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Translator’s Preface
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“If St. Augustin,”
says Nourrisson74
| 74
Philosophie de St. Augustin, Preface. | , “had left
nothing but his Confessions and the City of God, one
could readily understand the respectful sympathy that surrounds his
memory. How, indeed, could one fail to admire in the City of
God the flight of genius, and in the Confessions, what
is better still, the effusions of a great soul?” It may be safely
predicted, that while the mind of man yearns for knowledge, and his
heart seeks rest, the Confessions will retain that foremost
place in the world’s literature which it has secured by its
sublime outpourings of devotion and profound philosophical spirit.
There is in the book a wonderful combination of childlike piety and
intellectual power. Desjardins’ idea,75
| 75
Essai sur les Conf. de St. Aug. p. 5. | that, while in Augustin’s other
works we see the philosopher or the controversialist, here we see
the man, is only to be accepted as a comparative statement of
Augustin’s attitude in the Confessions; for philosophy and
piety are in many of his reflections as it were molten into one
homogeneous whole. In his highest intellectual flights we find the
breathings of faith and love, and, amid the profoundest expressions
of penitential sorrow, gleams of his metaphysical genius
appear.
It may, indeed, be from the man’s showing
himself so little, as distinguished from the philosopher, that some
readers are a little disappointed in the book. They have expected
to meet with a copiousness of biographic details, and have found,
commingled with such as are given, long disquisitions on
Manichæanism, Time, Creation, and Memory. To avoid such
disappointment we must ascertain the author’s design. The book is
emphatically not an autobiography. There is in it an outline
of the author’s life up to his mother’s death; but only so much
of detail is given as may subserve his main purpose. That purpose
is clearly explained in the fourth section of his Tenth Book. It
was that the impenitent on reading it might not say, “I
cannot,” and “sleep in despair,” but rather that, looking to
that God who had raised the writer from his low estate of pride and
sin to be a pillar of the Church, he might take courage, and
“awake in the sweetness of His grace, by which he that is weak is
made strong;” and that those no longer in sin might rejoice and
praise God as they heard of the past lusts of him who was now freed
from them.76
| 76
Confessions, x. sec. 4. | This, his
design of encouraging penitence and stimulating praise, is referred
to in his Retractations,77
| 77
See the passage quoted immediately after this Preface. |
and in his Letter to Darius.78
These two main ideas are embodied in the very
meaning of the title of the book, the word confession
having, as Augustin constantly urges, two meanings. In his
exposition of the Psalms we read: “Confession is understood in
two senses, of our sins, and of God’s praise.
Confession of our sins is well known, so well known to all the
people, that whenever they hear the name of confession in the
lessons, whether it is said in praise or of sin, they beat their
breasts.”79
| 79
Enarr. in Ps. cxli. sec. 19: see also in Ps. cxvii.
sec. 1, xxix. sec. 19, xciv. sec. 4, and xxix. sec. 19. | Again:
“Confession of sin all know, but confession of praise few attend
to.”80
| 80
Enarr. in Ps. cxxxvii. sec. 2. | “The former
but showeth the wound to the physician, the latter giveth thanks
for health.”81
| 81
Enarr. in Ps. cx. sec. 2. | He would
therefore have his hearers make the sacrifice of praise their
ideal, since, in the City of God, even in the New Jerusalem, there
will be no longer confession of sin, but there will be confession
of praise.82
| 82
In Ps. xliv. sec. 33, xcix, sec. 16. | It is not
surprising, that with this view of confession he should hinge on
the incidents of his life such considerations as tend to elevate
the mind and heart of the reader. When, for example, he speaks of
his youthful sins,83
he diverges
into a disquisition on the motives to sin; when his friend dies,84
he moralizes on death; and—to give
one example of a reverse process—his profound psychological
review of memory85
recalls his
former sin (which at times haunts him in his dreams), and leads up
to devout reflections on God’s power to cleanse from sin. This
undertone of penitence and praise which pervades the
Confessions in all its episodes, like the golden threads which
run through the texture of an Eastern garment, presents one of its
peculiar charms.
