Where We Left Off
Parts One and Two covered Books One to Three of Augustine’s Confessions. Here is everything you need. This part stands on its own.
The man. Born 354 in Thagaste, a small town in Roman North Africa, in what is now Algeria. Clever, ambitious, and educated at his family’s considerable expense towards a career as a professional public speaker. He wrote this book in his early forties, around 397 to 400, roughly twenty years after the events in this part.
The book. The Latin confessio means three things at once: confessing sin, confessing faith, and confessing praise. This is not a list of misdeeds. It is a prayer, addressed to God from first word to last, and you are overhearing it. Thirteen books: nine of life story, one on memory, three on the opening of Genesis.
Books One to Three. Book One argued that something in human wanting is disordered before any choice is made, using a jealous infant as the evidence, and ended with the formula that runs through everything: the gifts were good, the aim was wrong; evil is not a thing but a direction. Book Two took a trivial theft of some pears and used it to ask whether a person can want the wrong simply because it is wrong. Book Three took him to Carthage at seventeen, where a lost book by Cicero turned him towards the pursuit of wisdom, the Bible struck him as badly written, and he joined the Manichees.
The Manichees. A religion teaching two eternal opposed principles, Light and Darkness. Souls are fragments of Light trapped in matter. It answered the problem of evil cleanly, since God did not make evil and is not responsible for it, and it was flattering, since your own wrongdoing was not really yours. Augustine joined as a Hearer, the lower of its two ranks, at about nineteen.
Book Four picks him up there and runs the nine years out.
A Reminder About the Boxes
Six kinds of box run through this series. Word Box explains a hard term the moment it first appears. In Real Terms turns a number or a distance into something you can picture. How We Actually Know This names the physical evidence and says what it cannot show. The Argument is for places where experts genuinely disagree, and gives each side its strongest case rather than a version built to be knocked down. The Hidden Assumption digs out the premise everybody in an argument is quietly taking for granted. Remember This closes every chapter in the plainest words available.
One note specific to this part. The centre of Book Four is the death of a young man and the grief of the friend who loved him. Augustine goes on to use that grief as material for an argument, and the argument is worth following. But he was twenty and somebody he loved had died, and this part will let that stand as what it was before anything is built on top of it.
Three Things to Watch For
Books Four and Five run over about eleven years and cover a great deal of ground. Three threads run underneath all of it, and naming them now will make the rest easier to follow.
One. He keeps being told the truth by competent people and cannot hear it. His mother warned him in Book Two. A proconsul who had studied astrology himself warns him here. A friend argues the same case. Every time, the argument is good, the source is qualified, and nothing happens. What Augustine is interested in is not the arguments. It is the not hearing.
Two. The people closest to him have no names. The friend whose death is the centre of Book Four is unnamed. So is the woman he lived with for over a decade. Meanwhile he names a doctor he met a handful of times and an orator he never met at all. That is a pattern rather than an accident, and Chapter Ten comes back to it.
Three. Having a reason and acting on it are separated by years. The evidence that broke his religion arrives in Book Five, and he stays in it, keeps the friendships and takes the professional favours anyway. What finally moves him is a change of continent and a change of company. Watch the gap between the reason and the movement. It is the most honest thing in these two books, and Augustine never quite comments on it.
Contents
1Nine Years as a Hearer
Book Four opens by summing up nine years in a single sentence, and the sentence is doing a great deal of work. This chapter is about what those years actually contained.
1.1The sentence that covers a decade
Augustine opens Book Four by saying that for nine years, from his nineteenth year to his twenty-eighth, he was led astray and led others astray, deceived and deceiving. Publicly through what people call the liberal arts. Privately under the name of religion. Proud in the one, superstitious in the other, and empty in both.
That is a summary written by a man who has already decided what the period meant. Everything in it is judged before it is described, which is worth noticing early, because Book Four is the part of Confessions where the gap between what happened and how it is presented is widest.
Underneath the verdict, the nine years contain: a career, a household, a child, a serious intellectual life, a bereavement, and a religion he was slowly ceasing to believe. Most people would call that a substantial decade.
The nine years run from about 373 to 382, from age nineteen to twenty-eight.
Think of somebody today between nineteen and twenty-eight: leaving university, a first job, a partner, a child, a move, a death, and a slow loss of faith in something they had signed up to at nineteen.
Augustine covers all of it in two books and dismisses the whole span in one sentence. Whatever else the Confessions is, it is not a balanced account of how a life is spent.
1.2Selling words for a living
He taught. First back in his home town of Thagaste, then in Carthage, and later in Rome and Milan. His subject was rhetoric, which Part One explained was the qualification for a public career: the technical art of persuasive speech.
His own description of the job is savage. He says he sold victorious talkativeness. He taught young men the skill of winning, and he says he taught them to win in cases where the point was to get somebody condemned.
The liberal arts: the standard curriculum of an educated Roman: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, and the mathematical subjects. Called liberal because they were the studies suitable for a free man rather than a labourer, not because they were broad-minded.
Why it matters: Augustine puts the phrase in quotation marks, in effect, when he says "what men call the liberal arts". He is questioning whether an education whose product is a man skilled at winning arguments deserves the word free.
He is careful, though, in a way that is easy to miss. He says he had honest pupils, and that he taught them honestly, and that he did not teach them to destroy innocent men, though he did sometimes teach them to defend guilty ones. He is describing a profession he thinks is corrupting, not a crime he committed.
And he stayed in it for the whole nine years and for several more after that. The job funded everything. When he leaves it in Book Nine, that is the point at which the conversion becomes expensive.
1.3The woman he never names
During this period Augustine was living with a woman. Book Four introduces her in a single passage and she is not named there or anywhere else in anything he wrote.
What he does tell us is precise, and worth having exactly. They were together for a long time. He was faithful to her. He says so plainly, and he says he found out through her what the difference is between a union entered for the sake of children and one driven by appetite. She bore him a son. They were not married.
Concubinatus: a recognised arrangement in Roman society, not a scandal and not prostitution. A stable, usually monogamous household between a man and a woman who could not or did not marry, most often because of a difference in social rank. It carried no legal standing for the woman and the children were not legitimate heirs, but it was ordinary and openly acknowledged.
Why it matters: Augustine was not living a secret or disreputable life by the standards of his neighbours. He was living the standard arrangement for an ambitious young man of modest rank who could not yet afford a marriage that would help his career. The reason it could end so abruptly, as it does in Book Six, is that it never had any legal weight to begin with.
The absence of her name is the single most discussed silence in the book, and Part Two flagged it as a refusal rather than a gap: a man who knew a name declining to write it, in a work whose premise is telling the truth about himself in public. I said then that we would come to it properly in Part Four, where she is sent away, and that still stands. But note here that the silence begins in Book Four, at the point where she enters, and that Augustine names his own son, his friends, his teachers and a passing doctor without difficulty.
Their son was called Adeodatus, born around 372, when Augustine was about eighteen. The name means "given by God". Augustine says the boy was clever beyond many serious grown men, and he will describe his death in Book Nine.
1.4The contest, and the man who offered to fix it
One episode from these years is short and tells you a great deal about how Augustine’s mind worked, so it is worth pulling out.
He entered poetry contests. These were public competitions, judged, with a prize, and winning them built a reputation useful to a teacher. Before one of them, a man who dealt in sacrifices came to him and offered to secure the win.
Haruspex: a diviner who read the future from the entrails of sacrificed animals. The practice was very old, Etruscan in origin, and by Augustine’s day it was formally illegal in several respects and still widely used in private.
Why it matters: this was a real, professional, paid service, not a back-alley oddity. A man could be commissioned to obtain a specific result by sacrifice, the way one might now retain a lawyer or a fixer.
Augustine refused. His stated reason is the interesting part. He says he would not have a fly killed to win, because he detested the idea of taking life to obtain a prize.
And then he immediately sets that refusal against what he was doing at the same time. He would not sacrifice an animal to demons, and he was quite willing to consult astrologers, whose whole business he later concluded was no better. He notes the inconsistency himself and does not explain it away.
That is the pattern of the whole of Book Four, and it is the reason this part exists: a man with real moral instincts, real intelligence and real scruples, going wrong in ways his scruples did not cover.
Augustine sums up nine years, from nineteen to twenty-eight, in a single condemning sentence. Underneath it sit a career, a household, a child, a bereavement and a slow loss of faith. He taught rhetoric for a living and calls it selling victorious talkativeness. He stayed in the job for over a decade, and it funded everything.
He lived with a woman for years, was faithful to her, had a son with her, and never writes her name. Their arrangement, concubinatus, was ordinary for a man of his rank and carried no legal weight at all.
Offered a rigged win at a poetry contest by a professional diviner, he refused, because he would not have an animal killed for a prize — while consulting astrologers, which he later judged no better.
