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The Confessions of Saint Augustine is considered one of the greatest Christian classics of all time. It is an extended poetic, passionate, intimate prayer that Augustine wrote as an autobiography sometime after his conversion, to confess his sins and proclaim God’s goodness. Just as his first hearers were captivated by his powerful conversion story, so also have many millions been over the following sixteen centuries. His experience of God speaks to us across time with little need of transpositions. This acclaimed new translation by Sister Maria Boulding, O.S.B., masterfully captures his experience, and is written in an elegant and flowing style. Her beautiful contemporary translation of the ancient Confessions makes the classic work more accessible to modern readers. Her translation combines the linguistic accuracy demanded by 4th-century Latin with the poetic power aimed at by Augustine, not as discernable in previous translations.

Confessions — Book I, Chapter 1

• God is supremely great: infinite power and wisdom; worthy of praise.
• Humans are small and broken: mortal, sinful, and prideful, yet still drawn to praise God.
• The desire to praise God is itself God’s work in us.
• Key claim: God made us for himself, so the heart is restless until it rests in God.
• Paradox Augustine raises: how can you call on God without knowing him, and know him without calling on him?
• Answer: faith comes first (through hearing/preaching), and faith becomes the route into deeper seeking and knowledge.
  Augustine opens Confessions as prayer rather than autobiography. He starts by magnifying God’s greatness and then immediately contrasts it with the human condition: we’re weak, finite, and self-deceived—especially through pride—yet we still have a built-in pull toward worship. He treats that pull as evidence that God is already at work in the human soul, awakening desire for him. From this comes the book’s most famous thesis: because humans were made for God, we experience an inner restlessness until our life is re-centered on him.
  He then frames the spiritual life as a kind of loop: you call on God to be helped and to know him, but calling presupposes some prior knowledge of whom you’re calling on. Augustine resolves this by making faith the starting point: people begin by believing what they’ve heard proclaimed (preaching), and that initial trust becomes the means by which they seek God more fully and come to know him more truly.

Confessions — Book II, Chapters 4–6

Chapter 4

• Augustine says theft is condemned both by God’s law and by an inner moral law “written in the heart.” (newadvent.org)
• He emphasizes the oddity of his case: he stole despite having enough already, and better. (newadvent.org)
• He describes the act: he and other youths go out late at night, shake a pear tree, take a large haul, barely taste any, and throw most to pigs. (newadvent.org)
• His motive wasn’t the fruit; it was the pleasure of stealing and sinning as such. (newadvent.org)
• He frames it as “gratuitous” wrongdoing: the act had no real inducement beyond the evil of it. (newadvent.org)

Augustine uses the pear theft to isolate a disturbing kind of sin: not a lapse driven by need, but a chosen transgression where the thrill comes from violating what is forbidden. The pears are almost a prop; what he “enjoys” is the act of robbery itself and the self-knowledge that he is doing what he should not. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 5

• Augustine argues that sins usually have a “bait”: some attractive good people desire (beauty, pleasure, honor, power, revenge, the sweetness of friendship, etc.). (newadvent.org)
• The problem is not that these things are entirely worthless, but that the soul prefers them in a disordered way, neglecting higher goods—ultimately God, truth, and God’s law. (newadvent.org)
• He proposes a test for explaining crimes: we typically look for what the person hoped to gain (or feared losing). (newadvent.org)
• He argues that even apparently “motiveless” cruelty (his example is Catiline as traditionally portrayed) is still done for some further end (honor, wealth, security, escaping fear of law, etc.). (newadvent.org)
  Here Augustine sketches a general moral psychology: wrongdoing is often the mis-prioritizing of real goods. Pleasure, status, control, safety, and companionship can be genuinely appealing, but they become spiritually destructive when they replace God as the soul’s center. That’s why he doubts “purely motiveless” evil is common: people usually do bad things because they’re chasing some perceived benefit. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 6

