I’ve had a used paperback of The Confessions of St. Augustine around since 1957. I don’t know how many times I have dipped into it, and it never “clicked” with me. Grandson Kyle Schmidt took time off from his seminary grind in mid-August to spend a day fishing with me at the Lake of the Ozarks. When he returned to St.Louis he left behind some CDs of The Teaching Company with lectures on St. Augustine’s Confessions. Turns out they were loaned to Kyle by his mother Linda, and rather than return them I started listening. These CD lectures are team presentations by William R. Cook, Ph.D., and Ronald B. Herzman, Ph.D. I have listened to 6 of the 12 lectures of Part 1 of the Confessions, and I am hooked.

They pointed their students to a new translation by Sister Maria Boulding, O.S.B. It doesn’t take much to get me to buy Yet Another Book, so I bought a copy and was surprised to find that it was as enjoyably readable as my old translation was dense and unreadable. It turns out that there exists the Augustinian Heritage Institute, Inc that is busy producing a 48 volume The Works of Saint Augustine, of which The Confessions is the first.

The Introduction begins:

If the Bishop of Hippo looked out of his window as he picked up his pen, he saw a brilliant, colorful world, its hot details vivid in the fierce African sun. Augustine loved light, “the queen of colors” (X,34,51). He looked out at a prosperous Mediterranean country, at well-maintained roads gleaming white in the sun, at olive groves, orchards and vineyards, at municipal buildings and public baths. And everywhere was the stamp of Rome.

. . . Beyond the critics was a wider circle of potential readers who would listen far more sympathetically. Augustine was not the only cultured and intelligent man to embrace Christianity at a mature age, after a long intellectual search. Paulinus of Nola was a kindred spirit; he and many others would be very interested in anything Augustine might have to say about his understanding of his faith and its relation to philosophy and the humanities. Many another had perhaps found in Neo-Platonism the highest and most spiritual achievement of the human mind in search of union with God, yet turned away disappointed, as Augustine had, because something was missing.

Two books (chapters) of the Confessions are of particular interest to me. Book X has Augustine meditating on the nature of memory. Perhaps you can identify, as I have, with this little part of Augustine’s trying to get a handle on what memory is:

Now when I name “forgetfulness” and similarly recognize the thing I am naming, whence comes my recognition, if not from an act of remembering? I do not mean the recognition of the sound of its name, but of the thing signified, for if I forgot that, I would be unable to recognize the meaning of the word. So when I remember “memory,” memory itself immediately makes itself available; but when I remember “forgetfulness,” both memory and forgetfulness are promptly present; memory since by means of it I remember, and forgetfulness since that is what I am remembering. But what else is forgetfulness but loss of memory? How then can it be present so that I can remember it, when its very presence deprives me of the power to remember? . . . In the end, who can fathom this matter, who can understand how the mind works?

Ain’t this fun?

Book XI is titled Time and Eternity. I have this idea that the spiritual world of God’s realm is somehow beyond time and space, while our physical world has a ticking clock and finite dimensions. I will be very interested in finding out what Augustine has to say about this (I haven’t read this chapter yet).

Dave, with more to come. Maybe.