This is not a bad man behaving badly. It is a man with real scruples, going wrong in ways his scruples did not cover.
2Reading the Stars
Augustine took astrology seriously for years, at exactly the period when he was reading philosophy and thought of himself as a rigorous man. That combination is worth understanding rather than laughing at.
2.1What astrology actually was
The first thing to get straight is that this was not a fringe amusement. Astrology in the fourth century was a technical discipline with a mathematical apparatus, practised by trained professionals, taken seriously by educated people, and consulted by emperors. It was, in the ordinary sense, a science: it made predictions from calculations and it had a theory behind it.
Mathematicus: the ordinary Latin word for an astrologer. It is the same word as our "mathematician", and the overlap is not an accident. Casting a horoscope required real calculation: the positions of the planets at a given moment, worked out from tables, for a specified place.
Casting a nativity: computing the state of the heavens at the instant of a person’s birth, and reading their character and future from it.
Why it matters: when Augustine says he consulted the mathematici, he is describing visits to skilled technical practitioners, not to a fairground tent.
The theory behind it was not silly either. If the heavens are orderly and everything below is affected by what is above, then a sufficiently precise account of the sky at a given moment might tell you something about what is beginning at that moment. That is a bad theory, but it is a theory, and it was continuous with the astronomy that was correctly predicting eclipses.
2.2Why it was not stupid to believe
It is easy to treat this as a clever man’s embarrassing lapse. That reading costs you the interesting part.
Astrology in Augustine’s world had three things going for it that are hard to see now.
It had the prestige of mathematics. The calculations were genuinely difficult and genuinely correct as calculations. The sky really does behave predictably, and the people who could predict it were visibly not frauds about that part.
It sometimes worked. Predictions came true often enough to sustain belief. Augustine is going to be told exactly why, and the explanation is good.
It had no serious competitor. There was no established alternative account of why one person’s life goes one way and another’s goes differently. Astrology was answering a question nobody else was answering.
When we find an intelligent person from the past holding a belief we know to be false, we reach for one of two explanations. Either they were not as clever as advertised, or they had a blind spot, some local failure of rigour in an otherwise sound mind.
Both explanations share a premise: that a rational person confronted with a false belief should be able to see through it, and that failing to do so needs accounting for.
But rationality is not a property of a person on their own. It is mostly a property of what is available to them: what other explanations exist, what counts as evidence, who else has tested the claim, what instruments there are. Augustine had a theory that made predictions, that used real mathematics, that sometimes came true, and that had no rival. Believing it was not a failure of intelligence. It was the correct output of a mind working on the materials in the room.
The uncomfortable half of this: nothing about the reasoning is different when it is our turn. What we take to be obviously true is also the correct output of a mind working on the materials in the room.
The general form: treating a conclusion as evidence about the person rather than about their situation.
That box is not an excuse for Augustine and he does not offer one. He calls the whole business superstition and blames himself for it. It is a caution about a habit we bring to old books, which is to read every error as a character flaw.
2.3Why it appealed to him in particular
There is one further reason, and it is the one Augustine himself identifies. It is not general. It is about him.
If your future is written in the stars, then your faults are not your fault. The failure belongs to the sky, or to fate, or to whatever arranged the planets. Augustine says exactly this: the astrologers told him that the cause of his sin was in the heavens, and that a man was not to blame.
Now set that beside what he had already signed up to. The Manichees told him that his wrongdoing was not really his either, because a foreign substance inside him was doing it. Two different systems, and he had adopted both, and both delivered the same product. Augustine sees this and says so. He says he loved to be excused, and to accuse anything except himself. That is the connecting thread of the whole nine years, and it is why Book Four puts astrology and Manichaeism in the same breath.
It is also why the pear theft of Book Two matters so much to him in retrospect. That was the one episode he could not offload onto anybody or anything. Hold that in mind, because it becomes the spine of Book Seven.
2.4The old doctor who tried to talk him out of it
Two people argued with him about astrology during these years, and neither of them succeeded.
The first was a man named Vindicianus. He was a physician, an eminent one, who had served at the imperial court, and he was proconsul of Africa. He was the man who put the garland on Augustine’s head when he won a poetry contest. Augustine sought him out afterwards for his conversation.
Vindicianus told him to drop the astrology. And crucially, he had standing to say it, because he had studied it himself as a young man and had seriously considered making his living from it.
His argument was this. The predictions that come true come true by chance. There is so much material in the world that if you scatter statements across it, some will land. He compared it to a practice everybody knew: opening a book of poetry at random and reading the first line your eye falls on as an answer to your question. Sometimes the line fits astonishingly well. Nobody thinks the poet knew.
Vindicianus is describing the effect that keeps horoscopes in newspapers now.
Read twelve predictions with the star signs covered up and you will find several that fit your week. The prediction is not doing the work. Your life is large and the statement is small and vague, so a match is nearly guaranteed.
The argument is sixteen hundred years old, it is correct, and Augustine did not accept it.
The second was a young friend named Nebridius, who will matter later in the book. He was, Augustine says, a good and careful young man, and he laughed at the whole business of prediction and pressed the same case.
Augustine held out against both. He wanted, he says, some authority to point to, and he kept his books.
What finally broke it for him came later and elsewhere, in Book Seven, and it took a specific piece of evidence rather than an argument. I am flagging that now as a debt: Part Four will pay it, at the point in the text where it belongs. What matters for Book Four is that he had already been given a good argument by a qualified man and had not taken it.
That is worth one more sentence, because it is a pattern. In Book Two his mother warned him and he could not hear it. Here a proconsul with direct experience of the subject warns him and he does not take it. Augustine keeps showing you a man being told the truth by somebody competent and declining it, and his interest is not in the truth but in the declining.
Astrology in the fourth century was a technical discipline with real mathematics behind it, practised professionally and consulted by emperors. The Latin for astrologer, mathematicus, is our word "mathematician".
It had three real advantages: the prestige of calculation, predictions that sometimes came true, and no serious rival answering the same question.
Its specific appeal to Augustine was that it made his faults somebody else’s. So did Manichaeism. He had adopted two systems that delivered the same product, and he says so. Vindicianus, a proconsul and physician who had studied astrology himself, told him the hits were chance, like opening a poetry book at random and finding a fitting line. His friend Nebridius argued the same. He kept his books.
Reading a past thinker’s false belief as a character flaw costs you the interesting part. He was reasoning correctly on the materials in the room.
3The Friend Who Died
A young man Augustine had known since childhood fell ill and died, at about twenty, after an illness of a few days. This chapter is what happened. The arguments come afterwards.
3.1Who he was
They had grown up together in Thagaste. They had been at school together as boys, and had played together. When Augustine came back to teach in his home town, in his early twenties, the friendship resumed and deepened quickly. He says it was sweet to him beyond every sweetness in his life at that time.
One detail Augustine does not soften. The friend had been brought up a Christian, and Augustine had talked him out of it. He drew him into Manichaeism, which is what he had been doing with a number of people during those years. He states this plainly and returns to it.
And the friend has no name. Like the woman in the last chapter, he is not named here or anywhere else. Augustine names Vindicianus, a doctor he met once. He names Nebridius. He does not name the person he says he loved most in the world at that point in his life.
3.2The illness, and a baptism he did not know he was having
The friendship had lasted about a year when the young man came down with a fever.
He got worse. He lost consciousness. His household, who were Christians, believed he was dying, and while he lay unaware of what was happening they had him baptised.
This needs a note, because it looks strange and it was not.
Emergency baptism: because baptism was believed to wash away everything before it, and because so many people deferred it until late in life, baptising the dying was common and urgent. If a person was unconscious and about to die, it was performed anyway rather than lost.
Why it matters: Part One explained why Monica had not had Augustine baptised as a boy, and why he was nearly baptised during a childhood illness. This is the same practice from the other side. It was not a violation of the sick man’s wishes as his family understood things. It was a rescue.
Then he recovered. He came round, and he was well enough to talk.
3.3The joke, and the rebuke
As soon as he could, Augustine made a joke about it.
This is the hinge of the whole story and it is easy to read past. Augustine expected his friend to laugh with him at the baptism, because the baptism had happened to a body that was not conscious and to a man who, Augustine assumed, shared his own opinions. It was a joke between two Manichees about something absurd that pious relatives had done to one of them while he was out.
The friend did not laugh. Augustine says he recoiled from him as if from an enemy, and told him, with a sudden and startling authority, that if Augustine wanted to remain his friend he must stop saying such things.
Augustine was astonished. He decided to say nothing more for the moment and to wait until his friend was properly recovered, when he would be able to do what he liked with him again. That is his own phrasing, and it is not flattering to himself.
What had happened to the friend in the meantime is not recoverable and Augustine does not speculate. A man who had been raised a Christian, had been argued out of it, had come close to death, and had woken up baptised, decided that the baptism was his. That is all we are told.
