I. A Voice in the Garden

In the summer of 386, in Milan, Augustine wept beneath a fig tree. At least, that is how he would remember the garden many years later.

He was thirty-one. He had taught rhetoric, spent years among the Manichaeans and read the Platonists. Some of the intellectual obstacles to Christianity had fallen away. Yet understanding a position was not the same as consenting to the life it asked of him.

His mother Monica longed for his conversion. Her longing could not make the decision for him. Nor could an argument pack up his worldly ambitions, dismiss his accustomed pleasures and leave his old habits neatly outside the door. He had become persuaded of things he still could not bring himself to do.

He remembered hearing a childlike voice repeating Tolle, lege: take up and read. Taking it as a summons, he opened Paul's letters and read the passage in Romans urging the reader to turn away from revelry and lust and put on Christ. He describes the darkness of uncertainty clearing as he reached its end.

This is the conversion scene Augustine composed in the Confessions, not a recording made in the garden. Its force lies partly in what precedes the voice: a highly accomplished speaker has reached a place where eloquence can no longer get him past himself.

A conversion story could stop there. His life did not. The moment gave him a direction; it did not dispose of every question that would follow.

II. Writing Himself into the Question

The Confessions was written around the end of the fourth century. Its thirteen books do not all do the same work. The first nine look back over childhood, ambition, relationships, conversion and his mother's death. Book X turns toward the man doing the writing, his memory and his continuing temptations. Books XI–XIII explore Genesis, creation and time.

The book therefore does not end with the reassuring announcement that its author has become a better person. We have already followed him out of the garden when he takes us into memory and asks how well the man writing this account actually knows himself.

Self-examination already had ancient traditions: Zengzi's daily reflections in the Analects offer one example. Augustine's particular achievement was to turn an extended private history into sustained questioning, keeping even the person doing the remembering inside the question. That way of writing would exert an extraordinary influence on autobiographical literature.

He remembers a youthful theft, a long relationship with a woman who bore his son, and his appetite for distinction. He also recalls praying for chastity and restraint while quietly attaching a condition: not yet.

That condition catches the reader. I approve of change. I can imagine my better future self, and even feel moved by the prospect. Only do not take away today's advantages. A promise becomes a means of postponement. Sincerity itself can be recruited to keep things as they are.

Augustine addresses God, but he explicitly addresses possible human readers too. Confession here includes praise as well as the acknowledgment of wrongdoing; it is not news delivered to an uninformed deity. Where Wittgenstein reopened a book bearing his own name, Augustine reopened a life he had repeatedly managed to explain. Neither allowed an established version of himself to have the final word.

III. It Was Not About the Pears

A pear tree stands in Book II. As a teenager Augustine joined some companions in stealing its fruit at night. They ate a little and threw most of it to the pigs. He had not been hungry. Better fruit was available at home.

Years afterward, he still asks what he wanted that night. Wanting a pear would have been easier to explain. The attraction seems instead to lie in doing what was forbidden and getting away with it. The fruit becomes almost incidental.

But he does not leave us with the resounding declaration that he simply loved wrongdoing. His companions come back into the picture. Alone, he says, he would not have done it. The pleasure of shared mischief, the fear of looking timid, the embarrassment of not being shameless enough: these, too, belonged to the decision.

The scene is not so remote. Friends make jokes about someone who is absent. You do not particularly dislike the person, but you laugh along. Later, saying you meant no harm may be truthful; it still does not explain why you contributed to the humiliation.

Augustine understands the incident through sin and disordered love. He is not writing modern psychology, and we need not move the tree straight into Freud's consulting room. What is worth following is the refusal to finish too soon. One explanation proves insufficient, then another needs examining. A small theft can contain more of a person than a single motive will hold.

IV. Original Sin Is Not an Insult

Original sin became one of Augustine's most influential and contested teachings. He inherited earlier Christian traditions and, in later controversies, argued that our predicament cannot be explained solely through the wrong choices each individual makes. It belongs also to humanity's relationship with Adam's fall.

