Where We Left Off
Parts One to Three covered Books One to Five of Augustine’s Confessions. Here is what you need. This part stands on its own.
The man. Born 354 in Thagaste in Roman North Africa. 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 twelve years after the events in this part.
The book. Confessio means three things at once: confessing sin, confessing faith, and confessing praise. This 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.
The story so far. Book One argued that something in human wanting is disordered before any choice is made, and ended with the formula that runs through everything: the gifts were good, the aim was wrong. Books Two and Three took him to Carthage, where a lost book by Cicero turned him towards philosophy and he joined the Manichees. Books Four and Five ran out the nine years that followed: teaching rhetoric, a bereavement he could not explain to himself, and the slow collapse of a religion. He sailed to Italy after lying to his mother on a beach, and by 384 he held the public chair of rhetoric in Milan.
Where he stands now. No longer a Manichee. Not a Christian. Inclined towards the philosophers who said certainty was unavailable. Re-enrolled as a catechumen in the Catholic church, which is to say enrolled for instruction without being baptised, on the grounds that he might as well stand somewhere while he worked out what he thought. He has a partner of over a decade whom he has never named, and a son by her called Adeodatus.
The question he cannot answer. If God is good and made everything, where does evil come from? He has spent nine years with a religion whose main attraction was that it answered this, and he no longer believes the answer. Book Seven is where he finds another one.
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 something abstract into something you can picture. How We Actually Know This names the evidence and says what it cannot show. The Argument is for places where experts genuinely disagree, and gives each side its strongest case. 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.
Three Things to Watch For
This is the hardest part in the series so far, and the two books in it do very different jobs. Book Six is people. Book Seven is argument. Three threads hold them together.
One. The obstacle is not moral, it is imaginative. Augustine is not stuck because he wants to keep sinning, or not only. He is stuck because he cannot conceive of anything real that is not made of stuff, and until that goes, no answer to the problem of evil is even available to him. Chapter Seven is about that wall and Chapter Eight is about it coming down.
Two. Book Six is a book about other people, at the point where his own life is worst. Monica, Ambrose, Alypius, Nebridius, a drunk in a street, a girl he is engaged to, and a woman he sends away. Augustine gives more room to his friends here than anywhere else in the work. Watch what that does, and watch who is left out of it.
Three. Chapter Five is where this series pays a debt. Three times now I have told you that the namelessness of the woman Augustine lived with is a refusal rather than a gap, and twice I have said it gets worse in this part. It does. I am not going to soften it and I am not going to prosecute him either. The text is on the page and it is his own.
Contents
1Monica Arrives, and the Bishop Who Read in Silence
His mother crossed the Mediterranean to find him. Then she changed a lifelong religious practice overnight because a bishop told her to. And Augustine watched that bishop read.
1.1She crosses the sea
Monica followed him. Part Three ended with Augustine slipping out of Carthage at night while she prayed in a shrine by the harbour, having told her he was only seeing a friend off. She now crossed the same sea after him, through a storm bad enough that she ended up reassuring the sailors, and arrived in Milan.
What she found was not what she had feared. Augustine told her he was no longer a Manichee, but that he was not a Catholic Christian either.
Her reaction is the interesting part. Augustine expected her to be overjoyed at the first half. She was not particularly moved by it. She had never, he says, expected him to die a Manichee, and this was simply a stage. She told him calmly that she believed she would see him a faithful Catholic before she left this life.
He reports that calm as the strangest thing about her. She had wept for years and now she did not, because on her own account the outcome was not in doubt. Whatever one makes of that, it is a portrait of a specific kind of person, and it is drawn by somebody who had lived with her.
1.2The custom she gave up in a day
Then something happens that tells you more about Monica than any of the weeping.
She had a religious practice from home. In North Africa it was customary to bring food and wine to the shrines of the martyrs, eat a little there, and share the rest.
Meals at the martyrs’ shrines: an old and very widespread African Christian custom of bringing food and drink to the tombs of the martyrs on their feast days and holding a small meal there. It grew out of long-standing practices of dining with the dead, and church leaders worried it was sliding into drinking parties and into something close to offerings for the dead.
Why it matters: this was not a fringe habit. It was ordinary devotion for a woman of Monica’s background, and giving it up meant giving up something she had done all her life.
When she arrived at a shrine in Milan with her basket, the doorkeeper stopped her. The bishop had forbidden it.
She obeyed at once. Augustine says she accepted it not merely without complaint but readily, and that she went on to bring an offering of a different kind instead.
And then he adds a sentence that is unusually shrewd about his own mother. He says he does not think she would have given it up so easily if the prohibition had come from somebody other than Ambrose, whom she loved. The rule did not change her behaviour. The person giving it did.
That is the same observation this series has been making since Part Two, in his own mouth, about his own family: belonging does the work. He notices it in Monica in a single line and does not apply it to himself.
1.3The man who could not be consulted
Augustine desperately wanted to talk to Ambrose. He had a queue of questions and nowhere to put them. And he could not get an appointment.
The reason is entirely mundane, and Augustine reports it without bitterness. Ambrose was the bishop of the imperial capital. He was constantly besieged by crowds of people with business, whose troubles he served. In the small amount of time he was not doing that, he was eating a minimal meal or reading.
Milan in the 380s was not merely a large city. It was where the western emperor and his court actually lived, which made its bishop one of the most powerful men in the western half of the empire.
Ambrose successfully faced down an empress over a church building and later forced an emperor into public penance after a massacre. That is the man Augustine wanted to book a conversation with.
Picture trying to get a private hour with someone who runs a major institution in a capital city, in order to work through your own religious doubts, when you are a newly arrived provincial lecturer. Augustine could get into the room. He could not get the man’s attention.
So Augustine did what he could. He went to the sermons, sat in the crowd, and listened. And he says plainly that he never got to ask what he wanted to ask. Ambrose had no idea what was going on inside him. The two men were in the same room repeatedly and the conversation Augustine needed never happened.
1.4Ambrose reading
When he could not get near him, Augustine watched him. And he wrote down what he saw, in a passage of about four sentences that has generated a very large amount of scholarship.
Ambrose was reading. His eyes moved across the page and his mind worked out the meaning. His voice and his tongue were still. Anyone could come in, and people often did, and would find him reading like this, silently, and never otherwise.
Augustine then guesses at reasons, and the guessing is worth having because it shows what struck him as needing explanation. Perhaps Ambrose was protecting his voice, which was easily strained. Perhaps he read silently to avoid being stopped: a listener hearing a difficult passage would want it explained, and the bishop would lose the little reading time he had. Whatever the reason, Augustine concludes, it was a good one.
For a long time this passage was taken as proof that reading aloud was the norm in the ancient world and that silent reading was a rarity worth remarking on. That reading of it is now seriously disputed.
A single paragraph of Augustine has carried an enormous claim about how everybody in the ancient world read. In the last few decades that claim has been taken apart, and the dispute is instructive about how evidence works.
The traditional case, argued forcefully in the 1920s and repeated ever since, is that ancient reading was normally vocal. Texts were written without spaces between words, without punctuation and without lower case, which makes reading closer to decoding a score than to scanning a page, and sounding it out helps enormously. Books circulated by being read aloud to groups. And the plain evidence is that Augustine, an educated professional, found the behaviour worth four sentences and three separate hypotheses. People do not explain the unremarkable.
The rebuttal, pressed from the 1960s onwards and sharpened in the 1990s, is that there are numerous references in Greek and Latin literature to people reading silently, well before Augustine, and that nobody else treats it as strange. On this reading what surprised Augustine was not silence but something else: that Ambrose read silently while visitors stood there, which is a social oddity rather than a technical one, and that he could not be interrupted. The famous conclusion rests on one passage that does not say what it has been made to say.
A third position holds that "did they read silently?" is the wrong question, because reading is not one activity. Skimming a familiar document, working through a difficult text, and performing a poem are different tasks, and the evidence is perfectly consistent with silent reading being routine for some and vocal reading routine for others. The dispute was generated by treating a spectrum as a switch.
Where things stand: The strong traditional claim, that silent reading was essentially unknown, is now widely regarded as unsupportable, and the counter-evidence is real. What Augustine found remarkable about Ambrose remains genuinely unclear, and the third position has gained ground.
What would settle it: More collected instances would help and scholars have collected them thoroughly. The limiting factor is that people rarely describe what everyone does, so the ordinary case is exactly the one that leaves no record. That asymmetry is why the argument has run so long on so little.
Why people care so much: It matters beyond Augustine because the strong claim escaped into popular histories of reading, of the book, and of the mind, and is still repeated as settled fact in places where the rebuttal has never arrived.