It would not be right to overlook a charge
that has been brought against the book by Lord Byron. He says,
“Augustin in his fine Confessions makes the reader envy
his transgressions.” Nothing could be more reckless or
further from the
truth than this charge. There is here no dwelling on his sin, or
painting it so as to satisfy a prurient imagination. As we have
already remarked, Augustin’s manner is not to go into detail
further than to find a position from which to “edify” the
reader, and he treats this episode in his life with his
characteristic delicacy and reticence. His sin was dead; and he had
carried it to its burial with tears of repentance. And when, ten
years after his baptism, he sets himself, at the request of some,
to a consideration of what he then was at the moment of making his
confessions,86
he refers
hardly at all to this sin of his youth; and such allusions as he
does make are of the most casual kind. Instead of enlarging upon
it, he treats it as past, and only speaks of temptation and sin as
they are common to all men. Many of the French writers on the
Confessions87
| 87
In addition to those referred to, there is one at the beginning of
vol. ii. of Saint-Marc Girardin’s Essais de Litérature et de
Morale, devoted to this subject. It has some good points in it,
but has much of that sentimentality so often found in French
criticisms. | institute
a comparison in this matter between the confessions of Augustin and
those of Rousseau. Pressensé88
| 88
Le Christianisme au Quatrième Siècle, p. 269. |
draws attention to the delicacy and reserve which characterise the
one, and the arrogant defiance of God and man manifested in the
other. The confessions of the one he speaks of as “un grand
acte de repentir et d’amour;” and eloquently says, “In it
he seems, like the Magdalen, to have spread his box of perfumes at
the foot of the Saviour; from his stricken heart there exhales the
incense most agreeable to God—the homage of true penitence.”
The other he truly describes as uttering “a cry of triumph in the
very midst of his sin, and robing his shame in a royal purple.”
Well may Desjardins89
| 89
Essai sur les Conf., etc. p. 12. | express
surprise at a book of such foulness coming from a genius so great;
and perhaps his solution of the enigma is not far from the truth,
when he attributes it to an overweening vanity and egotism.90
| 90
He concludes: “La folie de son orgueil, voilá le mot de
l’ênigme, ou l’ênigme n’en a pas.”—Ibid. p.
13. |
It is right to point out, in connection with
this part of our subject, that in regard to some at least of
Augustin’s self-accusations,91
| 91
Compare Confessions, ii. sec. 2, and iii. sec. 1, with iv.
sec. 2. |
there may be a little of that pious exaggeration of his sinfulness
which, as Lord Macaulay points out in his essays on Bunyan,92
| 92
In vol. i. of his Crit. and Hist. Essays, and also in his
Miscellaneous Writings. | frequently characterises deep
penitence. But however this may be, justice requires us to
remember, in considering his transgression, that from his very
childhood he had been surrounded by a condition of civilisation
presenting manifold temptations. Carthage, where he spent a large
part of his life, had become, since its restoration and
colonization under Augustus Cæsar, an “exceeding great city,”
in wealth and importance next to Rome.93
| 93
Herodian Hist. vii. 6. | “African Paganism,” says
Pressensé,94
| 94
Le Christianisme, etc. as above, p. 274. | “was half
Asiatic; the ancient worship of nature, the adoration of Astarte,
had full licence in the city of Carthage; Dido had become a
mythological being, whom this dissolute city had made its
protecting divinity, and it is easy to recognise in her the great
goddess of Phœnicia under a new name.” The luxury of the period
is described by Jerome and Tertullian, when they denounce the
custom of painting the face and tiring the head, and the
prodigality that would give 25,000 golden crowns for a veil,
immense revenues for a pair of ear-rings, and the value of a forest
or an island for a head-dress.95
| 95
Quoted by Nourrisson, Philosophie, etc. ii. 436. |
And Jerome, in one of his epistles, gives an illustration of the
Church’s relation to the Pagan world at that time, when he
represents an old priest of Jupiter with his grand-daughter, a
catechumen, on his knee, who responds to his caresses by singing
canticles.96
It was a time
when we can imagine one of Augustin’s parents going to the
Colosseum, and enjoying the lasciviousness of its displays, and its
gladiatorial shows, with their contempt of human life; while the
other carefully shunned such scenes, as being under the ban of the
teachers of the Church.97
| 97
See Confessions, iii. sec. 2, note, and vi. sec. 13,
note. |
It was an age in which there was action and reaction between
religion and philosophy; but in which the power of Christianity was
so great in its influences on Paganism, that some received the
Christian Scriptures only to embody in their phraseology the ideas
of heathenism. Of this last point Manichæanism presents an
illustration. Now all these influences left their mark on Augustin.
