St. Augustine\'s Confessions: Passage Explication From Book

St. Augustine's Confessions: Passage Explication from Book III

Aurelius Augustine, or St. Augustine (354-430), one of the most important historical figures of the Roman Catholic Church and a major author of its doctrines (Lawall et al.) is the author of Confessions (begun in 397, when he was about 43). Confessions is a lengthy, detailed personal epistle addressed to God by Augustine, about the sins and mistakes of his earlier life, combined with a mature acknowledgement to God of his present understanding of his true purpose: to serve God. Augustine "did not convert to Christianity until he had reached midlife" (Lawall et al., p. 1221). Confessions, then, is a sort of autobiographical midlife accounting of Augustine's past sins and misplaced energies up to this point. Midlife marks a distinct turning point in Augustine's life and attitudes, and in the internal direction of Augustine the man. In this essay, I will explicate one paragraph from Book III of Confessions [Student at Carthage], the first, which appears in the Norton Anthology on pages 1229-1230. This passage seems especially personal and heartfelt, and, for its writer, possibly a difficult emotional and spiritual challenge.

As the first paragraph of this passage from Book III illustrates, Augustine yearns to confess to God the details of his youth, which he has spent recklessly and licentiously, having focused more on hedonistic pursuits than on spiritual service to God. As he states: "a cauldron of illicit love leapt and boiled about me." Augustine's figurative language here includes the metaphor of the fiery cauldron of desire, a powerful, dramatic figure of speech that vividly illustrates the overwhelming, overpowering lust of his youth. Within the language of this passage, Augustine also mirrors, perhaps even unconsciously, his confused state of mind during his student days, particularly through his employment of linguistic word play that emphasizes his own internal contradictions and oppositional thinking.

For example, within this passage Augustine states: "I was not yet in love, but I was in love with love, and hated myself for more keenly feeling the need." This sentence illustrates its author's own internal turmoil; he was "in love with love" [emphasis added], an abstract ideal, yet he "hated" himself, a tangible human being. Still, he yearned to discover a concrete "object" for his love. "I sought some object to love, since I was thus in love with loving; and I hated security and a life with no snares for my feet."

Next, Augustine speaks of being "hungry." At first it seems he means this in the same earthly way he once sought an "object" to love. Then, however, he surprises us, adding that he had in fact been "hungry" not in the physical sense, but rather, in a spiritual one, although he had not yet known it. Instead, he had mistaken one form of hunger for another, again and again, until he realized that the real food that he needed to assuage his hunger was spiritual nourishment. This is an example of the poetic juxtaposition of simple, concrete language against more metaphysical language and abstract inference. Through these types of subtle linguistic tug-of-war within Confessions, it becomes almost as if we experience, within this complex interplay of words, a nearly tangible sense of Augustine's struggle between his desire to experience what is visible and palpable (e.g., an "object"; the avoidance of "snares for my feet"; satisfaction of "hunger") and the spiritual and sublime, as represented by "that spiritual food which is thyself, my God." Augustine juxtaposes concrete and abstract imagery, describing, for instance, his wish to find an "object" to love, since he loves nothing tangible thus far, but instead only an idea, or, perhaps more accurately, an ephemeral yet visceral sensation he feels compelled to seek, again and again.

The narrative voice within this passage is poetic, in fact almost lyrical. It is also measured, rhythmical, and, perhaps most impressive of all, fresh and earnest, possessing a tone similar in places to that of an actual child confessing his or her innermost thoughts, impressions, hopes, and yearnings, to an unconditionally loving parent. In such a case, the child does not need to stop to ask if the parent understands all; he knows that the parent does in fact understand all, perhaps even before it is said. Thus Augustine's words tumble out breathlessly, unrestrained, such as near the end of the paragraph, when he states, " . . . my soul . . . broke out in sores, whose itch I agonized to scratch with the rub of carnal things -- carnal, yet, if there were no soul in them, they would not be the objects of love."

Within that passage (and in other portions of his Confessions as well) Augustine frequently constructs compound, complex, or compound-complex sentences. Characteristically, these are very long, and usually consist of multiple phrases and clauses. In terms of the punctuation of Augustine's language, there are not many periods, compared to a far greater number of both commas and semi-colons. Had Augustine's sentences been short and choppy instead, this would slow down the reading of his words. Since his sentences are mostly long and fluid, that particular structure hastens both the act and the ease of reading.