• Augustine asks directly: what did I love in that theft? The pears weren’t the point, and they had no special appeal. (newadvent.org)
• He acknowledges the pears were good as created things (they were “fair to the sight”), but insists the “sweetness” he tasted was the sweetness of sin. (newadvent.org)
• He then argues the theft had no true “beauty” in it—neither the beauty of virtue nor even the “shadowy” beauty that can cling to deceptive vices. (newadvent.org)
• He explains how vice works: it counterfeits something real—pride imitates exaltation, ambition imitates honor, lust imitates love, curiosity imitates knowledge, sloth imitates rest, etc.—but the true originals of these goods are found perfectly in God alone. (newadvent.org)
• He concludes that the soul “fornicates” when it turns from God to seek outside God what cannot be pure or stable apart from God. (newadvent.org)
• His final diagnosis of the pear theft: it was a warped attempt at “freedom”—a creaturely imitation of divine independence, doing what is unlawful simply because it is unlawful. (newadvent.org)
  Augustine deepens the pear story into a theology of disordered love. Created things can be good, but sin twists the soul into loving the wrong thing in the wrong way—or even loving the very act of rebellion. He frames this as counterfeit divinity: because he cannot possess real omnipotent freedom, he imitates a shadow of it by breaking the rule and savoring the forbiddenness itself. The theft becomes a miniature portrait of what sin is: turning away from God, grasping at substitute goods (or substitute “freedom”), and calling that grasping “delight.” (newadvent.org)

Confessions — Book VI, Chapters 1–5

Chapter 1

• Augustine says he had been searching for God “outside” himself and sinking into skepticism and despair about finding truth. (newadvent.org)
• Monica arrives in Milan, having crossed sea and land with steady confidence in God’s protection. (newadvent.org)
• She comforts even sailors during dangerous travel because she believes God assured her of safe arrival. (newadvent.org)
• Augustine tells her he is no longer a Manichaean, though not yet a Catholic Christian. (newadvent.org)
• Monica responds with calm certainty: she believes she will live to see him a Catholic believer, and she intensifies prayers and attendance at Ambrose’s preaching. (newadvent.org)
  Augustine frames this moment as a turning point in the atmosphere around him: he is no longer committed to Manichaeism, but he is spiritually unstable and close to despair. Monica’s role is steadiness and hope—she treats his partial movement away from error as the beginning of a larger cure, and she anchors that hope in prayer and in the teaching ministry of Ambrose. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 2

• Monica brings cakes, bread, and wine to memorial shrines of the saints, following an African custom. (newadvent.org)
• A doorkeeper stops her; when she learns Ambrose forbids the practice, she obeys immediately and without resentment. (newadvent.org)
• Augustine highlights her temperance: she was not driven by appetite for wine, and her piety wasn’t an excuse for indulgence. (newadvent.org)
• Even when she carried wine to multiple shrines, she limited herself to a small, diluted cup, sharing it in tiny sips as an act of devotion rather than pleasure. (newadvent.org)
  This chapter is a portrait of Monica’s spiritual “trainability.” Augustine contrasts her with people who become defensive when a beloved practice is corrected. Monica’s obedience is not mere rule-following; it’s a sign that she values truth and ecclesial authority more than habit or sentiment—even when the habit is religiously framed. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 3

• Augustine notes Monica might not have accepted the change so easily from someone she didn’t love and trust; she trusted Ambrose deeply because she saw him as instrumental in Augustine’s salvation. (newadvent.org)
• Augustine wants guidance on Scripture but can rarely consult Ambrose because of the constant demands of pastoral work. (newadvent.org)
• He admires Ambrose’s public honor, though he (mistakenly) imagines celibacy must be a grim burden. (newadvent.org)
• He describes Ambrose reading silently—eyes moving, mind grasping meaning, but no voice—so visitors often leave rather than interrupt. (newadvent.org)
  Augustine uses Ambrose to show a paradox: the person who could most help him is least available, not from coldness but from service and discipline. The silent-reading scene becomes a small symbol of Augustine’s situation: he is near a source of understanding, but still at the edge of it, watching more than receiving. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 4