I have given that argument more room than its subject strictly deserves, and deliberately, because it is the cleanest example in this series of something worth carrying into every other chapter: a single suggestive sentence, repeated confidently for a century, becoming a fact that nobody checked.
Monica crossed the sea after him and found him no longer a Manichee and not a Christian. She was calm, because she considered the outcome settled.
She gave up a lifelong African devotional custom overnight because Ambrose had forbidden it. Augustine notes she would not have obeyed so readily from anyone she did not love — the same observation about belonging he keeps making about other people and not himself.
He could never get Ambrose’s attention. The bishop of the imperial capital was besieged with business, and the conversation Augustine needed never happened.
So he watched him instead, and recorded that Ambrose read in silence.
That passage was used for a century to prove that ancient reading was normally aloud. The strong version of that claim is now regarded as unsupportable, and what actually surprised Augustine is not clear.
2The Beggar in the Street
On his way to deliver a speech full of things he did not believe, Augustine passed a drunk man laughing in the road, and it stopped him.
2.1The speech
As the public rhetorician of Milan, Augustine’s job included delivering formal speeches in praise of the emperor. He was preparing one. He says he was going to tell a great many lies, and that the people who knew they were lies would applaud them.
Panegyric: a formal speech of praise, usually for an emperor or a high official, delivered on a public occasion. It was a recognised literary form with rules, and everybody involved understood that its relationship to the truth was loose.
Why it matters: Augustine is not describing a moment of unusual corruption. He is describing his job. The public praise of power was the highest-status work a rhetorician did, and it was the thing his family had spent a decade paying for.
He describes his state that day precisely. His heart was panting with the strain of it. He was being consumed by anxieties. And walking through a street in Milan he noticed a beggar who had evidently had a few coins and spent them on drink, and who was joking and cheerful.
2.2The comparison
The argument Augustine makes from this is compact and it is worth setting out in his own order.
He and the beggar wanted the same thing. Both wanted to be happy. The beggar had got there that evening and Augustine had not, and was not going to.
The beggar had reached it by begging a few coins. Augustine was trying to reach it by an enormous circuit of anxious labour: the career, the reputation, the speech, the applause of people who knew he was lying.
So the beggar was ahead. Not morally, and Augustine is careful about this, but in the plain sense that one of them had what they were both after and the other did not.
Then he turns it, and the turn is what saves the passage from being a sentimental observation about simple pleasures.
The beggar’s happiness was false, he says, and so was the happiness he himself was chasing, and his was the more false of the two. The difference between them was this: the beggar would sleep off his drunkenness that night. Augustine had been sleeping in his for years, would wake up in it tomorrow, and would go on waking up in it.
2.3What is right about it
Two things in this passage are genuinely good and have not aged.
The first is the observation about circuits. Augustine notices that the path he is on has no terminus. The speech leads to the reputation, the reputation to the next post, and there is no point at which the process delivers the thing it was undertaken for. That is not a complaint about ambition being wicked. It is a structural observation about a certain kind of goal.
The second is the refusal to romanticise. A lesser writer would have made the beggar wise. Augustine does not. He says the man’s happiness was false too. He is not recommending poverty and he is not saying the drunk had found the answer. He is saying that on this particular evening a man with nothing had beaten him at his own objective, and that this should have told him something about the objective.
Strip out the fourth century and the observation is intact.
You are on the way to something you have worked towards for years, and it is not making you happy, and the next thing after it will not either, and you can see the whole ladder and none of the rungs is the top.
Then somebody who has none of it laughs in the street, and for about four seconds the entire structure looks optional. Augustine’s contribution is not the four seconds. It is that he wrote down what happened in them.
2.4What is wrong with it
The argument has a weak joint and it is worth naming, because Augustine leans on it hard.
The comparison treats his happiness and the beggar’s as the same kind of thing in different quantities, so that they can be placed on one scale and one declared further along. Everything in the passage depends on that.
But a drunk man’s cheerfulness and a professional’s satisfaction in his work are not obviously the same substance at different concentrations. If they are different in kind, the whole comparison collapses, and the beggar is not ahead of Augustine or behind him. He is elsewhere.
Augustine’s argument, and almost every argument anybody makes about who is happier, needs happiness to be one thing that comes in amounts. Otherwise there is no scale, and no answer to the question of who is further along it.
That premise is doing enormous work and it is almost never examined. We do not usually think this way about other states. Nobody asks whether a person is more "interested" than another person who is interested in a different thing, or expects a single answer.
And notice which side of Augustine’s own argument the assumption favours. If happiness is a quantity, the beggar can be ahead, which is the surprise the passage runs on. If it is not, the passage is a category confusion dressed as an insight.
It is worth adding that Augustine had a reason for the assumption. He held that all human beings want one thing and pursue it under many descriptions, which makes the single scale not a slip but a doctrine. That does not make it true. It does mean the objection has to be aimed at the doctrine rather than at the passage.
The general form: comparing two things on a scale that has not been shown to exist.
It is also fair to say that the objection does not damage the part of the passage that matters. Augustine’s real point is about his own condition and not about the beggar’s, and it survives without the comparison: the thing he was pursuing was not going to arrive, and he knew it, and he went to give the speech anyway.
Augustine was preparing a panegyric for the emperor, full of things he knew were untrue, for an audience that knew it too. That was the highest-status work in his profession.
He passed a drunk beggar laughing, and worked out that they both wanted the same thing and only one of them had it that evening.
He refuses to romanticise it. The beggar’s happiness was false too. The difference is that the beggar would sleep his off by morning and Augustine had been sleeping in his for years.
What is right: the path he was on had no terminus, and he could see the whole ladder and no top.
What is wrong: the comparison needs happiness to be one thing that comes in amounts. If it is not, the beggar is not ahead of him or behind him. He is elsewhere.
3Alypius at the Games
The most famous account of spectatorship in ancient literature, and it is about somebody else. Augustine gives his closest friend four pages and uses them to describe a man being taken apart by a crowd.
3.1Who Alypius was
Alypius came from Thagaste, from a leading family there, and was some years younger than Augustine. He had been Augustine’s pupil, first at home and then at Carthage. He followed him to Rome to study law, and then to Milan. He will be there in the garden in Book Eight and he will be baptised alongside him. He later became a bishop himself.
Augustine plainly loved him and says so. But the reason Alypius gets four pages in the middle of Book Six is not sentiment. It is that Alypius is an exhibit.
Book Six is about a man who knows what is good and cannot do it. Augustine is going to spend the rest of the work on that problem. Alypius is the same problem in somebody else, seen from outside, where it can be examined without the writer defending himself.
3.2Cured of the races by accident
The first episode is short and sets up the second.
At Carthage, Alypius had been swept up in the chariot races to a degree Augustine calls a madness. It was ruining his studies.
Augustine was lecturing at the time. In the middle of explaining a passage, he happened to reach for a comparison involving the circus, and used it contemptuously, to mock people who were caught by that sort of thing. He was not thinking about Alypius. He was making a rhetorical point.
Alypius took it as aimed at him, was ashamed, and gave up the races on the spot.
Augustine’s comment on this is the reason he includes it. He says he had no such intention, and that God used his tongue without his knowing it. What he is recording is that the thing which freed his friend was an accident: a stray sentence, aimed at nobody, that happened to land.
Keep that in mind for Book Eight, where a voice in a garden that was probably a child playing a game is the hinge of the entire work.
3.3The arena
Years later, in Rome, Alypius was studying law. Some friends and fellow students met him coming from dinner and pressed him, in a friendly and insistent way, to come with them to the amphitheatre.
The gladiatorial games: public spectacles in which men fought, often to the death, before large crowds, alongside the killing of animals and the public execution of the condemned. By Augustine’s day they were in decline and under increasing legal restriction, and they would end within a few decades. They were still running.
Why it matters: this is a state-sponsored mass entertainment built on watching people die. Alypius is not being taken to something disreputable and marginal. He is being taken to the games.
Alypius refused. He detested the whole business. His friends dragged him anyway, with the kind of force friends use, and he told them as they went that they could drag his body into the place but they could not make him watch. He would be present and absent at once, and would beat both them and the spectacle.
They took their seats. The crowd was raging with cruel delight, and Alypius shut his eyes and forbade his mind to go out to it.
Then a man fell in the fight, and the entire audience roared.
Overcome by curiosity, and confident that whatever it was he would be able to look at it and defeat it, he opened his eyes.
3.4What happened when he looked
Augustine’s description of what followed is exact and it does not spare his friend.
