The Confessions of St. Augustine

It has been years now since I first read the Confessions of St. Augustine. It was when I was in my late twenties, before I started college, in fact before I had ever gone to school at all. St. Augustine was part of my self-made education, and the saint taught me a lot—not only about how things were in the late Roman Empire, but about the human heart and its response to God. I first met the work in a Tennessee junk shop, in a tattered paperback I bought for a dime. Few of my dimes have been better spent. Reading the Confessions for the first time I felt as Robinson Crusoe must have felt on the island when he saw a single human footprint in the sand. Here is a man!—a real human being wandering around in the jungles of the printed page. A few books—Kierkegaard’s and Whitman’s—have the same quality of immediate contact with their authors. I feel I know St. Augustine; I feel that I have sat around and drunk coffee with him, swapped life stories. Better yet, sainthood apart, I feel that I am Augustine, for I too struggle with the flesh and yearn for God. I, too, will be restless until I find rest in Him, and herein lies the book’s great appeal, its hopefulness. Augustine found God, or was found by Him. The lone footprints in the sand lead to a great way, strait and narrow perhaps, and little traveled, but the way upward to where there is rest. There go Dante and Augustine and Kierkegaard, and there by the grace of God go I.

One day in the gaudy palace of the western Roman Empire, a young man delivered a speech before the emperor. It was a panegyric, a set piece praising the emperor just short of calling him a god—Rome was nominally Christian by then. The speech went well, the Latin phrases rolled out on well-oiled vowels, spun and danced gravely in balanced Ciceronian prose. He was a master of his art, this young teacher of rhetoric (about the same as an English professor today), clearly a man on his way up. The emperor smiled; he had been made to feel himself the worthy successor of Augustus and Trajan. It was a good sign; the speaker would be rehired. But the speaker was sick at heart, for he knew that every word, every well-honed phrase, was a lie. This emperor was hardly more than a purple tunic on a stick, a hollow puppet in the hands of the barbarian king who was in fact master of Rome. Forms had to be kept up, a good craftsman in Latin found to say the proper thing. So Augustine was hired to perpetuate the farce.

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Robert Allen

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It has been years now since I first read the Confessions of St. Augustine. It was when I was in my late twenties, before I started college, in fact before I had ever gone to school at all. St. Augustine was part of my self-made education, and the saint taught me a lot—not only about how things were in the late Roman Empire, but about the human heart and its response to God. I first met the work in a Tennessee junk shop, in a tattered paperback I bought for a dime. Few of my dimes have been better spent. Reading the Confessions for the first time I felt as Robinson Crusoe must have felt on the island when he saw a single human footprint in the sand. Here is a man!—a real human being wandering around in the jungles of the printed page. A few books—Kierkegaard’s and Whitman’s—have the same quality of immediate contact with their authors. I feel I know St. Augustine; I feel that I have sat around and drunk coffee with him, swapped life stories. Better yet, sainthood apart, I feel that I am Augustine, for I too struggle with the flesh and yearn for God. I, too, will be restless until I find rest in Him, and herein lies the book’s great appeal, its hopefulness. Augustine found God, or was found by Him. The lone footprints in the sand lead to a great way, strait and narrow perhaps, and little traveled, but the way upward to where there is rest. There go Dante and Augustine and Kierkegaard, and there by the grace of God go I.

One day in the gaudy palace of the western Roman Empire, a young man delivered a speech before the emperor. It was a panegyric, a set piece praising the emperor just short of calling him a god—Rome was nominally Christian by then. The speech went well, the Latin phrases rolled out on well-oiled vowels, spun and danced gravely in balanced Ciceronian prose. He was a master of his art, this young teacher of rhetoric (about the same as an English professor today), clearly a man on his way up. The emperor smiled; he had been made to feel himself the worthy successor of Augustus and Trajan. It was a good sign; the speaker would be rehired. But the speaker was sick at heart, for he knew that every word, every well-honed phrase, was a lie. This emperor was hardly more than a purple tunic on a stick, a hollow puppet in the hands of the barbarian king who was in fact master of Rome. Forms had to be kept up, a good craftsman in Latin found to say the proper thing. So Augustine was hired to perpetuate the farce.