• Augustine realizes he had been attacking a caricature of Catholic belief—especially the idea that Catholics imagine God as a bodily being bounded by human shape. (newadvent.org)
• He admits shame: he had mocked “carnal imaginations” rather than honestly investigating what the Church actually taught. (newadvent.org)
• He acknowledges he didn’t yet understand what “spiritual substance” is, but he now sees that God is not spatially confined the way bodies are. (newadvent.org)
• He begins to treat his earlier confidence as reckless: he spoke as if certain while in fact he was ignorant. (newadvent.org)
  The movement here is intellectual humility with spiritual consequences. Augustine isn’t fully converted, but he is “converted” away from a long-standing misunderstanding that had functioned like an obstacle: he learns that the Catholic faith is not committed to the crude materialism he accused it of, and that his earlier certainty was, in reality, an unearned arrogance. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 5

• Augustine compares his soul to someone harmed by a bad doctor: because he had been deceived before, he fears trusting even a trustworthy remedy. (newadvent.org)
• He comes to see faith as unavoidable in ordinary human life (history, places, relationships, even knowledge of one’s parents depends on testimony). (newadvent.org)
• He begins to prefer Catholic doctrine because it is more honest: it distinguishes what must be believed from what can be demonstrated, instead of promising “knowledge” and then demanding belief in absurdities (as he charges Manichaeism with doing). (newadvent.org)
• He grows more convinced that skepticism about Scripture is misplaced: if belief is necessary to live at all, refusing belief in authoritative Scripture is not superior rationality but a refusal of the medicine his soul needs. (newadvent.org)
  This chapter is Augustine’s pivot from “I will only accept what I can fully comprehend” to “refusing all trust makes healing impossible.” He’s not celebrating credulity; he’s describing how human life already rests on layers of trust, and how spiritual recovery requires a disciplined willingness to believe where one cannot yet see clearly—so that sight can later be healed. (newadvent.org)

Source (chapter numbering used here):
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110106.htm

Confessions — Book VIII, Chapter 12

• Augustine reaches an emotional breaking point: an inner “storm” gathers his misery and bursts into intense weeping. (newadvent.org)
• He withdraws from Alypius for solitude, collapses under a fig tree, and prays in anguish: “How long?” and “Why not now?” (newadvent.org)
• He hears a child’s voice (boy or girl, he can’t tell) repeatedly chanting: “Take up and read.” (newadvent.org)
• He interprets it as a divine command, returns to the book of Paul’s letters, and reads the first passage his eyes fall on (Romans 13:13–14). (newadvent.org)
• The reading produces an immediate inner change: doubt and darkness vanish, replaced by a sense of certainty and calm. (newadvent.org)
• Alypius reads further (Romans 14:1), applies it to himself, and resolves to join Augustine. (newadvent.org)
• They tell Monica; she rejoices, blessing God for answering her long prayers more fully than she had hoped. (newadvent.org)
  Augustine portrays conversion here as a decisive collapse of divided will. After prolonged inner conflict, he finally stops bargaining with “tomorrow” and pours himself out in tears and prayer under the fig tree, begging for an end to his bondage to old habits. The mysterious child’s chant functions like a summons that breaks the paralysis: he treats it as God directing him to Scripture, and the specific lines he reads (urging a clean break with sensual living and a “putting on” of Christ) land with the force of a verdict. In that moment, what had been theoretical becomes existential—his uncertainty evaporates, and his will snaps into alignment. Alypius is swept into the same movement, and Monica receives the news as the fulfillment of years of grief, prayer, and hope. (newadvent.org)

Source (New Advent, Book VIII, ch. 12):
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110108.htm

