, he studies the works of great classical authors like Aristotle and Cicero. He is then stricken with grief when one of his friends dies suddenly. Augustine reflects more on this, asserting that any love that does not have God at its center is bound to lead to grief and a sense of loss. He moves to Milan, where he meets Ambrose, a  prominent Christian theologian. He is becoming increasingly disecnhanted with Manichaeism, especially because its scientific claims do not hold. He realizes that a lot of his attraction to Manichaeism is because of its rhetorical value, not because of the substance of its claims. He nevertheless dismisses the Bible as a source of truth because he views the rhetoric as too plain. He continues to move toward Christianity but is held back by two main factors: his sins of lust and the problem of evil. He wants to live a life of the flesh and is unable to break this habit. He is even more concerned, however, with the problem of evil: if God created a perfect world, then how can evil exist? After much deliberation, he arrives at his famous theodicy: evil in of itself does not actually exist, and evil represents an absence of good and a turning away from God's grace. Having resolved his issues, he is now on the cusp of conversion. He famously opens up his Bible after hearing children chanting "Pick up and read" and opens to a passage that exhorts him to "put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts" (Romans 13:13-14). This passage fully convinces him of God's grace and he finally converts to Christianity. Soon after his baptism, his mother dies, but he does not feel the same grief he did when his friend died because his love was centered on God. He then proceeds to sermonize for the remainder of the book, reflecting on time, sensory perception, memory, and the book of Genesis at length.