3.4The relapse
A few days later the fever came back. He died. Augustine was not there.
That is the entire account. It takes Augustine about a page. Everything else in Book Four is the aftermath.
One source. Augustine, writing roughly twenty-two years later, about a private bereavement in a small provincial town.
There is no corroboration and there could not be. The young man is unnamed, no other writer mentions him, and nothing survives from Thagaste in the 370s that would record the death of a person of no public standing.
What supports it indirectly: the medical picture is entirely ordinary. A fever that worsens, a period of unconsciousness, an apparent recovery, and a fatal relapse within days is a recognisable course for several infections that were common and untreatable. Nothing in the account requires anything unusual to have happened.
What cannot be established: the conversation. The joke, the rebuke and Augustine’s reaction to it are reported speech from two decades on, and the exchange carries a great deal of weight in the book’s argument. It is exactly the kind of scene a writer would sharpen, and there is no way to check.
I want to be careful about how that box is used. Saying a scene cannot be verified is not saying it was invented. Most of what anybody knows about their own life is in the same condition. It is a note about what this text can and cannot be made to bear, not an accusation.
A young man Augustine had known since childhood, and had talked out of Christianity into Manichaeism, fell ill about a year into their renewed friendship.
While unconscious and thought to be dying he was baptised by his family. This was normal practice, not an outrage.
He recovered. Augustine joked about the baptism, expecting to be laughed along with, and was told sharply to stop if he wanted to remain a friend.
Augustine decided to wait until he was stronger and take it up again. A few days later the fever returned and the young man died.
He has no name. Augustine names a doctor he met once and does not name the person he says he loved most in the world.
4The Grief
What follows is one of the most exact descriptions of bereavement in any language, written by somebody who had been through it and could still find the words for it twenty years on.
4.1What it was like
Augustine says his heart went dark with grief, and that everything he looked at was death. His home town became a torture to him. His father’s house became a strange unhappiness. Everything he had shared with his friend had turned, without the friend, into an enormous torment.
His eyes looked for the friend everywhere and did not produce him. He says he hated every place, because no place had him in it, and none of them could now say he is coming, as they had when the friend was alive and away.
That last observation is precise in a way most writing about grief is not. The pain is not only that the person is absent. It is that every location has stopped being a place where they might arrive.
He describes becoming a problem to himself. He would ask his own soul why it was cast down and troubling him, and it had no answer. If he told it to hope in God, it refused, and rightly, he says, because the man he had lost was better and more real to it than the phantom he was being told to hope in.
Then the sentence that has been carried out of this passage more than any other. He says he had become a great question to himself.
4.2"I had become a great question to myself"
Four words in the Latin. It is worth unpacking, because it is doing more than expressing distress.
Augustine is not saying he was confused about what to do. He is saying that he himself had become the thing he could not understand. He was producing reactions he could not account for, wanting things he could not explain, and watching himself do it from somewhere that did not have access to why.
And notice where it sits. This is the man who in Book Two examined a fruit theft for pages trying to locate a motive, and could not. Here he examines his own grief and cannot locate it either. The same problem in a much sharper form: I do not know what is happening inside me.
That phrase is one of the load-bearing beams of the whole work. Book Ten exists because of it. The long examination of memory that stops the story dead is Augustine going back to this question with better tools, and Part Seven of this series is where we will do it.
The specific thing he is describing is the loss of the ordinary automatic sense that you know your own mind.
Most of the time you do not have to work out what you want. You simply want it, and the wanting comes with an explanation attached. Grief removes the explanations and leaves the wanting.
What Augustine noticed, and what almost nobody notices at the time, is that this is not a temporary fault in an otherwise transparent machine. It is a look at how much of the machine was always dark.
4.3The strangest thing he says
There is a sentence in here that readers usually pass over and that repays stopping on.
Augustine says he was amazed that other people were alive, since the man he had loved as though he would never die was dead. And then he says he was more amazed still that he himself was alive, when the friend was gone. He borrows a line from a poet and says that his friend had been half of his soul, and wonders how the remaining half could carry on.
Then he goes further, and this is the part that is genuinely his own. He says that perhaps he was afraid to die because that would mean the whole of the friend would be dead. He was keeping himself alive as a place where the other man was still partly stored.
And he says he loathed life and feared death at the same time, and could not tell which he wanted less.
4.4Why weeping helped, and nothing else did
One more observation, and it is the one that makes this passage feel modern.
Augustine says that weeping was the only thing that was sweet to him, and that it had taken his friend’s place in the affections of his mind.
That is a startling formulation. Not that crying provided relief from grief, but that crying became the thing he loved, and occupied the position the person used to occupy.
He then asks a question about it that he cannot answer, and he flags his own failure to answer it. Why is weeping sweet to people in misery? He notes that God is far away from us and we are wretched, and says the question is a mystery, and moves on. It is one of several places in this book where he raises something and admits he does not know.
Connect it back to Part Two if you want to see how his mind works. In Book Three he attacked the theatre for making people want to be made unhappy, and asked what was being enjoyed. Here he finds the same structure inside his own bereavement, without a play in sight, and this time he is not scornful about it. He is baffled.
4.5He ran
In the end he left. He went from Thagaste back to Carthage, and he says plainly why: because his eyes looked for the friend less in a place where they were not used to seeing him.
There is a piece of evidence worth knowing here, and it is the sort of thing that only turns up when you read a writer’s whole output rather than one famous book. In a work written a decade before Confessions, Augustine gives the same move a different explanation, connected with ambition rather than with grief. Both may be true. People rarely leave a place for one reason.
And time did what time does, which he also records without dressing it up. New friends, new things to enjoy, and gradually the grief gave way. He notes that other griefs took its place, and that he did not become well. He simply stopped being in that particular pain.
Grief made every place unbearable, because no place could any longer say "he is coming".
He says he had become a great question to himself: not confused about what to do, but unable to understand the thing producing his own reactions. That sentence is why Book Ten on memory exists.
He was astonished that anyone was alive, and more astonished that he was, and wondered whether he feared dying because it would finish off the part of his friend he was still storing. Weeping became the thing he loved, occupying the place the person had occupied. He asks why misery makes weeping sweet, says he does not know, and moves on.
He left Thagaste because his eyes looked for his friend less in a place that was not used to seeing him.
5Why He Calls the Grief a Fault
Having described the bereavement better than almost anyone before or since, Augustine delivers a verdict on it. The verdict is the reason a lot of readers put the book down.
5.1The verdict
Augustine does not present his grief as a natural sorrow he has since made peace with. He presents it as a symptom. He says he had poured out his soul onto sand by loving a man who would die as though he would not die. He calls himself wretched, and says the misery was the natural consequence of the attachment rather than of the loss.
He also says something colder still. He says he held his own misery dearer than his friend. He suspects that the grief itself had become a possession he did not want to give up.
There is no softening in the text. This is not a man saying that he grieved too long or in an unhealthy way. It is a man saying the grief was the correct output of a mistake, and that the mistake was in the loving.
5.2The argument behind it
Put in order, the reasoning has four steps, and it is worth having them straight before deciding what you think.
One. Everything in the created world is temporary. It comes into being, changes, and stops. That is not a defect in it; it is what being a created thing is.
Two. To love something is, among other things, to want it to remain. That is built into loving, not added to it.
Three. So loving a temporary thing as though it were permanent is a category error, and the pain when it ends is not bad luck. It is the error arriving.
Four. Therefore the sorrow, however sincere, is evidence that something was wrongly aimed, in exactly the sense Book One established: a good thing pointed at the wrong object.
That is a real argument. Each step is defensible on its own. Whether the conclusion should be accepted is what Chapter Six is about.
5.3What he is not saying
Three misreadings of this passage are common and all three are wrong on the text, so it is worth clearing them out before the argument.
He is not saying he should not have loved his friend. He says elsewhere in the same book that friendship is genuinely good and that it was God who made the sweetness in it. The target is a manner of loving, not the existence of the love.
He is not recommending emotional detachment. Augustine is not a Stoic and argues against Stoic composure repeatedly in later works. He thinks grief for the dead is appropriate. He wept at his mother’s death in Book Nine and defends the weeping.
He is not saying the pain was punishment. The argument is that the pain is the natural consequence of the mistake, in the way that a hangover is the consequence of drinking rather than a penalty imposed for it.
Getting those three off the table matters, because the strongest objection to Augustine here is not any of them. It is something harder, and it is in the next chapter.
5.4The problem with judging your own past
There is a separate difficulty with this passage that has nothing to do with whether the argument is sound, and it is worth naming on its own.
Augustine at twenty did not have this framework. He was not a Christian, he was a Manichee, and the whole apparatus of created goods, misdirected love and the aim of the will belongs to a man who spent the following two decades building it.
