참회록

 

  Confessions

          by

 St. Augustus

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Augustine's Confessions is a diverse blend of autobiography, philosophy, theology, and critical exegesis of the Christian Bible. The first nine Books (or chapters) of the work trace the story of Augustine's life, from his birth (354 CE) up to the events that took place just after his conversion to Catholicism (386 CE). Augustine treats this autobiography as much more than an opportunity to recount his life, however, and there is hardly an event mentioned that does not have an accompanying religious or philosophical explication. In fact, the events that Augustine chooses to recount are selected mainly with a view to these larger issues.

    아우구스티누스의 "참회록"은 자서전, 철학, 신학, 그리고 기독교 성경에 대한 비판적 주석이 다양하게 어우러진 작품이다. "참회록"'의 처음 아홉 책(또는 장)은 아우구스티누스의 탄생(서기 354년)부터 그가 가톨릭으로 개종한 직후(서기 386년)에 일어난 사건들에 이르기까지, 그의 생애를 추적하고 있다. 그는 이 자전적인 책에서 자신의 삶 이상의 것으로 다루고 있으며,  종교적 혹은 철학적 해설이 곁들여지지 않은 것은 거의 없다. 

Born and raised in Thagaste, in eastern Algeria (then part of the Roman empire), Augustine enters a social world that he now sees as sinful to the point of utter folly. Grade school teaches questionable pursuits with misguided aims, and everywhere boys like Augustine are trained to devote themselves to transient, material pursuits rather than to the pursuit of God. As a student in Thagaste and then Carthage, Augustine runs amok in sexual adventures and false philosophies (most notably Manicheism). He sees this period of his life primarily as a lesson in how immersion in the material world is its own punishment of disorder, confusion, and grief.

    알제리 동부(당시 로마 제국의 일부)의 타가스테(Thagaste: )에서 태어나고 자란 아우구스티누스는 스스로 죄악이 가득하다고 생각한  사회적 세계(학교)로 들어선다.

    초등 교육은 불명하고 그릇된 목적을 가르치며, 도처에서 아우구스티누스와 같은 소년들은 하느님 보다는 부질없고 물질적인 추구에 몸을 바치도록 훈련 받고 있다. 타가스테와 그 뒤 카르타고에서 학생 시절을 보낼 때, 아우구스티누스는 성적 방종과 그릇된 철학들(특히 마니교)에 빠져 방황한다. 그는 자신의 인생에서 이 시기를, 물질 세계로의 몰입은 곧 무질서, 혼란, 그리고 비탄을 가져오는  그 자체가 형벌임을 깨달은 시기로 본다. 

The young Augustine does, however, catch a passion for the pursuit of Philosophical truth, learning the doctrines of Manicheism, skepticism, and Neoplatonism. This last philosophy will have a profound influence on him—Confessions are perhaps the most masterful expression of his intricate fusion of Catholic theology with Neoplatonic ideas.

     젊은 아우구스티누스는 자신에게 지대한 영향을 미치게 될 마니교, 회의주의, 그리고 신플라톤주의의 교리들을 익히며 철학적 진리를 탐구하는 일에 열정을 쏟았다. '참회록'은 가톨릭 신학과 신플라톤주의 사상을 정교하게 융합한 그의 고백이다.

Moving back to Thagaste, then back to Carthage again, and on to Rome and Milan, Augustine continues to wrestle with his doubts about what he has learned and with his budding interest in Catholicism, the faith of his mother, Monica. He also continues to pursue his career as a teacher of rhetoric (an occupation he later frowns upon as the salesmanship of empty words) and his habits of indulgence in sex and other pleasures of the sensual world. Things change in Milan, where Augustine finally decides that Catholicism holds the only real truth. Convinced of this but lacking the will to make the leap into a fully devoted life (including baptism and sexual abstinence), Augustine has a famous conversion experience in his Milan garden and becomes a devoted and chaste Catholic.

    타가스테로 돌아간 후 다시 카르타고로, 그리고 로마와 밀라노로 이어지는 여정 속에서, 아우구스티누스는 자신이 이미 배운 것에 대한 의구심과 어머니 모니카의 신앙인 가톨릭에 대한 관심 사이에서 끊임없이 고뇌한다. 그는 또한 수사학 교사로서의 경력(훗날 그 자신이 ‘공허한 말 팔아 먹는 장사’라며 못마땅해 한 직업)을 이어가며, 성(性)을 비롯하여 감각적 쾌락에 탐닉하는 습관 또한 여전히 떨쳐내지 못하고 있었다. 밀라노에서  그는 마침내 가톨릭만이 유일한 진리임을 깨닫는다. 확신은 있었지만 세례와 금욕을 포함한 완전한 신앙 생활로 나아갈 의지가 부족했던 아우구스티누스는  밀라노 정원에서 그 유명한 회개 체험을 하고 독실하고 순결한 가톨릭 신자가 된다.

The last four Books of the Confessions depart from autobiography altogether, focusing directly on religious and philosophical issues of memory (Book 10), time and eternity (Book 11), and the interpretation of the Book of Genesis (Books 12 and 13). Despite this apparent sudden shift in content, however, the Confessions are remarkably coherent as a whole; in making his autobiography a profoundly reflective one, Augustine has already introduced many of the same ideas and themes that receive a direct treatment in the last four Books. The unifying theme that emerges over the course of the entire work is that of redemption: Augustine sees his own painful process of returning to God as an instance of the return of the entire creation to God.

    "참회록"의 마지막 네 권은 자서전적 서술에서 완전히 벗어나, 기억(제10권), 시간과 영원(제11권), 그리고 "창세기"의 해석(제12권 및 제13권)이라는 종교적, 철학적 주제에 초점을 맞추고 있다. "참회록"은  놀라울 정도로 일관성이 있다. 작품 전체를 일관하는 주제는 바로 구원이다. 그는 하느님에게로 돌아가는 자신의 고통스러운 과정을, 모든 피조물들이 하느님에게로 회귀하는 과정의 한 예로 본다.

The form of the work corresponds closely to its aim and its content; the work is about the return of creation to God, it aims to inspire others to actively seek this return, and it takes the highly original form of a direct address to God from one being in his creation. In this context, it is also noteworthy that, for Augustine, "confession" carried the dual meanings of an admission of guilt and an act of praise.

     또한 "참회록"은 신의 피조물 중 한 존재가 신에게 직접 말을 건네는, 지극히 독창적인 형식을 취하고 있다. 이러한 맥락에서, 아우구스티누스에게 있어 ‘참회’는 죄의 인정과 찬양이라는 이중적 의미를 지니고 있다.

Augustine titled his deeply philosophical and theological autobiography Confessions to implicate two aspects of the form the work would take. To confess, in Augustine's time, meant both to give an account of one's faults to God and to praise God (to speak one's love for God). These two aims come together in the Confessions in an elegant but complex sense: Augustine narrates his ascent from sinfulness to faithfulness not simply for the practical edification of his readers, but also because he believes that narrative to be itself a story of God's greatness and of the fundamental love all things have for Him. Thus, in the Confessions form equals content to a large degree the natural form for Augustine's story of redemption to take would be a direct address to God, since it is God who must be thanked for such redemption. (That said, a direct address to God was a highly original form for Augustine to have used at the time).

   아우구스티누스는 자신의 철학적이고 신학적인 자서전에 "참회록"이라는 제목을 붙였는데, 이는 이 작품이 취하게 될 형식의 두 가지 측면을 함축하기 위해서였다. 그 시대에 ‘참회한다’는 것은 자신의 허물을 하느님께 아뢰는 것과 하느님을 찬양하는 것(하느님에 대한 사랑을 고백하는 것)을 의미했다. 이 두 목적은 "참회록"에서 우아하면서도 복합적인 의미로 결합된다. 아우구스티누스는  죄로부터 신앙으로 나아가는 자신의 이야기를 기록하는 것은,  그 이야기가 읽는 이의 교화를 위해서 뿐만이 아니라 하느님의 위대함과 그분을 향한 만물의 근원적인 사랑이라고 믿기 때문이라고 했다. 따라서 "참회록"에서 그가 제시하는 구원의 이야기는 하느님께 직접 호소하는 형식을 취하였다(하느님께 직접 호소하는 형식은 당시 아우구스티누스이 사용한 매우 독창적인 형식이었다.)

This idea should also help us understand the apparently lopsided and unusual structure of the text. The first nine Books of the Confessions are devoted to the story of Augustine's life up to his mother's death, but the last four Books make a sudden, lengthy departure into pure theology and philosophy. This shift should be understood in the same context as the double meaning of 'confessions' for Augustine, the story of his sinful life and redemption is in fact a profoundly philosophical and religious matter, since his story is only one example of the way all imperfect creation yearns to return to God. Thus, the story of the return to God is set out first as an autobiography, and then in conceptual terms.

   "참회록"의 처음 아홉 권은 어머니가 세상을 떠나기까지 아우구스티누스의 삶에 관한 것이고, 마지막 네 권은  순수 신학과 철학의 영역으로 길고도 깊이가 있다. 죄악에 찬 삶과 구원에 관한 그의 이야기는 지극히 철학적이고 종교적으로, 이는 불완전한 모든 피조물이 하느님께로 돌아는 방식을 보여주는 하나의 사례이다. 따라서 하느님께로의 귀환 이야기는 먼저 자서전의 형태로, 그 다음은 전문 용어로 서술된다.

This idea of the return also serves as a good access to the philosophical and theological context in which Augustine is thinking and writing. The most important influence here (besides the Bible) is Neoplatonism, a few major texts of which Augustine read shortly before his conversion. The Neoplatonist universe is hierarchical, but things lower on the scale of being cannot be said to be bad or evil. Everything is good in so far as it exists, but things lower on the scale have a less complete and perfect Being. In contrast to God, who is eternal, unchanging, and unified, the lower levels of being involve what we know as the visible universe a universe of matter in constant flux, in a vast multiplicity, and caught up in the ravages of time.

    이 '회귀'라는 개념은 또한 그가 사유하고 저술하던 철학적, 신학적 맥락으로 접근하는 훌륭한 통로가 되어 준다. 여기서 (성경을 제외하고) 가장 중요한 영향을 미친 것은 신플라톤주의인데, 아우구스티누스는 회개 직전 그 몇 가지 주요 내용을 읽었다. 신플라톤주의 우주는 위계적이지만, 존재의 계단에서 더 낮은 곳에 위치한 것들이 악하다고 말할 수는 없고 다만 덜 완전할 뿐이다.  영원하고 불변하며 통일된 존재이신 하느님과 대조적으로, 하위 차원의 존재는 우리가 흔히 눈에 보이는 우주라고 알고 있는 영역을 포함한다. 우주는 끊임없이 변화하고 엄청나게 다양한 물질로 이루어져 있으며, 시간의 흐름에 따른 파괴적인 영향 아래 놓여 있다.

Augustine's lasting influence lies largely in his success in combining this Neoplatonic worldview with the Christian one. In Augustine's hybrid system, the idea that all creation is good in as much as it exists means that all creation, no matter how nasty or ugly, has its existence only in God. Because of this, all creation seeks to return to God, who is the purest and most perfected form of the compromised Being enjoyed by individual things. Again, then, any story of an individual's return to God is also a statement about the relationship between God and the created universe: namely, everything tends back toward God, its constant source and ideal form.

    아우구스티누스가 후세에 남긴 영향력은 이 신플라톤주의적 세계관을 기독교적 세계관과 결합시킨데 있다. 이 같은 세계관에서는 모든 피조물은 존재하는 한 선하며, 이러한 사상은 아무리 끔찍하거나 추해 보이는 피조물이라 할지라도 오직 하나님 안에서만 존재한다는 것을 뜻한다.  이로 인해 모든 피조물은 하느님께로 돌아가고자  한다. 하나님은 개별 존재들이 누리는, compromised 존재라는 가장 순수하고 가장 완전한 형태이시기 때문이다. 따라서 개인이 신에게로 돌아가는 모든 이야기는 곧 하나님과 하나님이 창조하신 우주 사이의 관계에 관한 진술이기도 하다. 즉, 만물은 자신의 변치 않는 근원이자 이상적 형태인 하나님으로 되돌아가려는 경향을 지닌다는 것이다.

A question to which much of the last four Books of the Confessions is devoted is how this relationship between an eternal God and a temporal creation could exist.How could the return to God be a process that takes place over time, if God is an eternal essence to which we already owe our very existence? How did God create the world (and 'when' could this have happened) if God is eternal and unchanging? The solution, for Augustine, involves a deep understanding of the simultaneity of eternity and time. Time, he argues, does not really exist it is more of an illusion we generate for ourselves for unclear reasons (fundamentally, we fall into time because of our distance from God's perfection). Past and future exist only in our present constructions of them. From God's point of view, all of time exists at once—nothing comes "before" or "after" anything else temporally. God created the universe not 'at' a specific time, but rather creates it constantly and always, in one eternal act.  

    "참회록"의 마지막 네 권은, 영원한 하나님과  피조물 사이의 이러한 관계가 어떻게 성립할 수 있는가에 관한 기록이다. 만일 하나님이 우리의 존재가 비롯된 영원한 분이시라면, 그 분께로 돌아가는 일이 어찌 시간이 걸리는 과정이라고 할 수 있을까? 하나님께서 영원하고 불변하시는 분이라면, 그분은 어떻게 세상을 창조(그리고 그 일은 '언제' 일어났을 수 있었는가)하셨는가? 아우구스티누스에게 있어 이 문제에 대한 해답은 영원과 시간의 동시성에 대한 깊은 이해에 있다. 그의 주장에 따르면 시간은 실재하지 않는, 우리 스스로 만들어낸 환상이다(우리가 시간 속으로 빠져드는 이유는, 근본적으로 하나님의 완전함으로부터 멀어져 있기 때문이다). 과거와 미래는 오직 현재 우리가 그렇다고 생각하기 때문에 존재하는 것이다. 하나님의 관점에서 볼 때  시간 상으로 그 무엇보다 앞 서거나 뒤 서는 것은 없다는 것이다.하나님은 우주를 특정한 시점에 창조한 것이 아니며, 영원히 그리고 끊임없이 창조하고 계신 것이다.

This idea puts the both the Neoplatonic worldview and Augustine's own act of "confessing" in a new perspective. There no longer needs to be any conflict between the idea of a return to God over "time" (as with the young and sinful Augustine) on the one hand and everything's constant existence in God on the other. Since time is simply an illusion of the lower hierarchy, it means the same thing to wander and return to God as it does to owe one's existence to God at every moment these are just two aspects of the same thing, one aspect told as a story and the other told in religious and philosophical terms.

    이 같은 생각은 신플라톤주의적 세계관과 아우구스티누스 자신의 '참회' 행위를 새로운 관점에서 바라보게 한다. 한편으로는'시간'의 흐름 속에서 (젊고 죄 많던 아우구스티누스의 경우처럼)  하느님께로 돌아간다는 생각과, 다른 한편으로는 모든 것이 하나님 안에 영원히 존재한다는 사실 사이에 더 이상 갈등이 있을 수가 없는 것이다. 시간은 단지 하위 차원의 환상에 불과하기 때문에, 하나님으로부터 벗어났다가 다시 돌아가는 것과 매 순간 자신의 존재를 하느님께 의존하는 것은 본질적으로 같은 의미이다. 즉, 이 둘은 동일한 현상의 서로 다른 두 가지 측면으로, 그 한 가지 측면은 일상적인 언어로, 다른 한 가지 측면은 종교적·철학적 용어로 서술될 뿐이다.

