Confessions of Augustine Summary: All 13 Books, One by One
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The Confessions is the story of how Augustine of Hippo came to faith in Christ, told as one long prayer to God. Augustine wrote it as a bishop in North Africa, looking back on the years he spent running from God. Books 1 through 9 tell his life, from infancy to his conversion in a garden in Milan, his baptism and his mother's death. Books 10 through 13 turn from his past to the present: what memory is, how a person finds God, what time is, and what the first chapter of Genesis teaches.
You can read the whole book free in TheWay Library in the nineteenth-century English translation by E. B. Pusey, the version quoted on this page. The book's page has the details, and each heading below links straight to that book in the reader.
The whole work opens with its most famous line:
Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.
The Confessions, Book I
That sentence is the plot of the whole book. Every chapter after it shows a restless heart looking for rest in the wrong places until God brings it home.
Book I: Infancy and boyhood
Augustine begins with praise, then asks how a small man can call on a great God. He looks at his own infancy and sees sin even there: the jealousy and temper of a baby. As a boy in school he was beaten for idleness, and he prayed, he says, that he might not be beaten. He loved Latin stories and wept for Dido in Virgil's poem, but hated Greek. He also tells how, as a boy, he fell sick and begged for baptism, then recovered, and his baptism was put off. Looking back, he grieves that the schools taught him to fear a grammar mistake more than a sin.
Book II: The stolen pears
At sixteen Augustine spent a year idle at home in Thagaste while his father saved money to send him to Carthage. Lust grew, and his father was pleased to see him growing into a man. His mother Monica warned him, and he ignored her. Then comes the scene readers remember: he and some friends stole pears from a neighbor's tree, not because they were hungry, but for the thrill of doing wrong. They threw most of the fruit to the hogs. Augustine spends the rest of the book asking why he loved the sin itself, and finds the answer in pride, a crooked imitation of God.
Book III: Carthage, Cicero and the Manichees
In Carthage he was "in love with loving," fond of the theater and eager to shine in the law courts. At nineteen he read Cicero's Hortensius, which set him on fire to seek wisdom. He tried the Scriptures, but their plain style seemed beneath him next to Cicero. So he joined the Manichees, a sect that spoke much of Christ but taught that good and evil are two warring substances. Monica wept for him. She dreamed that she stood on a wooden rule and was told that where she was, he would be also. A bishop she pleaded with told her to let him alone and pray, because "it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish."
Book IV: Teacher, friend and author
For nine years, from nineteen to twenty-eight, Augustine was a Manichee and a teacher of rhetoric. He lived with a woman he did not marry and stayed faithful to her. He consulted astrologers. A close friend from boyhood fell ill, was baptized, and died, and Augustine's grief darkened everything. Looking back, he teaches that a friend loved apart from God will always be lost, but a friend loved in God cannot be. He also wrote his first book, on beauty, and read Aristotle easily, yet none of it brought him nearer to God.
Book V: Faustus, Rome and Ambrose
Augustine had long waited to meet Faustus, a famous Manichee teacher. When Faustus came to Carthage, he turned out to be charming but unable to answer Augustine's questions, and Augustine's hold on the sect loosened. He sailed to Rome, slipping away from his mother by a lie while she prayed through the night. In Rome he fell gravely ill. He then won a post teaching rhetoric in Milan, where he went to hear the bishop Ambrose preach. He came for the eloquence, but the truth came in with it, and he began to see that the Old Testament could be defended.
Book VI: Milan, ambition and delay
Monica followed him to Milan. Augustine watched Ambrose reading silently and longed to talk with him, but the bishop was always surrounded by people. His friend Alypius, once dragged to the gladiator shows and swept away by them, lived with him, along with Nebridius. Augustine wanted honors, money and marriage. A marriage was arranged, the woman he had lived with for years was sent back to Africa, and he was left with their son and a wound that would not heal. He knew he ought to seek God, and he kept putting it off.
Book VII: The problem of evil
Augustine still could not think of anything that was not a body, and he could not answer the question "whence is evil?" He finally gave up astrology. Then he read some books of the Platonists and found there that God is spirit, that all things are good because God made them, and that evil is not a thing at all but a falling away from the good. He caught a glimpse of the unchangeable light of God. But he found no strength in those books to reach God, because they did not know the Word made flesh. That strength he found only in "the Mediator betwixt God and men, the Man Christ Jesus," and he began reading the apostle Paul.
Book VIII: The conversion in the garden
The truth was now plain to him, but his will was chained by habit. He heard how the great Roman teacher Victorinus had confessed Christ in public, and how two court officials had given up everything after reading the life of Antony of Egypt. Shaken, Augustine rushed into the garden with Alypius, threw himself under a fig tree and wept, asking, "Why not now?" Then he heard a child's voice singing, "Take up and read." He opened Paul's letters to Romans 13 and read. Doubt vanished. Alypius joined him, and they went in to tell Monica, who rejoiced. Our article on Augustine's conversion story tells this book in full.
Book IX: Baptism and Monica's death
Augustine gave up his teaching post at the next holiday and retired with friends to a country house, where he prayed through the Psalms. At Easter he was baptized in Milan with Alypius and his son Adeodatus. On the way home to Africa, at Ostia, he and Monica stood at a window and spoke together of the life to come, and for a moment seemed to touch eternal Wisdom. Days later she fell ill. She asked only to be remembered at the Lord's altar, and died. The book closes with Augustine's tribute to her patience, her prayers and her faith.
Book X: Memory and the present
Now Augustine confesses not what he was but what he is. He asks the earth, the sea and the sky whether they are God, and they answer, "He made us." He searches the vast halls of memory for God and finds that God was within him all along. This is the book with "Too late loved I Thee." He then examines himself under three temptations, which this translation calls the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the ambition of the world (the "pride of life" of 1 John 2:16). He ends by resting his hope on Christ, the true Mediator.
Book XI: Creation and time
Augustine turns to "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." He answers those who ask what God was doing before creation: there was no "before," because God made time itself. Then he asks his famous question, "What then is time?" and works toward the answer that we measure time in the mind, by memory, attention and expectation.
Book XII: Heaven and earth
Augustine studies the first verses of Genesis closely: the "heaven of heavens" and the earth "without form." He sets out several readings that faithful men hold and asks that those who differ on them do so in charity, since all hold that Moses wrote by the Spirit of truth.
Book XIII: The days of creation
The last book reads the six days of Genesis 1 as a picture of God's work of new creation: the Spirit over the waters, the firmament of Scripture, the fruitful works of believers. It sees the Trinity in the first verses and ends with a prayer for the peace of the Sabbath "which hath no evening," the eternal rest God gives his people.
Where to go next
If you're reading the Confessions for the first time, start with Books 1 through 9, then return to the last four slowly. For the man behind the book, see Who Was Augustine of Hippo?. For the lines worth marking, see our collection of quotes from Augustine's Confessions. Or open The Confessions of St. Augustine and begin with Book 1.