So what he is doing in Book Four is applying a later theory to an earlier experience and reporting the result as though it were a discovery about what the experience had been.
That is not necessarily illegitimate. It is what everybody does when they look back. But it means the passage has two things in it that cannot be separated: an unusually accurate description of a state, and a verdict passed on that state from outside it. The description may be reliable and the verdict may still be an import.
This is one of the standing disputes about Book Four, and it is a specific case of the largest question about Confessions as a whole.
The description is too exact to be reconstruction. The detail about places no longer being able to say "he is coming", the observation that weeping had taken the friend’s place, the double amazement at other people being alive and at himself being alive: these are not the things a theologian invents to illustrate a doctrine. They are the things a person remembers because they happened to them. The theory is laid over an accurate memory, and the two are visibly different in texture.
Twenty-two years separate the event from the writing, and in the interval Augustine acquired a complete theory of misdirected love that this episode illustrates perfectly. Perfect illustrations are suspicious. The friend is unnamed, which frees the story from checkable particulars; the timing of the baptism and the joke arrives exactly where the argument needs a turning point; and Augustine elsewhere gives a different reason for the same departure from Thagaste. The grief was real. The shape it has on the page is a later construction.
A third position holds that there is no stable difference here to argue about. Nobody stores an experience and later interprets it; the storing is already interpretation, and every subsequent recall rewrites. Augustine has no unmediated 373 to compare his 397 account against, and neither do we, and neither does anyone about anything. Asking which this is assumes an archive that human memory does not contain.
Where things stand: Everyone agrees that the description is unusually good and that the framework is later. The dispute is about how much the framework has shaped what is reported, and it cannot be resolved from the text, because a well-shaped account of a real event and a well-shaped account of a reconstructed one read the same.
What would settle it: Almost nothing. Augustine’s earlier works give a few points of comparison, and one of them does complicate the account of why he left Thagaste. That is suggestive rather than decisive.
Why people care so much: It matters because Book Four is one of the main places Confessions is used as evidence about ordinary emotional life in the ancient world. If the grief is heavily shaped by a later theory, it is weaker as a historical source and no weaker at all as literature.
For what it is worth, I lean towards the first position on the description and the second on the verdict, and I think the third position is right that the two cannot be cleanly separated. That is a hedge, and I would rather label it as one than pretend to a confidence the material does not support.
Augustine calls the grief a symptom, not a sorrow: the natural consequence of having loved a mortal man as though he would not die.
The argument in four steps: created things are temporary; loving wants permanence; so loving a temporary thing as permanent is an error; and the pain is the error arriving, not bad luck.
He is not saying he should not have loved his friend, not recommending detachment, and not saying the pain was a punishment. All three misreadings are common and all three are wrong on the text.
He had none of this framework at twenty. He is applying a later theory to an earlier experience and reporting the result as a finding.
Whether Book Four is a record or a reading is genuinely disputed, and cannot be settled, because an accurate account and a well-constructed one read exactly the same on the page.
6Loving Things That Can Be Lost
Augustine’s prescription is that you should love people in God. A great many readers have concluded that this amounts to telling you not to love people. This chapter puts both cases at full strength.
6.1The prescription
Having diagnosed the grief, Augustine gives the remedy, and it is stated positively rather than as a prohibition. Let the soul praise God in the things it loves. Love them in God, in whom they cannot be lost. Wherever the soul turns, it meets sorrow, except in him.
The key phrase is in him they cannot be lost. Augustine is not proposing that you care less. He is proposing a change in the relation, not in the intensity.
His diagnosis of what went wrong is worth stating carefully, because it is not what people expect. His complaint is not that he loved his friend too much. It is that he loved him as though the friend were the source of the goodness rather than a place where it was appearing. And a thing that is not the source cannot bear the weight of being treated as one.
The picture he is working with is closer to a window than to a possession.
You can love the light in a room. If you conclude that the window is producing the light, you have made a mistake about what a window is, and you will be genuinely bereft when it is bricked up, in a way that does not fit what actually happened.
Augustine’s claim is that a person is a window. The claim is not that windows do not matter. It is that a window is the wrong thing to expect sunrise from.
6.2What "in God" is supposed to do
Three things, on his account.
It makes the love survive the loss. If what you loved in the person is something that has its home elsewhere, then the death of the person does not annihilate the thing you loved. This is a real claim and it stands or falls with the metaphysics.
It stops the love becoming a demand. Loving somebody as your source of goodness puts on them a load no person can carry. Augustine thinks this damages the beloved as well as the lover, though he does not develop the point here.
It makes the loss intelligible. On his account grief without this frame is not merely painful but incomprehensible, which is exactly what he reported: I had become a great question to myself.
6.3The objection
Now the case against, and it deserves the strongest possible version rather than the caricature.
The objection is not that Augustine is cold. It is that his remedy, applied honestly, changes love into something else and then keeps the word.
Part of what it is to love a particular person is to care about them in their particularity: this one, not an instance of a kind, and not a location where a general good is showing up. If what you actually love is the good that is appearing in them, then the person has become a means, and a replaceable one. The friend is loved, on this reading, as a delivery mechanism.
And the objection has a second half that is harder. If the arrangement succeeds, and the loss no longer devastates you, that is not obviously a cure. It may be a description of having loved less. Grief is not a malfunction of attachment; it is attachment with the object removed. A technique for not being destroyed by a death may just be a technique for not having been that attached.
This is one of the oldest objections to Augustine and it is still live. It bears directly on how much of his account of the human being anyone should accept.
The remedy asks you to love in the person something that is not the person. Whatever that is, it is not what we mean by loving somebody, which is irreducibly about them and could not be transferred to a qualified replacement. The passage is honest about where this goes: Augustine says he held his misery dearer than his friend, and the natural next step is to hold God dearer than the friend, at which point the friend is third in a queue. A love arranged so that its object’s death does not devastate you has been arranged not to be love.
The objection assumes attachment and love are the same. Augustine is denying exactly that. Loving somebody as your source of meaning is not the maximum of love but a use of them, and it is the thing that produces jealousy, possessiveness and the demand that they never change. Loving them in God is what allows you to want their good rather than their presence, which is the harder and more genuine version. And the evidence is in the text: this framework did not stop Augustine grieving for his mother in Book Nine, and he defends that grief.
A third reading: the two sides hold different theories of what love is aimed at. If love is fundamentally a bond between two people, then anything that runs the bond through a third party dilutes it, and the objection lands. If love is fundamentally the recognition of something good and the willing of its flourishing, then locating the source of that good outside the beloved does not dilute anything. Nobody is going to settle that by reading Book Four more carefully.
Where things stand: Both sides agree about what Augustine recommends. They disagree about what happens to a human relationship when you do it, and that is a question about what love is rather than about what Augustine said.
What would settle it: Nothing textual will settle it. What can be brought to bear is Augustine’s own later conduct as evidence about whether the doctrine hollows out attachment: his grief for Monica, his letters to friends, and his writing on friendship, which is warm and voluminous. That is suggestive, and it is not proof, since a man may hold a doctrine and fail to live by it, which would be a point in the objectors’ favour rather than his.
Why people care so much: It matters far beyond Augustine. Every religious and philosophical tradition that recommends holding worldly attachments lightly faces this objection in the same form, and so does every secular version of the same advice.
Before deciding between those, it is worth looking at what all three of them rest on, because there is a premise underneath that neither the objection nor the reply states out loud.
Look at what the objection needs in order to work. It needs it to be the case that the measure of how much you love somebody is how much their loss would destroy you. Take that away and the argument that a non-devastating love is a lesser love has nothing to stand on.
That measure is not obviously right, and it is worth noticing that we do not apply it consistently. We do not think a parent who would be destroyed by their child moving away loves them more than one who would not. In that case we have a separate word for the excess, and we do not treat it as the maximum of the good thing.
But the assumption is not obviously wrong either, and Augustine needs it to be wrong. If devastation really is part of what loving a mortal creature is, and not a distortion of it, then his remedy does subtract something real and his reassurance is empty.
What the argument in the box above is actually about, underneath, is whether the pain of a bereavement is a measurement of the love or a separate phenomenon that tends to accompany it.
The general form: using the size of a reaction to measure the thing that produced it.
I have a stake in this one and will say so. I find the objection more persuasive than the reply, and I have therefore taken care to give Augustine’s side its full weight and to state the third position, which I think is the most honest of the three. Read my summary of the reply knowing that.
6.4One more thing Augustine says, which complicates all of it
Late in Book Four he says something that does not fit the tidy version of his position, and which anyone using this passage should know about.
He says that friendship is genuinely sweet and that God made it so. He says that what he loved in his friends was real, and that the talking and laughing and reading together and disagreeing without malice and being of one mind out of many were good things and not illusions.