In his youth he plunged deep into the pleasures of his day; and we
know how he endeavoured to find in Manichæanism a solution of
those speculations which haunted his subtle and inquiring mind.
Augustin at this time, then, is not to be taken as a type of what
Christianity produced. He is to a great extent the outgrowth of the
Pagan influences of the time. Considerations such as these may
enable us to judge of his early sin more justly than if we measured
it by our own privileges and opportunities.
The style of Augustin is sometimes criticised
as not having the refinement of Virgil, Horace, or Cicero. But it
should be remembered that he wrote in a time of national decay; and
further, as Desjardins has remarked in the introduction to his
essay, he had no time “to cut his phrases.” From the
period of his conversion to that of his death, he was constantly
engaged in controversy with this or that heresy; and if he did not
write with classical accuracy, he so inspired the language with his
genius, and moulded it by his fire,98
| 98
See Poujoulat, Lettres de St. Augustin, Introd. p. 12, who
compares the language of the time to Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry
Bones, and say Augustin inspired it with life. | that it appears almost to pulsate
with the throbbings of his brain. He seems likewise to have
despised mere elegance, for in his Confessions,99
| 99
Confessions, v. sec. 10. | when speaking of the style of Faustus, he says,
“What profit to me was the elegance of my cup-bearer, since he
offered me not the more precious draught for which I thirsted?”
In this connection the remarks of Collenges100
are worthy of note. He says, when
anticipating objections that might be made to his own style: “It
was the last of my study; my opinion always was what Augustin calls
diligens negligentia was the best diligence as to that;
while I was yet a very young man I had learned out of him that it
was no solecism in a preacher to use ossum for os,
for (saith he) an iron key is better than one made of gold if it
will better open the door, for that is all the use of the key. I
had learned out of Hierom that a gaudry of phrases and words in a
pulpit is but signum insipientiæ. The words of a preacher,
saith he, ought pungere, non palpare, to prick the heart,
not to smooth and coax. The work of an orator is too precarious for
a minister of the gospel. Gregory observed that our Saviour had not
styled us the sugar but the salt of the earth, and
Augustin observeth, that though Cyprian in one epistle showed much
of a florid orator, to show he could do it, yet he never would do
so any more, to show he would not.”
There are several features in the
Confessions deserving of remark, as being of special interest
to the philosopher, the historian or the divine.
1. Chiefest amongst these is the intense
desire for knowledge and the love of truth which characterised
Augustin. This was noticeable before his conversion in his
hungering after such knowledge as Manichæanism and the philosophy
of the time could afford.101
| 101 See Confessions, iv. sec. 1, note. | It is none the less observable in
that better time, when, in his quiet retreat at Cassiciacum, he
sought to strengthen the foundations of his faith, and resolved to
give himself up to the acquisition of divine knowledge.102
| 102 Ibid. ix. sec. 7, note, and compare x. sec.
55, note. | It was seen,
too, in the many conflicts in which he was engaged with Donatists,
Manichæans, Arians, and Pelagians, and in his earnest study of the
deep things of God. This love of knowledge is perhaps conveyed in
the beautiful legend quoted by Nourisson,103
| 103 Philosophie, etc. as above, i. 320. | of the monk wrapped in spirit, who
expressed astonishment at not seeing Augustin among the elect in
heaven. “He is higher up,” he was answered, “he is standing
before the Holy Trinity disputing thereon for all
eternity.”