Thus, again, Augustine's text is remarkably and complexly coherent, despite its apparent eccentricities and shifts in content. He is laying out the story of his life, opening himself as completely as possible to God and to his readers. In so doing, he is praising God for his salvation. Further, he is illustrating, with a temporal example, a specific view of the universe as unified across all time in an unchanging God.

    따라서 아우구스티누스의 진술은 겉보기에 기이하나, 놀라울 정도로 일관성을 지니고 있다. 그는 자신의 삶에 관한 이야기를 하며, 하나님과 독자들에게 자신을 완전히 들어내고 있다. 그렇게 함으로써 그는 자신의 구원을 위해 하나님을 찬양하며,  변치 않으시는 하나님 품 안에서 모든 시간에 걸쳐 통일된 우주관을 보여준 것이다.

We have left Christ out of this discussion, largely because the most challenging aspects of Augustine's thought often concern his use of the Neoplatonic system. Nonetheless, Christ is crucial to Augustine, although he has no place in Neoplatonism. Christ is the mechanism by which the return to God is effected. It is through Christ that a human can come to know his or her existence in God, since Christ is God made human. Augustine suggests that Christ is also wisdom itself, since wisdom too is a kind of intermediary between God and the lower levels of creation. It is in this wisdom, in the context of this "Christ," that God created the universe, and it is through this wisdom, Christ, that the universe can return to Him.

    우리가 이 논의에서 그리스도를 배제한 것은, 아우구스티누스 사상의 가장 난해한 측면들이 신플라톤주의와 관련되어 있기 때문이다. 그럼에도 불구하고, 신플라톤주의에서는 자리를 찾을 수 없는 그리스도가 아우구스티누스에게는 결정적으로 중요한 존재이다. 그리스도는 하느님께로의 회귀가 이루어지게 하는 매개체이기 때문이다. 그리스도는 사람이 되신 하나님이시기에, 인간은 그리스도를 통해서야 비로소 하나님 안에서 자신의 존재를 알 수 있는 것이다. 아우구스티누스는 그리스도 또한 지혜 그 자체라 하였는데, 이는 지혜 역시 하나님과 피조물 사이의 중재자이기 때문이다. 하나님께서는 바로 이 지혜 안에서, 곧 이 '그리스도'라는 맥락 안에서 우주를 창조하셨으며, 우주가 그분께로 돌아갈 수 있는 것 또한 바로 이 지혜 곧 그리스도를 통해서이다.

제1권

Augustine begins each Book of the Confessions with a prayer in praise of God, but Book 1 has a particularly extensive invocation. The first question raised in this invocation concerns how one can seek God without yet knowing what he is. In other words, how can we look for something if we don't know exactly what we're looking for? The imperfect answer, at least for now, is simply to have faith—if we seek God at all, he will reveal himself to us.

    "참회록"의 각 권은 하느님을 찬양하는 기도로 시작하지만, 특히 제1권은 방대한 분량의 기도문으로 이루어졌다. 이 기도문의 첫 번째 질문은, 하느님이 어떤 분인지 아직 알지 못하는 상태에서 어떻게 그분을 찾을 수 있는가 하는 점이다. 다시 말해, 우리가 정확히 무엇을 찾고 있는지 모른다면 어떻게 그것을 찾을 수 있는 것일까? 이에 대한 답은  믿음을 갖는 것이다. 하나님을 찾으면,  그분께서 우리에게 당신을 드러내실 것이라는 믿음이다.

Nonetheless, Augustine launches immediately into a highly rhetorical (and relatively brief) discussion of God's attributes. Asking God to "come into me," Augustine then questions what that phrase could possibly mean when addressed to God. The heart of this dilemma, which will turn out later to be one of the final stumbling blocks to Augustine's /귀의, 개종, 회심 (see Books 6 and 7), is that God seems both to transcend everything and to be within everything. In either case, it doesn't make precise sense to ask him to "come into" Augustine. God cannot be contained by what he created, so he can't "come to" Augustine in any literal sense. At the same time, God is the necessary condition for the existence of anything, so he's "within" Augustine already (so again it makes no sense to ask him to "come into me"). Further, God is not "in" everything in amounts or proportions—small pieces of the world don't have any less of God than big ones.

    그럼에도 불구하고, 아우구스티누스는 하느님의 속성에 관하여 매우 수사적인(또한 비교적 간결한) 논의를 펼친다. "내 안으로 오시라"고 기도를 드린 후, 그 말이 과연 어떤 의미인지 그는 자문을 한다. 훗날 아우구스티누스의 개종(하느님으로의 귀의)에 마지막 걸림돌이 될 이 자문의 핵심은, 하나님은 모든 것을 초월하여 존재하며, 아울러  모든 것 안에 존재한다는 점이다(6권 및 7권 참조). 어느 경우든, 하는님께  아우구스티누스 안으로 '들어 오시라'고 요구하는 것은 이치에 어긋난다. 하느님은 자신이 창조한 피조물에 담길 수 있는 분이 아니기에, 문자가 뜻하는 그대로  아우구스티누스에게 '오실' 수는 없기 때문이다. 동시에 하나님은 "존재"의 필수 조건으로, 아우구스티누스 '내부'에 이미 존재하기 때문이다(따라서 '내 안으로 들어오시라'고 요청하는 것은 이치에 어긋난다). 나아가, 하나님은 모든 것 안에 어떤 양이나 비율로 존재하시는 것이 아니다. 다시 말해 세상의 작은 부분이라고 해서 큰 부분보다 하나님이 덜 계신 것은 아니다.

Having hurriedly discredited the idea of God as any sort of bounded, mobile, or divisible being, Augustine sums up for now with a deeply Neoplatonic statement on the question of "where" God is: "In filling all things, you fill them all with the whole of yourself." Augustine then rephrases his question about God's nature, asking "who are you then, my God?" This rather direct approach generates a litany of metaphors concerning God, taken partly from scripture and partly from Augustine's own considerations.Examples include: "most high...deeply hidden yet most intimately present...you are wrathful and remain tranquil...you pay off debts, though owing nothing to anyone...." This list is rhetorical rather than analytic, and develops no coherent argument about God--it just introduces the mysteries of the subject.

    아우구스티누스는 하느님을 어떤 식으로든 한정되거나 이동하거나 나뉠 수 있는 존재로 보는 견해를  일축한 뒤, 하느님이 '어디'에 게신가 하는 문제에 대해 신플라톤주의적 색채가 짙은 다음과 같은 말로 마무리한다. "당신은 만물을 채우시되, 당신의 온전한 존재로 그 모든 것을 채우십니다."

    그는 또 하느님의 본성에  관해 다시 묻는다. "그렇다면 나의 하느님, 당신은 누구십니까?" 하느님께로의 이 같은 직접적인 접근 방식은 하느님에 관한 수 많은 은유를 낳는다.  "지극히 높으시며... 깊이 숨어 계시면서도 지극히 친밀하게 현존하시고... 진노하시면서도 평온함을 유지하시며... 누구에게도 빚진 것이 없으시면서도 빚을 갚아 주시는 분..." 등이 그 예이다. 이러한  예는 수사적인 것으로 하느님에 관한 논증이 아닌, 하느님의 신비로움을 소개할 뿐이다.

Augustine now turns to the story of his childhood, beginning with his birth and earliest infancy.As he would continue to do throughout his life, Augustine here follows the Neoplatonists in refusing to speculate on how the soul joins the body to become an infant. "I do not know," he writes, "whence I came to be in this mortal life or...living death" (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). 

    이제 아우구스티누스는 자신의 탄생으로부터 시작하여, 어린 시절의 이야기로 돌아간다. 평생 그러했듯이, 여기서도 그는 영혼과 육체가 어떻게 결합하여 아기가 되는 지에 관해 신플라톤주의 입장을 따랐다. 그는 "내가 이 필멸의 삶, 혹은 살아 있는 죽음 속에 어떻게 오게 되었는지 나는 알지 못한다" 라고 썼다(플라톤을 따라 그는 삶이란 사실상 일종의 죽음이며, 이 세상을 떠난 영혼이 누리는 삶이 진정한 삶일 것이라고 했다). 

With this question left up in the air, Augustine considers his infancy. He's extremely careful here, since he can't actually remember this period-- claims about it are explicitly justified with references to Augustine's later observations of infants. Infancy, it seems, turns out to be a fairly miserable state. All desires are internal, since infants have only "a small number of signs" to express their wants and also no physical power to fulfill them. Thoughtless and already sinful, the tiny Augustine made demands on everyone, thanked no one, and revenged himself on his caretakers with obnoxious weeping.

    이 문제가 미해결 상태로 남은 가운데, 아우구스티누스는 자신의 유아기 시절을 언급한다. 그는 이 시기를 실제로 기억할 수 없었음으로, 유아기에 대한 자신의 주장은 훗날 그가 유아들을 관찰하며 얻은 경험을 토대로 하였다. 유아는 자신의 욕구를 표현할 수 있는 신호가 제한되어 있고, 욕구를 충족시킬 신체적 능력도 없기 때문에 모든 욕구는 내면에 머무를 수밖에 없다. 철없고 이미 원죄에 물들어 있던 어린 아우구스티누스는 모두에게 무언가를 요구하면서도 누구에게도 고마워할 줄 몰랐으며,  자신을 돌봐주는 이들에게 듣기 싫은 울음소리로 대한 것이다.

There is a brief interlude here while Augustine asks again what he was before birth, and again the question goes unanswered. He only knows that at birth he had both being and life. He also points out here that God is the most extreme instantiation of both being and life, and that God is responsible for uniting these two qualities in new humans.

    아우구스티누스는 자신이 태어나기 전 어떤 존재였는지 다시 묻지만, 이번에도 그에 대한 답은 얻지 못한다. 그가 아는 ​​것은 오직 태어날 때 이미 존재와 생명을 모두 지니고 있었다는 사실 뿐이다. 여기서 그는 존재와 생명의 극단적 실현 형태가 바로 하나님이며, 하느님은 또 인간을 창조하며 이 두 가지 속성을 심어 놓으신다고 했다.

Returning to brutish infancy, Augustine considers to what extent he was sinning at that age. He's harsh on himself for the nasty attitude mentioned above, but concludes with a dismissal of responsibility for those times, of which he "can recall not a single trace."

    아우구스티누스는 짐승과도 같았던 유아기로 거슬러 올라가, 그 시절 자신이 어느 정도나 죄를 지었는지 고찰한다. 그는 앞서 언급한 어린 시절의 원죄에 대해 자책하지만, 정작 "죄의 흔적을 단 하나라도 기억해 낼 수 없는" 그 시절의 일에 대해서는 결국 책임을 묻지 않는다.

Soon, however, the infant Augustine began to exercise his memory, particularly in the service of learning to communicate through language (in Roman North Africa, this language was Latin). " Particularly disturbing to Augustine is the way language was used and taught at school—he regrets that he was taught to speak and write for corrupted purposes, namely in the service of gaining future honor and wealth. Using a term he will return to often, he refers to the use of this flashy language of public oratory (which emphasizes form over content) as "loquacity."In fact, Augustine continues, the whole scholastic system concentrated on "follies," punishing the students for boyish games in order to train them for equally misguided adult ones (such as business or politics).

    어린 어거스틴은 언어(라틴어)를 통해 의사소통하는 법을 배웠고 이를 통해  "격동하는 인간 삶 속으로 더 깊이 들어갔다"고 했다. 그가 특히 개탄스러워했던 점은 학교의 교육 방식이었다. 그는 훗날 명예와 부를 얻기 위한 수단 등, 타락한 목적을 위해 말하고 글 쓰는 법을 학교에서 배웠다는 후회의 말을 했다. 그는 스콜라 철학 전체가 어리석어 성인이 되어서도 마찬가지로 잘못된 길(사업이나 정치 등)에 종사하도록 훈련시켰다고 했다.

Another issue Augustine has to consider here is his early religious status. Born to a devoutly Catholic mother (Monica) and a pagan father (Patrick), Augustine's baptism is deferred until he's older. This was a common practice, meant to leave the cleansing of sin until after the hazards of youth and so to get the most out of the ritual when it was finally performed.

     아우구스티누스는 독실한 가톨릭 신자인 어머니(모니카)와 이교도인 아버지(파트릭) 사이에서 태어났으나, 성인이 될 때까지 세례를 받지 않았다. 이는 당신 흔한 관행이었는데, 젊은 시절을 지낸 뒤  그간의  지은 죄를 씻어냄으로써, 세례 의식의 효과를 극대화 하려는 의도 때문이었다.

Lines 19-29

Meanwhile, the folly of school continues. Most of the remaining sections of Book I are devoted to the errors of Augustine's early teachers, who meant well but were ignorant of the proper purposes of education. Of central concern here are the classical texts the young, unhappy Augustine was forced to read and, more broadly, the high-flown rhetorical language he was supposed to learn from them. Augustine particularly disapproves of fiction, which he sees as a misleading waste of time. It is sinful, he argues, to read of other people's sins while remaining ignorant of one's own.Overall, Augustine gives his boyhood teachers credit only for giving him the most basic tools for potentially good reading and writing—his "primary education."All the rest was simply a matter of learning perverted human custom rather than truth or morality (which are, in any case, more deep-seated than the "conventions" of language).Augustine particularly disapproves of fiction, which he sees as a misleading waste of time. It is sinful, he argues, to read of other people's sins while remaining ignorant of one's own.Overall, Augustine gives his boyhood teachers credit only for giving him the most basic tools for potentially good reading and writing—his "primary education."All the rest was simply a matter of learning perverted human custom rather than truth or morality (which are, in any case, more deep-seated than the "conventions" of language).

    한편, 학교 교육의 어리석음은 계속된다. 제1권의 마지막 부분은 아우구스티누스의 초기 스승들이 저지른 잘못을 기술하였는데, 그들이 선한 의도를 가졌을지는 몰라도 교육의 올바른 목적에 대해서는 무지했다고 했다. 여기서 핵심적인 관심사는 젊고 불행했던 그가 어쩔 수 없이 읽어야 했던 고전과, 그 고전들을 통해 익혀야 했던 고상하고 화려한 수사적 언어이다. 그는 특히 허구를 못마땅하게 여기는데, 허구적인 텍스트는 사람을 현혹하고 시간을 낭비하게 만드는 것으로 간주했다. 그는 자신의 죄는 알지 못한 채 타인의 죄에 관한 글을 읽는 것은 죄악이라고 했다. 전반적으로 아우구스티누스는  독서와 글쓰기 등, '초등 교육'을 해준 것에 대해서만 어린 시절 스승들의 공로를 인정했다. 기타 모든 것은 진리나 도덕을 배우는 것이 아니라, 왜곡된 인간의 관습을  익히는 것으로 보았다.

 

Book 1 closes with a very brief list of Augustine's selfish sins as a little boy, which he claims were "shocking even to the worldly set."He sees these as smaller, less significant versions of the sins of a worldly adult life. He admits, however, that there were some good things about him as well. These, though, were due entirely to God. The sins, on the other hand, were due to a "misdirection" of Augustine's gifts away from God and toward the material, created world.This "misdirection" is a reference to a key idea in Neoplatonism that informs most of Augustine's work, namely that God's creation has turned away from his eternal unity and toward the changing multiplicity of the created world.

    제1권은 어린 시절 아우구스티누스가 저지른 죄들을 간략하게 나열하며 마무리되는데, 그는 이 죄들이 "세속적인 사람들조차 경악하게 만들 정도"였다고 했다. 하지만 그는 자신에게도 좋은 점이 있었다고 했다. 좋은 점은 전적으로 하나님에게서 비롯된 것이었지만,  반면 죄는 그가 받을 은사가 하느님을 떠나  물질적이고 피조된 세상을 향하는 쪽으로 '잘못된 방향'을 잡았기 때문이었다.