This is a theological claim, not an experimental conclusion established by observing a few people. The jealous infant described in the Confessions does not, by a look on its face, prove a whole doctrine. Readers can understand the steps of Augustine's thinking without accepting every conclusion.

Nor is the doctrine adequately rendered as people being inherently dirty. Augustine holds that created nature is good and that evil is not an independent substance alongside goodness. To speak of damage, disorder and a need for healing is not to declare a person fundamentally worthless.

Bringing Huineng into the conversation should not turn it into a contest between slogans about clean and dirty human beings. Awakening and nonattachment in the tradition associated with Huineng do not mean erasing everything in a person that exceeds an account of them. Augustine's original sin does not mean labeling all such excess evil. The traditions pose different questions and envision different forms of release.

We can take away a narrower, more immediate question: why does knowing what I should do still fail to make me do it? Augustine offers a theological answer. The question remains available to someone who rejects that answer. Acknowledging limitation need not become hatred of the person who has limits.

V. More Effort Is Not the Whole Answer

Then make a firmer resolution. We know the advice: break the habit, leave the damaging relationship, admit the wrong you have avoided admitting. When the resolution fails, the easiest prescription is another dose of effort.

Augustine finds that prescription inadequate. If the person resolving to change is already pulled by conflicting wishes, a louder command will not necessarily mend the division. His claim is not that willing has vanished. It is that a self-sufficient will cannot accomplish its own salvation.

His hope lies in grace. God's gift is not a prize earned through good performance, nor assistance available only after the recipient has become worthy of it. In Augustine's faith, even the turn toward goodness and the willingness to receive help depend upon grace.

His thinking on grace developed through prolonged controversy. How freedom and grace belong together, and how a person acts within that relationship, remained questions for later Christian traditions too. Augustine continued to exhort, pray and call for action. Dependence on grace did not make a human response irrelevant.

Nor should a comparison with Wittgenstein set up two cartoon alternatives: one man changes entirely by himself, the other has no self left. Wittgenstein's revisions owed much to criticism from other people; Augustine's God is more than psychological support. A useful question survives the contrast: when I change, can I honestly credit every enabling force to myself?

A nonbeliever need not rename grace friendship or therapy to find something here. We can preserve its religious meaning while recognizing a more ordinary experience: seeking help need not be the opposite of agency. Sometimes action begins when we stop pretending we can do everything alone.

VI. Finishing a Song

In Book XI the question becomes time. We speak effortlessly of being early, being late or waiting a moment. Asked what time is, however, we can find those familiar words surprisingly difficult to explain.

What has passed is no longer here; what is coming is not here yet. The present slips into the past as we try to name it. How, then, do we judge one interval longer than another? What are we measuring?

Augustine asks us to consider reciting or singing something familiar. Before the song begins, it lies ahead in expectation. Partway through, some of it has entered memory while the rest remains to be sung. Attention carries what was expected into what is remembered. We never hold the song as one simultaneous block, yet we do experience it.

Memory, attention and expectation become ways into the experience of time. Augustine describes a stretching or distension of the mind. That is not the simple assertion that external time does not exist, nor an early delivery of Kant's or Husserl's completed answers. Related questions illuminate one another without making their thinkers interchangeable.

This is closer to the man in the garden than it first appears. Saying not yet, he assigns hope to the future while letting habit govern the present. We do more than move through time. We understand ourselves between memory and expectation, making promises or negotiating extensions.

In his faith, God's eternity is not an infinitely lengthened timeline. We may disagree without pretending a quick objection has settled the entire question. At least the song gives us this: explaining a life and holding that whole life at once are different things.

VII. One Question, Different Paths

The rationalizations and incompatible wishes invite comparison with Freud, and with the people in Dostoevsky's novels. Sometimes the more solemnly someone explains himself, the more clearly another voice becomes audible beneath the explanation.

