Confessions

“How shall I call upon my God, my God and my Lord, when by the very act of calling upon him I would be calling him into myself? Is there any place within me into which my God might come?”

This is one of the first questions Augustine poses to God in the prayer that opens Book I of Confessions. His confusion about how to call to God becomes one of his greatest anxieties throughout the entire work. Here, he is perplexed about how an infinite God could find space within human form.

“Matters are so arranged at your command that every disordered soul is its own punishment.”

This quotation provides the first look at Augustine’s conception of God’s justice, which Augustine asserts is perfect and dynamic, capable of immense adaptation depending on the circumstances. While elsewhere Augustine describes God’s justice in more familiar and tangible terms, here he speaks specifically of spiritual justice, asserting that there is no greater punishment for sin than the miserable, disfiguring separation from God that accompanies it, something he knows from personal experience.

“The beautiful form of material things attracts our eyes, so we are drawn to gold, silver and the like. […] We may seek all these things, but in seeking them we must not deviate from your law. The life we live here is open to temptation by reason of a certain measure and harmony between its own splendor and all these beautiful things of low degree. […] Sin gains entrance through these and similar good things when we turn to them with immoderate desire, since they are the lowest kind of goods and we thereby turn away from the better and higher: from you yourself, O Lord our God, and your truth and your law.”

This passage comes near the beginning of Augustine’s extensive reflection on the pear episode and is his first articulation of his theory of sin. After Augustine discovered Neoplatonism, his perspectives on sin shifted so significantly that for the first time he was able to make sense of the moral framework of Christianity and its all-powerful, infinitely good God. That