    이 같은 '잘못된 방향'은 아우구스티누스 사상의 기저를 이루는 신플라톤주의의 핵심 개념을 가리키는 것으로, 곧 하느님의 피조물이 하느님의 영원한 통일성으로부터 등을 돌려, 이 부질 없이 변하는 이 세상을 향하게 되었다는 것을 뜻한다. 

제2권

Though sinful in acting out his erotic desires, Augustine gives himself some credit, writing that "the single desire that dominated my search for delight was simply to love and be loved." Again, God has given Augustine only good properties, and it is his own fault for misdirecting those properties. In this case, the problem was that his love had "no restraint imposed [on it] by the exchange of mind with mind." Hence, pure love was perverted by its misdirection toward worldly things (bodies). Ideally, according to Augustine, sex is used only for procreation, and even then only in a relationship focused not on lust but on a loving, rational partnership (as he sees Adam and Eve relating before their fall).

    비록 에로틱한 욕망을 행동으로 옮긴 것은 죄스러운 일이었지만, 아우구스티누스는 "즐거움을 추구하던 나를 지배한 단 하나의 열망은 그저 사랑하고 사랑 받는 것 뿐이었다" 라며 자신에 대해  어느 정도 긍정적인 평가를 하였다. 다시 말해, 하느님은 그에게 오직 선한 속성만을 부여했으나, 그 속성을 잘못된 방향으로 이끈 것은 그 의 잘못이었다. 그의 사랑에 "절제"가 결여되어 있었던 것이다. 따라서 순수한 사랑은 육체라는 잘못된 방향으로 인해 왜곡되었던 것이다. 그에 따르면 성은 자녀 생산만을 위해서야만 이상적이며,  정욕이 아닌 사랑과 이성에 기초한 동반자적 관계 안에서 이루어져야 하는 것이다(그는 타락 이전의 아담과 이브의 관계를 바로 이러한 모습으로 보았다). 

Lines 5-8

Having finished grade school at this point, Augustine was preparing to leave for Carthage for further study. His father Patrick had managed to raise funds for this, and Augustine praises him for trying so hard to educate his son. Still, he notes, his father had no proper moral concern for him--as was the overwhelming custom, education was seen simply as a means to worldly success.

    초등 교육을 마친 아우구스티누스는 더 깊이 있는 학문을 공부하기 위해 카르타고로 떠날 준비를 하고 있었다. 그의 부친 패트릭은 이를 위한 자금을 준비했고, 아우구스티누스는 아들 교육을 위해 그토록 애쓴 아버지를 높이 평가했다. 그럼에도 그는 아버지가 자신에 대해 올바른 도덕적 관심을 갖지 않았다고 지적한다. 당시의 지배적인 관행이 그러했듯, 교육은 그저 세속적 성공을 위한 수단으로 여겼기 때문이다.

"But in my mother's heart," writes Augustine, "you had already begun your temple." The Catholic Monica often admonished young Augustine against fornication, and he now recognizes that God was speaking through her. At the time, however, her warnings seemed "womanish advice which I would have blushed to take the least notice of." Eventually, Monica tends to lets Augustine do as he will, fearing that a proper wife at this stage would impede his chances for a good career.

    아우구스티누스는 자신이 이미 성전을 쌓고 있음을 어머니가 마음에 두고 있었다고 했다. 가톨릭 신자였던 모니카는 어린 그에게 음행에 관해 자주 경고했고, 그는 하느님이 어머니를 통해 말씀하셨음을 깨달았다. 그러나 모니카는 그가 번듯한 경력을 쌓는 데 방해가 될까 우려하여, 그가 원하는 대로 하도록 내버려 두는 쪽을 택하였다.

Augustine considers the theft of the pears next. What particularly disturbs him about this teenage prank is that he did it out of no other motive than a desire to do wrong. "I loved my fall [into sin]," he writes. The pears were not stolen for their beauty, their taste, or their nourishment (there were better pears at home), but out of sheer mischief.

    이어 아우구스티누스는 배를 훔친 사건을 말한다. 이 십 대 시절에 저지른 그 일에서, 그를 특히 괴롭히는 점은, 오로지 악행을 행하려는 욕구 외에는 아무런 다른  동기도 없이 그가 그 일을 저질렀다는 사실이다. "나는 나의 '타락(죄로 빠져듦)'을 사랑했다"라고 그는 기록하고 있다. 그 배들을 훔친 것은 그것들이 가치가 있기 때문이 아니었다(집에는 더 좋은 배들이 있었다). 순전히 장난기 때문이었다.

Investigating this point further, Augustine again concludes that his actions simply represent a human perversion of his God-given goodness. ything humans desire in sinning) turns out to be a twisted version of one of God's attributes. In fact, each thing he sought to gain from stealing the pears (and eve. In a remarkable rhetorical feat, Augustine matches each sinful desire with a desire to be like God: pride seeks loftiness (and God is the highest), perverse curiosity desires knowledge (and God knows all), idleness is really aiming at "quietude" (and God is unchanging in his eternal repose), and so on.

    그 사실을 숙고한 끝에, 그러한 행동은 하느님이 부여하신 선함을 인간이 왜곡한 것일 뿐이라는 결론을 내렸다. 사실 그가 배를 훔침으로써 얻고자 했던 것들은(그리고 인간이 죄를 지으며 갈망하는 모든 것들은) 하느님의 속성이 인간에 의해 뒤틀린 형태로 나타난 것이다. 아우구스티누스는 놀라운 수사적 기교로 모든 죄스러운 욕망을 하느님을 닮고자 하는 욕망과 연결시킨다.  교만은 고상함이(하나님은 가장 높으시다), 왜곡된 호기심은 지식에 대한 갈망(하나님은 모든 것을 아신다)이, 나태함은 "고요함"(하나님은 영원한 안식 가운데 변함없으시다)이 뒤틀린 형태이다.

The underlying theme here is, again, Neoplatonic. For the Neoplatonists, all creation (the material world) has "turned away" from God's perfection, becoming scattered into a chaotic state of mutability, temporality, and multiplicity. God remains unchangeable, eternal, and unified, and creation always seeks (whether it realizes it or not) to return to God. Here, Augustine has argued that even sin itself fundamentally aims at a return to God.

    이 같은 주제 역시 신플라톤주의적이다. 신플라톤주의자들에게 있어 모든 피조물(물질 세계)은 하나님의 완전함으로부터 '등을 돌려', 혼란스러운 상태로 뒤틀려 버린 존재이다. 하느님은 변함없고 영원하며 통일된 분으로 계시며, 피조물은 (그 사실을 자각하든 못 하든) 언제나 하느님께로 돌아가기를 갈망한다. 여기서 아우구스티누스는 심지어 죄 그 자체도 근본적으로는 하느님께로 돌아가는 것을 지향한다고 했다.

Book 2 ends with a consideration of the peer pressure on which Augustine partly blames the theft of the pears. The main lesson he takes from this is that "friendship can be a dangerous enemy, a seduction of the mind." Like love, it must be subjected to reason if it is to be truly good.

    제2권은 아우구스티누스이 배 도둑질 사건의 원인 중 하나로 꼽은 '친구의 압력'에 대한 고찰로 끝난다. 그가 여기서 얻은 교훈은 "우정은 위험한 적이자 마음을 유혹하는 것일 수 있다"는 것이다. 사랑과 마찬가지로, 우정 또한 참으로 선한 것이 되려면 이성의 통제를 받아야 한다는 것이다.

제3권

Augustine begins Book 3 with a wholesale self-condemnation, recalling his "foul and immoral" state of being at Carthage and comparing it to a kind of "bondage," a "joy that enchains." His sexual adventures continued unabated, a "hell of lust" that Augustine again attributes to a misdirection of the love for God ("I sought an object for my love").

    제3권은 카르타고  시절의 "추잡하고 부도덕한" 상태를 회상하며, 이를 일종의 "속박"이자 "사람을 옭아매는 쾌락"에 비유하는 등 철저한 자기 비판으로 시작한다. 그의 성적 방탕은 수그러들 줄 모르고 계속되었는데, 아우구스티누스는 이러한 "정욕의 지옥" 또한 하느님을 향해야 할 사랑이 잘못된 방향으로 흐른 탓("나는 내 사랑의 대상을 찾고 있었다")이라고 설명한다.

Augustine also expanded his schoolboy "sin" of reading fiction, taking advantage of cosmopolitan Carthage to attend "theatrical shows." He particularly regrets having attended tragedies, since this constitutes immersion in fictional suffering without a recognition of one's own suffering in sin. 

    아우구스티누스는 또 학창 시절  국제적인 도시 카르타고를 배경으로 한 허구적인 이야기를 읽은 죄를 고백하였다.  그는 특히 비극 공연을 관람했던 일을 후회하였는데, 이는 죄로 인한 자신의 고통을 자각하지 못한 채 허구 속의 고통에 몰입하는 행위였기 때문이다.

Tragedy also encourages a "love of suffering" that Augustine now finds absurd and wrong. There is more of the language of bondage and masochism here, as Augustine recalls seeking out tragic stories that "scratched" his soul and became "inflamed spots, pus, and repulsive sores" according to God's justice ("you beat me with heavy punishments").

    비극은 또한 아우구스티누스가 이제 터무니없고 잘못된 것으로 생각하는 '고통에 대한 사랑'을 부추긴다. 비극에는 속박과 마조히즘의 언어가 짙게 배어 있는데, 그는 자신의 영혼에 상처를 내어 결국 하나님의 정의에 따라("당신은 무거운 벌로 나를 치셨습니다") '염증과 고름, 혐오스러운 상처'가 된 비극적 이야기들을 찾아 다녔던 일을 회상한다.

At this point Augustine came across a book by Cicero called Hortensius,which aims to rebut the position that philosophy is useless and does not lead to happiness. Cicero argues that this anti-philosophy opinion can only be judged by philosophy, since it is itself a philosophical statement. Augustine read the book at age eighteen, in the course of his studies to become a skilled and stylish orator. But this book, which also argues that the pursuit of truth through philosophy is the route to a happy life, moved him deeply: for the first time, he "longed for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardor in my heart." Perhaps most significantly, Augustine recalls reading Hortensius for its content rather than its form—an important initial deviation from his pursuit of "loquacity."

    그 무렵 아우구스티누스는 키케로의 저서 "호르텐시우스(Hortensius)"를 접하게 되는 데, 이 책은 철학이 무용하며 행복으로 인도하지 않는다는 주장을 반박하고 있다. 이러한 주장 역시 철학적 주장이므로, 키케로는 오직 철학을 통해서만 판단될 수 있다고 했다. 아우구스티누스는 능숙하고 세련된 웅변가가 되기 위해 공부하던 열여덟 살 때 이 책을 읽었다. 그는 철학을 통한 진리 추구가 행복한 삶으로 이르는 길이라고 역설하는 이 책에 감동을 받았다. 그는 처음으로 "가슴속에 솟구치는 열망으로 지혜의 불멸을 갈망"하게 된 것이다. 무엇보다 중요한 점은 아우구스티누스가 호르텐시우스의 저서를 형식보다는 내용 때문에 읽었다는 사실인데, 이는 그가 추구했던 "수다스러움"에서 벗어난 중요한 초기 행보였다.

It should also be noted that Augustine does not consider the Hortensius to be the most redemptive book that he could have loved at that point (that, of course, would have been the Bible). Specifically, he is at pains here to point out the apostle Paul's warning in the scriptures not to be deceived by philosophy to the exclusion of Christ. Throughout his Confessions, Augustine will take care to intersperse his philosophy with plentiful doses of praise to God and Christ.

    또한 아우구스티누스가 호르텐시우스의 책을  가장 구원적인 책(물론 그 책은 성경이었을 것이다)으로 여긴 것은 아니라는 점도 주목해야 할 것이다. 그는 그리스도를 배제하는 철학에 속지 말라는 성경 속 사도 바울의 경고를 강조하기도 했다. 아우구스티누스는 "참회록" 전반에 걸쳐 하느님과 그리스도에 대한 찬양을 풍성하게 하기 위해 각별한 주의를 기울였다.

Feeling that Hortensius was compromised by the lack of any reference to Christ (he attributes this feeling to Monica's early influence), Augustine finally decided to take a look at the Christian Bible.  Unfortunately, the early Latin bible was crudely worded and somewhat obscure. For a student of rhetoric and oratory like the young Augustine, its language was blunt and repulsive. He put it aside, missing what he now recognizes as its sublime simplicity, its "inwardness."

    그리스도에 대한 언급이 전혀 없다는 점 때문에 호르텐시우스의 글에 한계가 있다고 느낀 아우구스티누스는(그는 이러한 느낌의 원인을 어머니 모니카가 어린 시절 자신에게 미친 영향 탓으로 돌렸다) 마침내 기독교 성경을 살펴보기로 결심했다. 안타깝게도 초기 라틴어 성경은 문체가 투박하고 난해했다. 젊은 시절 수사학과 웅변을 공부하던 아우구스티누스에게 라틴어는 거칠고 거부감을 주었다. 그는 그 성경을 제낌으로써, 훗날 그가 깨닫게 된 성경의 숭고함과 그 '내면성'을 놓치고 말았던 것이다.

Lines 10-18

Still burning for truth, Augustine began to fall in with the pseudo-Christian sect known as the Manichees (followers of the self-declared prophet Mani).  Most of the remainder of Book 3 is devoted to an initial rundown of basic Manichee beliefs, their conflicts with the Catholic faith, and Augustine's errors in falling in with them (he would remain a Manichee for close to ten years).

    변함없이 진리를 갈망하던 아우구스티누스는 자칭 예언자 마니를 따르는 무리인 마니교(사이비 기독교 분파)에 빠져들기 시작했다. 제3권의 마지막 대부분은 마니교의 기본 교리와 가톨릭 신앙과의 갈등, 그리고 아우구스티누스가 마니교에 빠져들었던 과오(그는 10년 가까이 마니교도였다)를 다룬다.

Augustine's first criticism of the Manichee doctrines he believed concerns their dependence on an elaborate mythology. The sun and moon are venerated as divine beings, and Manichees tended to picture divinity in terms of "physical images" or "bodily shapes." These "fantasies" and "dreams" will plague Augustine almost until his conversion, keeping him from recognizing God as a "spiritual substance" rather than some sort of enormous physical mass. Augustine offers a brief account of the proper view here, noting that God is not a body or even a soul (the life of the body). Rather, God is "the life of souls, the life of lives," more truthful and reliable than either bodies or the soul.

    아우구스티누스가 한때 신봉했던 마니교 교리에 대해 처음으로 제기한 비판은, 그 교리가 정교한 신화에 의존하고 있다는 것이다. 마니교는 해와 달을 신성한 존재로 숭배하며, 신성을 '물리적 형상'이나 '신체적 형태'로 묘사하였다. 마니교 교리는 그가 참회할 때까지 그를 괴롭혔고, 그가 하나님을  '영적 실체'로 인식하지 못하게 가로막았다.

    여기서 그는  하느님은 육체도 아니고 심지어 영혼(육체의 생명) 조차도 아니라고 했다. 오히려 하느님은 "영혼의 생명이자 생명들의 생명"으로서, 육체나 영혼보다 더 진실하고 신뢰할 수 있는 분이라고 했다.

Augustine now turns to the three primary Manichee criticisms of Catholic belief (the refutation of these criticisms will be one of his central focuses toward the end of the Confessions). The first, and most famous, Manichee challenge concerns the nature and source of evil. If God is supremely good, and if he is also all-powerful, eternal, and the cause of all existence, how can evil exist? Where can it come from except God? At the very least, why can't God eliminate it? Manichees insisted that God is not all-powerful and that he is in fact in constant struggle against his opposite, the dark, material world that is by nature evil.