That passage is one of the warmest descriptions of ordinary friendship in ancient literature, and it sits about a page from the verdict that his love for one particular friend was a mistake.
He does not reconcile them, and I do not think they reconcile neatly. What is clear is that anybody who presents Augustine as an enemy of human affection has not read the end of Book Four.
The remedy is to love people in God, in whom they cannot be lost. The change is in the relation, not the intensity.
His diagnosis: he loved his friend as though the friend were the source of the goodness rather than a place where it appeared. A window is not a sunrise.
The strongest objection is not that this is cold. It is that a love arranged so that its object’s death does not devastate you may not be love at all, but a description of having loved less. Underneath that objection is the assumption that the size of the devastation measures the love. Augustine needs that assumption to be false, and it is not obviously either true or false.
A page from the verdict, he writes one of the warmest descriptions of ordinary friendship in ancient literature. He never reconciles the two.
7The Book He Wrote and the Book He Understood
Book Four ends with two pieces of intellectual autobiography: a book he wrote and lost, and a book he read and understood too easily. Both are there to make the same point about cleverness.
7.1His first book
At about twenty-six or twenty-seven, Augustine wrote and published a work in two or three volumes. It was called, in Latin, De pulchro et apto: on the beautiful and the fitting. It was an aesthetic treatise, asking what makes something beautiful in itself and what makes something beautiful because of how it suits its purpose.
It is lost. Augustine himself says he no longer had a copy when he wrote Confessions, and no copy has ever surfaced. This is the second lost book in this series, after Cicero’s Hortensius in Part Two, and the two losses are different in kind.
Hortensius is lost but quoted. Enough of it survives in other writers’ citations that its general argument can be reconstructed.
De pulchro et apto is lost and almost unquoted. Practically everything known about it is what Augustine says here, in a passage designed to dismiss it. He describes its subject, mentions its dedication, criticises its underlying assumptions, and says he cannot now remember whether it was in two books or three.
What this evidence supports: that the work existed, roughly what it was about, and who it was dedicated to.
What it cannot support: any assessment of its quality or its arguments. Our only reviewer is its author, twenty years later, using it as an example of his own youthful emptiness. If somebody found a copy tomorrow, there is no particular reason to expect it would match his description of it.
The detail about not remembering whether it was two books or three is worth pausing on. That is a real memory failure, reported without embarrassment, in a book whose entire method depends on recall. He does that repeatedly, and it is one of the reasons the work reads as honest even where it cannot be checked.
7.2Loving a man he had never met
He dedicated the book to a man called Hierius, an orator in Rome. Augustine had never met him. He had never heard him speak. He knew him entirely by reputation.
And then he does something genuinely acute. Instead of moving on, he stops and interrogates his own admiration.
Why did he love a man he had never met? Not for the man’s appearance, which he had not seen. Not for his arguments, which he had not heard. He loved him because other people praised him, and specifically because a particular kind of person praised him. He notes that if the same people had attacked Hierius instead of praising him, he would have felt the opposite about the same man, on the same evidence, which is none.
He then works out what was actually going on. What he loved in Hierius was what he wanted for himself. He wanted to be praised in that way by those people. The admiration was his own ambition looking at itself from the outside.
This is a completely intact piece of observation and it has aged better than almost anything else in Book Four.
It is the mechanism behind following somebody you have never met because accounts you respect follow them, admiring them for a competence you are in no position to assess, and losing the admiration instantly when the same accounts turn.
Augustine’s addition is the uncomfortable one: the admiration was never about that person. It was a picture of what he wanted to be, projected onto somebody he could not see.
7.3Aristotle at twenty, understood too easily
The last episode of Book Four goes back a few years. At about twenty, Augustine got hold of a book called the Categories, by Aristotle, and read it on his own.
Aristotle’s Categories: a short and famously difficult work setting out the basic kinds of thing that can be said about anything. The central distinction is between a substance, which is a thing that exists in its own right, such as a particular man, and everything else that can be said about it, such as its size, its colour, its position, or its relations. Those others exist only as features of a substance.
Why it matters: this framework was the standard equipment of educated thought for well over a thousand years. Augustine picking it up unaided at twenty is genuinely impressive, and he tells us so before telling us it did him no good.
He makes a point of the fact that he needed no teacher. He says that when he later met people who had been taught it by learned instructors with diagrams in the sand, they could tell him nothing he had not worked out alone. He reports this as a boast and then turns it.
The turn is this. Having acquired the framework, he applied it to God. He thought of God as a substance with attributes: God is great, God is beautiful, God is good, in the way that a man is tall and pale and heavy. Greatness and beauty would be things God had.
Part One introduced why this is a problem, in the section on divine simplicity: the claim that God has no parts and does not have properties the way a thing has properties. Augustine’s point here is that his own facility with the best available intellectual tool led him straight into the error, and led him in faster than a slower man would have gone.
7.4Why the two stories are together
It is worth asking why these two episodes close Book Four rather than sitting anywhere else.
Both are about capability without direction. He could write a treatise on beauty and could not see that his admiration for its dedicatee was self-regard. He could master Aristotle unaided and used the mastery to get God wrong faster.
And that is exactly the shape of the verdict on the grief in Chapter Five: a real capacity, functioning correctly, aimed at the wrong thing. Book Four is one argument told four times, in a bereavement, in an astrology habit, in a book dedication and in a piece of philosophy.
His summary of the whole matter is characteristically blunt: what did his quickness profit him, when he was reading everything he could get and did not know where any of it came from?
At about twenty-six he wrote his first book, On the Beautiful and the Fitting. It is lost, and almost everything known about it comes from the passage in which he dismisses it.
He dedicated it to Hierius, a Roman orator he had never met, and then interrogated his own admiration: he loved the man because the right people praised him, and would have despised him on the same evidence if they had turned.
What he actually loved in Hierius was what he wanted for himself.
At about twenty he read Aristotle’s Categories unaided, and used it to think of God as a substance with attributes — the exact error his facility made him quicker to reach.
Book Four is one argument told four times: a real capacity, working properly, aimed at the wrong thing.
8Faustus
For nine years Augustine had been told that his questions would be answered when the great man came. In his twenty-ninth year, the great man came.
8.1The promise
Whenever Augustine raised a difficulty with the Manichees he was given the same answer. Wait for Faustus. When Faustus arrives he will explain it, and more besides. Faustus was a Manichee bishop, from Mileve in North Africa, famous across the movement as its most learned and most eloquent teacher.
That deferral had been running for years, and Augustine says it kept him in place. This is worth flagging as a mechanism rather than as a detail: a promise of a future answer is often more effective at holding somebody than an answer would be, because it cannot be tested.
8.2The crack that had already opened
Before Faustus arrived, something had gone wrong, and it is the most concrete intellectual event in the whole of Books Four and Five.
Augustine had been reading the astronomers. Not astrologers, this time: the people who calculated the motions of the heavens. And he had noticed that they could predict eclipses of the sun and the moon, years ahead, giving the day, the hour, and how much of the disc would be covered. Then the eclipse would happen exactly as stated.
The Manichee books also described the heavens, at great length, and their account was different. Among other things, they explained eclipses as concealments of cosmic events. And their account did not match the observations.
This is a clean test and it is worth appreciating how clean.
One side says: on this date, at this hour, this much of the sun will go dark. The other side offers a story about what eclipses mean. Then the date arrives.
Predictions with a time on them are the rarest and most valuable thing in any dispute, because reality settles them without asking anyone’s opinion. Augustine had found one, and his own side had failed it.
Augustine draws the conclusion carefully, and the care matters. He does not say the astronomers were godly men; he says elsewhere in the same passage that they had found out a great deal and had not found the one who made it. His point is narrower and sharper.
Mani had claimed divine authority for his writings. If a man claims to speak with divine authority and then gets a checkable matter wrong, the claim is damaged, whatever else is true. It is not that astronomy refutes Manichaeism’s theology. It is that a demonstrably false statement made under a claim of revelation costs the revelation its standing.
That is a good argument, and Augustine would use versions of it for the rest of his life. It is also, note, the exact opposite of the way he had treated astrology: there he had wanted an authority and kept his books despite the evidence. Something in him had changed in the interval.
8.3The man who arrived
Faustus came to Carthage. Augustine was twenty-nine.
He was, Augustine says at once, a great snare of the devil. Then he describes him, and the description is much more generous than the label.
Faustus was charming. He was a pleasant speaker with an agreeable manner, and he said the same things the other Manichees said, only far more attractively. Augustine went to the meetings and found the room delighted.
And Augustine, who had been waiting nine years, went looking for the answers and found that the man had not read the books.
He had a little Latin literature. He had not gone deeply into the liberal arts. He had no training in the subjects Augustine’s questions were about. He was an excellent presenter of a doctrine he was not equipped to defend at the level Augustine needed it defended.
