THE
CONFESSIONS OF
SAINT
AUGUSTINE
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
BOOK ONE
Confessions
of the greatness and unsearchableness of God, of God’s mercies in infancy
and boyhood, and human wilfulness; of his own sins of idleness, abuse of his
duties, and of God’s gifts up to his fifteenth year.
BOOK
TWO
Object
of these Confessions. Further ills of idleness developed in his sixteenth
year. Evils of ill society, which betrayed him into theft.
BOOK
THREE
His
residence at Carthage from his seventeenth to his nineteenth year. Source of
his disorders. Love of shows. Advance in studies, and love of wisdom.
Distaste for Scripture. Led astray to the Manicheans. Refutation of some of
their tenets. Grief of his mother Monnica at his heresy, and prayers for his
conversion. Her vision from God, and answer through a Bishop.
BOOK
FOUR
Augustine’s
life from nineteen to eight and twenty; himself a Manichean, and seducing
others to the same heresy; partial obedience amidst vanity and sin;
consulting astrologers, only partially shaken herein: loss of an early
friend, who is converted by being baptised when in a swoon; reflections on
grief, on real and unreal friendship, and love of fame; writes on “the fair and fit,” yet cannot rightly, since he entertained wrong notions
of God.
BOOK
FIVE
St.
Augustine’s twenty-ninth year. Faustus, a snare of Satan to many, made an
instrument of deliverance to St. Augustine, by showing the ignorance of the
Manichees on those things, wherein they professed to have divine knowledge.
Augustine gives up all thought of going further among the Manichees: is
guided to Rome and Milan, where he hears St. Ambrose, leaves the Manichees,
and becomes again a Catechumen in the Church Catholic.
BOOK
SIX
Arrival
of Monnica at Milan; her obedience to St. Ambrose, and his value for her;
St. Ambrose’s habits; Augustine’s gradual abandonment of error; finds
that he has blamed the Church Catholic wrongly; desire of absolute
certainty; how shaken in his worldly pursuits; God’s guidance of his
friend Alypius; Augustine debates with himself and his friends about their
mode of life; his inveterate sins, and dread of judgment.
BOOK
SEVEN
Augustine’s
thirty-first year, gradually extricated from his errors, but still with
material conceptions of God; much aided by an argument of Nebridius; sees
that the cause of sin lies in free-will, rejects the Manichean heresy;
recovered from the belief in Astrology, but perplexed about the origin of
evil; is led to find in the Platonists the seeds of the doctrine of the
divinity of the WORD, but not of His humiliation; but, not knowing Christ to
be the Mediator, remains estranged from Him; all his doubts removed by the
study of Holy Scripture, especially St. Paul.
BOOK
EIGHT
Augustine’s
thirty-second year. He consults Simplicianus; from him hears the history of
the conversion of Victorinus, and longs to devote himself entirely to God,
but is mastered by his old habits; is still further roused by the history of
St. Antony, and of the conversion of two courtiers; during a severe
struggle, hears a voice from heaven, opens Scripture, and is converted.
BOOK
NINE
Augustine
determines to devote his life to God, and to abandon his profession of
Rhetoric, quietly however; retires to the country to prepare himself to
receive the grace of Baptism, and is baptized with Alypius, and his son
Adeodatus. At Ostia, in his way to Africa, his mother Monica dies. Her life
and character.
BOOK
TEN
Having
in the former books spoken of himself before his receiving the grace of
Baptism, in this Augustine confesses what he then was. But first, he
enquires by what faculty we can know God at all; whence he enlarges on the
mysterious character of the memory. Then he examines his own trials under
the triple division of temptation; what Christian continency prescribes as
to each. On Christ the Only Mediator, who heals all infirmities.
BOOK
ELEVEN
Augustine
breaks off the history of the mode whereby God led him to holy Orders, in
order to “confess” God’s mercies in opening to him the Scripture.
Moses is not to be understood, but in Christ, not even the first words In
the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Answer to cavillers who
asked, “what did God before He created the heaven and the earth?”
Inquiry into the nature of Time.
BOOK
TWELVE
Augustine
proceeds to comment on Genesis 1, i, and explains the “heaven” to mean
that spiritual and incorporeal creation, which cleaves to God
unintermittingly; “earth,” the formless matter whereof the corporeal
creation was afterwards formed. He does not reject, however, other
interpretations, but rather confesses that manifold senses may and ought to
be extracted from it.
BOOK
THIRTEEN
Continuation
of the exposition of Genesis 1; it contains the mystery of the Trinity, and
a type of the formation, extension, and support of the Church
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