He was struck with a worse wound in his soul than the fighter had taken in his body. He fell more wretchedly than the man whose fall had made the noise. As soon as he saw the blood he drank in savagery, and did not turn away, and fixed his gaze, and took in the frenzy without knowing it.
He was delighted with the wickedness of the contest and drunk on the bloody pleasure. He was no longer the man who had come in. He was one of the crowd that had brought him, and a true companion of the people who had dragged him there.
He shouted. He burned. He carried the madness away with him. And he went back, and he took others.
Augustine says God rescued him from it later, and says it took a long time.
The mechanism Augustine describes has four steps and they are the same four steps now.
A person is confident they can be exposed to something and remain themselves. They arrange to be present but not participating. Something loud happens and the confidence is enough to make them look. And then the thing is not something they are watching. It is something they are doing.
The detail that makes it land is the last one. He did not merely enjoy it. He went back, and he brought people. What was done to him he then did to others, which is how the crowd that took him was made in the first place.
3.5What Augustine is doing with it
It is worth asking why this scene is here and not in Book Three with the attack on the theatre, where it would fit the subject better.
The answer is that it is not an argument about entertainment. It is an argument about the will, placed immediately before the part of the book where Augustine’s own will is the subject.
Alypius did everything right by the standards of a rational agent. He knew the thing was bad. He did not want to go. He decided in advance not to look. He had a strategy and he executed it. And a noise defeated all of it in a second, and he was reassembled into a different person before he had time to consider anything.
That is the anti-Socratic case in a scene. Part Two set out the classical principle that nobody does wrong willingly, because to see clearly that something is bad is to be unable to want it. Alypius saw clearly, wanted correctly, and was carried anyway.
Alypius’s plan rests on a premise he never states and that most people share: that watching is a position outside the thing watched. You can attend without joining, be in the room without being in the event, and the boundary is guarded by your intention not to join.
Augustine’s account denies this and does not argue for the denial, which is why it is easy to read the scene as a story about a weak-willed man rather than as a claim. The claim is that a crowd at a spectacle is not an audience surrounding an event. It is part of the event, and the fighting is being done for the roar, so the roar is a component of it and anyone producing the roar is inside.
On that account Alypius’s strategy could not have worked, because the thing he was trying to be outside of included him from the moment he sat down. Closing his eyes did not put him outside it. It made him a quiet part of it.
The uncomfortable extension: the assumption is doing the same work now, every time anyone reasons that consuming something is not endorsing it because they are only looking.
The general form: treating a boundary maintained by your intentions as a boundary that exists in the world.
That is a claim, not a proof, and it can be resisted. The obvious reply is that audiences do routinely watch terrible things without becoming them, and that Augustine has generalised from a case where his friend was already susceptible. But the reply has to be made, and most readers of this scene do not notice that anything has been asserted.
3.6Two more things about Alypius, and Nebridius
Two shorter episodes are worth having, because they stop Alypius being merely the man who broke at the games.
He was arrested for a crime he did not commit. Walking in a public square in Rome, he picked up an axe he found lying by a fence and was seized by guards as the silver thief they were hunting. He was being marched off when an architect who knew him recognised him and stopped it, and the real thief was found. Augustine’s comment is that a man destined to judge cases had been shown, from the inside, how easily an innocent man is convicted on appearances.
He refused a bribe. Holding a legal post in Rome, with a powerful senator pressing him to approve something improper, and with real threats behind it, Alypius refused. Augustine notes that the man was strong here and had broken there, and does not reconcile the two.
And Nebridius came. Part Three introduced him as the young friend who argued against astrology. He left a comfortable estate near Carthage and a mother who did not want him to go, and travelled to Milan for no reason except to be with Augustine in the search for truth. Augustine records this and does not entirely know what to do with it.
Alypius was Augustine’s pupil, his closest friend, and later a bishop. He gets four pages because he is the same problem as Augustine, visible from outside.
He was cured of the chariot races by an accident: a stray contemptuous remark in a lecture that was not aimed at him. Remember that when you reach the garden in Book Eight.
Dragged to the gladiatorial games against his will, he closed his eyes and planned to defeat the spectacle by not watching. A roar made him look. He was reassembled into one of the crowd in a second, shouted, went back, and took others.
He did everything a rational agent should: he knew it was bad, did not want to go, and planned not to look. All of it was defeated by a noise.
His plan needed watching to be a position outside the thing watched. At a spectacle staged for the roar, it is not.
4Thirty Years Old and Stuck
Halfway through Book Six Augustine stops and takes stock of himself, and the stocktaking is one of the most recognisable passages in the book.
4.1"Tomorrow I shall find it"
He was thirty. He had been searching, on his own account, since he was nineteen, when Cicero turned him towards philosophy. Eleven years. And he says he was still stuck in the same mud, wanting to enjoy present things that were slipping away and wearing him out, and telling himself that tomorrow he would find it, that it would become clear and he would grasp it.
The sentence has a specific shape and it is worth noticing. It is not despair. It is the opposite: a perfectly sincere confidence, renewed daily, that the matter will resolve shortly. Tomorrow the thing will become plain.
Augustine’s point, writing at forty-three, is that this state can be maintained indefinitely and feels like progress from the inside. He was not refusing to decide. He was waiting for the decision to become obvious, which is a different posture and a far more comfortable one.
Eleven years is a long time to be about to work something out.
Put it on any modern scale: from leaving university to being well into a career. From meeting somebody to having children with them. The whole of a decade, with the question live the entire time and no answer at the end of it.
And every single day of it, on his own account, felt like the day before the answer.
4.2What he had already stopped believing
It is worth being precise about where he actually stood, because "stuck" is vague and his position was not.
Listening to Ambrose, he had discovered something that genuinely startled him. The Catholic church did not teach that God had a human body.
That sounds trivial and it is not. Part Two explained that the Manichees attacked the Jewish scriptures partly by pointing at passages describing God in bodily terms and asking whether a God with hands and a face was worth worshipping. Augustine had been repeating that attack for nine years. He now found out that the people he had been attacking did not hold the position he had been attacking.
His own word for how this felt is shame. He says he was ashamed of having barked for so many years, not against the Catholic faith, but against a figment of his own imagination.
So by the middle of Book Six he had lost the Manichees, lost his main objection to the church, and gained nothing. He describes himself as being in the position of a man who has stopped being sure the road is wrong without having any reason to think it is right.
4.3The discovery about believing
Out of that position comes a small argument that is one of the more durable things in Book Six.
Augustine had been holding out for proof. He wanted the truths of religion demonstrated as clearly as a mathematical result, and had been refusing to commit to anything he could not verify.
Then he looked at how much of his ordinary life ran on things he could not verify.
He had never seen most of the places he was confident existed. He accepted events from history on the word of people who wrote them down. He believed his friends about their own lives. And, the example he presses hardest, he believed who his parents were, which he could not possibly establish for himself and had entirely on report.
The argument is not that everything should therefore be believed. It is narrower and better: that he had been applying to one subject a standard he applied to nothing else, and that if he held the rest of life to that standard he would have to stop functioning.
Testimony: in philosophy, the source of belief that comes from being told something by somebody else rather than from working it out or seeing it yourself.
Why it matters: how much of what a person knows rests on testimony, and whether that is a defect, is a live question in modern philosophy of knowledge. Augustine’s version of the point is compact and it is essentially the one still made: an individual who accepted only what they had personally verified would know almost nothing.
It is worth flagging what this argument does and does not do for him. It removes an objection. It does not supply a reason to believe anything in particular, and Augustine does not pretend it does. What it changes is the demand: he stops requiring proof before he will take anything seriously, which is what allows the next two years to happen at all.
4.4The plan that failed over wives
One more episode from this stretch, because it is the funniest thing in the book and it also matters.
Augustine, Alypius, Nebridius and a group of about ten friends discussed withdrawing from public life together. They would pool their property into a common fund, live in a shared household away from the crowds, and take turns administering it for a year at a time so the others could think. Two of them were wealthy enough to make it work. It was seriously planned.
It collapsed on one question. Some of them had wives and some of them intended to have wives, and nobody could work out what the wives were supposed to do in this arrangement.
Augustine reports the collapse without comment. Read it beside the next chapter and the silence is loud: a group of men designing an ideal life found it impossible to place the women in it, and the plan died rather than the design being changed.
4.5Epicurus, and the one thing that stopped him
One short passage from this stretch is worth pulling out, because it shows exactly how thin the thread was.
Augustine and his friends discussed the good life, and he says that he would have handed the prize to Epicurus — the philosopher who taught that pleasure is the highest good — except for one thing.
Epicurus: a Greek philosopher of the fourth and third centuries BC who taught that the goal of life is freedom from pain and disturbance, that the gods take no interest in us, and that the soul does not survive death. His name became shorthand in Roman writing for a life organised around pleasure, which is a caricature of what he actually argued.