Confessions — Book IX, Chapter 27

• Monica is suddenly struck with a fever a few days after the “Ostia window” conversation. (newadvent.org)
• During the illness she falls into a brief swoon, losing awareness of visible things. (newadvent.org)
• When she regains consciousness and sees Augustine and his brother, she asks, “Where was I?” (newadvent.org)
• She then speaks with startling composure about her burial: she tells them that this is where they will bury their mother. (newadvent.org)
• Augustine stays silent and holds back tears; his brother says he’d prefer she die back in her own country. (newadvent.org)
• Monica corrects that instinct: she tells them not to be troubled about where her body is laid, and makes one request—remember her at the Lord’s altar wherever they are. (newadvent.org)
• She then grows quiet again, suffering as the illness worsens. (newadvent.org)
  This chapter shows Monica moving from earthly attachments (even the natural desire to be buried “at home”) to a focused, Eucharistic kind of hope. Her calm directions about burial, and her single request to be remembered at the altar, underline what Augustine wants you to see: her confidence that God is not bound to place, and that the deepest bond between them is now spiritual rather than geographic or sentimental. (newadvent.org)

Source (New Advent; appears as Book IX, Chapter 11, section 27):
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110109.htm

Confessions — Book XI, Chapters 14–28

Chapter 14

• Augustine hits the central puzzle: we speak constantly about “time,” yet struggle to define it.
• Past and future seem not to “be” (past no longer is; future not yet), and the present seems to vanish instantly.
• If the present never passed away, it would be eternity rather than time. (newadvent.org)
  Augustine frames time as something we rely on in ordinary speech but cannot securely “locate” in being: time appears to exist only by slipping out of existence—especially the present, which seems to be real only as it is ceasing to be. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 15

• We call times “long” or “short,” but we usually mean past or future durations (e.g., “a hundred years ago / hence”).
• Yet past and future are not “now,” so how can what is “not” be long or short?
• The only candidate for “long” would be a present interval—but the present keeps shrinking under analysis. (newadvent.org)
  He forces a linguistic correction: instead of saying “the past is long,” we really mean “it was long when it was present,” because only what is present can possess length. But when you press what counts as “present,” it collapses from year, to month, to day, to hour, down toward an indivisible instant. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 16

• We undeniably perceive intervals and compare them (“double,” “shorter,” “longer”).
• But we only measure time while it is passing; once it has passed, it cannot be measured because it is no longer there.
• Past and future, strictly speaking, can’t be measured as such because they are not present. (newadvent.org)
  Augustine tightens the paradox: we do measure time, but measurement seems to require presence—and time’s defining feature is that it won’t stay present. So whatever time is, it must be tied to passing perception rather than to a stable “thing” sitting out there to be examined. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 17

• Augustine refuses a cheap answer: he knows the standard “three times” (past, present, future), and he won’t simply deny it.
• He asks: if past and future “are,” where are they? Where do they “come from” and “go to”?
• Prophecy and memory suggest past/future are real in some sense—otherwise nothing could be foretold or truthfully narrated. (newadvent.org)
  He begins shifting from “time as external stuff” to “time as it is present to the soul.” Past and future can’t be present as past and future, yet we undeniably relate them—so their reality must be accessed differently than the reality of physical objects. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 18

• Past and future can only be “found” as present in some way: past as memory, future as anticipation/forethought.
• When we report the past, we draw on images retained in memory, not the past event itself.
• When we foresee the future, we do so from present signs/causes and present mental images. (newadvent.org)
  Augustine’s key move is phenomenological: what is present to us is always present, even when it refers to past or future. Memory is present memory; anticipation is present anticipation. This lets him keep the ordinary language of “past” and “future” while relocating their “being” into present acts of the mind. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 19

• Augustine admits he cannot explain how God teaches prophets about future things.
• Since God is not subject to “future” the way creatures are, the mechanism is beyond Augustine’s reach.
• He asks for illumination rather than pretending certainty. (newadvent.org)
  This is a humility checkpoint: Augustine distinguishes what he can analyze (human experience of time) from what he can only worshipfully confess (God’s manner of knowing/teaching). (newadvent.org)

Chapter 20

• He rejects the crude claim that there simply “are” past and future as times.
• He proposes a reformulation: three “presents” in the soul—memory (present of past), attention/sight (present of present), expectation (present of future).
• Ordinary speech about “past/present/future” can remain, so long as we understand what we mean. (newadvent.org)
  Augustine reframes time as a threefold structure of consciousness. The “three times” are not three regions of being; they are three modes of presence within the soul. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 21

