Around the year 397, Saint Paulinus asked Saint Alypius to recount his life. As he could not do so out of humility, he asked Saint Augustine to do it, and thus the beginning of Book VI was born, possibly forming the core of the Confessions, which is joined by another biography, that of Saint Monica, in Book IX. From that request were born The Confessions, thirteen books written between 397 and 401 that would become one of the three great works that made Augustine a reference for philologists, philosophers, and theologians for centuries.
Three parts, a single movement
The Confessions are not read as a conventional autobiography. They are constructed in three distinct blocks.
Books 1 to 9 trace Augustine’s life before his conversion: childhood, the years dedicated to rhetoric, nearly a decade linked to Manichaeism, the passage through skepticism, the arrival in Milan, the encounter with Saint Ambrose, his conversion, and baptism. It is the most narrative part and also the best known.
Book 10 changes register completely: it stops recounting the past and pauses in the present, at the very moment Augustine is writing. It is an examination of memory and of the temptations that, as he confesses, still accompany him even as a bishop.
Books 11 to 13, finally, leave the autobiographical behind and become an allegorical commentary on the creation account in Genesis.
The garden scene
If there is a moment for which the entire work prepares, it is the scene in the garden of Milan, in Book 8. Augustine, plunged into an inner crisis, hears a child’s voice repeating a chant over and over: tolle, lege — take and read. He opens the Scriptures and his eyes fall upon a verse from Paul’s letter to the Romans: “Clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh” (Rom 13:14). It is, according to the account itself, the culminating point of the entire work, as it moves the conversion of Saint Augustine.
Ostia: a vision shared with his mother
Shortly after, while waiting to travel back to Africa, Augustine and his mother Monica share a mystical experience in the port of Ostia in the year 387: one of the so-called Augustinian “ascensions,” brief and intense intuitions of the divine. Weeks later, Monica dies in the same city of Ostia. Book 9 closes precisely with her death.
“Late have I loved You”
In Book 10, amidst his reflection on memory and the desire for God, Augustine leaves one of the most cited phrases in all of Christian literature: “Late have I loved You, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved You!”. A confession of late love that summarizes, better than any summary, the entire movement of the book: life as a journey back toward Him who was already there from the beginning.
A work that continues to be read
Almost 1600 years later, The Confessions continue to be studied as one of the first — and most influential — gazes of a human being into their own interior. This August, as we celebrate the feast of Saint Augustine, is a good occasion to return to those pages: not as an ancient document, but as the story of someone who was late to love, and who did not stop telling it, for he never stopped loving God.