While from the time of his conversion we find
him holding on to the fundamental doctrines of the faith with the
tenacity of one who had experienced the hollowness of the teachings
of philosophy,104
| 104 See Confessions, xiii. sec. 33, note. | this passion
for truth led him to handle most freely subjects of speculation in
things non-essential.105
| 105 Ibid. xi. sec. 3, note 4. | But whether viewed as a
controversialist, a student of Scripture, or a bishop of the Church
of God, he ever manifests those qualities of mind and heart that
gained for him not only the affection of the Church, but the esteem
of his unorthodox opponents. To quote Guizot’s discriminating
words, there was in him “ce mélange de passion et de douccur,
d’autorite et de sympathie, d’ctendue d’esprit et de rigueur
logique, qui lui donnait un si rare pouvoir.”106
| 106 Histoire de la Civilisation en France, I.
203 (1829). Guizot is speaking of Augustin’s attitude in the
Pelagian controversy. |
2. It is to this eager desire for truth in his
many-sided mind that we owe those trains of thought that read like
forecasts of modern opinion. We have called attention to some such
anticipations of modern thought as they recur in the notes
throughout the book; but the speculations on Memory, Time, and
Creation, which occupy so large a space in Books Ten and Eleven,
deserve more particular notice. The French essayists have entered
very fully into these questions. M. Saisset, in his admirable
introduction to the De Civitate Dei,107
| 107 A portion of this introduction will be found
translated in Appendix ii. of M. Saisset’s Essay on Religious
Philosophy (Clark). | reviews Augustin’s theories
as to the mysterious problems connected with the idea of Creation.
He says, that in his subtle analysis of Time, and in his attempt at
reconciling “the eternity of creative action with the dependence
of things created,…he has touched with a bold and delicate hand
one of the deepest mysteries of the human mind, and that to all his
glorious titles he has added another, that of an ingenious
psychologist and an eminent metaphysician.” Desjardins likewise
commends the depth of Augustin’s speculations as to Time,108
| 108 Essai, etc. as before, p. 129. | and
maintains that no one’s teaching as to Creation has shown more
clearness, boldness, and vigor—avoiding the perils of dualism on
the one hand, and atheism on the other.109
In his remarks on Augustin’s
disquisitions on the phenomena of Memory, his praise is of a more
qualified character. He compares his theories with those of
Malebranche, and, while recognising the practical and animated
character of his descriptions, thinks him obscure in his
delineation of the manner in which absent realities
reproduce themselves on the memory.110
| 110 Ibid. pp. 120-123. Nourrisson’s criticism
of Augustin’s views on Memory may well be compared with that of
Desjardins. He speaks of the powerful originality of Augustin—who
is ingenious as well as new—and says some of his disquisitions
are “the most admirable which have inspired psychological
observation.” And further, one does not meet in all the books of
St. Augustin any philosophical theories which have greater depth
than that on Memory.”—Philosophie, etc. as above, I.
133. |
We have had occasion in the notes to refer to
the Unseen Universe. The authors of this powerful
“Apologia” for Christianity propose it chiefly as an antidote
to the materialistic disbelief in the immortality of the soul
amongst scientific men, which has resulted in this age from the
recent advance in physical science; just as in the last century
English deism had its rise in a similar influence. It is curious,
in connection with this part of our subject, to note that in leading up to
the conclusion at which he arrives, M. Saisset quotes a passage
from the City of God,111
which contains an adumbration of
the theory of the above work in regard to the eternity of the
invisible universe.112
| 112 This position is accepted by Leibnitz in his
Essais de Théodicée. See also M. Saisset, as above, ii. 196-8
(Essay by the translator). | Verily, the saying of the wise man
is true: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be;
and that which is done, is that which shall be done: and there is
no new thing under the sun.”113
3. We have already, in a previous paragraph,
briefly adverted to the influence Christianity and Paganism had one
on the other. The history of Christianity has been a steady advance
on Paganism and Pagan philosophy; but it can hardly be denied that
in this advance there has been an absorption—and in some periods
in no small degree—of some of their elements. As these matters
have been examined in the notes, we need not do more than refer the
reader to the Index of Subjects for the evidence to be obtained in
this respect from the Confessions on such matters as
Baptism, False Miracles, and Prayers for the Dead.
