The Confessions Of St. Augustine

________________________________________________
Title:     The Confessions Of St. Augustine
Author: George Hamlin Fitch [More Titles by Fitch]

AN ELOQUENT BOOK OF RELIGIOUS MEDITATION--THE ABLEST OF
EARLY CHRISTIAN FATHERS TELLS OF HIS YOUTH, HIS FRIENDS
AND HIS CONVERSION.

In reading the great books of the world one must be guided largely by his own taste. If a book is recommended to you and you cannot enjoy it after conscientious effort, then it is plain that the book does not appeal to you or that you are not ready for it. The classic that you may not be able to read this year may become the greatest book in the world to you in another year, when you have passed through some hard experience that has matured your mind or awakened some dormant faculties that call out for employment.

Great success or great failure, a crushing grief or a disappointment that seems to take all the light out of your world--these are some of the things that mature and change the mind. So, if you cannot feel interest in some of the books that are recommended in these articles put the volumes aside and wait for a better day. It will be sure to come, unless you drop into the habit of limiting your reading to the newspapers and the magazines. If you fall into this common practice then there is little hope for you, as real literature will lose all its attractions. Better to read nothing than to devote your time entirely to what is ephemeral and simply for the day it is printed.

The Confessions of St. Augustine is a book which will appeal to one reader, while another can make little of it. For fifteen hundred years it has been a favorite book among priests and theologians and those who are given to pious meditation. Up to the middle of the last century it probably had a more vital influence in weaning people from the world and in turning their thoughts to religious things than any other single book except the Bible. And this influence is not hard to seek, for into this book the stalwart old African Bishop of the fourth century put his whole heart, with its passionate love of God and its equally passionate desire for greater perfection. As an old commentator said, "it is most filled with the fire of the love of God and most calculated to kindle it in the heart."

This is the vital point and the one which it seems to me explains why the Confessions is very hard reading for most people of today. The praise of God, the constant quotation of passages from the Bible and the fear that his feelings may relapse into his former neglect of religion--these were common in the writers who followed Augustine for more than a thousand years. In fact, they remained the staple of all religious works up to the close of the Georgian age in England. Then came a radical change, induced perhaps by the rapid spread of scientific thought. The old religious books were neglected and the new works showed a directness of statement, an absence of Biblical verbiage and a closer bearing on everyday life and thought. This trend has been increased in devotional books, as well as in sermons, until it would be impossible to induce a church congregation of today to accept a sermon of the type that was preached up to the middle of the last century.

For this reason it seems to me that any one who wishes to cultivate St. Augustine should begin by reading a chapter of the Confessions. If you enjoy this, then it will be well to take up the complete Confessions, one of the best editions of which will be found in Everyman's Library, translated by Dr. E. B. Pusey, the leader of the great Tractarian movement in England. Pusey frowns on the use of any book of extracts from St. Augustine, but this English churchman, with his severe views, cannot be taken as a guide in these days. Doubtless he thought Pamela and Coebs in Search of a Wife entertaining books of fiction; but the reader of today pronounces them too dull and too sentimental to read.

Many there are in these days who preserve something of the old Covenanter spirit in regard to the Bible and other devotional books. One of these is Dr. Wilfred T. Grenfell, superintendent of the Labrador Medical Mission, an Oxford man, who cast aside a brilliant career in England to throw in his life with the poor fishermen along the stormy coast which he has made his home. Dr. Grenfell has come to have the same influence over these uneducated men that General Gordon of Khartoum gained over alien races like the Chinese and the Soudanese, or that Stanley secured over savage African tribes. It is the intense earnestness, the simple-minded sincerity of the man who lives as Christ would live on earth which impresses these people of Labrador and gains their love and confidence. Grenfell in a little essay, What the Bible Means to Me, develops his feeling for the Scriptures, which is much the same feeling that inspired Augustine, as well as John Bunyan. Grenfell even goes to the length of saying that he prefers the Bible as a suggester of thought to any other book, and he regrets that it is not bound as secular books are bound, so that he might read it without attracting undue attention on railroad trains or in public places while waiting to be served with meals.

Gordon carried with him to the place where he met his death pieces of what he firmly believed was wood of the real cross of Calvary, and on the last day of his life, when he looked out over the Nile for the help that never came, he read his Bible with simple confidence in the God of Battles. Stanley believed that the Lord was with him in all his desperate adventures in savage Africa, and this belief warded off fever and discouragement and gave him the tremendous energy to overcome obstacles that would have proved fatal to any one not keyed up to his high tension by implicit faith in the Lord.

If you wish to know what personal faith in God means and what it can accomplish in this world of devotion to mammon, read Stanley's Autobiography, edited by his wife, that Dorothy Tennant who is one of the most brilliant of living English women. It is one of the most stimulating books in the world, and no young man can read it without having his ambition powerfully excited and his better nature stirred by the spectacle of the rise of this poor abused boy slave in a Welsh foundlings' home to a place of high honor and great usefulness--a seat beside kings, and a name that will live forever as the greatest of African explorers.

It is this marvelous faith in God, which is as real as the breath in his nostrils, that makes St. Augustine's Confessions a vital and enduring book. It is this faith that charges it with the potency of living words, although the man who wrote this book has been dead over fifteen hundred years. Augustine was born in Numidia and brought up amid pagan surroundings, although his mother, Monica, was an ardent Christian and prayed that he might become a convert to her faith. He was trained as a rhetorician and spent some time at Carthage. When his thoughts were directed to religion the main impediment in the way of his acceptance of Christianity was the fact that he lived with a concubine and had had a child by her. Finally came the death of his bosom friend, which called out one of the great laments of all time, and then his gradual conversion to the Christian church, largely due to careful study of St. Paul.

Following hard upon his conversion came the death of his mother, who had been his constant companion for many years. Rarely eloquent is his tribute to this unselfish mother, whose virtues were those of the good women of all ages and whose love for her son was the flower of her life. In all literature there is nothing finer than the old churchman's tender memorial to his dear mother and his pathetic record of the heavy grief, that finally was eased by a flood of tears. Here are some of the simple words of this lament over the dead:

"I closed her eyes; and there flowed withal a mighty sorrow into my heart, which was overflowing into tears; mine eyes at the same time, by the violent command of my mind, drank up their fountain wholly dry; and woe was me in such strife! * * * What then was it which did grievously pain me within, but a fresh wound wrought through the sudden wrench of that most sweet and dear custom of living together? I joyed indeed in her testimony, when, in her last sickness, mingling her endearments with my acts of duty, she called me 'dutiful,' and mentioned with great affection of love that she never heard any harsh or reproachful sound uttered by my mouth against her. But yet, O my Lord, who madest us, what comparison is there betwixt that honor that I paid her and her slavery for me?"

Augustine was the ablest of the early Christian fathers and he did yeoman's service in laying broad and deep the foundations of the Christian church and in defending it against the heretics. But of all his many works the Confessions will remain the most popular, because it voices the cry of a human heart and shows the human side of a great churchman.

[The end]
George Hamlin Fitch's essay: Confessions Of St. Augustine

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN