I’ve been re-reading Augustine’s Confessions. It’s a fascinating book that pulls forward so many strands that I’ve been working over in these essays and meditations, but it does so with a level of complexity and sophistication that rewards repeated reading. 

For this meditation, I explore how Augustine’s Confessions transforms Stoicism’s moral psychology into a conceptual framework for narrating one’s experience at a level of detail inconceivable to (and unnecessary for) Stoicism’s ethics. As a result, we get a whole new way of being ourselves in the world that respects the past events that make each of us who we are while holding ourselves accountable to undoing old habits and creating new ones when ethical circumstances demand it. 

We face these challenges today under different circumstances than Augustine did in the late fourth century when he published Confessions. Racisms, sexisms, ageisms, have’s and have-not’s, global warming and a host of other injustices demand that we look at ourselves (particularly those living on the upside of these equations) through the habits (consuetudo) that we’ve formed and the responsibilities we have for equaling out the distribution of benefits and consequences. 

While these challenges have to be faced at the level of large-scale policy making, they won’t hold unless transformations are made in our well-ingrained habits, particularly in the western world. Martha Nussbaum’s newest book (The Cosmopolitan Tradition) convincingly shows how we are the heirs of a Stoic moral psychology that has great power but significant blind spots for dealing with the modern problems of life on earth. Many of the arguments she makes with respect to Cicero, I made in a previous meditation on the “Apolitical Baggage of Seneca.” 

To be sure, the Confessions doesn’t take care of the apolitical baggage, and it certainly doesn’t end up giving us an answer for how to politically engage in the world. In fact, it makes the problem much worse. Augustine’s brand of Christianity in the Confessions advocates for withdrawl from politics to pursue one’s own salvation as an internal, psychological exercise. (This notwithstanding his adept political maneuvering through his victorious battles over the Pelagians and the Donatists.)

Augustine’s Confessions does, however, give us a powerful way to look at our own habits as the problem. Habit (consuetudo) is fundamental to Augustine’s moral philosophy. It represents the innumerable events of each of our lives that make us who we are. As such, our habits govern the way we think, the way we feel, and therefore the way we act in the world. Far from seeing the problems of the world as good vs evil (as the Manichees do), he finds our fundamental problems in the way that the cultures we live in create our very selves. 

Yet Augustine isn’t making an argument for strict determinism. Though we are creatures of habit, we remain responsible for those habits. We retain the ability to recognize our bad habits and find ways to undo them in favor of new ones. This is fundamentally what a confession does in Augustine’s hands: it uses moral psychological concepts (habit, will, reason, assent, memory) to narrate an autobiography. As a “confession,” this autobiography achieves two things: 

1. A deconstruction of one’s self through an examination of how habits (consuetudo) have imperceptibly and over the course of a lifetime built up a self that is the product of its surrounding culture. Yet the the author remains responsible for the creation of these habits — his feelings, thoughts and emotions that drive his actions. 

2. An opening of that self to new possibilities of being without necessarily knowing what is on the other side of that deconstruction. 

For #1 to happen, habits need to be seen as available for interpretation and examination. This can only occur by creating an interpretive framework – nouns, verbs, etc. – that one can apply to one’s thoughts and feelings — a moral psychology. 

It’s no mystery that Augustine had a deep knowledge of the moral psychology handed down from Aristotle and the Stoics — particularly through his reading of Cicero and Seneca. But he does something with that moral psychology that was merely nascent in those authors: he uses its concepts as an interpretive framework for a prolonged narration of his own development. 

Of course Augustine was reworking the fundamental Christian practices of revelation and conversion by reinterpreting them within the framework of this moral psychology. But I do believe that the technique of “confession” can be separated from the religious “truth content.” The ability to look at one’s present habits to understand their ethical implications for oneself and their impact on others does not require belief in the holy trinity or any other overriding Truth. This is why we can draw clear through-lines from Stoic concepts of “impression” and “assent” to Augustine’s concepts of “will” and “memory” (memoria) to Freud’s concepts of id, ego and super-ego. Far from being only descriptive concepts, these are also practical interpretive devices that help us be better human beings by understanding the forces that make us and to remake ourselves if and when necessary. 

Augustine’s special contribution to our modern moral psychology is to make revelation and conversion into internal psychological processes rather than external performative rituals, as was common in early Christian communities. In the process, he seeks to tie psychological health to acceptance of Christian Truth, but his connection is tenuous. Concepts of will, memoria, and consuetudo can have powerful impact on how each of us makes our way in the world without having to be believers. In fact, it’s clear that Augustine’s consuetudo owes a lot to Aristotle’s ethos. English translators commonly use the words “habit” and “habituation” to translate them respectively. To have something revealed to you — that driving a gas guzzling car has bad impacts on our planet and the creatures living on it; that going to Chick-fil-A and McDonalds every day is to be complicit in the inhumane treatment of animals — and to determine to change behavior (conversion) can be generalized beyond a strictly fourth-century Christianity. 

