Confession Book I
Admissions (Latin: Confessiones) is a self-portraying work by Holy person Augustine of Hippo, comprising of 13 books written in Latin between Advertisement 397 and 400.
The work outlines Saint Augustine's sinful youth and his conversion to Christianity.
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The first book
The main book of the Admissions is committed principally to an investigation of Augustine's life as a kid, from his outset (which he can't remember and should remake) up during his time as a student in Thagaste (in Eastern Algeria).
Augustine's description of his early years leads him to ponder on human genesis, will and desire, language, and memory, wasting little time in getting to the philosophical core of his autobiography.
[1-3]
Each Book of the Confessions starts with a prayer of thanksgiving to God, but Book I has a notably lengthy invocation. The first question posed by this invocation is how one may seek God without first understanding who he is. To put it another way,
At least for now, the flawed answer is to just have faith—if we seek God at all, he will show himself to us.
[4-6]
Augustine quickly dives into a very rhetorical (and short) exposition of God's qualities. Augustine, after asking God to "enter within me," wonders what such word might possible imply when addressed to God.
God cannot be confined by his creation, thus he cannot literally "come to" Augustine. God, on the other hand, is a necessary condition for anything to exist, thus he's already "inside" Augustine (so again it makes no sense to ask him to "come into me"). Furthermore, God is not "in" everything in the same quantities or proportions—smaller bits of the earth have no less God than larger ones.
[7-8]
Augustine now begins to tell the tale of his childhood, starting with his birth and early youth. Augustine follows the Neoplatonists in refusing to theorize on how the soul joins the body to become a baby, as he did throughout his life. "I have no idea how I got to be in this mortal existence or...living death," he writes (following Plato, Augustine leaves open the possibility that life is really a kind of death and that true "life" is enjoyed by the soul when it is not in this world).
Augustine, who was already wicked and thoughtless, made demands on everyone, thanked no one, and retaliated against his carers with noisy sobbing.
[9-10]
Augustine asks what he was before birth for the second time, and the inquiry is again unanswered. He just knows that he had both existence and life at birth. He also mentions that God is the most extreme manifestation of both existence and life, and that God is the one who brings these two characteristics together in new humans.
[11-12]
Returning to his brutish childhood, Augustine mulls about how much he was sinning at that age. He's tough on himself for the above-mentioned unpleasant attitude, but he dismisses culpability for those periods, saying he "can recollect not a single trace."
[13-16]
Augustine, on the other hand, began to use his memory soon after he was born, notably in the service of learning to communicate through language (in Roman North Africa, this language was Latin). Augustine, as usual, is ambivalent about this ability, noting that it allowed him to "enter more deeply into the stormy society of human life." Augustine finds the way language was used and taught at school particularly unsettling; he laments that he was taught to talk and write for perverted goals, specifically to earn future prestige and money.