    이제 아우구스티누스는 가톨릭 신앙에 대한 마니교의 세 가지 주요 비판에 눈을 돌렸다( 마니교 비판에 대한 반박은 참회록 후반부의 핵심 주제임). 그 첫 비판은  악의 본질과 기원에 관한 것이다. 만약 하느님이 지극히 선하며 동시에 전능하고 영원한 존재이자 모든 존재의 원인이라면, 어떻게 악이 존재할 수 있겠는가? 악이 하느님 이외의 어디에서 비롯될 수 있을까? 적어도 왜 하느님은 악을 없애지 못하는 것일까? 마니교도들은 하느님은 전능하지 않으며, 사실상 본질적으로 악한 어둠의 물질 세계, 즉 자신과 대립하는 존재와 끊임없이 투쟁하고 있다고 주장했다.

The second Manichee challenge concerns the nature of God as a being: "is God confined within a corporeal form? has he hair and nails?" This question is intimately tied to the question about evil, since it also challenges the idea of God as omnipotent and omnipresent. In the Manichee view, God is limited—he is not everywhere, and does not control everything.

    마니교의 두 번째 비판은 존재로서의 하느님의 본성에 관한 것이다. 즉, "하느님은 육체적 형태에 갇혀 있는가? 하느님에게도 머리카락과 손톱이 있는가?"라는 질문이다. 이 질문은 하느님이 전능하고 온 우주에 편재(遍在)한다는 관념에  대한 질문이기도 하다. 마니교의 관점에서 볼 때 하느님은 제한적인 존재이다. 즉, 하느님은 모든 곳에 존재하지 않으며 만물을 통제하지도 않는다는 것이다.

The rebuttal Augustine introduces to these first two challenges is Neoplatonic in nature, and its use for the defense of Catholic theology is one of the central achievements of his work. Simply put, God is Being itself, the most pure and supreme form of existence. Everything else is God's creation, and fits into a descending scale of Being—the further something is from God, the less true existence it has.

    아우구스티누스가  이 두 비판에 대한 반박은 신플라톤주의적 성격을 띠며, 이를 가톨릭 신학을 옹호하기 위해 활용하였고 이는 그의 핵심적인 업적이다. 간단히 말해, 하느님은 '존재 그 자체'이며, 가장 순수한  최상의 존재 양태이다. 그 밖의 모든 것은 하느님의 피조물로 존재의 하향적 위계 속에 자리 잡고 있는데, 하느님에게서 멀어질수록 그 존재의 참됨은 줄어든다.

Things lower on this descending scale have greater multiplicity, greater temporality, and greater general disorder. In short, the further away from God something is, the more scattered and fleeting it is. Heaven (not the starry firmament but the realm of angels) is close to God, and comes very close to having his full, unchanging Being (maximum existence). Human souls or minds are a step further down, and bodies and other material things are at the bottom of the pile. (Of course, these spatial images serve only as a metaphor—to believe in them literally would be a big mistake).

    이 하향적 위계의  하위에 존재하는 피조물들은 보다 큰 무질서를 지닌다. 간단히 말해, 하느님으로부터 먼 피조물일 수록 더욱 산만하고 덧 없다. 천국(별이 빛나는 하늘이 아니라 천사들의 영역)은 완전하고 불변하는 존재이신 하느님에 가깝다. 인간의 영혼이나 정신은 천국보다 한 단계 아래에 있으며, 육체와 다른 물질적인 것들은 가장 아래 쪽에 있다(물론 이러한 공간적 이미지는 은유일 뿐이며, 이를 문자 그대로 믿는 것은 큰 오류이다.)

This idea allows Augustine to answer the Manichee question of evil as follows: "evil has no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being." Evil is just a name for a lack of true existence, a label for how far a thing (or person) has wandered from unity with God. 

    이러한 사상을 바탕으로 아우구스티누스는 악에 관한 마니교도의 질문에 다음과 같이 답할 수 있었다. "악은 참된 존재의 결여"의 다른 이름이며, 어떤 존재(또는 사람)가 하느님으로부터 얼마나 멀어졌는 지를 나타내는 표지이다.

We might think of evil, metaphorically at least, as a king of tattered Being, with the evilest things barely more than ghosts. (It's helpful here to recall Augustine's treatment of the pear theft in Book 2, where he tried to demonstrate that each sin was really a twisted or incomplete attempt to be like God). Thus, evil is not some dark substance that exists in conflict with God; it is simply the extent to which something in God's creation has turned away from him, the extent to which a thing (or human) is unaware of its existence in God. In a significant sense, Augustine argues that there is no evil.

    적어도 은유적으로 말하자면, 악은 누더기 같은 존재의 왕으로, 가장 악한 것들은 유령에 지나지 않는다고 생각할 수 있다. (여기서 아우구스티누스가 그의 저서 2권에서 배 도둑 사건을 다룬 부분을 떠올리는 것이 도움이 될 것입니다. 그는 모든 죄가 사실은 신을 닮으려는 왜곡되거나 불완전한 시도임을 보여주려 했습니다.) 다시 말해 악은 하느님과 갈등하는 어떤 어두운 실체가 아니라, 하느님의 창조물(인간)이 하느님과 멀리 떨어져, 하느님 안에 자신의 존재를 인지하지 못하는 걸 말한다. 뜻 깊은 의미에서 아우구스티누스는 악이란 존재하지 않는다고 했다.

This argument depends on the recognition of God as a spirit, the "life of life," the condition for existence itself. God is being and goodness, and his creation is a hierarchy in which each existing thing is good in its own order (so that evil is simply a matter of relative good). The recognition of God as such a spirit also answers the second Manichee challenge, which concerns the statement in Genesis that man is made in God's image. How could this be, asked the Manichees, unless God is somehow corporeal?

    이 말은 하느님을 영이자 '생명의 생명'이며, 존재를 위한 조건으로 인식하는 데 뿌리를 두고 있다. 하느님은 존재이자 선이며, 하느님이 창조하신 세계는 각 피조물이 자신의 질서 안에서 선한 상태를 유지하는 위계적 구조로 이루어져 있다(따라서 악은 단지 상대적인 선의 문제일 뿐이다). 하느님을 이와 같은 영으로 인식하는 것은 마니교도들의 두 번째 비판에 대한 해답이기도 한데, 그 비판은 인간이 하느님의 형상대로 창조되었다는 창세기의 기록과 관련을 맺고 있다. 마니교도들은 하느님이  육체를 지닌 존재가 아니라면 어떻게 그런 일이 가능하겠느냐고 반문했던 것이다.

Though he does not elaborate much here, Augustine interprets the scripture to refer to God as "Spirit," and man as capable of finding that Spirit within himself at any time. Thus, God need not be corporeal to explain the statement in Genesis. Neither is God some sort of infinite mass, some kind of substance that extends in all directions to infinity. In general, Augustine faults the Manichees (and his own sinful lifestyle) for keeping him from understanding spiritual substance. He will be plagued for quite awhile by the effort to conceive of God without forming an image of him (even if the "image" is of an infinite mass), without using "the mind of my flesh" rather than pure mind.

     아우구스티누스는 해당 성경 구절을 하나님은 '영(Spirit)'이시며 인간은 언제든지 자신의 내면에서 그 영을 발견할 수 있는 존재라는 의미로 해석한다. 따라서 창세기의 말씀을 설명하기 위해 하느님이 반드시 어떤 육체적 형태를 지녀야 할 필요는 없다. 또한 하느님은 무한한 질량이거나 또는 모든 방향으로 끝없이 뻗어 나가는 어떤 실체 같은 존재도 아니다. 대체로 아우구스티누스는 자신이 영적 실체를 이해하지 못했던 원인을 마니교도들, 그리고 자신의 죄 많은 삶의 방식 탓으로 돌렸다. 그는 하느님의 형상을 떠올리지 않은 채 순수한 정신만으로 하느님을 깨닫고자 오랫동안 애를 쓰며 시달렸다.

Augustine now moves on to the third major Manichee challenge: the rejection of the book of Genesis and much of the Old Testament. The Manichees ridiculed the recurrence of polygamy and animal sacrifice in these parts of the bible, finding them in conflict with God's laws as they are set out elsewhere in the Bible. Augustine argues that, while God's law is by definition eternal and unchanging, it reveals itself to humans by degrees and manifests itself differently according to the historical context.

    그는 마니교도들이 제기한 세 번째 비판, 즉 창세기와 구약 성경에 대한 그들의 배척을 반박한다.  마니교도들은 성경에 등장하는 일부다처제나 동물 제사를 조롱하며, 이는  하느님의 율법과 모순된다고 했다. 이에 대해 아우구스티누스는 하느님의 율법은 본질적으로 영원불변이나, 인간에게는 역사적 상황에 따라 각기 다른 방식으로 나타난다고 반박했다.

The contrast is between "true, inward justice," which can be found by finding God inside oneself (apart from the material world), and relative justice, which serves the everyday human world. But interestingly, Augustine cannot bring himself to separate sodomy from his somewhat mystical concept of absolute justice, and notes that it is a "perversion of nature" and therefore wrong regardless of the context.

    여기서 두 가지 정의가 대조되는 바, 자신의 내면에서 하느님을 발견함으로써 얻을 수 있는 '절대적인 내면적 정의'와, 일상적인 인간 세계에서 작동하는  '상대적 정의'가 그것이다.  그러나 아우구스티누스는 남색Sodomy을  절대적 정의 개념으로부터 분리할 생각을 못했고, 이를 '자연의 왜곡'으로 간주하여 상황과 관계없이 그른 것으로 보았다.

Dismissing, then, the Manichee criticisms of Old Testament behavior (which, he says, were correct at the time), Augustine sketches out a brief classification of kinds of sin (which presumably are unchanging). There are, he writes, three basic motives for misdeeds: "the lust for domination...the lust of the eyes...[and] sensuality—either one or two of these, or all three at once." (In later works, this classification would evolve into a division of sinful motives into pleasure, pride, and curiosity).

    그는  죄의 유형을 간략하게 분류하였다. 그는 잘못된 행위를 유발하는 세 가지 근본적인 동기가 있다고 했다. "지배하려는 욕망, 눈의 욕망, 그리고 "육욕"이며, 이 중 하나 또는 둘, 또는 셋 모두가 동시에 작용할 수 있다"고 했다. 이러한 분류는 후기 저작에서 쾌락, 오만, 호기심이라는 죄를 짖는 동기로 구분한다.

Augustine proceeds to note a few cases where it may be unclear to what extent an act is sinful. Making "progress" in the world, for example, may be done for good or sinful motives--likewise the punishment of others. Some sinful acts, such as animal sacrifice, may be justifiable if they are prophetic acts (as was the case with the sacrifices in the Old Testament).

    아우구스티누스는 어떤 행위가 어느 정도까지 죄가 되는지 몇 가지 예를 든다. 무엇인가 '성취'를 이루는 일은 선한 동기에서 비롯될 수도 있고 죄스러운 동기에서 비롯될 수도 있으며, 타인을 처벌하는 경우가 그렇다. 동물 제사와 같은 죄스러운 행위라 할지라도, 그것이 예언자의 행위라면(구약 성서의 제사가 그러하듯) 정당화될 수 있다.

Lines 19-21

Book 3 concludes with a description of a vision experienced by Monica at this point in Augustine's life. She is standing on a "rule" (presumably a long, narrow strip or platform). She meets a stranger and tells him she is distraught over her son's refusal to become a good Christian. The stranger tells her: "'Where you are, there will he be also.'" Monica then turns to find Augustine standing behind her on the rule.

    제3권은 아우구스티누스의 생애 중 모니카가 체험한 환상에 대한 묘사로 마무리된다. 그녀는 어떤 '자Rule'-아마도 길고 좁은 띠 모양의 발판이나 지지대였을 것이다-위에 서 있었다. 그때 한 낯선 사람을 만난 그녀는 아들이 훌륭한 그리스도인이 되기를 거부하여 몹시 괴롭다고 털어놓았다. 그러자 그 낯선 사람은 그녀에게 "그대가 있는 곳에 그도 있을 것입니다"라고 했다. 이에 모니카가 몸을 돌려보니, 아우구스티누스가 그녀의 뒤에서 같은 '자' 위에 서 있었다.

Taking the vision as a good omen, Monica nonetheless proceeded to beg a local priest to try to convert Augustine. Refusing, the priest says Augustine is not ready yet. He does, however, also say: "'as you live, it cannot be that the son of these tears should perish.'" Augustine uses the story to remind his readers that despite all his errors (including his fall into Manichee illusion), God has a plan for his salvation, executed partly through Monica.

    모니카는 그 환상을 좋은 징조로 여겼지만, 그럼에도 불구하고 지역 사제에게 아들을 개종시켜 달라고 간청했다. 사제는 아우구스티누스가 아직 준비되지 않았다는 이유로 이를 거절하며 다음과 같은 말을 했다. "살아 계신 주님을 걸고 말하건대, 당신이  그 많은 눈물을 흘렸으니, 아들이 멸망할 수는 없는 일입니다." 아우구스티누스는 이 일화를 통해, 자신이 저지른 온갖 잘못(마니교의 미혹에 빠졌던 일 포함)에도 불구하고 하느님께서는 그의 구원을 위한 계획을 가지고 계셨으며, 그 계획이 부분적으로는 어머니를 통해 이루어졌음을 독자들에게 상기시킨다.

Book IV 

Lines 1-7

Augustine opens this Book with a short description of his pursuits in Thagaste, which he says consisted primarily of "being seduced and seducing, being deceived and deceiving." He points out that he spent his public hours in pursuit of empty, worldly goals (his ambition to attain public office, which required great skill in oratory as well as contacts and money) and his private hours pursuing a "false religion" (Manicheism). This hypocritical life, in which he sought both material gain and (false) spiritual purity, was nothing but a form of "self-destruction."

    아우구스티누스는 타가스테에서의 생활을 짤막하게 묘사하며 제4권을 시작하는데, 그는 그 시절을 주로 "유혹하고 유혹당하며, 속고 속이는" 일로 보냈다고 했다. 그는 공적인 시간에는 헛된 세속적 목표(뛰어난 웅변술은 물론 인맥과 재력이 필요했던 공직 진출에의 야망)를 좇는 데 힘썼고, 사적인 시간에는 "거짓 종교"(마니교)를 추구했다고 했다. 물질적 이익과 (거짓된) 영적 순수함을 동시에 추구했던 이러한 위선적인 삶은, 결국 "자기 파멸"의 한 형태에 지나지 않았다.

Chief among Augustine's regrets about this period are his career as a "salesman" of the "tricks of rhetoric" (he was an instructor in rhetoric, partly to students at the law courts) and his persistence in keeping a concubine. Although he doesn't say much about this unnamed woman, she stayed with Augustine for nearly ten years, eventually bearing him a son (Adeodatus, who would die at age seventeen).

    이 시기에 대해 아우구스티누스가 가장 후회하는 일로는 '수사학의 기교'를 파는 '장사꾼'으로서 보낸 시절(그는 수사학 교사였으며, 법정 관계자들을 대상으로 가르치기도 했다)과 오랫동안 첩을 두었던 일이다. 이름이 알려지지 않은 이 여성에 대해 그가 구체적으로 언급한 바는 별로 없지만, 그녀는 아우구스티누스와 거의 10년 동안 함께 지내며 그의 아들(열일곱 살에 세상을 떠난 아데오다투스)을 낳았다.