Augustine puts it in a phrase worth keeping: the man was serving a fine cup, and the cup was empty.
8.4The honesty that made it worse
And now the part that makes this scene good rather than merely disappointing.
Faustus knew he did not know, and said so.
When Augustine put questions to him, Faustus declined to pretend. He admitted that these matters were beyond him and refused to attempt them. Augustine says this openly increased his liking for the man. He calls the modesty of a mind that admits its limits more beautiful than the knowledge he had come for.
That is a remarkable thing to write about someone you are describing as a snare of the devil, and it is the strongest evidence that Augustine is not simply settling scores in this passage.
But it ended the hope. If the most learned man in the movement could not answer the questions, and was honest enough to say so, then the answers did not exist. The deferral that had held Augustine in place for years had nowhere left to defer to.
8.5What actually happened next: nothing, for a while
Here is the detail that most retellings flatten, and it is important.
Augustine did not leave. He says the enthusiasm collapsed and that he gave up all thought of advancing further among them, but that he stayed loosely attached because he could not see anything better. He kept Manichee friends, lodged with a Manichee in Rome, and used Manichee contacts to get his next job. The formal separation is still years away.
He also, in an odd and rather warm turn, started studying with Faustus. Since Faustus was interested in literature, and Augustine was teaching it, they read together. The man who ended his religion became, briefly, his reading companion.
The way this episode is normally told, and the way Augustine half tells it, Faustus is the refutation and the departure follows. That is the shape we expect from an intellectual biography: an argument fails, the believer notices, the believer leaves.
What the text actually reports is different. The argument failed. Augustine noticed. Augustine stayed for years, kept the friendships, took the professional favours, and drifted out only after moving to another continent and meeting different people.
This is the third time in this series that his own account has described belonging doing the work while the narration credits a proposition. Part Two noted it about how he joined. Here it is about how he left, and the shape is the same in reverse: the reasons arrive on time and the person does not move.
The uncomfortable version: if beliefs are held and dropped socially rather than evidentially, then the entire genre of the intellectual conversion narrative, of which Confessions is the founding example, may be a systematically misleading way to describe what happens to people.
The general form: reporting the reason a change was justified as though it were the cause of the change.
That box is not a claim that Augustine’s reasons were insincere. The eclipse argument is a good argument and he clearly took it seriously. It is a claim about the distance between the moment a reason becomes available and the moment a person acts on it, which in this case is several years and one sea crossing.
Augustine’s whole case for leaving the Manichees rests on one man being underwhelming. That is a heavy load for a single encounter to carry, and Faustus is known to us almost entirely through Augustine.
Augustine could have made Faustus a fraud and did the opposite. He records the charm, the effectiveness, the popularity, and above all the honesty about the limits of his own learning, which he says he admired. A hostile writer inventing a villain does not put that in. The specific claim, that Faustus was eloquent but not trained in the technical subjects, is modest, checkable in principle by anyone who had met him, and not obviously self-serving.
The generosity is in the details and the verdict is in the frame. Faustus is introduced as a snare of the devil before he says a word, and the episode is positioned as the hinge on which nine years turn. Augustine also later wrote a long polemic against a work of Faustus’s, which means the man in Book Five is being described by someone who had since become his professional opponent. And the questions Faustus could not answer were about astronomy, which is not obviously the subject on which a religious teacher should be judged.
A third view: whether or not the report is accurate, the scene is structurally necessary. A conversion narrative needs a moment where the old system visibly fails, and the honest disappointment of a good man is a far better one than a refutation would be. That does not make it false. It does mean we should expect it to have been shaped, and it explains why the years of not leaving get one sentence.
Where things stand: It is agreed that Augustine’s portrait is unusually kind in its particulars and unfavourable in its framing. What is disputed is how much the framing distorts, and whether one man’s limitations were really the reason for the break.
What would settle it: Some independent traction exists. A substantial part of Faustus’s own writing survives, embedded in the work Augustine later wrote against him, and it shows a capable and pointed controversialist. That is consistent with Augustine’s description of an effective speaker without technical training, and it is not consistent with a fool.
Why people care so much: It matters because this is the moment the founding conversion narrative of Western Christianity turns, and because it is a clean case of a movement being known through the account of the person who left it.
One thing is worth adding about Faustus himself, since he leaves the story here and never returns to it as a person. Within a few years of this meeting he was denounced as a Manichee and sent into exile on a Mediterranean island. Augustine, who by then had every reason to be pleased about it, records that the punishment was unusually mild and suggests that orthodox Christians had intervened on his behalf. Whatever else is true of the portrait, the man in it was treated by his opponents as worth protecting.
For nine years Augustine’s questions were deferred with "wait for Faustus". A promise of a future answer holds people better than an answer, because it cannot be tested.
Before Faustus arrived, the astronomers had already broken something: they predicted eclipses to the hour and the Manichee books did not match. Mani had claimed divine authority, and a checkable false statement made under a claim of revelation costs the revelation its standing. Faustus was charming, effective, and untrained in the subjects the questions were about. A fine cup, empty.
He admitted he did not know, and Augustine says he liked him more for it. That honesty is what ended the hope: if the best man had no answers, there were none.
And then Augustine did not leave. He stayed loosely attached for years, kept the friendships, took the favours, and drifted out only after moving continent and meeting different people.
9The Shore, Rome, and Milan
He left Africa by lying to his mother on a beach. Within two years he was in Milan, in a job arranged by a pagan, listening to the bishop who would baptise him.
9.1Why he left Carthage
The reason Augustine gives is professional and unheroic. His students in Carthage were impossible. Part Two introduced the Wreckers, the student gang that broke up other people’s lectures; by now Augustine was on the other side of the desk. Gangs of young men would burst into a classroom in which they were not enrolled and disrupt it, and the custom protected them.
He had heard that students in Rome were better behaved, held in order by discipline, and not permitted to barge into a teacher’s room at will. So he decided to go.
He is careful to say that this was the reason he gave himself and not the real cause. His own account is that God was moving him and that the motives he was conscious of were the goad rather than the reason. That is a piece of theology laid over a career decision, and it is up to the reader what to do with it.
One point of independent interest: in a work written years before Confessions, Augustine indicates that ambition was in the mix for an earlier move of the same kind. People usually have several reasons and promote whichever is most presentable.
9.2The lie at the harbour
Monica did not want him to go. She came to the port with him and would not leave. Augustine says she held on to him violently, either to keep him back or to come with him.
So he lied. He told her he was staying with a friend until the wind was right for the friend to sail. She did not believe him and would not go. He persuaded her to spend the night in a shrine to Cyprian, close to the ship.
Cyprian: bishop of Carthage, executed in 258 during a persecution, and by Augustine’s day the most venerated Christian figure in North Africa. A shrine to him near the harbour would have been a natural and safe place for a devout woman to spend a night in prayer.
Why it matters: the detail is not decorative. Augustine put his mother into a church to pray for him while he used the time to get away from her, and he tells you that is what he did.
That night the wind came and he sailed. She was praying while the ship left.
In the morning she was, he says, wild with grief and filled God’s ears with complaints. And Augustine, writing twenty years later, does not excuse it. He calls it a deception. He says he lied to a mother, and to such a mother.
Then he adds the interpretation that makes the passage characteristic of the whole book: she was asking God to keep her son with her, and God was refusing her request in order to give her the thing she was actually asking for, which was that Augustine should be saved. The prayer was denied so that the prayer could be granted.
Whether or not you accept that reading, notice its structure. Augustine will use it again for every reversal in the rest of the book. It is the interpretative engine of Confessions, and it is worth being able to spot it: the thing that looked like the disaster was the mechanism.
The reading Augustine gives here is only available from the far end. He knows he was baptised in Milan. From that vantage point, the lie on the beach becomes the necessary first step, and Monica’s refused prayer becomes a granted one.
The assumption both his defenders and his critics tend to share is that this is a claim about the events. Defenders say providence really was at work. Critics say he is dressing up a shabby act in theology. Both treat the question as being about what was going on in 383.
But the reading is not a report about 383 at all. It is a property of telling. Any sequence of events that ends somewhere can be narrated so that everything before points at the ending, and the narration will feel like discovery rather than construction, because the events really did happen in that order.
The test is what the same interpretative move would say about a life that ended badly. Augustine’s framework has an answer for that too, but it is a much quieter one, and it is not on this page.
The general form: mistaking the shape a story acquires when you know how it ends for a shape the events had while they were happening.
None of that decides whether Augustine’s theology is true. It is a note about why this particular passage is so persuasive, which is a different question and worth keeping separate.
9.3Nearly dying among strangers
He reached Rome and almost immediately fell seriously ill with a fever. He nearly died.