Why it matters: Augustine is saying that on the merits, as he then saw them, the pleasure-seeker had the better case.
The exception was this: Epicurus denied that anything survives death, and Augustine could not get himself to believe that. Because he thought there was a life after this one and a judgement in it, the calculation changed and Epicurus lost.
It is worth being clear about what this admission contains. At thirty, the only thing standing between Augustine and a straightforwardly hedonistic philosophy was a belief about survival after death that he had inherited and never examined. Not an argument. Not the light in Book Seven, which had not happened yet. An assumption from childhood, doing structural work in an adult man’s life.
At thirty, eleven years into searching, he was telling himself daily that tomorrow it would become clear. That state can be maintained indefinitely and feels like progress from inside.
He had learned that the church did not teach that God has a body, and was ashamed of having spent nine years barking at a figment of his own imagination.
He had been holding out for proof, then noticed that he believed on testimony almost everything else in his life, including who his parents were. That removed an objection without supplying a reason.
A serious plan for ten friends to withdraw and live in common collapsed over what to do about wives. Augustine reports it without comment.
He had lost the Manichees, lost his main objection to the church, and gained nothing. That is the position from which the rest of the book starts.
5The Woman Is Sent Away
This series has told you three times that her namelessness is a refusal rather than a gap, and twice that it gets worse here. It does. This chapter reports what the text says and what it does not.
5.1The marriage
Monica set about arranging a marriage for her son. Augustine was pressed to it by friends as well, chiefly on the grounds that a wife with money would ease the costs of the career they were all pursuing. A girl was found and asked for, and Augustine agreed to the match.
She was about two years short of the legal age for marriage. Under Roman law a girl could be married at twelve. So she was about ten.
That is a plain historical fact and it should be stated plainly. Betrothal well before the legal minimum was ordinary among Roman families arranging advantageous matches, and the wedding waited for the age. Augustine records that he liked her and that the delay of two years was the reason for what happens next. He offers no other comment on her at all. She is not named either.
Nothing in this series requires you to soften that, and I am not going to. It is also worth saying, for accuracy rather than for comfort, that Augustine is not describing something his contemporaries would have found remarkable, which is a separate observation from whether it was defensible.
One detail from the arranging is worth having, because it is a rare glimpse of how Monica thought. She tried to get guidance about the match in dreams, and reported the results to her son. Augustine says she got nothing but confused imaginings of her own making, and that she could tell the difference between those and a genuine revelation by something she could not put into words, a kind of taste she was unable to explain.
That is an unusually honest thing for either of them to record. A woman who believed she had received real messages from God also believed that most of what came to her in sleep was nothing, and had no account of how she told them apart beyond a sense she could not describe. Augustine reports it without endorsing it and without mocking it.
5.2What the text says
Here is the passage, in plain English, with nothing added.
The woman he had been living with was torn from his side, as an obstacle to his marriage. His heart, which was stuck to hers, was cut and wounded and left a trail of blood.
She went back to Africa. She vowed to God that she would never know another man. She left their son with Augustine.
And then, because he could not wait two years for the bride, and because, as he says, he was not so much a lover of marriage as a slave of appetite, he got another woman. Not a wife. He says the wound made by the cutting away of the first one did not heal but festered, and grew colder, and more desperate.
That is the whole of it. It is four sentences in the original.
5.3What the text does not say
Now the absences, listed plainly, because they are the substance of this chapter.
Her name. Not here, not anywhere in anything Augustine wrote across a lifetime of enormous productivity.
Who did it. The verb is passive. She was torn from his side. The sentence has no agent. Monica arranged the marriage, and Augustine agreed to it, and the grammar of the sentence contains neither of them.
What she wanted. We are told she made a vow. We are not told whether she was consulted, whether she agreed, or whether she had anywhere to go.
What happened to her. She returns to Africa and leaves the record entirely. Whether she lived, where she went, whether she was supported, whether she ever saw her son again: none of it is in any source.
Their son. Adeodatus was about fourteen. He stayed with Augustine. Nothing is said about how that was decided or what it was like for either of them.
And one thing that is present and worth naming as present: Augustine records that he was in pain. The bleeding heart in that passage is his own. The woman’s grief, if she had any, is not described, and neither is the question of it.
5.4The one thing he does say about her
There is a sentence that critics of this passage sometimes miss and that defenders of it sometimes overstate, so here it is exactly.
Augustine says he could not even imitate a woman. He is comparing himself to her, unfavourably, on the specific point that she kept her vow of continence and he could not manage two years.
That is a real acknowledgement and it is genuinely to her credit in his own terms. It is also, read carefully, still about him. She appears in it as the standard he failed to meet, which is a role, not a portrait.
This passage has become the main site of modern argument about Augustine as a person. The positions below are all held by people who have read the whole corpus, and none of them is a caricature.
He describes himself as complicit and as culpable. He does not claim he resisted. He immediately took another woman, which he reports as evidence against himself. A man of thirty-one with a public position ended a thirteen-year union for financial and social advancement and got engaged to a child, and the passage is written by that man at forty-three specifically in order to say so. Reading this as an indictment is not imposing modern standards. It is agreeing with the author.
On this reading Augustine’s honesty stops precisely where it would cost him most. He can say he was a slave of lust, which is an accusation that flatters by making him a victim of his own appetite. What he cannot write is a sentence with himself as the subject and her as the object.
The grammar does the work: she was torn away, by nobody. And the namelessness across a lifetime is the same operation performed at scale.
The most sympathetic reading available notes the legal position. Part Three explained that their arrangement carried no legal standing whatever. He could not have married her; the social distance that made her a concubine rather than a wife was the same distance that barred the marriage. Ending such a union on engagement was the expected course, and everybody around him — his mother, his friends, his profession — was pushing. This does not make it right. It places the failure in a structure rather than solely in a man.
Where things stand: Nobody disputes the facts, because Augustine supplies all of them and supplies them against himself. What is disputed is what the shape of the telling shows: whether the passive voice and the missing name are evasion, decorum, or protection of a living woman.
What would settle it: Nothing will settle it, and the reason is worth stating exactly. The only person who could tell us what happened is the one person the record was built without. There is no source for her that does not pass through him.
Why people care so much: It matters because Augustine’s writing on sex, marriage and desire shaped Western thought for fifteen centuries, and this is the one place where we can see what he did rather than what he argued.
Before choosing between those, it is worth noticing something all three have in common, and which makes the whole argument stranger than it looks.
Every position in that box, including the harshest, is conducted entirely in evidence Augustine supplied. The prosecution uses his words. The defence uses his words. The verdict, whichever way it goes, is reached on a file assembled by the accused.
The shared assumption is that the passage gives us access to the event. It does not. It gives us access to one participant’s account of the event, written twelve years later, in a work of religious self-examination, about a woman who could not read it and would not have been asked.
This is not a complaint that Augustine is unreliable. It is a point about what is structurally unavailable. We do not know what she was told, what she was offered, what she said, or whether the word "vowed" describes a free act or the only description a returning woman could give of her situation.
And notice the effect: because the only voice is his, even the case against him is shaped by what he chose to include. His pain is in the passage, so his pain is in the argument. Hers is not in the passage, so it is not in the argument, and the discussion is about him either way.
The general form: mistaking the surviving account for the event.
I said in the front matter that I would neither excuse him nor prosecute him, and I have tried to hold that. But I will say one thing directly, because silence would be its own position. The most striking fact about this passage is not what Augustine did. Men in his position did it routinely. It is that a writer capable of describing his own grief for an unnamed friend across four pages of Book Four wrote four sentences here, and that in a work whose whole method is the pitiless examination of his own motives, this is the place where the examination stops.
A marriage was arranged for social and financial advantage. The girl was about two years under the legal minimum of twelve. She is not named either.
The woman Augustine had lived with for over a decade was torn from his side — the verb is passive and the sentence has no agent. She returned to Africa, vowed never to know another man, and left their son.
Unable to wait two years, he took another woman, and says the wound did not heal but festered.
What is absent: her name, who did it, whether she was consulted, what became of her, and any account of her grief. What is present: his pain.
Every argument about this passage, for and against him, is conducted entirely in evidence he supplied. There is no source for her that does not pass through him.
6Firminus, and the End of Astrology
Part Three left a debt: Augustine was given a good argument against astrology by a qualified man and kept his books anyway. Here is what finally worked, and it was not an argument.
