Augustine is quite conscious and upfront about the newness of what he is doing in the Confessions. Like an eighteenth-century novelist, he spends significant space telling readers how to read and understand what he is writing. The opening sections of Book X make this explicit and lay out “the spirit that I ask to be listened to” (X iv 6). He is very clearly redirecting his reader from a prurient interest in the sexual exploits of his earlier life, but he is doing more than that. He is asking his readers to take his Confessions as an example for their own Christian conversion. As such, the Confessions are a new way of thinking about and enacting salvation — one that does not rely on one-time rituals like baptism or simply professing a belief in Jesus Christ as the only son of a monotheistic God. This new method of conversion is driven by storytelling, specifically the narration of conversion experiences of others that are designed to land home in the reader and inspire his or her own conversion. 

Not only does Augustine tell us this, he structures the narrative as a set of stories that link the storyteller and the hearer/reader in a chain of shared emotions. One’s own conversion and salvation occurs by hearing about others and letting their stories become an inspiration to seek one’s own conversion. 

The critical Book VIII is a nesting of stories of conversion within Augustine’s own story. In the interlocking stories, the presence of books (the epistles of Paul and the Life of Antony and even Cicero’s Hortensius) and the act of reading drives the action of Book VIII. This is critical for Augustine’s practice of “confession” as Christian conversion. 

Book VIII can be read in three parts: 

1. The conversion story of Victorinus

2. The conversion story of Ponticianus’s acquaintances in the garden of a monastery outside Milan

3. Augustine’s own conversion

Each of the first two stories contains an act of reading that transforms the reader. Victorinus — who “had read and assessed many philosophers’ ideas , and was tutor to many noble senators” — reads scripture and is converted from a pagan to a Christian by the act of reading: “after his reading, he began to feel a longing and drank in courage” (VIII ii 4). We are told that he is “extremely learned and most expert in the liberal disciplines,” but his reading of scripture is transformative in a way that the canonical works of a liberal education cannot be. 

Hearing Victorinus’s story from Simplicianus, Augustine is similarly moved: “As soon as your servant Simplicianus told me this story about Victorinus, I was ardent to follow his example” (VIII iv 9). But Augustine’s ardency is not matched by the power of his “will,” and he is compelled to explain why. At this point, he embarks on one of his most sophisticated transformations of Stoic moral psychology by elaborating on the nature of human will, habit (consuetudo), choice and responsibility. At the end of this section (which will be picked up again before his conversion in the Milanese garden and again in Book X), Stoic moral psychology is fully transformed by these far more sophisticated concepts. 

Augustine is clear when he says, “I was ardent to follow [Victorinus’s] example” that he sees this as a moment of Stoic “notional assent,” which is intellectual in nature but not emotional enough to drive the breaking of old habits. Consuetudo (habit) is in fact the real problem holding Augustine back from conversion: 

The law of sin is the violence of habit by which even the unwilling mind is dragged down and held, as it deserves to be, since by its own choice it slipped into the habit. ‘Wretched man that I was, who would deliver me from this body of death other than your grace through Jesus Christ our Lord?’ (Rom. 7: 24-5) (VIII v 12)

Habit, will, choice and grace are the conceptual scaffolding that allows Augustine to structure the Confessions as a personal narrative of salvation. Conversion and salvation are not struggles of good and evil (as with the Manichees). Victorinus is not evil and suddenly chooses good. His reading of scripture leads to a turning away from his pagan education and toward a personal transformation that leaves behind his past habits to embrace new ones.

We will see this same pattern two more times in Book VIII: next with Ponticianus’s story and then with Augustine’s own recounting of his experience of Lady Continence in the Milanese garden. Sitting between these stories, he will revisit the moral psychology of habit, will, and choice and bring even more sophistication to it. 

Let’s take the scene leading up to the Milanese garden that involves Ponticianus. Here we have a story within a story within another story. Ponticianus shows up unannounced one day where Alypius and Augustine are staying. He notices, by chance, “a book on top of a gaming table” (the epistles of Paul). Ponticianus’s initial picking up and reading leads to him telling the story of Antony, which leads to him telling the story of two friends who happen to come upon the Life of Antony in their wandering through the gardens of a monastery outside Milan. 

One of them began to read it. He was amazed and set on fire, and during his reading began to think of taking up this way of life and of leaving his secular post in the civil service to be your servant… Angry with himself he turned his eyes on his friend and said to him: ‘Tell me, I beg of you, what do we hope to achieve with all our labors? What is our aim in life? What is the motive of our service to the State? Can we hope for any higher office in the palace than to be Friends of the Emperor? (VIII vi 14)

This same pattern will, of course, play out in the Milanese garden. Immediately after Ponticianus leaves, Augustine turns to Alypius much like one friend turned to the other in Ponticianus’s story: “What is wrong with us? What is this that you have heard?” (VIII viii 19). But before Augustine breaks off the retelling of Ponticianus’s retelling of a story told to him (for he was not present at the conversion of his two companions), Augustine provides the true meaning of the story he has just heard: 

So he [one of the two companions] spoke, and in pain at the coming to birth of new life, he returned his eyes to the book's pages. He read on and experienced a conversion inwardly where you alone could see and, as was soon evident, his mind rid itself of the world. Indeed, as he read and turned over and over in the turbulent hesitations of his heart, there were some moments when he was angry with himself. But then he perceived the choice to be made and took a decision to follow the better course. (VIII vi 15)

Augustine is setting up the story of his own conversion in the Milanese garden by telling the story of a similar conversion in a similar garden. Here he is not merely telling his readers how the Confessions are to be read, but he is dramatizing it by dramatizing his own hearing of another’s confessional narrative. To make this utterly clear, Augustine tells us how the story affects him: “But while [Ponticianus] was speaking, Lord, you turned my attention back to myself” (VIII vii 16). The narration of another’s emotional struggles with conversion becomes the occasion for the hearer/reader to turn inward and create a similar struggle in oneself. 

