A Book Addressed to God, Overheard by Us
Augustine's Confessiones (397–400) is conventionally called the first autobiography, which undersells it. Plenty of earlier writers recorded their lives. What Augustine does that nobody had done is treat his own interior — his memory, his divided will, his experience of time — as a subject requiring sustained analysis.
The book has thirteen books, and their distribution is the first surprise. Nine are narrative, running from infancy to his mother's death. The remaining four are not autobiography at all: book ten analyses memory, book eleven analyses time, and books twelve and thirteen interpret the opening of Genesis. A reader who expects a life story finds it stops two-thirds of the way through.
That is not a structural failure. The narrative books pose a problem the analytical books answer. How does a person come to want what they do not want? Augustine's account of the divided will, "I was at odds with myself", describes wanting and not wanting a single thing at once, and locates the conflict inside a single will rather than between a good and a bad soul. Anyone who has failed to keep a resolution has the experience; nobody had written it down this way.
The analysis of time in book eleven is the most quoted passage. Augustine asks what we measure when we measure time. The past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist, and the present has no duration, so the thing being measured cannot be time itself. His answer is that there are three presents in the soul:
| Traditional name | Augustine's correction | Where it exists |
|---|---|---|
| Past | Present of things past | Memory |
| Present | Present of things present | Attention |
| Future | Present of things future | Expectation |
Time, on this account, is a distentio animi, a stretching of the mind, and what we measure is the impression that passing things leave.
The address matters as much as the content. The entire work is written in the second person, to God. This is why the interiority is possible: Augustine is not explaining himself to readers, who might be flattered or deceived, but to an addressee already in possession of the facts. The confession can therefore afford to be unsparing, and we read it as overhearers.
Common pitfall: reading the pear theft in book two as a story about stealing fruit. Augustine chooses it precisely because the pears were worthless and he was not hungry, the point is a wrong done for no motive at all, which is a far harder thing to explain than theft for gain.