Kimberly Sta. Maria Dalton

Professor Caferro

Medieval History

20 September 1999

St. Augustine: Sinner or Saint?

The Confessions of St. Augustine was not, as some scholars have claimed, the work of a weak-willed or self-indulgent man. Rather, it was the work of a very determined and self-sacrificing individual who was looking back into his sinful past. When Augustine wrote the Confessions he had already been a devout follower of the Christian faith for several years. He had a complex motive for undertaking such self-analysis. His purpose in recounting of his own struggle to accept the Christian faith was to exalt God for saving him from the sinfulness of his youth. Through the Confessions, Augustine was also able to reaffirm to himself who he was, and to encourage other believers and disbelievers to follow him in their own personal search for God's true mercy.

In order to illustrate Augustine's unusual determination and strength of character, it is necessary to examine his life. St. Augustine was born in Northern Africa to Patricius, a pagan father, and Monica, a Christian mother. Both parents desired success for their son, so Augustine was sent to school in Carthage to learn to be a rhetorician. What may be counted as his first youthful weakness was his susceptibility to peer pressure. Augustine often felt the need to boast of imaginary sexual exploits and it was with these friends of his youth that he committed a theft of some pears (Book 2, Chapter 4). Augustine was particularly troubled by this incident "what pleased me was not what I stole, but that I stole; nor would I have got any pleasure out of it by myself…That out of mere fun and play should proceed an eagerness to hurt and an appetite to do harm to others and with no sort of a desire either to avenge myself or to gain anything for myself!" Augustine spends much time talking about his theft of the pears, even going so far as to compare the act to fornication (Book 2, Chapters 6-10).

Literal fornication; however, was to be Augustine's most frequent sin. He was a 17 year old college student in Carthage (Book 3, Chapter 1) when he first committed this act. Later, he took on a concubine which bore him a son, Adeodatus (Book 4, Chapter 2) "In those years I lived with a woman who was not bound to me by lawful marriage; she was one who had come my way because of my wandering desires and my lack of considered judgment; nevertheless, I had only this one woman and I was faithful to her" (Book 4, Chapter 2). However, when his concubine was shipped off to Africa so as not to be a hindrance to his planned marriage, he quickly replaced her with another woman despite the fact that his former concubine had pledged a vow of chastity. "I had two years to wait until I could have the girl to whom I was engaged, and I could not bear the delay. So, since I was not so much a lover of marriage as a slave to lust, I found another woman for myself-not of course, as a wife" (Book 6, Chapter 16).

Augustine's first religious involvement was with the Manichees, a heretical Christian sect. They were troubled by an apparent inconsistency in orthodox Christian belief. How, the Manichees wondered, could a good and omnipotent God have created evil? Manichees concluded that God was not omnipotent and that evil was a separate force from God. Thus, sin was not the fault of the sinner, but rather of the evil itself.

Augustine continued with the Manichee faith for nine years of his life. According to his Confessions; however, he did not lead a satisfied life as a Manichee. "On the one hand I and my friends would be hunting after the empty show of popularity-theatrical applause from the audience, verse competitions, contests for crowns of straw, the vanity of the stage, immoderate lusts-and on the other hand we would be trying to get clean of all this filth by carrying food to those people who were called "the elect" and "the holy ones," so that in the factory of their own stomachs they could turn this food into angels and gods, by whose aid we should be liberated" (Book 4, Chapter 1). Augustine might have stayed with the Manichees had he not been so disappointed by Faustus' "ignorance" and his inability to answer Augustine's questions about the Manichee faith (Book 5, Chapter 7).

While studying in Carthage, Augustine happened upon Hortensius by Cicero which encouraged him to lead a more philosophical life. "I began to compare some of the things said by the philosophers with those inerminable fables of the Manichees, and it seemed to me that what the philosophers said was the more probable…" (Book 5, Chapter 3) The reasoning that Augustine developed through his philosophy caused him to reject Manicheeism and turn to Neoplatanism. According to the Neoplatanists, evil was not a separate entity, but rather the absence of good. After becoming dissatisfied with their beliefs as well, Augustine left the Neoplatanists and finally decided to be a "catechumen" in the Catholic church (Book 5, Chapter 14). He struggled for some time with the idea of giving up his worldly pleasures, "Toys and trifles, utter vanities had been my mistresses, and now they were holding me back, pulling me by the garment of my flesh and softly murmuring in my ear: 'Are you getting rid of us?'" before receiving what he considered to be a message from God in the form of a children's song. "Take it and read it," the children were chanting. Augustine, who took the message to be for him, picked up a Bible and read, "Go, sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come and follow me." Immediately his heart was at rest and he accepted the Christian faith (Book 8, Chapter 12).