6.1The story
Afriend called Firminus came to Augustine to have a horoscope read. Firminus was well educated, well born, and an enthusiastic consulter of astrologers without knowing much of the technical literature himself. Before Augustine gave an opinion, he asked Firminus what he thought, and Firminus told him a story about his own birth.
Firminus’s father had been deeply interested in astrology, and had a friend who was equally keen. The two of them tracked the birth of every creature in their households, right down to the animals, recording the exact moment so that the stars could be read.
When Firminus’s mother was pregnant, a household slave of the friend was pregnant at the same time. The two men prepared. When the labours began, each household sent word to the other, and each had messengers standing by to carry news of the actual birth the instant it happened.
The messengers met each other halfway. The two children had been born at the same moment, so exactly that no difference in the position of the stars could be found between them, down to the smallest points the astrologers used.
Firminus was born into a leading family. He went on to wealth and public honours. The other child was born a slave, and remained a slave, and Firminus knew him and could report it.
6.2Why this destroyed it
The argument is short. Two people with identical charts had opposite lives. If the chart determines the life, that cannot happen. It happened.
Augustine says his resistance dissolved. And then he did the thing that shows he had actually understood it rather than merely been struck by it: he turned the case around on Firminus, who was still a believer.
If he read Firminus’s chart, he said, he would have to see in it distinguished parents, a noble house, a good birth, a proper education. And if the slave had come to him with the same chart, he would have to read out of it the lowness of his birth, his servile condition, and everything else opposite. From identical data he would have to produce contradictory readings, and if he produced the same reading he would be wrong about one of them.
Augustine adds the further case, which he pressed elsewhere for the rest of his life: twins. Children born minutes apart, sharing effectively the same sky, whose lives go entirely differently. If the sky determines the life, twins should be indistinguishable in fortune, and they are not.
What Augustine has here is what a modern researcher would call a natural control.
Two subjects, one variable held identical, everything else different. The astrologer’s claim is that the identical variable is the cause. If it were, the outcomes would match. They are opposite.
It is not a sophisticated experiment and it did not need to be. The whole system made a prediction it could not survive, and one household with an unusually obsessive father happened to have run the test by accident.
6.3Why this worked when Vindicianus had not
And now the point that makes this chapter worth a chapter.
Part Three covered the earlier attempt. Vindicianus, a proconsul and a physician who had studied astrology himself and had considered making a living from it, told Augustine the successes were chance, and gave him a good explanation of why: scatter enough vague statements over a life and some will land. Nebridius argued the same. Augustine kept his books.
Vindicianus gave him the better argument. Vindicianus explained the mechanism, which is the thing that actually generalises. Firminus gave him one anecdote about two babies.
The anecdote worked and the explanation had not.
Augustine notices part of this. He says explicitly that he was persuaded because of the reliability of the person telling him. Not because of the strength of the reasoning: because he trusted Firminus.
That is the fourth time in this series that Augustine has described a belief moving for a social reason while narrating it as a movement of the mind. Part Two noted it about how he joined the Manichees. Part Three noted it about how he left them, and about his mother giving up her custom for Ambrose. Here it is again, and this time he says the quiet part himself and then continues as though he had not.
The Firminus story is a chain: two fathers observed the births, Firminus was told about it by his father, Firminus told Augustine, and Augustine wrote it down roughly twelve years later.
Every link is a report. Nobody in the chain is checkable, including the crucial claim that the births were simultaneous, which rests on two enthusiasts timing an event they wanted to be simultaneous.
What this supports: that Augustine was told this and found it decisive. That much is solid, because it is his own experience.
What it cannot support: that it happened. And it is worth noticing that the story is exactly as vulnerable to Vindicianus’s objection as any horoscope is. A striking coincidence, reported by an interested party, with no way to check the measurement.
Some scholars have thought the whole Firminus passage sits oddly in Book Seven and have wondered whether it was inserted later. It is the only narrative interruption in an otherwise dense stretch of philosophy.
None of which affects whether astrology is true. It is not, and Augustine was right. What it affects is the account of how he came to think so, which is the thing this book is actually about.
Two children were born at the same instant, timed by two obsessive fathers: Firminus into a leading family, and a slave’s child into slavery. Their lives went opposite ways.
The argument: identical charts, opposite outcomes. Augustine turned it on Firminus by pointing out he would have to read contradictory futures from the same data. He added the case of twins, which he used for the rest of his life.
This worked. Vindicianus’s better argument had not. The proconsul had explained the mechanism; Firminus told an anecdote.
Augustine says outright that he was persuaded by the reliability of the person telling him. That is the fourth time in this series he has described a belief moving socially while narrating it as reasoning.
The story is itself unverifiable and as vulnerable to coincidence as the horoscopes it refuted. Astrology is still false. The account of how he came to think so is the interesting part.
7The Obstacle
Augustine could not imagine anything real that was not made of stuff. Until that went, the question he had spent a decade on could not even be asked properly, let alone answered.
7.1The sponge in the sea
Book Seven opens with Augustine describing what he actually pictured when he thought about God, and he is unsparing about it. He had stopped imagining God in the shape of a human body. That much Ambrose had given him. But he still could not conceive of anything that existed except as a body of some kind.
So he imagined God as an enormous bright substance, infinite in every direction, seeping through everything that exists the way light or air would.
And then he gives the image he had settled on, which is his own and is very good. Imagine the whole of creation as a sponge, large but finite, floating in a sea that goes on forever. The sea is God. It fills the sponge completely, soaks every part of it, and extends infinitely beyond it in all directions.
The image is not stupid and it is worth taking seriously for a moment, because it does a great deal of what it needs to.
God is everywhere: the sponge has sea in every pore. God is greater than creation: the sea is infinite and the sponge is not. God is not a thing among things: the sponge is in the sea, not beside it. Creation depends on God completely and God does not depend on creation.
It gets three or four hard things right. The problem is not that the picture is crude. The problem is what it forces to be true next.
7.2Why the picture made the question unanswerable
Here is the trap, and it is worth going slowly because everything in the next two chapters depends on seeing it.
If everything that exists is made of some kind of stuff, then evil, if it exists at all, is made of some kind of stuff.
Now ask where that stuff came from. Two answers are available and both are catastrophic.
Either God made it. In which case God made evil, and is the author of it, and is not good.
Or God did not make it. In which case there is something that exists and does not come from God, so God is not the source of everything, and there are two ultimate powers. That is Manichaeism, which he has just left.
There is no third option as long as the assumption holds. Augustine had been going round this loop for years. He describes himself as tormented by it, swollen up and shut in, driven by the question and unable to move.
And notice what has actually gone wrong. It is not that he lacks information. It is not that he is reasoning badly; the loop is valid. He is trapped by a premise he does not know he is holding.
Augustine’s premise is that anything which genuinely exists must occupy space, be made of something, and be located. He did not adopt this after consideration. He says he could not conceive otherwise, which is the mark of an assumption rather than a belief: it is not a position he holds, it is the shape of the room he is thinking in.
It is also, and this is the part worth sitting with, an extremely natural assumption. Everything anybody has ever bumped into is made of stuff. The demand that a real thing be somewhere is not superstition; it is the generalisation of every encounter a person has ever had.
What breaks the loop in Book Seven is not new evidence about God or about evil. It is somebody handing him a way to think about things that are real without being anywhere. Once that is available, the two catastrophic options stop being the only two, and a question that had been unanswerable for a decade becomes answerable in about a page.
The lesson is general and it is why this box is here rather than in the chapter on the answer. A problem that resists every attempt for years is often not a hard problem. It is a problem being asked inside a premise that makes it insoluble, and the work is finding the premise, not finding the answer.
The general form: mistaking the limits of what you can picture for the limits of what there is.
7.3Nebridius’s question
Before the solution arrives, Augustine records an argument that had already destroyed the Manichee answer for him, and it is worth having because it is clean.
Nebridius had asked, years earlier: what would the race of darkness have done to God, if God had simply refused to fight?
Work it through. The Manichee story is that the powers of Darkness attacked the realm of Light, and that God sent part of himself into the struggle, and that this is how Light got trapped in matter. So ask what the alternative was.
If Darkness could have harmed God, then God is damageable, and a damageable God is not what anybody means by God.
If Darkness could not have harmed God, then there was no reason to fight, and the entire story collapses. Everything that follows from it, including the trapped Light and the whole apparatus of salvation, is unnecessary.
Either way the myth fails. Augustine calls this argument enough on its own to have finished the Manichees, and says so.
But note what it does not do. It removes an answer. It does not supply one. Augustine is now out of the loop he was in and still inside the larger one, with the question intact and nothing to say to it.
7.4What he had already worked out
Two pieces were in place before the breakthrough, and they matter for what comes.