4. There is one feature in the
Confessions which we should not like to pass unnoticed. A
reference to the Retractations114
| 114 Quoted immediately after this preface. | will show that Augustin highly
appreciated the spiritual use to which the book might be put in the
edification of the brethren. We believe that it will prove most
useful in this way; and spiritual benefit will accrue in proportion
to the steadiness of its use. We would venture to suggest that Book
X., from section 37 to the end, may be profitably used as a manual
of self-examination. We have pointed out in a note, that in his
comment on Ps. 8 he makes our Lord’s three temptations to be
types of all the temptations to which man can be subjected; and
makes them correspond in their order, as given by St. Matthew, to
“the Lust of the Flesh, the Lust of the Eyes, and the Pride of
Life,” mentioned by St. John.115
Under each of these heads we have,
in this part of the Confessions, a most severe examination
of conscience; and the impression is deepened by his allegorically
likening the three divisions of temptation to the beasts of the
field, the fish of the sea, and the birds of the air.116
| 116 See Confessions, v. sec. 4, note, and x.
sec. 41, note. | We have
already remarked, in adverting to allegorical interpretation,117
| 117 See ibid. vi. sec. 5, note. | that where
“the strict use of the history is not disregarded,” to use
Augustin’s expression, allegorizing, by way of spiritual
meditation, may be profitable. Those who employ it with this idea
will find their interpretations greatly aided, and made more
systematic, by realizing Augustin’s methods here and in the last
two books of the Confessions,—as when he makes the sea to
represent the wicked world, and the fruitful earth the Church.118
| 118 See Confessions, xiii. sec. 20, note 3, and
sec. 21, note 1. |
It only remains to call attention to the
principles on which this translation and its annotations have been
made. The text of the Benedictine edition has been followed; but
the head-lines of the chapters are taken from the edition of
Bruder, as being the more definite and full. After carefully
translating the whole of the book, it has been compared, line by
line, with the translation of Watts119
| 119 “St. Augustin’s Confessions translated,
and with some marginal notes illustrated by William Watts, Rector
of St. Alban’s, Wood St. (1631).” | (one of the most nervous
translations of the seventeenth century), and that of Dr. Pusey,
which is confessedly founded upon that of Watts. Reference has also
been made, in the case of obscure passages, to the French
translation of Du Bois, and the English translation of the first
Ten Books alluded to in the note on Bk. ix. ch. 12. The references
to Scripture are in the words of the Authorized Version wherever
the sense will bear it; and whenever noteworthy variations from our
version occur, they are indicated by references to the old Italic
version, or to the Vulgate. In some cases, where Augustin has
clearly referred to the LXX. in order to amend his version thereby,
such variations are indicated.120
| 120 For whatever our idea may be as to the extent of
his knowledge of Greek, it is beyond dispute that he frequently had
recourse to the Greek of the Old and New Testament with this view.
See Nourrisson, Philosophie, etc. ii. p. 96. | The annotations are, for the most
part, such as have been derived from the translator’s own
reading. Two exceptions, however, must be made. Out of upwards of
four hundred notes, some forty are taken from the annotations in
Pusey and Watts, but in every case these have been indicated by the
initials E. B. P. or W. W. Dr. Pusey’s annotations (which will be
found chiefly in the earlier part of this work) consist almost
entirely of quotations from other works of Augustin. These
annotations are very copious, and Dr. Pusey explains that he
resorted to this method “partly because this plan of illustrating
St. Augustin out of himself had been already adopted by M. Du Bois
in his Latin edition…and it seemed a pity not to use valuable
materials ready collected to one’s hand. The far greater part of
these illustrations are taken from that edition.” It seemed the
most proper course, in using such notes of Du Bois as appeared
suitable for this edition, to take them from Dr. Pusey’s edition,
and, as above stated, to indicate their source by his initials. A
Textual Index has been added, for the first time, to this edition,
and both it and the Index of Subjects have been prepared with the
greatest possible care.
J. G. P.
St. Mark’s Vicarage, West
Hackney, 1876.
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