Confessions by St. Augustine (Summary+Review)

Hello everyone and welcome to the Biblical Bookworm. My name is Elizabeth and today I'll be talking about the book Confessions by Saint Augustine, which was written between 397 and 400, which makes it the oldest book I've ever reviewed on this channel. In the book Saint Augustine writes about his sinful youth and his conversion to Christianity. The book is considered to be one of the most important works of Saint Augustine and it's one of the most influential works in not only the history of Christian theology, but philosophy in general. It is not an autobiography in the literal sense, but is rather an autobiographical text that contains religious, moral, theological, and philosophical elements as Saint Augustine explores the nature of God and sin within the context of his life. Before filming this video I read and listened to many other summaries of this book on the internet, trying to find a summary of the theological and philosophical teachings contained in it, and I couldn't really find any, as most summaries contained only a short account of Saint Augustine's life, and just stressed how great the impact of the book was on Christian and philosophical literature, but no one summarized the teachings. So in this video I will focus on Saint Augustine's philosophical and theological theories, and just like in the original text, I will first put them within the context of his life, and at the end I will summarize his theoretical thoughts that he doesn't combine with an account of his life. Saint Augustine was born in a city that is now located in Algeria, and his mother Saint Monica was Catholic, while his father was a pagan. And Saint Augustine wasn't baptized as a child, as back then people tried to delay baptism as much as possible, because baptism washes away all sins, and they wanted to sin as much as possible before getting baptized. And Saint Augustine had the same idea when he prayed his famous prayer, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet. Saint Augustine received a great education in rhetoric, grammar, literature, and oratory, and also arithmetic philosophy and natural science. But he regrets having chosen to study secular literature instead of scripture when he was younger. Saint Augustine writes that back then he feared making a grammatical error more than sinning. As the book is called Confessions, Saint Augustine analyzes his sins in the book, which for example were the fact that he was in a relationship with a woman he was not married to, and they also had a son. And a well-known story of him sinning is the pear tree incident, which seems trivial at first, but reveals the human temptation to sin just because something is forbidden. I will read this passage because no one can describe it better than Saint Augustine himself. There was a pear tree close to our own vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was not tempting either for its color or its flavor. Late one night, having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was, a group of young scoundrels and I among them went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden. Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart, which thou didst pity, even in that bottomless pit. Behold now, let my heart confess to thee what it was seeking there, when I was being gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was full and I loved it, I loved my own undoing, I loved my error, not for which I erred, but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself. Again, the purpose of the story wasn't to show what a crime it is to steal a few pears, but to illustrate sinning only for sin's sake. What I also like about it is that it shows you the style the entire book is written in to give you a notion of the book as a whole. When it comes to Saint Augustine's search for truth, he first converted to the Manichaean religion during his time as a teacher of liberal arts, and as he later understood that it was a heresy, a part of confessions is devoted to refuting Manichaeism. This religion led to a kind of asceticism that Augustine struggled with his whole life. He thought that the human weakness to like material things led to sin, and at the end of Confessions, Saint Augustine explains that it is not sinful to love God's beautiful creations, but that we should not become too attached to the things of this world. He also makes a case against astrology, which he earlier believed in, and says if astrology was right, then twins would have the same futures as they were born almost at the same time, and the stars would have hardly been in a different constellation, so the person who foretold their future would say the same for each of the twins, and that doesn't happen because twins live completely different lives. When Saint Augustine moved to Milan because his teaching was requested there, he met Bishop Ambrose, who today is known as Saint Ambrose, and the latter introduced him to a new perspective on God, which lead Augustine to become a catechumen of the church. One day in his garden, Saint Augustine heard a child sing a song called Pick Up and Re. This led him to pick up Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and in this text he read a passage that would convince him to convert. The account of his life ends with his baptism, and he uses the rest of the book for philosophical and theological reflection. His main theological concerns are the nature of God, matter and evil, the abstract ideas of memory and time, and the reconciliation of the Genesis creation story to the accepted Catholic doctrine. When Saint Augustine analyzes Genesis, one thing that I found particularly interesting are his thoughts on the sentence which God said after creating Adam and Eve in Genesis 1-28, and God blessed them, saying, Increase, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth. He explains that strangely God didn't bless the animals or plants in the same manner, although they multiply just as humans do, and so Saint Augustine concludes that the command to increase and multiply not only applies to procreation, but also to fruitfulness of reason. So here Saint Augustine makes the case for a figurative interpretation of the Bible, and also proves that the idea that one Bible passage can have different true meanings, as long as the interpretation doesn't contradict the Bible. Saint Augustine also shares his thoughts on the nature of time, and here he finds that there are three kinds of time in the mind. The time regarding the things of the past, which is a memory, the present, which is contemplation, and the future, which is expectation. I found his elaborations on memory especially interesting, and so I will read a passage to you, but I have to warn you it's going to be a little bit difficult. When I name forgetfulness, and I understand what I mean by the name, how could I understand it if I did not remember it? And if I refer not to the sound of the name, but to the thing which the term signifies, how could I know what that sound signified if I had forgotten what the name means? When, therefore, I remember memory, then memory is present to itself by itself. But when I remember forgetfulness, then both memory and forgetfulness are present together. The memory by which I remember the forgetfulness which I remember. But what is forgetfulness except the privation of How, then, is that present to my memory which, when it controls my mind, I cannot remember? But if what we remember we store up in our memory, and if, unless we remembered forgetfulness, we could never know the thing signified by the term when we heard it, then forgetfulness is contained in the memory. It is present so that we do not forget it, but since it is present, we don't forget. Now let's get to my opinion on the book. The book is, of course, a masterpiece, and when it comes to its beauty, I'd say it's an 11 out of 10, even for someone like me who doesn't know much about beauty, doesn't look for beauty, and is not an English native speaker. I definitely noticed that he put more thought into creating a beautiful masterpiece than any other author I've read so far. The problem is, of course, that you have to be in the right mood to read such a complicated work of literature, and so it's not a good idea to try to read it in a rush, because you really have to take time to savor it and to really absorb and reflect upon everything that St. Augustine talks about. And to be honest, when I read it, I didn't finish it at first, because I felt like reading it is pointless, because it was so complicated and I didn't get anything out of it. But when I prepared this video, I read in the summaries that the interesting or the philosophical part is at the end of the book, so I finished it real quick before filming this video. And so I can't really give the book an overall rating, because I feel like that would distort the value of the book, because on one hand it's extremely beautiful, and on the other hand it's extremely complicated and hard to follow. And so I will remain without a rating for this book. That's been it for today. I hope you liked the video. See you next week. God bless and bye!