It cannot be said that St. Augustine's life did not contain many faults. He was weak- willed concerning chastity and he gave in easily to peer pressure as both a pear-stealing child and as a society-pleasing adult. Augustine was also self indulgent when he ignored his poor mother and continued to live in corruption despite her pleading. Augustine would never have denied such faults. In fact, one gets the sense from the Confessions that Augustine believed that the self was not just the present manifestation of the individual.. He realized that he had to accept his past and understand it to realize who he was and to move forward with his life. Augustine always admitted responsibility for the actions of his youth, though he realized God's divine grace allowed him to change himself into a better person.

Despite these many examples of his shortcomings, Augustine was far from the typical weak-willed individual even as a youth. If, as some scholars assert, he really had a lack of willpower, he could have remained with any of the various religions of his day that required little self-reform. For example, surely it would have been far easier to adhere to the Machean philosophy which separated sin from the sinner. Such a belief would have allowed Augustine to live in sinful decadence with his mistress all the while being 'free from guilt'. However, Augustine felt in his soul that he had not yet found the 'true' religion. Rather than staying with the Macheans, he denounced their faith and his search for truth continued (Book 5, Chapter 7).

Augustine's ability to break free from religious groups he no longer believed in was one type of strength. His searching for another faith with the belief that there was indeed a 'true' religion that he had not yet found was quite another kind of strength. Augustine realized that he was unhappy with his life and felt that it was being wasted. He recognized many of his faults and felt guilty for them. However, instead of just wallowing in self-pity and guilt, he had the willpower to seek for what he needed outside of himself. He had the capacity to pursue the peace he longed to possess. It would have been far easier to abandon his search for his idealistic religion or to denounce religion all together.

Augustine may have become a member of almost every religious movement of his time, but he was not a blind follower. He constantly questioned particular movement's beliefs to see if they offered the inner peace he was seeking. In the end, Augustine did not settle for the most popular religion or the one that most easily accommodated his lifestyle. Instead, Augustine chose the one that satisfied the inner desires of his heart. In so doing, he selected perhaps one of the hardest faiths for an intellectual in his day to accept due to the Bible's inelegant phrasing. Indeed, many of Augustine's early conflicts with Christianity centered around the almost base simplicity of the Bible when compared to great rhetoricians such as Cicero. Augustine addressed his first impressions of the Holy Scriptures in Book 3, Chapter 5 of Confessions:

In accepting Christianity, Augustine also had to embrace the ideals of chastity, 'loving thy neighbor as thyself,' and the equality of all mankind whether they be well educated and of good birth or not. The switch to chastity could not have been easy for Augustine, and his lofty understanding and financial success probably made the idea of equality somewhat challenging.

Another way in which Augustine showed strength was in his writing of the Confessions. Few men in generations since, for fear of scorn, have been willing to write out all their misdeeds to be published and distributed publicly. Augustine was a very reputable man of power in his day. His Confessions' modern-day equivalent might be similar to an autobiography of President Clinton in which he admitted that he had participated in sexual misconduct. No present-day politician or church leader, such as a senator or the Pope, would be likely to publish a similar autobiography. To do so would be political or societal suicide. Thus, Augustine's strength came not from a perfect past in which he steered clear of all temptations, but instead from his willingness to humble himself and admit his faults. He was strong enough to acknowledge where his life had fallen into sinfulness and corruption and to confess not just before God, but before everyone who read his testimony.

Throughout his life, it is true that Augustine often failed in his search for truth and that his existence seemed far from perfection, but only close-minded scholars would conclude from his writings that Augustine resembled a weak-willed or self-indulgent individual at the time the Confessions was actually penned. To come to such conclusions, one would have to focus solely on the misdeeds of his youth and ignore the great theologian that grew out of that youthful sinfulness. St. Augustine's Christian deeds far outweighed his pagan ones. His many writings helped define Catholicism as well as Protestantism. His Confessions, though possibly detrimental to his reputation, spread a word of hope among any disbelievers who feared that they could not be saved or believers who were struggling with their own stumbling blocks. Such an honest, self-sacrificing account to encourage other believers could not have come from a weak-willed or self-indulgent individual. By this time, the corrupt Augustine spoken of in Confessions was long past, and a new and better individual, changed through prayer and devotion to God, had risen to take his place.