In Augustine’s case, this inner struggle will be portrayed as an internal psychological problem of his “will.” This portrayal mixes personal narrative with a philosophical discussion of “will” that intervenes between his movement into the garden (VIII viii 19) and the moment where he hears “pick up and read” coming from nearby children (VIII xii 29). The purpose of this section of moral psychology is to thoroughly and completely ground the struggle within Augustine’s own interiority as the scene of the action. By relying on “will” as the ground for the struggle, he simultaneously individualizes the struggle while making it a human struggle as well — we all have a “will,” and we all have habits that we inherit from our culture, and we all share in the original sin of Adam that is the source of these conflicts. 

As I discussed in the previous meditation, this discussion of will can be read as a direct confrontation with the weakness of Stoicism’s “assent” as the locus of moral responsibility. For the Stoics, assent remains a relatively simple concept. As I’ve discussed in an earlier meditation, it involves slowing down one’s mental process to align one’s actions with the values that one wants to marshal to drive one’s actions. Throughout Book VIII, Augustine seems to substitute “will” for Stoic assent in the sense that will is the locus of moral responsibility. In making this substitution, he provides a far more complex and sophisticated moral psychology of action that is thoroughly grounded in a theory of how one’s will is affected by the “chain” of old habits while striving for the true happiness that can only come from breaking those habits and converting to Christianity:

… there is no monstrous split between willing and not willing. We are dealing with a morbid condition of the mind which, when it is lifted up by the truth, does not unreservedly rise to it but is weighed down by habit. 

Reading “will” as a more complex kind of Stoic “assent,” salvation is not a simple matter of assenting or not. Assenting to a truth is not good enough; it is merely an intellectual assent. Truly knowing oneself and undoing old habits must be an anxiety-ridden and emotional confrontation with one’s self, not with external forces of good and evil:

In my own case, as I deliberated about serving my Lord God (Jer. 30: 9) which I had long been disposed to do, the self which willed to serve was identical with the self that was unwilling. It was I. I was neither wholly willing nor wholly unwilling. So I was in conflict with myself and was dissociated from myself. The dissociation came about against my will. Yet this was not the manifestation of an alien mind but the punishment suffered in my own mind. 

Again, this is not a simplistic Manichean struggle of good versus evil where an individual has two wills driven by abstract and “alien” universals — one inclined toward good, the other toward evil. The work of the Confessions is to make the struggle for salvation into a psychological condition for every person seeking salvation. The conflict between habit and desired change is fought out at the level of the human will. Unlike abstract notions of good and evil, consuetudo is very particular to the individual and therefore requires an individual journey to undo it.

But after the undoing, there remains the problem of what is on the other side: 

Ingrained evil had more hold over me than unaccustomed good. The nearer approached the moment of time when I would become different, the greater the horror of it struck me. But it did not thrust me back or turn me away, but left me in a state of suspense. (VIII xi 25)

“Ingrained” and “unaccustomed” are the operative terms of the first sentence. A “confession” is thus a narrative of a personal journey that starts from the belief that one needs to undo old habits to form new ones — one must be healed from something. It is necessarily anxious and fraught with emotion as it opens onto a horizon that is hard for one to imagine – you will necessarily be “in a state of suspense.” 

In Augustine’s hands, this “state of suspense” actually becomes permanent as one’s conversion is never complete in this life. One cannot rid oneself of the original sin of Adam; one cannot completely overcome old habits; one’s will is never fully autonomous enough to control the mind and one’s desires. Crucially, for Augustine, will alone is not sufficient to attain salvation. “Grace,” as he would come to call it, is the necessary condition, but that can only be granted voluntarily by God. One’s will is not sufficient to attain grace.

A “confession” is thus an ongoing process of self-examination that takes the very nature of our experience as the subject and object of the inquiry. As such, Augustine leaves us with a theory of the individual that is far more modern than what we find in his philosophical predecessors. Yes, the Aristotelian and Stoic individuals are creations of their surrounding cultures. Yes, there is a moral psychology that is used to explain how one can and should take responsibility for one’s own actions — and how we can correct those actions in future episodes. But what’s missing is an individual with a psychologically driven autobiography, and who has a self-creating power to use storytelling to effect self-transformation of himself and the others who hear that story.

The Augustinian individual is a creative force that uses language and storytelling in powerful ways of self-transformation. In this way, the modern subject is born and handed down to us. Where Augustine goes awry is by trying to hammer home the point that the story we tell about ourselves must be the right story. Thus Augustine aligned this creative self with a quest for Truth that is anxiety ridden and unnecessarily dogmatic. But I will take this up in part 3 of this meditation.