Augustine does recall, however, making some progress toward truth. In part through the influence of his close friend Nebridius, Augustine concluded that astrology is "utterly bogus." (This will prove an important first step in discarding the colorful Manichee mythology, which contains a number of bizarre accounts of the heavenly bodies). Shunning this dubious form of prediction and the elaborate sacrificial rituals that often accompanied it, Augustine began to attribute its occasional success almost entirely to chance, which he sees as "a power everywhere diffused in the nature of things."

    그러나 아우구스티누스는 진리를 향해 어느 정도 진전을 이루었다고 했다. 절친한 친구 네브리디우스의 영향으로 그는 점성술은 "완전한 허구"라는 결론을 내렸다(이는 천체에 대해 기괴한 설명을 하는마니교를 버리는 첫걸음이었다.). 그는 마니교의 예언 방식과 제례 의식을 멀리하였다. 어쩌다 알아 맞히는 마니교 예언을 전적으로 우연으로 생각했는데, 그는 그 우연을 "사물의 본성 속에 퍼져 있는 힘"으로 보았다.

Lines 8-18

Such considerations were interrupted for a while when a close friend of Augustine suddenly passed away, leaving him grief-stricken: "everything on which I set my gaze was death." Realizing now that his grief would have been alleviated by faith in God, Augustine concludes that his grief meant he had "become to myself a vast problem." Attached to the transient, embodied things of the world (rather than to God), he suffered grief when they disappeared.

    마니교에 관한 그 같은  성찰은, 가까운 친구가 갑작스럽게 세상을 떠나면서 잠시 중단되었습니다. 슬픔에 잠긴 그는 "내 시선이 머무는 곳마다 죽음이 있었다"고 토로했다. 훗날 아우구스티누스는 하느님에 대한 믿음이 있었다면 그 슬픔을 이겨낼  수 있었으리라는 것을 깨닫고, 슬픔이란 곧 "자신이 자신에게 거대한 문제"가 되어버린 상태임을 알았다. 그는 하느님이 아닌, 육신을 지닌 세상의 덧없는 사물들에 집착했기에, 그들이 사라질 때 슬픔을 겪었던 것이다.

This theme gets a lengthy treatment here, as Augustine investigates the unreliability and transience of things and the permanence of God. Misery, he writes, is due to an unreasonable attachment to "mortal things." Further, this is always the state of the soul without God—misery is everywhere when there is nothing eternal to depend on. "Where," Augustine asks, "should I go to escape from myself?... Wherever the human soul turns itself, other than you, it is fixed in sorrows."

    여기서 그는 만물의 불확실성과 덧없음, 그리고 하느님의 영원성을 생각하며 이 주제를 깊게 다루었다. 그는 슬픔이란 '죽을 수밖에 없는 것들'에 대한 무분별한 집착에서 비롯된다고 기록하고 있다. 나아가 이는 하느님이 안 계신 영혼이 겪는 보편적인 상태이기도 하다. 즉, 의지할 영원한 대상이 없을 때 슬픔은 어디에나 존재한다. 아우구스티누스는 이렇게 묻는다. "내 자신으로부터 벗어나려면 어디로 가야 합니까? ... 인간의 영혼이 당신이 아닌 다른 곳으로 향할 때면, 그 영혼은 슬픔에 얽매이고 맙니다."

With everything around him looking like death, Augustine again left Thagaste for Carthage. His state of mind at this point was not good, but the lessons he learned from his grief are still with him. The chief lesson, again, is transience. Every material thing, no matter how beautiful, is demarcated by a beginning and an end—no sooner does anything come to be than it is "rush[ing] toward non-being." These things, then, should only be the object of love in as much as one is loving the presence of God in them.

    주변의 모든 것이 죽음의 그림자로 뒤덮인 듯한 상황 속에서, 아우구스티누스는 다시 타가스테를 떠나 카르타고로 향했다. 당시 그의 심경은 무척이나 어두웠지만, 그 슬픔을 통해 얻은 가르침은 여전히 ​​남아 있었다. 그 가르침은 바로 '덧없음'이었다. 아무리 아름다운 물질적 존재라 할지라도 그 것에는 시작과 끝이 정해져 있어, 생겨나는 그 순간부터 이미 '비존재(non-being)를 향해 치닫고' 있기 때문이다. 따라서 어떠한 존재든, 그 안에 깃든 하나님의 임재를 사랑하는 마음으로 대할 때에만 비로소 사랑의 대상이 될 수 있는 것이다.

God, on the other hand, is "a place of undisturbed quietness." Though the things of the world pass away, taken together they are part of a timeless whole. Through God, one can perceive this whole, since God is the ground for all existence. If this is recognized, temporality shouldn't be a concern.

      세상의 만물은 사라져 가지만, 그것들을 모두 합치면 시간의 제약을 받지 않는 전체의 일부를 이룬다. 하느님은 흔들림이 없는 고요의 장소이며 모든 존재의 근거이시기에, 하느님을 통해 우리는 이 전체를 인식할 수가 있다. 이러한 사실을 깨닫는다면, 만물의 "일시성"은 더 이상 문제가 되지 않을 것이다.

There are a few references here to speech and language in the context of transience. Speech for Augustine is problematic in two deeply intertwined ways. Firstly, it is always successive--one cannot say anything all at once. Thus, speech (and writing, for that matter) is always bound in temporality, that state which is unknown to God but suffered by his estranged creation. In addition, speech is incapable of accurately describing God (a concern of the first pages of the Confessions). In both form and content, then, language is a poor tool with which to pursue the truth of God. There is an exception, however: prayer or confessions, forms of direct address to God's mercy. (The Latin for this word carries the double meaning of admitting guilt to God and praising God.) God is always listening, and direct address to him is the format for the Confessions as a whole.

    여기서 "일시성"이라는 맥락 속에서 말과 글에 대한 몇 가지 언급이 등장한다. 말이나 글은 "일시성"에 구속을 받는데, 이 "일시성"은 하느님으로부터 소외된 피조물들이 겪는 고통의 상태이다. 게다가 말로는 하느님을 정확하게 묘사할 수 없다. 형식과 내용 모두에서 말은 하느님의 진리를 추구하는 데 있어 부적절한 도구이다. 그러나 예외가 있다. 바로 기도 또는 참회, 즉 하느님의 자비에 직접적으로 호소하는 형식이다. 참회의 라틴어 어원은 하느님께 죄를 고백하는 것과 하느님을 찬양하는 것, 두 가지 의미를 모두 담고 있다. 하느님은 언제나 듣고 계시며, 이 책 "참회록"은 그분께 직접 드리는 고백이다.

Lines 19-27

Augustine devotes some time to a reappraisal of a book he wrote during this period in Carthage, called The Beautiful and the Fitting. The book argued that there were two kinds of beauty: beauty inherent in the thing itself and beauty by virtue of the thing's use value.

    아우구스티누스는 카르타고에 머물던 시기에 "아름다움과 적합함The Beautiful and the Fitting" 이라는 책을 썼다. 이 책에서 그는 아름다움에 두 가지 종류가 있다고 했는데, 하나는 사물 자체에 내재된 아름다움이고, 다른 하나는 그 사물의 사용 가치에서 비롯되는 아름다움이다.

There are a number of retractions Augustine wants to make concerning this work, most of which he now considers "miserable folly." First to go is the dedication, which was made to Hierius, a Roman orator well known at the time. Augustine recognizes that he dedicated his work to this man solely because Hierius was popular: "I used to love people on the basis of human judgement, not your judgement, my God."

    그는 이 책에서 몇 가지 내용을 삭제하였는데,  가장 먼저 철회하는 것은 당시 유명했던 로마의 연설가 히에리우스에게 바쳤던 헌사이다.  그 헌정은 오로지 히에리우스의 명성 때문이었음을 그는 인정했다. 그리고 "저는 사람들을 사랑할 때 당신의 판단이 아니라 인간적인 판단에 근거하였습니다, 나의 하느님" 이라는 고백을 했다.

In The Beautiful and the Fitting, Augustine also argued that there is an evil substance that causes division and conflict, whereas the nature of the good is the unity and peace whose most perfect instantiation is in pure mind. Two things are wrong with this view, and both are Manichee errors. First, there is the idea of evil as a substance—an impossibility if God is to be omnipotent and omnipresent. Second, there is the idea of the mind as "the supreme and unchangeable good."

    그 책에서 아우구스티누스는 분열과 갈등을 초래하는 악의 실체가 존재함을 주장했다.  반면 선의 실체는 통일과 평화이며, 선의 그 가장 완전한 형태는 순수한 정신에 있다고 했다. 그러나 이러한 견해에는 두 가지 오류가 있는데, 먼저 악을 하나의 실체로 보는 관점이다. 하느님이 전능하고 편재하신다면 성립할 수 없는 관점이다. 둘째는 정신을 '지고'의 불변하는 선'으로 여기는 관점이다. 모두 마니교적 오류인 것이다.

Augustine considers his second error in particular to be "amazing madness." The soul, he now knows, is not itself the fundamental truth or good. It participates in God, but is not itself God or some small piece of God. The error about evil and this error about the soul together constitute, in Augustine's eyes, a massive arrogance characteristic of Manichee beliefs: evil is thought to exist due to God's impotence (rather than human impotence), and humans mistake themselves for God.

    아우구스티누스는 특히 자신의 두 번째 오류를 "놀라운 광기"로 보았다. 영혼 그 자체가 근본적인 진리나 선이 아님을 깨달은 것이다. 영혼은 하느님에 참여하는 존재일 뿐, 하느님그 자체이거나 하느님의 작은 파편은 아님을 안 것이다. 아우구스티누스에게 악에 관한 오류와 영혼에 관한 이 오류는 마니교 신앙의 특징인 거대한 오만이었던 것이다. 즉, 마니교는 악은 인간의 무능력이 아닌 하느님의 무능력 때문이며, 인간이 스스로를 신으로 착각한  것으로 믿은 것이다.

With this retraction made, Augustine moves from what he was writing at the time to what he was reading: Aristotle's Categories.Like the Neoplatonists, Augustine now understands Aristotle's work as a system applicable only to this world (and to logical exercises in general), but not to God. At the time, however, he was puzzled and misled. Trying to conceive how God could have beauty and magnitude as attributes (following Aristotle's system), he failed to realize that "you [God] yourself are your own magnitude and your own beauty."

    삭제 작업을 마친 후 그는 집필에 참고했던 아리스토텔레스의 "범주론"에 관해 언급했다. 신플라톤주의자들과 마찬가지로, 그는 아리스토텔레스가 주장한 체계가 하느님에게는 적용될 수 없으며, 오직 이 세상(그리고 일반적인 논리적 탐구)에만 적용되는 체계라고 했다. 그러나 당시 그는 이 문제로 혼란 속에 모르는 게 있었다. 아리스토텔레스의 체계에 따라 하느님이 어떻게 아름다움과 크기라는 속성을 지닐 수 있을지 파악하려 애쓰던 그는, 정작 "하느님 자신이 곧 하느님의 크기이자 아름다움"이라는 사실을 깨닫지 못했던 것이다.

This error led Augustine further into the false problems of trying to imagine God. With the influence of Manichee beliefs all around him, he pictured God as "like a luminous body of immense size and myself a bit of that body. What extraordinary perversity!"

    이러한 오류는 그로 하여금 하느님의 모습을 상상하려는 잘못으로 더욱 깊이 빠져들게 하였다. 당시만연했던 마니교 신앙의 영향으로, 그는 하느님을 '거대한 빛의 덩어리'로, 그리고 자신을 '그 덩어리의 작은 일부'로 묘사했는데,  참으로 기이하고도 비뚤어진 생각이 아닐 수 없었다.

Book 5

Lines 1-13

Augustine begins by reminding us that everything and everyone is part of the whole of God's creation. This is in line with the Neoplatonic ideas discussed in Book 3; nothing is inherently evil, and even the most "wicked" people continually praise God (though they do not know it). "You [God] see them and pierce their shadowy existence," he writes, and "even with them everything is beautiful, though they are vile." (Later, in his City of God, Augustine will liken such apparently evil people and things to the dark areas in a beautiful painting).

    아우구스티누스는 모든 존재와 만물이 하나님의 창조라는 거대한 전체의 일부라는 사실을 상기시키며 이야기를 시작한다. 이는 제3권에서 논의된 신플라톤주의 사상과 맥을 같이하는 것으로, 본질적으로 악한 것은 없으며 가장 '사악한' 사람들조차도, 비록 자신들은 깨닫지 못할지라도 끊임없이 하느님을 찬양하고 있다는 것이다. 그는 "주님께서는 그들을 보시고 그들의 그림자 같은 존재를 꿰뚫어 보신다, "그들이 비록 추악할지라도 그들을 포함한 모든 것이 아름답습니다"라고 했다. 훗날 아우구스티누스는 자신의 저서 "신국론"에서, 겉보기에 악해 보이는 사람과 사물들을 아름다운 그림 속 어두운 부분에 비유하였다.

At age twenty-nine, still in Carthage, Augustine gets to meet Faustus, a respected sage of the Manichees. Before describing the encounter, Augustine takes the opportunity to make some points about the difference between scientific astronomy and the Manichee account of the heavens, a comparison that he was considering at the time.

    스물아홉 살의 나이에 여전히 카르타고에 머물던 아우구스티누스는 마니교의 저명한 현자인 파우스투스를 만났다. 그 만남을 서술하기에 앞서, 그는 고심하고 있던 주제인 천문학과 마니교의 우주관 사이의 차이점에 관한 몇가지 견해를 밝혔다.

Though he now knows that science is worthless without praise to God (who made the scientists and even the numbers they use), at the time he was impressed by astronomy's reliability in accounting for heavenly movements. In contrast, the Manichee account (which included claims that the eclipses serve to "hide" heavenly battles) was starting to seem inaccurate.

    그는 과학자들과 그들이 사용하는 숫자까지도 창조하신 하나님을 찬양하지 않는다면 과학이 무가치하다는 것을 알고 있었지만, 당시 천체의 움직임을 설명하는 과학적인 천문학의 확실성에 깊은 인상을 받았다. 반면, 일식이 천상에서의 전투라는 마니교의 설명은 부정확하다고 생각했다.

Augustine is initially impressed by the modesty Faustus exhibits—the sage simply refuses to theorize about subjects he doesn't know intimately (astrology is an example). Interestingly, however, Faustus' rhetorical flashiness doesn't impress Augustine, who claims that by this time he had learned to value the content of speech over mere loquacity. The net result of the interview was disillusionment: Augustine departed with more doubts than ever about Manichee myths and pseudo-science.

    아우구스티누스는 파우스투스가 보여준 겸손함, 즉 자신이 깊이 알지 못하는점성술에 대해 굳이 이론을 펼치려 하지 않는 태도에 깊은 인상을 받았다. 그러나 파우스투스의 화려한 수사법은 그에게 별다른 감흥을 주지 못했는데, 이는 아우구스티누스가 이미 단순한 말재주보다는 말의 내용을 더 중시하는 태도를 갖추고 있었기 때문이었다. 결국 그 만남이 남긴 것은 환멸뿐이었다. 그는 마니교의 신화와 사이비 과학에 대해 그 어느 때보다 더 큰 의구심을 품었던 것이다.

Lines 14-21

Finding his students too rowdy and altogether too reminiscent of himself when he was a student, Augustine departed Carthage for Rome. Monica, who had accompanied him to Carthage, grieved at his departure, and Augustine confesses that he told her a white lie in order to get on the boat to Rome without delay. Almost immediately on arrival in Rome, Augustine was stricken gravely ill (in referring to this illness as a punishment from God, he makes the first-ever use of the phrase "original sin"). For his recovery, he gives credit to God, of course, but also to Monica's prayers.