He had concluded that the will is free. He says he had come to see that his own will was the reason he did wrong, and that this was as certain to him as his own existence. When he acted against what he judged best, he did it. Nobody else did it in him. That is a direct rejection of the Manichee comfort described in Part Two, where his wrongdoing belonged to a foreign substance.
And he could not make it fit. Because if his will was made by a good God, how did it come to move the wrong way? Every time he tried to explain the bad will he found himself needing something behind it, and then something behind that.
So the position at the end of Chapter Seven is precise. He has lost the Manichee answer. He has accepted responsibility. He cannot explain how responsibility is possible. And he cannot think about any of it except in terms of stuff.
Augustine pictured God as an infinite sea with creation as a sponge floating in it, soaked through. The image gets several hard things right.
The trap: if everything real is made of stuff, then evil is made of stuff, and either God made it (so God is not good) or God did not (so there are two powers, which is Manichaeism). There is no third option while the premise holds.
Nebridius’s question had already destroyed the Manichee story: if Darkness could harm God, God is damageable; if it could not, there was no reason to fight. Either way it collapses. But that removes an answer without supplying one.
He had already concluded that his own will was the cause of his wrongdoing, and could not explain how a will made by a good God moves the wrong way.
He was not short of information and he was not reasoning badly. He was trapped by a premise he did not know he was holding: that to be real is to be somewhere.
8The Books of the Platonists
Somebody handed him some books. Augustine says they contained almost everything, and lacked one thing. Which books they were is still argued about.
8.1What he was given, and by whom
Augustine records it in a single loaded sentence. God procured for him, through a man swollen with monstrous pride, certain books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin.
That is all we get. The man is not named. The books are not named. Both silences have produced a great deal of scholarship.
The Platonists (Neoplatonism): the philosophical tradition descending from Plato as it existed in the third and fourth centuries. Its central figure was Plotinus (about 205 to 270), whose writings were collected by his pupil Porphyry into a work called the Enneads.
What they taught, in outline: reality descends in levels from a single ultimate source. The source is not a body, is not in space, has no parts, and is beyond description. Below it is Mind, which is where the eternal realities are. Below that is Soul. Below that is the physical world. The way back up is inward: the soul turns away from the senses, into itself, and through itself towards the source.
Why it matters: that is a complete, worked-out account of things that are real without being made of anything. It is exactly the tool Augustine was missing.
The translator was almost certainly Marius Victorinus, a distinguished Roman rhetorician who had turned Greek philosophy into Latin and who had himself converted to Christianity late in life. Augustine will tell Victorinus’s story at length in Book Eight, and that is where the identification comes from.
8.2What he found in them
Augustine describes what he read by quoting the opening of John’s gospel and saying, in effect: this was in there. Not in these words, he is careful to add, but this in substance, and supported by many kinds of argument.
What was in there, on his account: that there is an eternal source; that from it comes a Word or Mind through which everything else exists; that this is not a body; that the soul is not the light but bears witness to the light; that the human mind can turn towards it.
That is a startling thing for a Christian bishop to write, and Augustine knew it. He is saying that a substantial part of the highest Christian theology was already present in pagan philosophy, arrived at by argument, without revelation.
8.3The turn inward, and upward
And then something happened, and Augustine describes it in the first person and in the past tense as an event.
Warned by the books to return into himself, he entered into his own inmost parts. And there, he says, he saw a light. Not the ordinary light that everyone sees, and not a larger version of it. Something else entirely, above his mind, because it had made his mind.
He says he trembled with love and with dread. He says he heard, as if from a height, the words: I am the food of the fully grown. Grow, and you will feed on me. And you will not change me into yourself the way you change ordinary food into your body. You will be changed into me.
Later in the book he describes a second attempt, in more careful language: a step-by-step ascent from bodies, to the soul that perceives them, to the reasoning power, and beyond it to what simply is. And it arrived, he says, in the flash of one trembling glance. And he could not hold it. He was dragged back down by his own habits.
That is the pattern of Book Seven and it is the whole difference between Book Seven and Book Eight, which is Part Five of this series. He saw. He could not stay. Knowing the answer turned out not to be the same as being able to live in it, which is the thing the rest of the work is about.
8.4The one thing that was not there
Then Augustine lists what he did not find, and the list is the point of the chapter.
He did not read there that the Word became flesh and lived among us. He did not read that he came to his own and his own did not receive him. He did not read that he emptied himself and took the form of a servant and was obedient to death.
In other words: the Platonists had the destination and no road. They could describe the country and could not tell him how to get there, and worse, they made the getting there a matter of intellectual ascent, available to the clever and the disciplined.
Augustine’s complaint is that he had tried that and it had not held. He says he was not yet humble enough to hold Christ, and that he had been chattering as though he were expert while actually being unable to sustain what he had glimpsed for more than a moment.
And he records the order, and says the order was providential. He read the Platonists first and Paul afterwards. If he had read Paul first, he says, he might have thought that the philosophers had everything and the scriptures added nothing.
Two connected disputes run through the scholarship on this passage, and the second is much larger than the first.
The traditional identification is the Enneads of Plotinus, in Victorinus’s translation, and the verbal echoes in Book Seven are strong. On this reading Augustine used Platonism as a set of tools — an account of immaterial reality, the inward turn, evil as privation — and put them at the service of a Christianity he had never actually left, since he had been a catechumen since infancy and never abandoned the name of Christ. His own list of what was missing is the decisive evidence: he tells you what the tools could not do.
A major twentieth-century line of scholarship, associated above all with Pierre Courcelle, argued that Porphyry — Plotinus’s pupil, editor, and a fierce critic of Christianity — was as important or more so, and that the Milan circle around Ambrose was steeped in a specific Platonism whose fingerprints are all over Book Seven. On this view the tidy story of Plotinus plus scripture is too simple, and Augustine is deliberately vague about his sources.
The strongest version of the sceptical case looks past the books to the year. The works Augustine actually wrote immediately after this, at a country retreat, read like the productions of a Platonising philosopher, not of a man who has undergone the crisis described in Book Eight. On this reading Confessions, written a decade later, projects a Christian conversion back onto what was at the time a philosophical one, and it was later immersion in church life and in Paul that made him the Augustine we have.
Where things stand: That the debt is large is agreed by everyone, including Augustine. The identification of the specific texts is genuinely unresolved: the echoes fit Plotinus well, some fit Porphyry, and Augustine names nothing. The third position was fiercely argued through the middle of the twentieth century, and while few now hold its strongest form, it permanently changed how the 386 material is read.
What would settle it: Real evidence has been brought to bear here and can be again: close comparison of Augustine’s Latin with the surviving Greek, and with what survives of Victorinus. That work has narrowed the question without closing it. The limiting factor is that Augustine wrote from memory, a decade later, in his own idiom.
Why people care so much: It matters because it decides whether the central figure of Western Christian thought reached his central positions by revelation, by philosophy, or by a combination he was not fully candid about. People with strong commitments in that area tend to have strong views here.
I will say where I stand, since it affects the next chapter. I think the first position is closest to right about the philosophy and that the third is more valuable than its conclusions: it forced everyone to read the 386 material against the works Augustine actually wrote that year, which is exactly the kind of check this series keeps asking for.
An unnamed man gave him books of the Platonists, translated into Latin almost certainly by Marius Victorinus. Neither the man nor the books are named.
What the Platonists supplied: a complete account of things that are real without being made of anything, and a route back to them that runs inward rather than outward. Exactly the tool he was missing.
He turned inward and saw a light above his mind, and heard that he would not change it into himself as with food, but would be changed into it. It came in a flash and he could not hold it.
What was not there: the Word made flesh, and a God who took the form of a servant. The Platonists had the destination and no road, and made arrival a matter of being clever enough. Which books, and how much he owed them, is genuinely unresolved. He read the Platonists first and Paul second, and says that order was providential.
9Where Evil Comes From
This is the centre of the entire work. Augustine has been asking the question for more than a decade. The answer takes about a page, and it has been argued about ever since.
9.1The question, one more time
If God is entirely good, and entirely powerful, and made everything that exists, then where did evil come from? God cannot have made it, because God is good. Nothing exists that God did not make. So evil either does not exist, which is absurd, or it came from somewhere else, which means God is not the source of everything.
The last chapter showed why Augustine could not get out of this. He assumed that to be real is to be made of something, so evil had to be a stuff, and a stuff has to have a maker.
The Platonists removed the assumption. What follows is what he could see once it was gone.
9.2First move: everything that exists is good
Augustine starts somewhere that sounds like a pious platitude and is actually the whole argument in compressed form.
Everything that exists is good, precisely insofar as it exists.