Two things about this are worth having. The first is that he was still unbaptised, and he notes with something like horror what would have followed if he had died there. The second is that his mother did not know. She was in Africa, praying for him daily, unaware that he was close to death.
And he was lodging with a Manichee. That detail is the evidence for what Chapter Eight said: the break with them was not a break. He had lost the belief and kept the network.
9.4The students who did not pay
He recovered and started teaching, and discovered that he had traded one problem for a worse one.
Roman students did not riot. They did something more efficient. They would attend a teacher for most of the term and then, shortly before the fees were due, transfer as a group to somebody else, leaving the first teacher unpaid.
Teachers of rhetoric were paid directly by their pupils, not by an institution. There was no salary and no contract worth anything.
So a coordinated walkout before payment day was not rudeness. It was the removal of a term’s income, and the teacher had no recourse.
Augustine had crossed the Mediterranean to escape disruptive students and landed among organised ones.
His comment on it is dry and characteristic: he hated them, and not with a perfect hatred, because he hated what they did to him more than the wrong itself.
9.5Believing nothing, on purpose
This is the low point of the whole narrative, intellectually, and Augustine is unusually vague about it, which is itself worth noticing.
Having lost confidence in the Manichees and having nothing to replace them with, he began to think that the philosophers who said certainty was unavailable might be right.
Academic scepticism: the position associated with the later Academy, the school descended from Plato, holding that nothing can be known with certainty and that the wise course is to withhold assent and follow whatever seems most probable.
Why it matters: this is not modern casual doubt. It was a disciplined philosophical position with serious arguments behind it, and Cicero — the author who had turned Augustine towards philosophy in the first place — was its main channel into Latin. Augustine later wrote a whole book attacking it, which tells you how seriously he had taken it.
He also says that he still could not conceive of anything existing that was not physical. He thought of God as a vast bright substance stretched through space, and he thought of evil as a substance too. Part One flagged this in Book One, where the young Augustine’s crude picture of God is being demolished by the older one. Here is the picture itself, held by an educated man of thirty.
This is the single biggest obstacle in his intellectual life, and I am flagging it as a debt now: Part Four covers Book Seven, where it is finally removed, and where the answer to the question of where evil comes from depends entirely on removing it first.
Book Five is deliberately hazy about the period between losing the Manichees and finding anything else. Different readers have filled the haze differently.
He says so, in as many words: he considered that the philosophers who denied the possibility of knowledge were right, and he held back from committing. He later wrote an entire book refuting Academic scepticism, which is not the behaviour of a man who had merely brushed against it. Take the text at face value: for a period he thought nothing could be known.
He also says he never abandoned the name of Christ, that his mother’s teaching held, and that he could not fully accept a position that had no place for it. And the practical evidence points the other way from despair: he kept working, kept his Manichee friends, and pursued a promotion. A man in a genuine epistemic crisis behaves differently from a man managing his career. The scepticism may be a retrospective label for a period of not knowing what to think.
A third reading holds that Augustine is imprecise here because the period does not fit the story he is telling. A conversion narrative needs a darkness before the light, and it needs that darkness to be a condition rather than a muddle. What he seems actually to have had was several years of unresolved drift while life carried on, which is both extremely common and narratively useless.
Where things stand: It is agreed that he was not a Manichee believer and not a Christian in these years, and that he says he inclined to scepticism. What is disputed is whether "sceptic" describes a position he held or a name he later gave to a gap.
What would settle it: His own philosophical works from immediately after the conversion, especially the one attacking the Academics, are the best available evidence and have been worked over thoroughly. They establish that he knew the arguments well. They cannot establish when he came to know them.
Why people care so much: It matters because this is the stretch of the book where the narrative is thinnest, and it is exactly the stretch that would tell us most about how a person actually moves between belief systems.
9.6The pagan who sent him to Ambrose
Milan sent to Rome asking for a teacher of rhetoric to be supplied at public expense. Augustine applied. He got the post, after being tested on a set subject, and the man who selected him was the prefect of the city, Symmachus.
Quintus Aurelius Symmachus: prefect of Rome, one of the great orators of the age, and the most prominent public defender of the traditional Roman religion against the now dominant Christianity.
Why it matters: shortly before this, Symmachus had formally petitioned the emperor to restore an altar and the traditional rites, and Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, had successfully blocked him. These two men were direct opponents.
So the sequence is this. A pagan grandee, freshly defeated by the bishop of Milan, selects a young man who is still moving in Manichee circles and sends him to Milan to hold a prominent public chair. And the young man is baptised by that bishop three years later.
Augustine reports the appointment without dwelling on the irony, but it is there, and it fits the interpretative engine described earlier: the thing that looked like one move turns out to have been another. It is also, more prosaically, how appointments worked. Augustine got the job through Manichee contacts, and Symmachus had reasons of his own to place a non-Catholic in a public post in Ambrose’s city.
9.7Going for the style, caught by the content
In Milan he met Ambrose, and the meeting is described with more warmth than almost anything else in these two books. Ambrose received him kindly, like a father. Augustine says he began to love him, at first not as a teacher of the truth but as a man who was kind to him. And then he went to hear him preach, for the wrong reason, and this is the detail that makes the passage.
Augustine attended the sermons to assess the technique. He was a professional rhetorician evaluating a rival professional, and he wanted to know whether Ambrose’s reputation as a speaker was deserved. He says he was not interested in what was being said and cared only about how.
Set that beside Part Two, Chapter Eight. Ten years earlier he had picked up Cicero for the style and been caught by the content. Now he goes to hear Ambrose for the style, and the same thing happens again, and Augustine points it out himself: along with the words he cared about, the matters he did not care about came in, and he could not separate them.
What came in was this. The Manichee objections to the Old Testament, which Part Two set out and which had held Augustine for nine years because nobody had answered them, turned out to have answers. Ambrose read those passages figuratively. The bodily descriptions of God, the behaviour of the patriarchs, the sacrifices: read as figure rather than as literal report, the objections did not land.
Augustine says the effect was not that he was convinced Christianity was true. It was that he stopped being convinced it was absurd. He describes himself as a man who had been shouting against a position nobody actually held.
Figurative reading: interpreting a passage so that its literal sense also stands for something else, rather than taking every statement as a plain report of fact.
Why it matters: this is the technical move that unlocked scripture for Augustine, and it is the thing he had lacked. It is not evasion. Ambrose was working in an established tradition of reading that goes back centuries before him. But it is a method, and Augustine did not have it, and neither did the Manichees, which is why the argument between them had been unwinnable.
So Book Five ends with him nowhere in particular: no longer a Manichee, not a believer, doubtful about everything, and enrolled again as a catechumen in the Catholic church, on the grounds that he might as well be in the place where his parents had put him while he worked out what he thought.
That is not a conversion. It is a man deciding where to stand while he waits. Books Six, Seven and Eight are the waiting.
He left Carthage because students disrupted his classes, and left Rome because Roman students transferred in a group before paying. He crossed a sea to swap chaos for organised non-payment.
He lied to Monica at the harbour, put her in a shrine to pray, and sailed that night. Writing twenty years on, he does not excuse it.
His reading of it — her prayer was refused so that it could be granted — is the interpretative engine of the whole book, and it is only available from the far end.
In the gap he leaned towards Academic scepticism and still could not imagine anything existing that was not physical. That last obstacle is what Book Seven removes.
Symmachus, the leading pagan of the age and Ambrose’s direct opponent, gave him the Milan post. He went to hear Ambrose for the style and was caught by the content, exactly as he had been by Cicero ten years earlier.
Figurative reading answered the objections that had held him for nine years. He was not convinced Christianity was true. He stopped being convinced it was absurd.
10An Honest List of What We Do Not Know
Two lists, as always, with the reasons attached. And a closing note on the fact that the two people who matter most in these books have no names.
10.1Genuinely unknown
Who the friend was. No name, no family, no other mention anywhere. Why unknown: Augustine chose not to name him, and a young man of no public standing who died in a provincial town in the 370s left no other trace. This is a refusal and an absence of record at the same time.
Whether the deathbed conversation happened as reported. The joke, the rebuke, and the vow to take it up again later carry the weight of the whole episode. Why unknown: reported speech from twenty-two years on, with one witness, arriving exactly where the argument needs a turning point.
How much of the grief description is memory. Why unknown: an accurate account of a real experience and a well-constructed reconstruction read identically. This is the standing problem of the whole work and it does not have a solution.
The name of the woman he lived with. Why unknown: he declined to write it, in every work, across a lifetime. Not lost. Withheld.
What was actually in De pulchro et apto. Why unknown: the book is lost and barely quoted. The only description is by its author, dismissing it.
Whether he was really a sceptic in these years. Why unknown: Book Five is vague precisely here, and his own later writings establish that he knew the arguments without establishing when.