    카르타고의 자기 학생들이 너무 소란스럽고 학창 시절 자신의 모습을 닮았다고 느낀 아우구스티누스는 그곳을 떠나 로마로 갔다.  어머니 모니카는 그의 떠남을 슬퍼했으나, 그는 지체 없이 로마행 배에 오르기 위해 어머니에게 선의의 거짓말을 했다고 고백했다. 로마에 도착한 그는 곧 심각한 병이 들었다. 그는 이 병을 하느님의 벌이라고 여기며 "원죄"라는 표현을 처음으로 사용했다. 그는 자신의 회복을 물론 하느님의 은총으로 여겼지만, 어머니의 기도에도 감사를 표했다.

Appraising what he knew when he began living in Rome, Augustine makes a reference to "the Academics," the skeptical school that arose at Plato's Academy. He thought the Academics "shrewder than others," and their pervasive logical challenges to any belief at all had, in Augustine's mind, a particularly devastating effect on the somewhat goofy postulates of Manichee mythology.

    로마 생활에서 깨달은 새로운 지식에 감사하며, 아우구스티누스는 플라톤의 아카데미에서 비롯된 회의주의 학파인 '아카데미 학파'에 관해 언급한다. 그는 아카데미 학파가 누구보다도 예리하다고 생각했으며, 그들의 논리는 마니교에 치명적인 타격을 입혔다고 보았다.

Still, however, the Manichees had left Augustine plagued by images when he thought of God or of evil: God as "a physical mass" or "a luminous body," even evil as "a malignant mind creeping through the earth." Even worse, his lingering dualism (the idea that God and evil are two warring substances) meant that he still took no real responsibility for his sins. Worse still, he accepted the Manichee disbelief in Christ's incarnation in human form, picturing him instead as a wholly divine being "emerging from the mass of [God's] dazzling body."

    그럼에도 불구하고, 마니교는 아우구스티누스의 머릿속에 끈질긴 이미지들을 남겨 놓았다. 즉, 하느님을 '물리적 질량'이나 '빛나는 몸'으로, 심지어 악조차도 '지상을 기어 다니는 사악한 정신'으로 여기게 했던 것이다. 더 심각한 문제는 그에게 남아 있던 하느님과 악을 서로 대립하는 이원론으로 인해, 그가 자신의 죄에 대해 진정한 책임을 느끼지 않았다는 점이다. 설상가상으로 그는 그리스도가 인간의 형상으로 성육신했다는 사실을 부정하는 마니교의 견해를 받아들여, 그리스도를 하느님의 눈부신 몸으로부터 솟아나온 완전한 신적 존재로 상상했다.

Lines 22-25

Things were going poorly in Rome, where Augustine quickly discovered his students to be cheaters who would often walk out just before the end of classes to avoid paying the teacher. Disgusted, Augustine took an opening for a teacher of rhetoric in Milan. This will turn out to be an important move: it was "to end my association with [the Manichees], but neither of us knew that [yet]." In Milan waited Bishop Ambrose, who would be a major influence in Augustine's conversion to Catholicism.

    로마에서의 생활은 순탄치 않았다. 아우구스티누스는  제자들이 수업료를 내지 않으려고 강의가 끝나기 직전에 자리를 뜨거나 속임수를 쓴다는 걸 곧 알게 되었기 때문이다. 이에 환멸을 느낀 그는 밀라노에서 수사학 교사를 구한다는 소식을 듣고 그곳으로 자리를 옮겼다. 이는 훗날 중요한 전환점이 되었다. 당시에는 그 누구도 몰랐지만, 이 이동은 결과적으로 그가 마니교도들과의 관계를 끊게 되는" 계기가 되었기 때문이다. 밀라노에는 그가 가톨릭으로 개종하는 데 지대한 영향을 미치게 될 암브로시우스 주교가 그를 기다리고 있었다.

In Milan, Augustine became increasingly open to Christian philosophy and theology, primarily for the reason that he hears the Old Testament "figuratively interpreted" for the first time. This experience is the practical catalyst that allows Augustine to begin to move toward total faith in the church. Genesis, with its apparently intractable issues of a God that "created" and did things like a being who lived in time and in a body, suddenly seemed much more reasonable when "expounded spiritually." The apparently sinful actions of the prophets of the Old Testament also took on new sense when read metaphorically.

    밀라노에서 아우구스티누스는 기독교 철학과 신학에 대해 점차 마음을 열게 되었는데, 이는 무엇보다도 구약 성경 해석이 비유적임을 처음으로 알았기 때문이었다. 이는 그가 교회의 가르침을 온전히 믿는 신앙으로 나아가는 실질적인 계기가 되었다. 시간과 육체 속에 존재하는 존재처럼 무언가를 '창조'하고 행동하는 하느님이라는, 얼핏 보기에 난해한 창세기 말씀이 '영적으로 풀이'되자, 그 말씀이 훨씬 더 합리적으로 다가왔다. 또한 구약성경 속 죄악처럼 보였던 예언자들의 행위도 은유적임을 이해하자 비로소 새로운 의미로 다가왔다.

Augustine became at this point a near-convert, a "catechumen" waiting for a final sign from God that he should take the plunge and be baptized. The one remaining obstacle to his total belief, he says, was his persistent imagery of God as a physical mass or ghostly substance, expanded or diffused through everything like a gas. He still lacked the concept of a spiritual substance.

    이제 그는  사실상 개종 단계에 이르러, 세례를 받기로 결단하라는 하나님의 마지막 신호를 기다리는 '예비 신자'였다. 그가 온전히 신앙을 받아들이는 데 남은 마지막 걸림돌은 하느님을 물리적인 덩어리나 유령 같은 실체로, 마치 가스처럼 만물에 퍼져 있거나 확산되어 있는 존재로 상상하는 버릇이었다. 그는 아직 영적 실체라는 개념을 알지 못했던 것이다.

Book 6 

Lines 1-8

In Milan, Augustine was becoming increasingly open to Christian doctrine, and he begins Book 6 by crediting Monica (who has followed him to Milan as well) and Ambrose for this. Monica led a quiet and extremely devout life in Milan, serving as a constant reminder to Augustine that he may well have been destined for Catholicism. Ambrose, as Bishop, was extremely busy and Augustine found it hard to find a moment for a private audience with him.

    밀라노에서 아우구스티누스는 점차 기독교 교리를 받아들일 마음의 준비가 되어가고 있었는데, 이러한 변화는 어머니 모니카(그를 따라 밀라노까지 온 인물)와 암브로시우스 덕분이었다고 밝혔다. 밀라노에서 조용하고 지극히 경건한 삶을 살았던 모니카는 아들에게 가톨릭 신앙으로 나아갈 운명이라는 사실을 끊임없이 상기시켜 주었다. 한편 주교였던 암브로시우스는 업무가 바빠, 아우구스티누스는 그와 개인적으로 만나기가 어려웠다.

Ambrose's sermons, however, continued to make an impact on Augustine, particularly in their interpretive approach to the Old Testament. As Ambrose described this interpretive method, "the letter kills, the spirit gives life." A big step came when Augustine learned that most Catholics do not take literally the passage in Genesis in which God makes man "in his own image." He began to suspect that other "knotty" passages in scripture may hide deeper meanings as well.

    그럼에도 불구하고 암브로시우스의 설교는 아우구스티누스에게, 특히 구약 성경 해석하는 방식에서 계속 영향을 미쳤다. 암브로시우스는 구약 성경 해석 방식을 "문자는 죽이고 영은 살린다"는 말로 설명했다. 아우구스티누스는 하는님께서 인간을 "자신의 형상대로" 창조하셨다는 창세기의 구절을 대다수 가톨릭 신자들이 문자 그대로 받아들이지 않는다는 사실을 알았고, 이는 중요한 전환점이었다. 그는 성경 속의 또 다른 여러 '난해한' 구절들에도 더 깊은 의미가 숨겨져 있을 수도 있다고 생각했다.

Augustine was also increasingly attracted to the refusal of the church to offer "proof" of its doctrines. Augustine finds this an engaging form of modesty, and the idea that faith, not reason, is the basis for true knowledge helps alleviate his skepticism to some degree.

    아우구스티누스는 또한 교회가 '증거' 제시를 거부하는 태도에 점점 더 마음이 끌렸다. 그는 교회의 이러한 태도를 겸손함으로 여겼고, 이성이 아닌 신앙이 참된 지식의 토대라는 생각은 그의 회의감을 해소하는 데 도움이 되었다.

Lines 9-24

Turning to events in his daily life at Milan, Augustine recounts some of the issues discussed in his circle of friends. The first concerns a beggar they passed on the way to an important speech Augustine was to deliver. Augustine was miserably nervous about his upcoming performance, but the wretched, filthy beggar appeared to be immensely happy in his drunken stupor. This disturbed Augustine deeply, and he spoke to his friends about "the many sufferings that accompany our follies."

    그는 밀라노에서 겪은 몇 가지 일화를 이야기했다. 첫 번째 일화는 그가 중요한 연설을 하러 가던 길에 마주친 한 거지와 관련된 이야기이다. 아우구스티누스는 곧 있을 연설 때문에 몹시 초조해 하고 있었지만, 비참하고 지저분한 몰골의 그 거지는 술에 취해 몽롱한 상태에서도 더할 나위 없이 행복해 보였다. 이 모습은 아우구스티누스에게 깊은 충격을 주었고, 그는 친구들에게 "우리의 어리석음에 따른 수많은 고통"에 대해 이야기했다.

These friends, whose spiritual condition Augustine felt to be "much the same as mine," are named as Nebridius (with whom Augustine had discussed astrology in Book 4) and Alypius, who will later witness Augustine's conversion and become a very close friend. Alypius is described here as full of integrity in his career at the law courts but possessing a potentially "fatal passion for the circus" and public shows in general. Augustine depicts himself and his two friends as three young spiritual questers after truth, and he seems to have depended on their company and moral support.

    아우구스티누스가 자신과 "영적 상태가 거의 비슷하다"고 여겼던 그의 친구들은 네브리디우스(제4권에서 아우구스티누스와 점성술에 관해 논의했던 인물)와 알리피우스입니다. 특히 알리피우스는 훗날 아우구스티누스의 개종을 지켜보며 아주 가까운 친구가 되는 인물이다. 알리피우스는 청렴한 인물로 묘사되지만, 한편으로는 오락에 열정을 지닌 사람으로 묘사되기도 했다. 아우구스티누스는 자신을 포함 이 두 친구를 진리를 찾아 나선 세 명의 젊은 영적 구도자로 묘사하고, 그들의 도덕적 지지에 의지했던 것으로 보인다.

Having nearly convinced himself that Catholicism is the only place where he will find the truth, Augustine began to worry deeply about the issue of sexual abstinence. Although the church allowed sex in the context of marriage, it encouraged men to try to live without it if possible. Augustine felt at least that he should get married, in large part because marital status and the money that came with the bride (the dowry) would help advance his career to still higher levels. He debated the topic often with Alypius, who had remained chaste after an early and unpleasant sexual experience.

    아우구스티누스는 가톨릭이야말로 진리를 찾을 수 있는 유일한 길이라는 확신을 굳혀가던 중, 성적 금욕 문제로 깊이 고민하기 시작했다. 교회는 결혼 생활의 범위 내에서 성관계를 허용했으나, 남성들에게는 가능하다면 성관계 없이 지내도록 권장했다. 아우구스티누스는 결혼을 생각했는데, 무엇보다도 결혼을 통해 아내로부터 얻게 될 재산(지참금)이 자신의 경력을 한 단계 더 발전시키는 데 도움이 될 것이라 여겼기 때문이다. 그는 불쾌한 성적 경험 이후 줄곧 순결을 지킨 알리피우스와 이 문제를 두고 자주 논의했다.

Though fascinated by Augustine's sexual appetite, Alypius argued against a wife, in large part because he and his two compatriots had been toying seriously with the idea of withdrawing from society to lead a bohemian philosopher's life. Nonetheless, Augustine agreed to marry. The bride-to-be was only twelve, however, so the marriage would not have been for a few years. In the meantime, Augustine is forced to send away his concubine (the mother of his son Adeodatus).

    알리피우스는 아우구스티누스의 결혼을 반대했는데, 이는 그들이 사회를 떠나 보헤미안 철학자로서의 삶을 살겠다는 계획을 하고 있었기 때문이다. 그럼에도 불구하고 아우구스티누스는 결혼하기로 결정했다. 그러나 신부감이 겨우 열두 살이었음으로,  결혼식은 몇 년 뒤에나 치러질 예정이었다. 그사이 아우구스티누스는 자신의 첩(그의 아들 아데오다투스의 모친)을 떠나보내야만 했다.

Book VII 

Lines 1-7

Augustine begins with another appraisal of his philosophy at the time, paying particular attention to his conceptions of God as a being and of the nature of evil (the two concepts that Neoplatonism would alter most for him). The problem of picturing God remained central. Having rejected Manichee dualism, Augustine was finally trying to imagine God as "incorruptible and inviolable and unchangeable" rather than as some kind of limited, partly impotent substance.

    아우구스티누스는  '존재로서의 하느님'과 '악의 본질'에 주목한다. 하느님을 어떻게 형상화할 것인가 하는 문제는 여전히 핵심적인 과제였다. 마니교의 이원론을 배척한 그는 마침내 하느님을  "부패하지 않고 침해 받지 않으며 불변하는" 존재로 생각코자 애를 썼다.

He still,  however, has no conception of spiritual substance (a substance that is not matter and does not exist in space). He pictured God as "a secret breath of life" or like sunlight, when he shouldn't have been "picturing" him at all. "My eyes are accustomed to such images," he writes, and "my heart accepted the same structure. Augustine couldn't get around the idea that anything not occupying space could still have existence. (He notes that even the power of thought itself, if he had considered it, would have served as an example).

    그러나 그는 여전히 영적 실체(물질이 아니며 공간에 존재하지 않는 실체)에 대한 개념을 몰랐다. 그는 하느님을 "생명의 비밀스러운 숨결"이나 햇빛과 같은 것으로 묘사했는데, 그렇게 해서는 안 될 일이었다. 그는 "내 눈은 그런 이미지에 익숙해졌고, 내 마음도 같은 구조를 받아들였다"라고 썼습니다. 그는 공간을 차지하지 않는 것이라면, 무엇이든 존재할 수 있다고 생각했다.

Similarly, although Augustine now thought of Manichee dualism as "an abomination," he still had no solution to the problem of evil. He even reached the point of suspecting (after listening to other Catholics) that human free will causes evil, but was left with the question of why humans can choose evil at all. How could it even be an option to choose something other than God, if God is omnipotent?

    아우구스티누스는 이제 마니교의 이원론을 '가증스러운 것'으로 생각했지만, 여전히 악의 문제에 관한 해결책은 찾지 못하고 있었다. 그는 인간의 자유 의지가 악을 초래한다는 생각을 했으나, 도대체 왜 인간이 악을 선택할 수 있는가 하는 의문은 풀리지 않았다. 하느님이 전능하시다면, 어떻게 하느님이 아닌 다른 것 선택이 가능한 지가 의문이었다.

This problem, too, Augustine now attributes to improper visualization. He thought of God like an immense ocean, with the world as "a large but finite sponge" within it. Thus, he asked, "how [did] evil creep in?" And if matter itself was evil (as the Manicheans taught), why did God create it?

