Why and how to read Augustine’s Confessions
In the comments to my CWR article on different translations of the Confessions, a reader related the common experience of trying to read Augustine and giving up. “The time to read and digest the Confessions is a monumental task.” He wonders whether it is worth it for the average Catholic to slog through Augustine. Especially, I might add, when there are so many other good spiritual writers out there with more accessible texts.
The gentleman then suggests a follow-up article covering “the spiritual value of reading the Confessions” and some “approaches to reading it.” While I do not think the Confessions is required reading for every faithful person, I do want to take up this reader’s suggestion and offer some guidance for those who do want to read and digest it.
The spiritual value of reading Augustine’s Confessions
The Confessions changes lives. I know this is true because it changed mine. I read the Confessions as a freshman in college when I was a very lapsed Catholic in search of a way. I admired Augustine’s questioning God, his profound introspection, and his honest struggles with sin. In the Confessions, Augustine is everyman; he is you and me, a sinner who struggles with lust, ambition, and distraction. I have read the Confessions more than a dozen times over the past twenty years and each time it is fresh. It is the kind of book that grows as you grow. Each time I read it, I am beckoned to go deeper, further up and further in.
Augustine teaches us how to pray. Currently, I am re-reading the Confessions for an undergraduate course I am teaching at Hope College. My prayers were already formed deeply by this work when I wrote my dissertation on it, but I have found even now that I am praying more throughout the day and that my prayers are shaped by what I am reading. I find I want to confess more, to praise God more, and to see everything in the light of God. Augustine shows us how to turn every moment, every memory—good and bad—into a prayer of praise and thanksgiving. Augustine teaches us to do now what we will be doing forever, that is, if we in fact do now what he teaches us to do.
Augustine teaches us who God is and who we are. The Confessions begins with a distinction between the greatness of God, who is eminently worthy of praise, and us humans, a portion (or “particle,” in one lovely translation) of God’s creation, who are encumbered by our mortality, by weakness and sin. Yet, we are made for God. We are made with a dynamic orientation toward him and we are restless until we rest in him. The Confessions explores the nature of God and the nature of human beings in light of God. So, in addition to learning how to speak to God properly, we also learn how to think about him, and ourselves, properly.