Why he really left Carthage. He gives the students. An earlier work of his own points at ambition for a comparable move. Why unknown: people have several motives and report the presentable one, and there is no way to weigh them from outside.
10.2Solid
The chronology. Nine years as a Manichee Hearer, roughly 373 to 382. Teaching at Thagaste then Carthage. Faustus at twenty-nine, so 383. Rome 383, Milan 384. Why solid: Augustine’s own dating is internally consistent, and the Milan appointment is a public post that can be placed against the prefecture of Symmachus.
That Faustus of Mileve was a real and prominent Manichee bishop. Why solid: a substantial amount of his own writing survives, quoted at length in the polemic Augustine later wrote against him, and he is independently attested. He was exiled for Manichaeism a few years after this meeting.
That Vindicianus was a real physician of standing. Why solid: medical writings attributed to him survive independently of Augustine, and his court connection is attested elsewhere.
That Symmachus was prefect of Rome and the leading defender of the traditional cults. Why solid: Symmachus is one of the best-documented figures of the century. His official correspondence and his petition to the emperor survive, as does Ambrose’s reply to it.
That Ambrose preached figurative readings of the Old Testament. Why solid: Ambrose’s own sermons and treatises survive in quantity and do exactly this. Augustine’s report can be checked against the source, which is rare in this book.
That astronomers of the period could predict eclipses accurately. Why solid: the methods survive, the tables survive, and the predictions can be recomputed today.
That teachers of rhetoric were paid directly by pupils and were vulnerable to non-payment. Why solid: attested across the period in sources unconnected with Augustine, including legislation.
10.3Two people with no names
One closing observation, because it is the most striking fact about Books Four and Five and it is easy to walk past.
The two people who matter most to Augustine in this period are the friend who died and the woman he lived with. Neither is named.
Around them, in the same two books, he names Vindicianus, a doctor he spoke to a handful of times. He names Nebridius. He names Faustus, Symmachus, Ambrose, Hierius, a man he never met, and Elpidius, a controversialist he heard argue. He names his son.
So this is not a general reticence about names and it is not a convention of the period. It is specific, and it applies to exactly the two relationships that were closest.
I do not know what it means and I am not going to pretend to. The standard explanations, that the friend was a private person of no interest to posterity, or that naming the woman would have exposed her, are reasonable and are not obviously sufficient, since Augustine names plenty of private people and the woman was already publicly known to his circle.
What can be said is that it is a pattern and not an accident, that it is made by an author with total control over his text, and that it should be read as an act. We will meet it again in Part Four, at the point where she is sent away, and it is worse there.
We do not know who the friend was, whether the deathbed conversation happened as reported, how much of the grief account is memory, the woman’s name, what was in his first book, or what he really believed in the gap years.
We do know the chronology, that Faustus and Vindicianus and Symmachus were real and are attested independently, that Ambrose really did preach figurative readings — his sermons survive and can be checked — and that the astronomers really could predict eclipses.
The two people closest to Augustine in these books are the only two who go unnamed, while he names a doctor he met a handful of times and a man he never met at all.
That is a pattern, not an accident, made by an author with complete control over his own text. What it means is not known.
Timeline
Dates in this period rest largely on Augustine’s own account, which is internally consistent and can be anchored at one end by the Milan appointment. Where a date is uncertain, it says so.
| Date | Event | Where it appears |
|---|---|---|
| 373 | Reads Cicero’s Hortensius. Joins the Manichees as a Hearer, in his nineteenth year. | Book III |
| c. 373–375 | Teaches at Thagaste. The friendship, the friend’s illness and baptism, and his death. | Book IV |
| c. 375 | Leaves Thagaste for Carthage, by his own account to escape the places that reminded him. | Book IV |
| c. 375–383 | Teaches rhetoric at Carthage. Living with the unnamed woman and their son Adeodatus. | Book IV |
| this period | Consults astrologers. Wins a poetry contest, crowned by the proconsul Vindicianus, who argues against astrology. Nebridius argues the same. He keeps his books. | Book IV |
| c. 380–381 | Writes his first book, De pulchro et apto, dedicated to Hierius, an orator in Rome he had never met. Now lost. | Book IV |
| c. 374 (recalled) | Had read Aristotle’s Categories unaided at about twenty. Undated in the text. | Book IV |
| before 383 | Reading the astronomers, he notices that eclipse predictions succeed and the Manichee account does not match. | Book V |
| 383 | Faustus of Mileve comes to Carthage. Augustine is twenty-nine. The hope collapses. He does not leave. | Book V |
| 383 | Sails for Rome, deceiving Monica at the harbour and leaving at night while she prays in the shrine of Cyprian. | Book V |
| 383 | Falls dangerously ill in Rome, still unbaptised, lodging with a Manichee. Recovers. | Book V |
| 383–384 | Teaches in Rome. Students transfer in groups to avoid paying. Leans towards Academic scepticism. | Book V |
| 384 | Selected by Symmachus, prefect of Rome, for the public chair of rhetoric at Milan. | Book V |
| 384 | Meets Ambrose. Attends his sermons to assess the technique. Figurative reading answers the Manichee objections. Enrols again as a catechumen. | Book V |
| — | Part Four starts here: Books VI and VII — Monica arrives, the woman is sent away, and the question of where evil comes from. | — |
Glossary
Every hard word used in this part, in plain English. Terms carried over from earlier parts are repeated so this part stands alone.
About the Author
This series is read and explained by Lovepreet Singh, and published as part of The Living Archive at misterlove.in.
The Living Archive takes difficult material and rebuilds it so that anyone can follow it, without dropping the hard parts along the way. Its first series was a fourteen-part history of Punjab running to around nine hundred and fifty pages. This is its second.
I read the book, I did the reading around it, and I wrote down what I found. I am not a specialist in late antiquity and I am not going to pretend to be one. Where a question is genuinely contested among people who are, I have said so and given each side its strongest case rather than choosing for you. Where I could not find out, I have written that I could not find out.
The method used here was worked out on the Punjab series and is written up as a portable specification, so that any part of this work can be checked, continued or rebuilt by somebody else. That is the point of an archive that calls itself living.
[Editorial note, to be replaced before publishing: the method requires a one-line statement of the author’s own position with regard to religious material, placed where readers will see it. This is the only field in the document still unfilled.]
The Living Archive
The Living Archive is a method for writing hard things simply without making them shallow. It was developed by Lovepreet Singh and tested on a fourteen-part history of Punjab. It runs on three rules.
One. Simplification is not compression. The simple version is usually longer than the difficult one. Words are being spent to buy comprehension.
Two. Two dials, turned in opposite directions. Language as simple as it can be made. Content as deep as the subject actually goes. Turning both down produces something readable and useless.
Three. Every side gets its strongest case, and where nothing settles a question, that gets said. A verdict that honestly reports a deadlock is worth more than a tidy answer that is not true.
A word on sources
This document carries no footnotes. It is a synthesis of the published record rather than new primary research, and it is written for readers who want to understand a book, not for specialists who want to check my workings.
What the archive is good at here: this part is unusually well anchored outside Augustine. Symmachus, Ambrose, Faustus and Vindicianus are all independently attested, and in the cases of Ambrose and Faustus we have substantial amounts of their own writing. Roman teaching arrangements, ancient astronomy and the practice of astrology are all documented from sources unconnected with him.
What it is bad at here: the emotional centre of these two books — the friendship, the death, the grief — rests entirely on one witness writing twenty-two years later with a purpose. Where a claim in this document rests only on Augustine’s account of himself, I have tried to say so in the text rather than let it pass as established.
On translations: all renderings of Augustine in this document are my own plain-English paraphrases, made deliberately loose so that they explain rather than reproduce. They are not quotations from any published translation and should not be cited as such. Where the exact wording matters, go to a proper edition.
Corrections are welcome and will be acted on. Later editions will record what was changed and who caught it.
What Comes Next
Part Four covers Books VI and VII: two years in Milan, from about thirty to thirty-two. It contains the coldest thing in the book and the hardest argument in it. These are the questions it takes on.
- Monica arrives in Milan. What does she do, and what does it cost?
- A marriage is arranged for social advantage, and the woman Augustine has lived with for over a decade is sent back to Africa without their son. What does he say about it, and what does he not say?
- Who were Alypius and Nebridius, and why does Augustine give so much space to his friends at the point where his own life is falling apart?
- Why did the sight of a drunk beggar in a Milan street stop him in his tracks?
- What exactly did he read in "the books of the Platonists", and why does he say they contained one thing and lacked another?
- How do you stop believing that everything real is made of stuff — and why was that the obstacle blocking everything else?
- And the question the whole book has been building towards: if God is good and made everything, where does evil come from?
That last one is the hinge of the entire work. Augustine’s answer is that evil is not a thing at all, and Part Four is where we finally see the argument in full rather than the formula.