This is not to minimize the importance of Christianity to the development of this moral psychology. Without Augustine’s obsessions over the high stakes involved in Christian revelation and conversion, we don’t get the passion, urgency and enduring value of the Confessions. Conversion to Christianity provides the emotional content of the narrative (and the high stakes). Without it, we’d merely be left with a rather stale account of one person’s intellectual development – if such a thing would have been written at the time. 

By way of comparison, let’s take Seneca’s famous “review of the day” that appears in Book III of On Anger. The passage is worth quoting at length; 

Is there anything finer, then, than this habit of scrutinizing the entire day? What sort of sleep follows this self-examination—how peaceful, how deep and free, when the mind has been either praised or admonished, when the sentinel and secret censor of the self has conducted its inquiry into one’s character! I exercise this jurisdiction daily and plead my case before myself. When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent, aware of this habit that’s now mine, I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by. For why should I fear any consequence from my mistakes when I am able to say, “See that you don’t do it again, but now I forgive you. In that discussion you spoke too aggressively: from now on don’t get involved with people who don’t know what they’re talking about…. in the future consider not just whether what you say is true but whether the person you’re talking to can take the truth.” (III 36 2-4)

Habit, self-examination, character are all essential to how this nightly ritual works, but this is a far cry from an autobiographical confession. It is, rather, a special instance of the Stoic concept of lekta – the ability to verbalize one’s thoughts and feeling so as to make them available for scrutiny. Like Augustine’s Confessions, this lekta is a backward looking “self-examination.” Seneca can review the events of the day and verbalize the reasons for his reactions. Lekta doesn’t have to happen in the moment (as it is more traditionally presented in Stoic writings), but can be done retrospectively as a form of training and preparation for doing better next time. This is fundamental to Seneca’s brand of Stoicism. 

But Seneca’s nightly self-examination is very far from anything like a confession in Augustine’s sense. A prolonged examination of one’s thoughts and feelings over a lifetime is not part of Seneca’s self-examination, though it is a “habit.” The backward look is short-term and episodic, not autobiographical. There is no sense in which an autobiography is necessary because the Stoic moral psychology that Seneca uses is corrective rather than seeking a moment of conversion — the operative question for the Stoic is always, “How can I do better next time?” There is also very little about “why” Seneca handled different situations like he did.

There is, also, a significant difference in tone between Seneca’s self-examination and Augustine’s Confessions. With Seneca, we have a calm and “rational” review of one’s behavior so as to correct unwanted behavior in the future: “why should I fear any consequence from my mistakes when I am able to say, ‘See that you don’t do it again.’” To the contrary, Augustine’s Confessions are an anxiety-ridden excavation of one’s past in order to undo deep-seated habits lodged in one’s memoria (the subject of Confessions Book X).

In Augustine’s hands, the ability to verbalize one’s feelings becomes a full blown literary genre that takes one’s own long-term development as the subject and object of the narrative. To do this, Augustine needs a more complex moral psychology than is provided by impression, lekta, assent and impulse. The result is a shifting of the scene of the action to a psychologized inside that has its own forces independent of the external world.

Let’s take a look at a key passage in the pivotal Book VIII. I could select many others, but the density of the moral psychological concept of “will” as the foundation of the narrative is on full display after his frustration at not having the same instantaneous conversion that he has just heard about from Ponticianus:

The willing is not wholehearted, so the command is not wholehearted. The strength of the command lies in the strength of the will, and the degree to which the command is not performed lies in the degree to which the will is not engaged. For it is the will that commands the will to exist, and it commands not another will but itself…. 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. (VIII ix.21)

The “willing” being described here is not an abstract philosophical discussion, but is a description of himself and what he was feeling. Neither are we dealing with a self-examination that results in self-corrections — “I will do better next time.” Nor is it coldly rational and hidden from the world after dark like Seneca’s nightly self-examination. It is anxious, fraught with self loathing, and experienced by another (his friend, Alypius) in the light of day.

In fact, reason as the driver of acknowledging and assenting to truth is impotent in this passage. To be more direct, Augustine seems to be rewriting the Stoic concept of “assent” as the moral psychological concept that one uses to evaluate “impressions” and form “impulses” to proper actions. As many commentators on Stoicism have pointed out, “assent” is the moment where one becomes responsible for one’s actions because once assent occurs, the action is automatic.

Here Augustine has clearly assented to the truth of Christianity, but that assent is not creating the automated result that he expects to occur. In VIII 20 he discusses his expectation that “the power to act is identical with the will. The willing itself was performative of the action. Nevertheless it did not happen.” This yields a “monstrous condition” that is played out within one’s own psychologized interior. For Augustine, the individual cannot heal this monstrous condition by him or herself. She will need help from God, and this is where Augustine’s concept of “grace” will play a major part in his theology. It signifies human helplessness in achieving their own salvation, but it does not absolve them of trying. Breaking old habits is painful work and not merely self-corrective and not fully under one’s control.

Thus a far more complex psychology emerges in the Confessions than that of Stoicism. In the process, one’s individual and personal experience becomes something that can be narrated as a retrospective autobiography of what has happened “inside” one’s mind. In part 2 of this meditation, I’ll take up the structure of the Confessions to look at how this moral psychology structures the narrative itself and makes demands on the reader as to how the book is to be understood and put to work in one’s own self-examination.