• We measure times “as they pass,” comparing durations.
• Yet the present has no extended space, and past/future are not; so where is the thing we measure?
• He presses the puzzle of time’s “passage” (from future through present into past) while insisting measurement still happens. (newadvent.org)
  This chapter sharpens the enigma: measurement seems to require an extended object, but time—especially the present—offers no stable extension. Augustine is setting up the idea that the “extension” relevant to measuring time must be located in the mind’s activity rather than in external motion itself. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 22

• Augustine turns from analysis to prayer: he begs God not to close off this mystery.
• He confesses ignorance directly to the one who knows.
• He frames the inquiry as part of his reverent engagement with Scripture, not idle curiosity. (newadvent.org)
  The intellectual quest becomes devotional: understanding time matters because it bears on how creatures relate to the Creator, and how Scripture’s language about beginnings and “before” should be heard. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 23

• He rejects identifying time with the motions of the sun, moon, and stars (or any bodies).
• Even if heavenly motions stopped, we’d still speak and measure durations (e.g., a potter’s wheel; syllables long/short).
• He concludes time is some kind of “extension,” but what kind remains unclear. (newadvent.org)
  Augustine separates time from astronomy: celestial motion can mark time, but it cannot be time’s essence. Our ability to compare durations in speech and action suggests time is more fundamental than any particular moving object. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 24

• Time is not identical with bodily motion.
• We measure motion by time (how long something moved), which implies time is conceptually distinct from motion.
• Motion can vary (fast/slow), yet time is the measure used across those variations. (newadvent.org)
  The point is methodological: if time were just motion, you couldn’t coherently use time to measure motion. Time must be the dimension within which motion is measured, not the motion itself. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 25

• Augustine confesses he speaks “in time” while still not knowing what time is.
• He acknowledges the limits of expression and understanding.
• He asks God to “enlighten” his darkness—an explicit plea for clarity. (newadvent.org)
  This chapter makes the inquiry personal: the mystery of time is not merely theoretical; it’s woven into the act of thinking and speaking. Augustine’s honesty here becomes part of his method: don’t fake precision where none has been granted. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 26

• We seem to measure longer spans by shorter ones (like long vs short syllables).
• But this yields a problem: the shorter sound is gone before the longer is fully present to compare.
• Augustine suspects time is a kind of “protraction/extension,” likely of the mind itself. (newadvent.org)
  He is closing in on a psychological account: what remains available for measurement isn’t the vanished sound itself, but what the mind retains and compares. So the “extension” relevant to time-measurement begins to look like an extension of consciousness. (newadvent.org)

Chapter 27

• Time is measured as it passes: a voice that begins, continues, and ends can be “measured,” but not as future and not as already-past.
• Yet we only report its duration once it is finished—when it is no longer sounding.
• This pushes the question: what exactly is present in us that allows measurement after the sound is gone? (newadvent.org)
  Augustine’s sound-example shows how time-measurement depends on the mind carrying forward what has just passed, while also holding an intention toward what is coming next. Measurement is tied to an inner continuity that outlasts any single “now.” (newadvent.org)

Chapter 28

• Augustine locates time’s structure in the mind: it expects, attends/considers, and remembers.
• “Long future” = long expectation; “long past” = long memory.
• He illustrates with a psalm: before singing, attention holds the whole; during singing, expectation shrinks and memory grows, with present attention mediating the transfer.
• He scales the model up: what happens in a psalm happens in each part, in a life’s actions, and across human history. (newadvent.org)
  This is Augustine’s payoff: time is not three external containers but a dynamic distension within consciousness. The mind stretches across what it anticipates and what it retains, and the “present” is the active point where what was future is carried into memory. The psalm example makes the claim concrete: you can “watch” time being made present in the act of attention itself. (newadvent.org)

Source (chapter numbering used above, New Advent — Book XI):
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110111.htm