    아우구스티누스는 이 문제 또한 하느님을 시각화하여 비롯된 것으로 보았다. 그는 하느님을 거대한 대양으로, 그리고 세상을 그 안에 있는 "크기는 하지만 유한한 스펀지"로 생각했다. 그래서 그는 "어떻게 악이 스며들었는가?"라고 물었다. 또한 만약 물질 그 자체가 악이라면(마니교도들의 가르침처럼), 하느님은 왜 그것을 창조했을까라는 생각이었다.

Lines 8-22

After a brief discussion of astrology (which, in a conversation with a prominent astrologer called Firminus, he finds as improbable as ever), Augustine turns to his Neoplatonic experience. Picking up a Neoplatonic text, he read what seemed to be almost another version of Genesis. The book (he doesn't name it) struck Augustine as thrillingly similar to Genesis, and authoritatively contrary to Manichee dualism.

    저명한 점성가 피르미누스와 점성술에 관한 토론 후(아우구스티누스는 점성술이 여전히 믿기 어렵다고 느꼈다), 그는 자신의 신플라톤주의적 경험을 이야기했다. 그는 신플라톤주의 문헌에서 마치 '창세기' 의 말씀 같은 내용을 접하였는데, 창세기와 놀라울 정도로 유사하나 마니교의 이원론과는  배치되는 내용이었다.

Having briefly touched on his excitement about what he found in this text, Augustine almost immediately turns to what he didn't find there: namely, he didn't find any reference to Christ as God in human form. The Neoplatonists back up the idea of God as the cause of the existence of all things (as well as the assertion that the soul is not the same thing as God), but they mention nothing about the idea that "the Word was made flesh [i.e., Christ] and dwelt among us." (This sudden attention to the absence of Christ from these texts may be an attempt to pre-empt criticism from purist Catholics. Throughout the Confessions, Augustine is careful not to show unmitigated enthusiasm for philosophy in and of itself).

    아우구스티누스는 그 문헌에서 발견하지 못한 것, 즉 인간의 모습으로 나타난 하느님으로서의 그리스도에 대한 언급을 찾지 못했다고 했다. 신플라톤주의자들은 만물의 존재 원인이 하는님이라는 생각을 지지하지만, "말씀이 육신(즉, 그리스도)이 되어 우리 가운데 거하셨다"는 생각에 대해서는 아무런 언급도 하지 않았다. 

Augustine also makes two other criticisms of Neoplatonism here: it fails to give any praise to God, and it is tainted by polytheist tendencies. These problems notwithstanding, the young Augustine was inspired enough by his new reading that he had a powerful vision of God. Turning inward as the Neoplatonists advised, Augustine "entered and with my soul's eye, such as it was, saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than my mind."

    여기서 아우구스티누스는 신플라톤주의에 대해 두 가지 비판을 더 제기하였다. 즉, 신플라톤주의는 하느님을 찬양하지 않으며 다신교적 성향에 물들어 있다는 것이다. 그럼에도 불구하고, 젊은 아우구스티누스는 새롭게 접한 신플라톤주의 사상에 깊은 영감을 받아 하느님에 대한 강렬한 환상을 체험한다. 신플라톤주의자들의 조언에 따라 자신을 성찰한 그는 "내면으로 들어가, 비록 불완전하나마 내 영혼의 눈으로, 바로 그 영혼의 눈보다 더 높은 곳에 있는, 내 지성보다 더 고귀한 불변의 빛을 보았다." 라고 고백했다.

Perhaps for the first time, this wasn't a visual kind of light. It was "utterly different from all other kinds of light. It transcended my mind, [but] not in the way that oil floats on water." There was no false imagery in this vision, but no imagery at all ("this way of seeing you did not come from the flesh"): Augustine was finally able to "see" God with his mind instead of his mind's eye. What he "saw," he writes, "is Being, and that I who saw am not yet Being." This is indeed a very Neoplatonic vision, and it allowed Augustine finally to understand God and creation as part of the same spectrum of relative Being (with God as the pinnacle and Augustine "far" from him).

    

In this moment, Augustine also finally understood the nature of evil: namely that, "for [God] evil does not exist at all." All elements of the world are "good in themselves," but may appear evil when there is "a conflict of interest." Further, Augustine saw that human "wickedness" is not a substance "but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance, you O God, toward inferior things, rejecting its own inner life." This, too, is a Neoplatonic position: nothing can be truly antagonistic to God (the cause of all existence), but human free will allows a turn away from him.

Lines 23-27

Unfortunately, Augustine's inward view of God proved to be transient, a "flash of a trembling glance." Augustine blames the weight of his sins (especially his "sexual habit") for pulling him back down out of the vision. He also gives attention to another obstacle that prevented him from "enjoying" God for more than a moment: he had not yet put his faith in Christ, "the mediator between God and man."

Augustine attributes this hesitation to follow Christ to a lack of humility, without which knowledge only goes so far. Christ, writes Augustine, "detaches [those who accept him] from themselves." At the time of his Neoplatonic vision, however, he seems to have taken on the Neoplatonic idea of Christ "only as a man of excellent wisdom" who was chosen by God (though in Book 5 he claims the opposite error of believing Christ to be wholly divine).

"Of these Neoplatonic conceptions I was sure," writes Augustine, "but to enjoy you I was too weak." An answer presented itself soon after, however, when Augustine began to read the apostle Paul. Here he again finds strong affinities with Neoplatonism, but also the element of grace and humility lacking from those more strictly philosophical texts. "I...found that all the truth I had read in the [Neo]Platonists was stated here together with the commendation of your grace [i.e., praise to God]."

Book 8 

Lines 1-18

Characteristically of this part of the Confessions, Augustine begins by taking stock of his progress toward God at the time. He had removed all doubt "that there is an indestructible substance from which comes all substance," and recognized that God was a spiritual substance with no spatial extension. "My desire," he writes, "was not to be more certain of you but to be more stable in you."

Augustine is further moved by the story (told by his Christian friend Simplicianus) of Victorinus, a highly respected rhetorician and translator of the Neoplatonic texts Augustine had just read. Victorinus had converted to Christianity toward the end of his life, and Augustine was much impressed that such an intelligent and successful man had had the faith to become Catholic.

Nonetheless, Augustine did not yet convert. Though no further obstacles stood in his way, he felt he was struggling against a second will within himself: "my two wills...one carnal, one spiritual, were in conflict with one and other." Augustine remained attached by habit to the beauty of material things and pleasures, though he felt that this habit was "no more I."

Comparing his state with that of a drowsy sleeper trying to get up, Augustine continued to edge closer to conversion. Nebridius was turning down work at the law courts to have more time for spiritual pursuits, and Alypius was in close dialogue with Augustine about the same issues. With a great deal of motivation already in the air, a friend (Ponticianus) tells Augustine of monasteries outside the city and of two men who had given up their worldly lives in an instant to become monks. For Augustine, this is almost like an accusation: "you thrust me before my own eyes.... The day had now come when I stood naked to myself."

Lines 19-26

Augustine's crisis of will finally came to a head when, in conversation with Alypius, he became angry at himself and "distressed not only in mind but in appearance." Walking out into the garden to calm down, Augustine began beating himself and tearing his hair, stricken over his failure of will. It was not even a matter of deciding to do something and then having to do it: "at this point the power to act is identical with the will."

This, indeed, was partly what was so maddening about the situation--Augustine did not need the will to do something so much as the will to will something. He reflects here on the paradox that, in beating himself, his limbs obeyed the will of his mind even as his mind could not obey itself. The answer, he suggests, is that he had two wills. This idea is quickly dismissed, however. It would be Manichean to blame his fault on the existence of two separate wills. "It was I," Augustine admits. "I...was dissociated from myself" (hence his soul felt "torn apart").

Augustine's habits continued to nag and whisper to him, even as he said to himself, "let it be now, let it be now." Finally, as the voices of habit began to weaken, Augustine says that "Lady Continence" came on the scene and moved to embrace him (a metaphor rather than a vision, although the garden scene as a whole blurs the line between rhetoric and a literal account). All Augustine's self-contained misery welled up, and he moved off to a bench to weep.

As he sat there, he says, he heard a child's voice "from a nearby house" repeating the words, "pick up and read, pick up and read" (one old manuscript reads "from the house of God," so it is unclear if this is a vision or a literary device). Hearing this as a divine command to open his Bible, Augustine did so and read an injunction against "indecencies," a command to "put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts."

This was enough to convert Augustine immediately and finally, and he hurries to tell the good news to Alypius (who is in the garden and who joins Augustine in his decision to convert) and to Monica (who is thrilled). Augustine has finally arrived at his goal.

Book 9 

Lines 1-15

With the complete emergence of Augustine's free will in fully embracing God, he knew he had to retire from his position as a teacher (a salesman of loquacity). Not wishing to cause a stir, he waited until the next period of vacation before leaving his post—at this point, recurrent chest pain would have excused his withdrawal in any case. Meanwhile, Nebridius and another friend, Verecundus, had also decided to follow Augustine in converting to Catholicism.

Having shed his worldly occupation, Augustine continued to read and write. His chief works during this period were dialogues that set out the Neoplatonist reading of Christianity he had come to embrace. These he now sees as prideful works, though he does not retract anything specific from them. Augustine also had a powerful experience reading the Psalms at this point: "emotions exuded from my eyes and my voice."

There is a brief glance back to the Manicheans here, for whom Augustine now had nothing but pity and a lingering disgust. Now that he had saved himself, he began to wonder what to do about people who were as lost as they were.

Augustine was finally baptized, by Ambrose and in the company of his son Adeodatus and his friend Alypius. He immediately began to take greater part in Ambrose's congregation, participating in a sit-in against the anti-Catholic policies of Arian Justina (the mother of Valentinian II).

Lines 16-37

After recounting these events, Augustine turns his attention to Monica. Recalling her devout, humble, and wise nature over the course of her life, Augustine praises his mother for maintaining peace with his father and among her friends. He also suggests that God was using her for a higher purpose—in part, to see Augustine safely into the arms of the church. Although his father Patrick has passed away, Augustine tells us that Monica finally persuaded Patrick to be baptized shortly before his death.

Part of the occasion for this reminiscence is a vision Augustine and Monica shared in Ostia after his conversion and just before she fell ill and passed away. Augustine tells this story next. Looking out over a garden in Ostia, Augustine and Monica were discussing the nature of the reward met by saints in the afterlife. In the attempt to conceive of this paradise, Augustine recalls, they sought past earthly bodies to the stars, then went further, seeking for the answer inwardly (in the nature of their own minds).

Still chasing this idea through dialogue, mother and son reach a kind of eternal wisdom (again a transient experience): "we touched it to some small degree by a moment of total concentration of the heart." Unlike Augustine's previously recounted visionary ascent (after first reading the Neoplatonists), this one seems to be a quest for truth infused by love; the shared nature of the experience is in part a testimony to this change.

Attempting to describe the experience further, Augustine postulates that, if everything (including the soul) were utterly quiescent and unmoving, God would speak through himself rather than through any mediation. This is similar to what he and Monica experienced. "Eternal life," he writes, "is of the quality of that moment of understanding."

Following the vision, Monica told Augustine that she felt she had done all she had to do on earth. She fell gravely ill soon thereafter. Exhibiting an indifference as to whether she was to be buried back in Thagaste or not, she told Augustine that "nothing is distant from God."

Augustine decided not to grieve over her death (since she was going to be with God), but he recalls feeling a great deal of pain nonetheless. Unable to answer rationally why he was so sad, Augustine concludes nonetheless that weeping before God is acceptable because God is infinitely compassionate. He closes the Book (and the story of his life) with a prayer for Monica's soul.

Book 10 

Lines 1-11

Augustine introduces his investigation with an appraisal of his love for God. "When I love [God]," he asks, "what do I love?" It is nothing to do with the five physical senses, but rather with their five spiritual counterparts: metaphorical and intangible versions of God's light, voice, food, odor, and embrace. In other words, Augustine must look inward at his own mind (or soul) to "sense" God.

This is an ability that is not directly possible for inanimate things or beasts. Nonetheless, Augustine argues, they all participate in God because they have their existence only in him. Further, they highlight the wonder of the consciousness of God attainable by humans: "the created order speaks to all, but is understood" only by contrasting it with inner truth.

Yet "sensing" God with his spiritual faculties is not quite direct knowledge of God, and Augustine delves deeper into himself in this attempt to "find" God and know him. Briefly considering the life of the body, which God gives, Augustine rejects it--God is not this, but the "life of life." Moving on, he considers "another power," not that which animates his body but "that by which I enable its senses to perceive." This is the mind, but Augustine is again unsatisfied: even horses, he points out, have this basic form of mind.

Lines 12-26

And so "I come to the fields and vast palaces of memory," writes Augustine. He begins his analysis of this most puzzling human faculty with a discussion of what kinds of things the memory holds. Each kind, considered in turn, raises its own (often extremely involuted) philosophical dilemmas.

The first kind of memory to be treated is the rough category of sensory perceptions—the most familiar and obvious kind of memories. Augustine draws the initial metaphor of a storehouse of memory, in which images of things experienced are stored (sometimes inconveniently), retrieved, and re-stored (sometimes in new places).

This leads Augustine to consider what sort of things the images stored in the memory are. Profoundly strange entities, these "images" can be tasted, heard, seen, etc., all without the things of which they are images actually being present. Augustine professes to be flabbergasted at the sheer immensity of such a storehouse of images, which can seem almost real: memory is "a vast and infinite profundity."

The vastness of memory is thus more than Augustine can grasp, which means that "I myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am." This state of affairs, however, seems to be a paradox. How, asks Augustine, could the mind be external to itself such than it cannot know itself? Memory is seeming increasingly enigmatic.

Leaving this train of thought for a moment, Augustine notes that his memory also holds skills. This kind of memory seems to be another case altogether, since it is not images of the skills but the skills themselvesthat are retained.

From skills, Augustine moves quickly to consider ideas, which constitute yet another distinct kind of memory. By ideas, Augustine means the ideas themselves, not any sensory information by which they might be communicated. How is it, he wonders, that a new idea can be self-evidently true? There are many cases in which we believe something not on the authority of the source, but because the idea itself strikes us as true.

Augustine's answer is a deeply Platonic one: the memory of such ideas must have been "there before I learnt them," waiting to be recognized. Augustine suggests that, although we don't recognize them as memories when we recognize the truth of ideas, the pieces of these ideas are present somewhere far back in our memories. In coming across an idea (whether through our own thoughts or through an external source) whose truth we recognize, we are actually "assembling" the disordered pieces of an eternal "memory."

To secure the distinction between the idea itself and the form in which we learn it, Augustine here points to the examples of mathematical lines and numbers: although we may see a line or number written, this material form simply signifies a more perfect form already in our minds (a perfect form we have never actually seen outside of us).

The next type of memory named is emotional memory, which poses the following problem: how is it that we can remember emotions without re-experiencing them? Augustine recalls times when he has even found himself sad at the memory of joy (the joy of his carnal lusts, for example), or joyful upon remembering a past sorrow. Are emotional memories images, then, stored at some sort of remove from the original? Emotion seems too much a part of the mind itself for this to be likely.

Leaving these dilemmas as well, Augustine's inward analysis reaches a fever pitch when he tries to understand how he can remember forgetfulness. Reaching no real conclusion in the rapidly expanding knot of paradoxes this question generates, Augustine stops to marvel at memory, "a power of profound and infinite multiplicity."

In passages like this last one, Augustine seems determined to employ every rhetorical device at his disposal to illustrate the profundity and infinite complexity of memory. This is due to some extent to his overall effort to demonstrate the finding of an infinite God within one's own mind, but he also wants to designate memory as a particularly fecund ground for self- investigation.

