Augustine: The Confessions (Books I-VIII) [Part one]

Epic. Why hasn't anyone ever told me to read this before? Sure it's challenging language with "thou", "shewed", and other words not commonly spoken today. Regardless of the effort, Augustine rewards the reader with this text. It's filled with deep questions of faith and the challenging pursuit of relationship with God. I have empathy for him over fifteen-hundred years later.

For who can call on Thee, not knowing Thee? For he that knoweth The not may call on Thee as other than Thou art. Or is it rather that we call on Thee that we may know Thee? But how shall they call on Him in Whom they have not believed?

As I go through the quotations that struck me, many of these are things that I struggled with. Here he proposes a Chicken or Egg question: What came first Faith or Familiarity? How can I even Believe in something so outrageous as a Loving God? How can I take the risk to know this God without believing in his 'Love'?

In my personal faith life I find that the Spirit breaks the loop; it makes the reach to my soul saying, "Hey YOU! Yeah YOU! There's something more... Look for it." In a sense you could say that it plants the seed of faith and familiarity. Then in my life it has a chance to grow from there.

Later in Book II he talks about his 16th year and the "Evils" that he lived...

Where was I, and how far was I exiled from the delights of Thy house, in that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when the madness of lust (to which human shamelessness giveth free license, though unlicensed by Thy laws) took the rule over me, and I resigned myself wholly to it? My friends meanwhile took no care by marriage to save my fall; their only care was that I should learn to speak excellently and be a persuasive orator.

I find this very relevant to my life. I work in youth ministry; I've spent many a day filled with lust. I know this madness and what it is like to try to resist the blood curdling humanity of being a teenage boy. I went to a public school and later a fairly liberal college where sexuality was accepted (perhaps a bit too much). I love the line, "My friends meanwhile took no care by marriage to save my fall," because it is not a fall that can be averted alone. In what ways can we create a situation where it's easier to say, "no" to those things that should wait until marriage?

"I defiled, therefore, the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, and I beclouded its brightness with the hell of lustfulness; and thus foul and unseemly, I would fain, through exceeding vanity, be fine and courtly. I fell headlong then into the love wherein I longed to be ensnared."

I understand this; It is an echo of my heart for many years. Perhaps, my heart was not in the same place as his, but it echos with the same lines. Later he talks about his lustfulness in book six... "Yet the matter was pressed on, and a maiden asked in marriage, two years under the fit age; and, as pleasing, was waited for." But he didn't wait...

But unhappy I, who could not imitate a very woman, impatient of delay, inasmuch as not till after two years was I to obtain her I sought, not being so much a lover of marriage as a slave to lust, procured another, though no wife, that so, by the servitude of an enduring custom, the disease of my soul might be kept up and carried on in its vigor, or even augmented, into the dominion of marriage.

But on that note. I've put off posting this too long. I'll finish the second half with a "Part Two" later.