Confessions by Augustine of Hippo

Published 397 · 114,910 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Memoir & Autobiography, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality

How hard is Confessions to read?

Confessions scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
Modern translations render Augustine's Latin into clear English, but theological and philosophical vocabulary (Manicheanism, concupiscence, original sin, Neoplatonism) requires some background knowledge.
Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
Augustine's prose moves between passionate direct address to God, analytical philosophical argument, and narrative memoir. The shifts in register create syntactic variety that demands attentive reading.
Abstraction: 82 out of 100
The most concrete passages (stealing pears, hearing a child's voice in a garden) serve the most abstract arguments about free will, time, memory, and the nature of God.
Information density: 62 out of 100
Theological argument, philosophical analysis, autobiographical narrative, and scriptural exegesis layer over each other. The final books on Genesis and the nature of time are especially dense.
Narrative indirection: 48 out of 100
Augustine narrates directly to God and explains his motivations openly. The indirection lies in the gap between the sinful young man and the bishop who remembers him.
Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
The pear tree as motiveless sin, the garden as conversion scene echoing Eden, the child's voice as divine command. Augustine's symbols are theologically loaded but clearly articulated.
Ironic distance: 38 out of 100
Augustine writes with intense, confessional sincerity. The distance is temporal rather than tonal: the mature bishop looks back at his younger self with compassionate severity.
Resolution withholding: 35 out of 100
The conversion in the Milan garden provides decisive resolution for the autobiographical narrative. The philosophical books on time and memory open new questions but from a position of faith.
Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
Thirteen books shifting from autobiography (Books 1-9) to philosophical meditation on memory, time, and creation (Books 10-13). The structural pivot surprises readers expecting continuous memoir.

How Confessions is regarded

Confessions holds a literary regard score of 96 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Confessions sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (395 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Confessions scores 55 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
And I, a man, and such a man, sought to conceive of Thee the sovereign, only, true God
Symbol: Anagogic
And I entered and beheld with the eye of my soul (such as it was), above the same eye of my soul, above my mind, the Light Unchangeable.
Mythos: Romance iii (romance iii)
Take up and read; Take up and read.
Genre: Confession + Anatomy
What then have I to do with men, that they should hear my confessions

Where the story of Confessions takes place

  • Roman Africa and Italy, 354-387: Thagaste, Carthage, Rome, Milan, Ostia (354 to 387), the main setting

5 things that are true of Confessions, with the passage for each

  1. Augustine says he stole pears at sixteen, not to eat them but to throw them to hogs.

    took huge loads, not for our eating, but to fling to the very hogs, having only tasted them.

  2. He spent nine years, from age nineteen to twenty-eight, as a Manichaean follower.

    For this space of nine years (from my nineteenth year to my eight-and-twentieth) we lived seduced and seducing

  3. His concubine is sent back to Africa and their son stays with him.

    And she returned to Afric, vowing unto Thee never to know any other man, leaving with me my son by her.

  4. He recalls praying for chastity with the qualification 'only not yet'.

    Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.

  5. The scripture passage he opens in the garden urges him to put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh.

    put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, in concupiscence.

Scenes in Confessions that Frye would name

47 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, Book VIII
instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away. The text read in the garden resolves the quest in a flash of recognition.
Hamartia, Book II
I loved to perish, I loved mine own fault, not that for which I was faulty, but my fault itself. The pear theft is the archetypal fatal misstep, sin loved for its own sake.
Agon, Book VIII
Thus did my two wills, one new, and the other old, one carnal, the other spiritual, struggle within me; and by their discord, undid my soul. The central contest of the quest is internal: the divided will against itself.
Anagnorisis, Book VIII
Thou, O Lord, while he was speaking, didst turn me round towards myself Pontitianus's tale forces Augustine to see his own foulness, the pivotal self-recognition.
Point of epiphany, Book IX
we came to our own minds, and went beyond them Augustine and Monica reach a shared moment of eternal Wisdom from the window at Ostia.
Pathos, Book IX
I closed her eyes; and there flowed withal a mighty sorrow into my heart Monica's death at Ostia is the book's closing pathos for the narrative.

Books that share these scenes with Confessions

About the author

Augustine of Hippo