The encounter is worth preserving. But Augustine is not a psychoanalyst in ancient dress. Wanting and not wanting to change need not map neatly onto a battle between consciousness and the unconscious. Many of the desires in the Confessions are painfully well known to their owner.

The pear story includes the pleasures of transgression and companionship. Freud would also ask why people repeat painful experiences; the problems developed around repetition compulsion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle already take us beyond a choice between wanting the theft and wanting the fruit.

Augustine investigates will, love, sin and grace. Freud develops another account of conflict and mental processes. Dostoevsky makes characters inhabit their difficulties in stories. They have not simply discovered an identical basement and given its furniture different names.

A reader can nevertheless move among these books with a shared question: does my explanation of myself already contain the person I would like others to see? We do not have to adopt an entire theory before asking. We only have to slow down, next time, before declaring that we know exactly why we acted.

VIII. Two Cities, Not Two Maps

Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410. Some blamed the abandonment of the old gods for Christianity. Augustine began The City of God in 413 and completed its twenty-two books around 426. The work grew far beyond an immediate defense against those accusations.

He speaks of two cities through two orientations of love: self-exaltation reaching contempt for God, and love of God displacing the supremacy of one's own glory. City here does not mean a map with Rome colored red and the church blue. The distinction is not simply state versus church.

Their citizens are intermixed in history, sharing visible societies. We do not know everyone's final allegiance; visible church membership does not supply a guarantee of salvation. This is different from saying one person simultaneously belongs to both cities. Inner conflict does not erase the distinction between their ultimate orientations.

Nor does the city of God exist only at history's end. It has a pilgrim life in the present, while its fulfillment belongs to the future Augustine awaits in faith. Rome's fate and Christian hope are thereby separated. No empire provides an eternal insurance policy.

There is a sharp warning here against allowing an existing order to occupy the place of an ultimate answer. Yet Augustine also came to defend coercive measures to bring religious dissenters into the church. His searching self-examination did not make his treatment of other people's freedom consistently generous. We need to read the insight together with the difficulty its author leaves us.

Reading Hegel, Marx or Augustine alongside one another calls for distinctions among their arguments, related institutional practices and the hopes they hold out. These are different things. We can ask how a hope enters power and how it treats those who dissent. Comparison then returns from a list of winners to the difficulties of actual life.

IX. The Book Remains Open

Augustine died in Hippo on 28 August 430, aged seventy-five, while a Vandal army besieged the city in what is now Algeria. His thinking had not ended in the garden of 386. Extensive work on the Trinity, free choice, scripture and history still lay ahead.

Late in life he even revisited his own writings in the Retractations, reviewing and correcting earlier claims. Faith had given him a direction, not a blanket exemption from thinking again. Later readers can still encounter a thinker engaged in revision.

His influence extended through the Middle Ages into the Reformation; Luther had been an Augustinian friar. For a reader unready to follow the whole theology, however, what stays first may be a hesitation: I want to change, but not yet.

Now let him arrive at this series' imagined bridgehead, carrying an open Confessions. Wittgenstein's two books lie nearby. Neither man has to defeat the other, and neither can end the other's thinking. One reopens answers already given; the other questions again the self those answers had helped explain.

We need not accept original sin to be moved by tears in a garden. Nor must we pronounce people permanently unclean to acknowledge the difficulty of change. Owning a harm, relinquishing a respectable excuse, asking someone for help: these can be beginnings, not rewards reserved for those who already qualify.

The book remains open. Perhaps a whole life cannot be put in order today. But the date to which we keep postponing it might move a little closer.

Notes

The garden, pears, memory and time discussions draw on Confessions VIII, II, X and XI respectively. These are retrospective accounts. Original sin and grace are presented as Augustine's theological positions, not verdicts on human worth. The bridgehead is a literary invention.

Further reading: Confessions II, VIII, X, XI, City of God XIV, On Grace and Free Will, and Letter 93 on religious coercion. See also the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Augustine for biographical and intellectual context.