His reasoning: God is good and God made everything. A good maker does not produce something bad in its very being. So every thing, considered simply as a thing that is, is good. There is no exception, because there is nothing that God did not make.
Notice what this immediately gets him. If everything that exists is good, then evil cannot be a thing that exists. Not because evil is unreal or unimportant, but because being a thing and being good have turned out to be the same property looked at from two angles.
9.3Second move: then what is evil?
The answer is that evil is not a substance. It is a lack. It is the absence of a good that ought to be present in a thing.
Privation: the technical term for this. A privation is not merely an absence; it is an absence in something that should have had the thing. A stone is not blind, because a stone was never going to see. An eye that cannot see is blind, because seeing is what an eye is for.
Why it matters: this distinction does all the work. If evil were merely "absence", then everything would be infinitely evil, since everything lacks countless properties. Evil is a specific kind of absence: a missing good in a thing that is the kind of thing which ought to have it.
Augustine’s way of testing it is corruption. Ask what it means for something to go bad.
A thing that is corrupted has lost some good it had. Rust is not something added to iron; it is iron losing its integrity. A wound is not a substance; it is flesh missing what it should have. Illness is not a thing in the body; it is the body’s functioning falling away.
And then the test that clinches it for him. If corruption could continue without limit, and take away all the good in a thing, what would be left? Nothing at all. The thing would cease to exist entirely.
So corruption cannot be a substance, because a substance that consumed itself completely would leave a residue, and this leaves nothing. Corruption is the draining away of being, and where being is entirely gone the thing is gone with it.
The clearest way to hold this is a hole.
A hole is real. You can fall into one. You can measure it, photograph it, and be killed by it. But a hole is not made of anything, and you cannot have a jar of hole. It is a specific absence in something that is made of something.
Nobody asks what factory produces holes, or worries that the existence of holes proves there is an anti-manufacturer working against the road builders. The question does not arise, because a hole is not that kind of item.
Augustine’s claim is that evil is that kind of item, and that the entire problem of where it came from arose from treating it as the other kind.
9.4Third move: then what is a bad will?
This is where the argument earns its keep, because a rusting nail is one thing and a person choosing to do harm is another.
Augustine’s answer is the formula this series has been quoting since Part One, and here at last is the full version of it.
A bad will is not a will aimed at something bad, because there is nothing bad to aim at. Everything that exists is good. A bad will is a will that has turned away from the highest good towards a lower one, and given the lower one the place that belonged to the higher.
Nothing in that account is evil considered by itself. Money is good. Food is good. Another person’s body is good. Your own life is good. What is wrong is a relation: the order in which those goods are being wanted.
So evil is a privation in the will, in exactly the sense of the word box above. The will was made to be aimed at the highest thing. It is not. That missing orientation is not a substance that got in. It is a good that is not there.
Now go back to the pear theft in Part Two and see what it becomes. Augustine said his theft was a counterfeit of freedom: a real good, badly imitated. He wrote that with this doctrine in hand. And go back to the grief in Part Three: a real good, his friend, given a place that could not hold it. Both episodes are this chapter, told in advance as stories.
9.5What the argument achieves
Set out plainly, it does four things.
God is not the author of evil, because evil is not a thing to be authored.
There is no second power, because there is nothing for it to be made of. Manichaeism is not refuted by argument here; it is dissolved, because the thing it was invented to explain turns out not to need explaining in that way.
Responsibility lands on the will, which is where Augustine had already concluded it belonged.
Nothing has to be called bad. This matters more than it looks. Augustine spends the rest of his life insisting that bodies are good, that matter is good, that marriage is good, that the world is good. Every one of those positions is this argument being applied.
9.6The objections that will not go away
And now the difficulties, because they are real and the passage is often presented as though it settled everything.
This is one of the most consequential arguments in the history of Western thought, and it has been under attack for most of that history. Here are the strongest versions of the main objections and of the replies.
The account works reasonably for wrongdoing, which can plausibly be described as a lack of right ordering. It works badly for pain. A person in agony is not experiencing an absence. Agony is a presence, vivid and specific, and describing a burn as "a privation of bodily integrity" is a redescription that leaves out the entire content of the thing being described. If the theory has to call the worst experiences human beings have "not really anything", something has gone wrong with the theory rather than with the experiences.
Grant that evil is a privation. The question then becomes why a good and all-powerful God permits privations, and that question is exactly as hard as the one we started with. Nothing has been answered; a noun has been changed into a noun phrase. And on the specific case of the will, the account has a hole Augustine himself circles: if the will was made good by God, what made it turn? Either something caused the turn, in which case the cause needs explaining, or nothing did, in which case it is unintelligible.
The reply is that the objections misidentify the target. Augustine is not explaining why suffering happens or making anybody feel better about it. He is answering one specific question: what kind of item is evil, and does its existence force us to posit a second ultimate power? On that question the argument works and has never been bettered. As for the will, Augustine agrees it is unintelligible, and says so: he argues that a bad will has no efficient cause and that looking for one is like trying to see darkness. That is not evasion. It is the claim that a defect, by definition, does not have a positive explanation.
Where things stand: Almost nobody now thinks privation is a complete theodicy, and Augustine did not claim it was. Most current opinion is that it succeeds as an account of the metaphysical status of evil and fails as an account of why suffering is permitted, and that these were always two questions. The objection about pain has real force and continues to be pressed.
What would settle it: Nothing empirical will settle it, because it is a dispute about what kind of thing evil is and what counts as an explanation. What could shift it, and has, is sustained work on whether the will’s turn can be made intelligible without either determinism or randomness. That work is ongoing and is not close to finished.
Why people care so much: The stakes are as large as they get. This argument is the reason Western Christianity is not dualist, the reason the material world is not treated as evil in that tradition, and the background to every subsequent Western attempt to reconcile a good God with a world containing children’s hospitals.
There is one further move Augustine makes here that I want to flag rather than defend, because it is the weakest thing in the chapter and it is usually skipped by his admirers.
He argues that things which look evil in isolation fit into the whole, the way a dark patch in a picture contributes to the composition, and that if we could see the whole we would find it good. This is sometimes called the aesthetic defence.
It is, on the face of it, a very bad argument about the suffering of individuals, and it has been criticised as such continuously. A person is not a brushstroke, and telling somebody their agony contributes to the composition is not obviously distinguishable from telling them it does not count. Augustine holds it anyway and returns to it in later works.
Both the question Augustine spent a decade on and the Manichee answer that satisfied him for nine years share a premise: that to explain evil is to identify the stuff it consists of and trace where the stuff came from.
That premise is what generated the problem in the first place. It is also the premise the privation account attacks, and this is why the argument feels either like a revelation or like a cheat depending on which side of it you are standing.
From inside the premise, saying evil is a privation looks like refusing to answer. You asked what it is and were told what it is not. From outside, the question was malformed and the correct response to a malformed question is to show why it cannot be answered as posed.
Notice that this is the same operation as the boxes in Chapter Seven and in Part Two on the pear theft. Three times now, a question that resisted every attempt has turned out to be a question with a bad premise inside it. That is not a coincidence about Augustine. It is what philosophical progress usually looks like, and it is why it so often feels unsatisfying at the moment it happens.
The general form: demanding that every real thing be a kind of stuff.
Which does not decide whether Augustine is right. It explains why the argument in the box above has run for sixteen centuries without either side feeling that the other has engaged with them.
9.7Then he read Paul
Book Seven does not end with the argument. It ends with Augustine picking up the letters of Paul, and the last pages are about what he found there that the Platonists had not given him.
He expected to find contradictions. Instead he found, he says, that everything true he had read in the philosophers was said here too, and said with something added.
What was added, on his account, was the diagnosis of his own condition. The Platonists had shown him the country. Paul told him why he could not walk there: that he could see the better and want it and still find another law in himself pulling the other way, and that no amount of seeing would fix it.
That is the exact experience Chapter Eight described — the glimpse he could not hold — turned into a diagnosis. It is also, in advance, the entire subject of Book Eight, which is Part Five of this series.
One further detail belongs here because it is a useful corrective to any impression that Augustine was now sorted out. At this stage he did not understand what Christians actually claimed about Christ. He thought of him as a man of surpassing wisdom, unmatched but not more than that. And Alypius, his closest friend, was under the impression that the Catholic position was that Christ had a human body without a human mind, and could not accept it for that reason. Both of them were arguing with a version of the doctrine that nobody held.
That is the second time in this part that Augustine reports rejecting a position nobody was defending, and he flags it as such. Chapter Four had him ashamed of barking for nine years at a figment. Here he and Alypius are doing it again, in a different direction, at the point where they are supposedly closing in on the truth.
