Writing a Spiritual Autobiography : Augustine’s Confessions

It is often said that Plato and Aristotle are the two mountains whose shadow fell on the Western world. But mountains are alive, they grow and decay, and new competitors flirt with their heights. Augustine is one such, truly a peak stemming out of two tectonic plates. Like the Greeks, he inspects every corner, every minute detail of his being. With Augustine, in the fourth century AD, philosophy is already existential : it takes not a single thing of life for granted, and he insists for the human subject to face and tackle his greatest challenges. But like with the early Christians, this seeking is addressed to one sole interlocutor, one apex : God. And there too, centuries before modern literature, Augustine’s voice is already highly reflexive and ‘meta’. In this self-conscious memoir, Augustine prays God to learn how to pray, imploring Him to reveal His divine presence to his sceptic mind. Purity of intent : Augustine, the thinker of the will, sings the praise of this power within, this solid orientation of the mind and heart, which starts to change reality even before it enters the outer world.

In the Confessions, Augustine recounts, in the first person, the story of his life, with the accessibility of a diary and the depth of a prayer. He meditates on education, politics, friendship, religion, sexuality, ambition, curiosity and distraction, and many other themes, through select scenes of his experience, from childhood up to his conversion to Christianity at age 31. Augustine revisits his life – and reflects on the exercise itself, what writing permits, and how best to live with one’s past, between both extremes of shame and nostalgia. This long story invokes also that of his worldly trajectory in the Christian Church, and the turning point to would be the death of his mother, Monica. The book closes with a sumptuously creative commentary on memory and time in the initial sections of the Genesis.

A close reading of the Confessions would thus highlight at once one of the first autobiographies in a literary style, the elaboration of philosophical responses to Plato and Plotinus (Neo-Platonism), and the retelling of a journey towards God. Augustine, through these Confessions, is thus today, and always, a major source of inspiration to return to, for our contemporary intellectual, literary and existential quests.