Move one: everything that exists is good, insofar as it exists, because a good God made everything. So evil cannot be a thing that exists.
Move two: evil is a privation — a missing good in something that ought to have had it. Corruption drains being away, and a thing drained completely would not exist at all, so corruption is not a substance. A hole is real and is not made of anything.
Move three: a bad will is not aimed at something bad, because there is nothing bad to aim at. It is a will that has given a lower good the place belonging to a higher one. The fault is in the order, not the objects.
What it achieves: God is not the author of evil, there is no second power, responsibility lands on the will, and nothing has to be called bad — not bodies, not matter, not the world.
The objections that stand: it handles wrongdoing far better than it handles pain, and it relocates rather than answers the question of why a good God permits privations. Augustine’s further claim that evils fit the beauty of the whole is the weakest thing in Book Seven.
He saw all of this. He could not live in it. That gap is Book Eight.
10An Honest List of What We Do Not Know
Two lists, with reasons. And a note on the difference between a gap in the record and a decision by an author, because this part has both and they are not the same thing.
10.1Genuinely unknown
Which books of the Platonists he read. Why unknown: he does not say. The echoes fit Plotinus well and some fit Porphyry, and he was writing from memory a decade later in his own idiom. Close comparison of the Latin with the surviving Greek has narrowed this without closing it.
Who gave them to him. Described only as a man swollen with pride. Why unknown: Augustine withheld the name, and the description is an insult, which suggests the withholding was deliberate rather than a lapse.
Whether the experience described in Book Seven happened as an experience. Why unknown: he reports an event in the first person. Whether that reports something that occurred in 386 or presents a philosophical position in narrative form cannot be determined from the text, and the works he wrote later that same year read rather differently.
What became of the woman he sent away. Why unknown: there is no source for her that does not pass through Augustine, and he wrote four sentences.
The fiancée’s name, family, or fate. Why unknown: the same. The engagement is broken in Book Eight and she leaves the record entirely.
Whether the Firminus story is true. Why unknown: a chain of reports with no checkable link, resting on two enthusiasts timing an event they wanted to be simultaneous.
What surprised Augustine about Ambrose reading. Why unknown: he offers three guesses and none is confirmable, and the traditional answer has been substantially undermined.
10.2Solid
The chronology. Monica arrives in Milan 385. The marriage arranged and the woman sent away 385. The Platonist books and the Firminus story 386. Why solid: internally consistent and anchored by the Milan appointment and by Ambrose’s episcopate.
That Ambrose was bishop of Milan and a major political force. Why solid: Ambrose is one of the best-documented figures of the century, with a large surviving body of letters, sermons and treatises, and his confrontations with the imperial court are attested from several directions.
That African Christians held meals at martyrs’ shrines and that bishops moved against the practice. Why solid: attested widely in the period, including in Augustine’s own later letters where he deals with it as a bishop himself.
That the gladiatorial games were still running and were in decline. Why solid: legal restrictions on them survive, and the general trajectory is documented independently.
That the legal minimum age of marriage for girls was twelve, and that betrothal before it was ordinary. Why solid: Roman law on this is explicit and survives, and the practice is attested across many families.
That concubinage was a recognised arrangement with no legal standing for the woman. Why solid: documented in Roman legal sources independently of Augustine entirely.
That Marius Victorinus translated Platonist works into Latin and converted to Christianity. Why solid: Victorinus is independently attested, some of his own writing survives, and a public statue of him is recorded.
That the privation account of evil is Augustine’s and became the standard Western position. Why solid: it is set out at length in many of his works and its reception is traceable through a thousand years of subsequent writing.
10.3A gap and a decision are not the same thing
One closing distinction, because this part contains both kinds and confusing them produces bad readings in opposite directions.
A gap is where nobody wrote anything down. We do not know what happened to most people who lived in the fourth century, and nothing follows from that about anybody’s intentions. That is the situation with, for instance, the exact identity of the Platonist texts: Augustine had no reason to be precise and every reason to be brief.
A decision is where an author who could have written something did not. The woman has no name. The fiancée has no name. The friend in Book Four had no name. The man who supplied the books that changed his life has no name, and gets an insult instead. That is four, in a work of enormous length by a writer who names doctors, officials, and men he never met. The distinction matters because the two invite different responses. A gap invites patience and better evidence. A decision invites the question of why, and that question is legitimate, and asking it is not the same as accusing anybody of anything.
I do not know why. I have not found an explanation that covers all four cases, and I am suspicious of the ones that cover two. What I am confident of is that it is a pattern, that a pattern in a text this controlled is authorial, and that noticing it is part of reading the book properly rather than a modern grievance imported into it.
We do not know which Platonist books he read, who gave them to him, whether the Book Seven experience happened as an experience, what became of the woman or the fiancée, or whether the Firminus story is true.
We do know the chronology, that Ambrose and Victorinus are independently attested with surviving writings, that the martyrs’ shrine meals and the games and the marriage law are all documented outside Augustine, and that the privation account is his and became the Western standard.
A gap is where nobody wrote anything down. A decision is where an author who could have written something did not. This part contains both and they are not the same.
Four people who mattered are unnamed: the dead friend, the woman, the fiancée, and the man who gave him the books. In a work this controlled, that is authorial. I have not found an explanation that covers all four.
Timeline
This part is better anchored than the previous ones, because several of the people in it are independently documented. Where a date is uncertain, it says so.
| Date | Event | Where it appears |
|---|---|---|
| 384 | Augustine takes the public chair of rhetoric at Milan and meets Ambrose. | Book V |
| 385 | Monica crosses to Milan. She finds him neither Manichee nor Catholic, and is calm about it. | Book VI |
| 385 | She gives up the African custom of meals at the martyrs’ shrines because Ambrose has forbidden it. | Book VI |
| 385 | Augustine watches Ambrose reading in silence, and cannot get the private conversation he wants. | Book VI |
| 385 | The panegyric for the emperor, and the drunk beggar in the street. | Book VI |
| recalled | Alypius: the chariot races at Carthage, the arrest in Rome, the refused bribe, and the gladiatorial games. Undated in the text. | Book VI |
| 385 | Nebridius leaves his estate near Carthage and comes to Milan to join the search. | Book VI |
| 385 | A marriage is arranged. The girl is about two years under the legal minimum of twelve. | Book VI |
| 385 | The woman Augustine has lived with for over a decade is sent back to Africa. She leaves their son with him. He takes another woman. | Book VI |
| 385 | The plan for ten friends to withdraw and live in common collapses over the question of wives. | Book VI |
| 386 | Firminus tells the story of the two births. Augustine abandons astrology for good. | Book VII |
| 386 | An unnamed man gives him books of the Platonists in Latin translation, almost certainly by Marius Victorinus. | Book VII |
| 386 | The turn inward, and the light above his mind, glimpsed and not held. | Book VII |
| 386 | The answer: evil is not a substance but a privation. He then reads Paul. | Book VII |
| — | Part Five starts here: Book VIII — the garden in Milan, and the difference between seeing an answer and being able to live in it. | — |
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 is the best-anchored part of the series so far. Ambrose, Victorinus, Plotinus and Porphyry all left writings that survive, so Augustine’s reports about them can be tested against the sources rather than merely believed. Roman marriage law, concubinage, the games and the shrine meals are all documented independently.
What it is bad at here: the two most consequential passages in this part are the least checkable. The sending away of the woman rests on four sentences by the man who did it, and the vision in Book Seven rests on a first-person report written a decade later. Where a claim in this document rests only on Augustine’s account of himself, I have tried to say so in the text.
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. This applies with particular force to Chapter Five, where the precise wording carries a great deal of the argument and every translator has made choices.
Corrections are welcome and will be acted on. Later editions will record what was changed and who caught it.
What Comes Next
Part Five covers Book Eight, on its own, because it is the most famous chapter of the most famous religious autobiography ever written and it deserves the room. It runs about two months in 386. These are the questions it takes on.
- Augustine now knows the answer. Why can he not act on it, and what exactly is stopping him?
- What does he mean when he says he had two wills, and that neither was fully his?
- Why does a book about one man’s conversion contain three other people’s conversion stories first?
- Who was Victorinus, the old professor who translated the books that changed Augustine’s life, and why is his story told at such length?
- What is the most quoted prayer in the book — "give me chastity, but not yet" — actually asking for?
- What happened in the garden, what was the voice, and what did he read?
- And the question that decides how you read the entire work: did it happen the way he says it did?
That last one is not a hostile question and this series will not treat it as one. It is the central scholarly dispute about Confessions, it has been running for a century, and both sides are held by serious people.