Summarizing the kinds of memory covered thus far (senses, skills, ideas, and emotions), Augustine briefly suggests looking for God elsewhere in himself, since even "beasts" have memory. But one question intrudes: how can we be mindful of God if he is not already inour memories? This same question, the reader will remember, opens the Confessionsin Book I: how can we seek God if we don't already know what he looks like?

Lines 27-37

Augustine's initial response to this paradox here offers a slightly different account of the same answer given in Book 1 (which amounted to "seek and ye shall find"). He suggests that, even when something is lost to memory, we should still look for it there. It's likely, he argues, that some part or trace is retained such that we can "reassemble" the knowledge of God as we "reassemble" other true ideas from their scattered parts deep in the memory.

The same question, he then notes, applies to the pursuit of the happy life (which for Augustine is life with the knowledge of God). People everywhere seek the happy life, but how can they seek it without already knowing what it is? "Where did they see it to love it?" Perhaps, he considers, we did know happiness once (this is a reference to Adam, our common ancestor, according to the Bible, who led the supremely good life before his fall into mortality). Something like a memory of this original goodness seems likely, since the characteristics of the happy life that people seek seem largely universal.

Specifically, the universal feature of what people seek in life seems to be joy. The true and greatest joy, argues Augustine, is joy in God. Even those who do not seek God nonetheless "remain drawn toward some image of [this] true joy." Their will is for this joy; the obstacle to their pursuit of it in God is nothing but a lack of will. This idea is, again, Neoplatonic. Wickedness or distance from God is due not to any flaw in God's creation, but rather to the misdirection or impotence of the human will to recognize God's perfection.

Augustine bolsters this argument with the further proposition that the joy universally sought in the happy life must be joy in the truth. Thus, we know how to seek the happy life not because we remember any particular joys but because we remember the nature of truth itself (in the Platonic sense of memory beyond a single human life). Augustine makes the point that the desire for truth is at least as universal as the desire for joy; no one wants to be deceived.

This "memory" of eternal truth, however, is tenuous. People often love mundane objects or bodies themselves in place of the higher truth in them, and are reluctant to change because to do so would be to admit deception.

At this point, Augustine stops again to take stock of his pursuit of knowledge about God. He cannot find God in the senses, nor in emotion. Neither, he says, can he find God himself in the mind, which is much too changeable. Asking yet again how he could have ever found God if God wasn't already in Augustine's memory, Augustine finally identifies one characteristic by which he sought God without knowing him per se: he found God simply by the fact that God transcends the mind where he had been looking. God is that which is above all aspects of the mind. The beauty of this account, it seems, lies largely in the fact that the nature of God, if he is provisionally defined as that which transcends the mind, can only be known in as much as the mind is known first. Thus, the search for God remains an inward search.

Lines 38-69

Perhaps in humble response to the knowledge of the search for God that he has just claimed, Augustine spends the remainder of Book X confessing the ways in which he is still separated from a truly (almost impossibly) Godly life.

The first obstacle is that, although celibate, he is still plagued by erotic images. Wet dreams are particularly disturbing to him, since it appears that his reason (with which he would normally fend off lurid images) falls asleep along with his body. Food, although it is necessary, also holds "a dangerous pleasantness," and Augustine struggles to eat as though he were simply taking medicine. Smell is also mentioned briefly, though Augustine doesn't see it as much of a problem.

Sound is equally dangerous in its potentially pleasing qualities. (It should be noted that the appreciation of the beauty of God's creation is not the issue in these "dangerous" sensory phenomena, but rather the potential attachment to worldly things at the expense of God himself). A particularly tricky issue with regard to sound concerns music in church--what is the proper balance between inspiring the congregation to seek God and miring them in the sensory pleasures of his creation?

Vision comes next, and gets the same wary treatment. Considering light itself, Augustine prays, "may [this] get no hold upon my soul." Taking sight as the best sensory metaphor for knowledge, he also takes this opportunity to return briefly to the issue of beauty in mundane objects (the subject of his early work On the Beautiful and the Fitting). As before, Augustine attributes most false attachments to worldly beauty to a confusion of means with ends (things should be loved for their ends, their use value). Thus, artistic beauty should never be "excessive" and art should never be made without a careful consideration of its morality.

Augustine continues his most up-to-date confession, admitting that he still enjoys a certain feeling of power or glory when he is praised. He feels he has "almost no" insight into this problem, though he knows that praise should only please him in as much as it expresses the true benefit someone else has gained from him. The ego, he notes, should not be the focus of praise, since (as stated in the discussion of memory above) it is not God.

In the end, Augustine feels he "can find no safe place for my soul except in [God]." He must do his best against the bombardments of sin from all sides, and have faith that God will have mercy on him.

Book 10 concludes with a note against the visions of God claimed by the Neoplatonists. These were not true insights, since they were based on a kind of pagan "theurgy" that did not include Christ. "They sought a mediator to purify them," writes Augustine, "and it was not the true one."

Book 11 

Lines 1-16

Noting that any confession he makes must be ordered in time, Augustine again reminds us of the common ground between the philosophical, religious, and autobiographical material in his book: all are in praise of God.

Following this introduction (and justification), Augustine begins in earnest to determine when time started and the nature of God's relation to this "beginning." The first misconception to clear up concerns the statement in the Book of Genesis that God "made" creation. Augustine argues that God did not make the heavens and the earth in a literal sense (like a craftsman). In fact, God did not make his creation "within" the universe at all, since nothing (including space) could exist before this act of creation.

Turning to the mechanism by which God created, Augustine again puzzles over Genesis: "by your word you made [the creation]...but how did you speak?" As with his reading of the term "made" above, Augustine here shows us that the words of Genesis are not to be taken literally but spiritually (a crucial approach that he learned largely from Bishop Ambrose).

God created the universe with a "word," but this word is not like normal speech. Normal speech is successive—even a single word has a part that comes before and a part that follows. This cannot be the case with God's "word" of creation, because it would require there already to have been time before God created it. God's word cannot have unfolded in time (which did not yet exist), but must be "spoken eternally." It has no "becoming," and does not come into being over time. Rather, it is "spoken" continuously, and never changes.

If this is the case, however, how could it come to be that creation is temporal? If God created all through an eternally uttered Word, how could the things he created succeed one and other and change constantly? Augustine is not yet sure how to answer this question precisely, but he hints at a kind of holism-in-determinism. Things change, but only according to God's whole, unchanging design: "everything which begins to be and ceases to be begins and ends its existence at that moment when, in the eternal reason where nothing begins or ends, it is known that it is right for it to begin and end."

In the context of this roughly sketched answer, Augustine notes a deeper meaning of the word "beginning." God himself (in the form of Christ, who is the living "Word" of God) is the "beginning," not in the sense that he was there "first" (remember, God is eternal and has nothing to do with time) but in the sense that he is the "fixed point" to which we can return. "The Word" is first in the sense that he is the first cause, the unmoving point that is the source of all things. This reading of the "beginning" as the Word (Christ) allows Augustine to get around the apparently temporal implications of the "beginning" in Genesis.

Another way of stating this same interpretation is to refer to Christ (who is the "beginning") as "wisdom." Christ, for Augustine (and for all Christians), is the route by which one can seek the wisdom of God. Hence, Augustine can write here: "Wisdom is the beginning, and in the beginning you made heaven and earth." Again, this is a profoundly spiritual reading of the words used in Genesis. We are no longer talking about a temporal beginning at all, but simply about the context of eternal wisdom (accessible to us through Christ) in which God eternally "makes" the world.

Such a reading of Genesis also allows Augustine to respond to a criticism made by the Neoplatonist Porphyry (the primary disciple of Plotinus). Porphyry claimed that the creation was impossible, because there would have had to be a moment when God decided to create. In other words, the will of God (which is by definition unchanging) would have had to change.

Augustine can now reply that this is a misconception based on the failure to recognize the eternal, constant sense of the word "creation." God did not create the universe at a given time, because for God there isno time. The act of creation is both instantaneous and eternal. Since time is a feature only of the created world (not of God), there couldn't have been any time before God created the universe. Augustine puts this in a number of ways: "There was no 'then' when there was no time," or, "It is not in time that you [God] precede all times. Otherwise you would not precede all times." Again, God is "first" only in the sense of being the eternal cause of all creation. He wasn't "doing" anything before he created the world (a common Manichee challenge), because there was no "before."

Lines 17-41

Augustine now begins to consider time itself. He has argued that time has nothing to do with God himself (thus clearing up the apparent temporality of the creation act), but the creation in which we live still seems to exist in time. Following Aristotle, Augustine notes that everyone thinks they know what time is, at least until they are asked.

Past, present, and future seem to be the defining elements of time. Augustine begins, then, by noting that time depends on things passing away (past), things existing (present), and things arriving (future). Already, Augustine is ready to hint at a significant point: if time is defined by things arriving, remaining for a moment, and passing away, then time seems to depend utterly on a movement toward non-being. As Augustine quickly concludes, "indeed we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it tends toward non-existence."

This idea (and its paradoxical consequences) will occupy Augustine for the rest of Book 11. He strengthens his proof that time does not exist with a lengthy discussion of past, present and future. Neither past nor future, he points out, actually exist—the past is certainly not extant now, and neither is the future (if they were, they would be the present). Even the present is hard to pin down; Augustine divides it into years, months, days, and so on, eventually determining that the present itself cannot truly be said to exist. The present occupies "no space" of course, but it also has "no duration" (any duration would immediately become past and future, which do not exist). Thus, when we look for time we find it to have no real

Nonetheless, time would seem to have some sort of existence, since we can all talk about it and even measure it. The best Augustine can do here is to say that time can only exist in the present, through the mechanisms of memory and prediction. The past is nothing but memory images that exist in the present. The future, on the other hand, gets its apparent existence from predictions based on signs that exist in the present. With this provisional account of "where" time exists, Augustine is willing to accept the common "usage" of the terms past, present, and future (as long as we know we are actually only referring to a present instant without duration).

Augustine still has a problem, however, because it does appear that we can measure time. Yet how could we possibly be measuring something that has no actual duration and (of course) no extension? A provisional answer may lie in the fact that we seem to measure time as it "passes" through the present moment.

This still leaves us, however, with the paradox of measurement--we may measure time as it passes us, but with what? Given only the present instant, what increments could we possibly use to measure something with no duration or extension?

Augustine toys with and dismisses some possible accounts of temporal measurement put forth by others, most significantly the astronomically inspired idea that time is measured by the movements of the heavenly bodies. He argues strongly that bodies, heavenly or otherwise, move in time, and are not themselves definitive of time. The course of the sun may mark a day, but twenty-four hours would still pass if the sun stopped.

Augustine has now debunked a number of ideas about time, namely the idea that it has any existence other than in a durationless present instant. He still, however, cannot account for the "time" with which we all are familiar. Indeed, he will not provide a solid answer at all. He does make one suggestion, however: time seems to be a sort of "distention" (distentio; stretching) of the soul. The soul, which should be abiding in the eternal present (since no other time truly exists), becomes stretched out into temporality, into an apparent successiveness of events.

This idea, though it goes largely unexplicated, comes from Plotinus, who wrote of time as "a spreading out of life." Unlike Plotinus, however, Augustine sees this stretching or distension as a painful fall away from God. This is another version of the fall from God's eternal, unified, and unchanging grace into the created world of multiplicity and temporality.

Augustine does offer some brief confirmation of this idea that time is a property not of the external world but rather of the soul itself. Returning to the issue of memory, he notes that when we appear to be measuring time as some property of the world, we are actually measuring something in our own memory. Since the past does not truly exist, we can only be considering the images of past times as they are now retained within us. Thus, it would indeed seem that time is some property of the mind (or soul) itself, perhaps a kind of "distention."

Augustine closes this discussion with a comparison between his own existence in temporality and God's existence in eternity. Augustine, muddled in his complex pursuit of the nature of time, finds himself "scattered in times whose order I do not understand." For God, on the other hand, it is not simply a matter of being able to know all times (as a superhuman might), but a matter of the unity of all times in a single, timeless eternity.

Book 12

Lines 1-8

Augustine begins with the question of priority in the creation (he loosely defines 'priority' later in Book XII). The text of Genesis describes a nascent earth as 'invisible and unorganized,' in Augustine's reading - an earth comprised of fluid 'formless matter.' Genesis further implies that the initial 'heaven' was not the starry firmament but rather the 'heaven of heaven'--God's 'house,' the angelic order of being nearest to him.

It's important to remember here that Augustine has already posited the non-temporal sense of the phrase 'in the beginning' (Book 11): the beginning is not a time at which God created the heavens and the earth, but rather the eternal, unchanging wisdom (which is also the nature of Christ) in which he created them.

Augustine argues that the visible heavens and earth are not primary in creation; rather, God constructed their concrete physical aspects from a totally 'formless matter' that was created 'first' (again, this 'first' has an ultimately non-temporal sense). This, he says, is the sense of the 'earth invisible and unorganized.'

This formless matter is virtually a quasi-nothingness; it is at the bottom of the Neoplatonic hierarchy of being, furthest from God, since it is matter (which is unlike God) without form (form being more godly than formlessness), and possessing the weakest claim to actual existence. The idea of formless matter is often difficult to grasp - the definition itself refers to the inscrutable quality of this type of 'unintelligible' matter. Augustine again partly blames Manichee theology for muddying his conception of this idea. With an emphasis on the visual, Augustine previously pictured formless matter as 'many different' horrible forms in constant flux rather than viewing it as completely lacking all form.

To reiterate, Augustine emphasizes that formless matter is almost nothing—a kind of 'nothing something' with so little existence that he freely refers to it simply as 'nothing.'

Along with formless matter, the 'heaven of heaven' also precedes the visible 'heaven and earth' in the order of creation. God first made the heaven of heaven and formless matter, then forged the visible heaven and earth out of this formless matter.

Lines 9-16

Here, Augustine elaborates on the concept of a heaven of heaven, God's 'house' or 'city.' His reading of the phrase is inspired by the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry, who recognized a 'world-soul,' which is neither God himself, nor the human soul, but a created order which rests in eternal contemplation of God. Augustine refers to the heaven of heaven as 'the creation in the realm of the intellect'-- a static dimension composed purely of mind. Although it is not 'co-eternal' with God (i.e., it is neither part of God nor equal to him in perfection), it nonetheless 'participates' in God's eternity in a direct and open way. (Some of Augustine's language regarding an unmediated, face-to-face view of God recalls the vision he shared with Monica at Ostia). If formless matter is almost nothing, the heaven of heaven is, in a basic sense, almost God.

Both formless matter and the heaven of heaven, though not necessarily eternal in the same way as God, also exist 'outside time.' Formless matter is atemporal precisely because it has no form. Time, Augustine points out, has no relevance if nothing whatsoever changes. Formless matter, by its very definition, lacks any forms that might change. Put simply, objects without form can not change and without change there is no time.

The heaven of heaven, on the other hand, has a kind of absolute, extreme version of form that precludes change, and therefore any temporal interaction. We might think of it as having an absolutely rigid, perfect form. Since it does have form, it is capable of change. It's proximity to God, however, insures that this never happens: it is 'so given form that, though mutable, yet without any cessation of its contemplation [of God], without any...change, it experiences unswerving enjoyment of [God's] eternity and immutability' (author's italics).

Here Augustine offers further explanation of the proposition that the heaven of heaven is eternally 'contemplating' God. The heaven of heaven 'knows' God without any obstacle: 'the intellect's knowing [in this case] is a matter of simultaneity...in total openness [to God].' The knowledge of God associated with this realm of creation is not like human knowledge, in which we know 'one thing at one moment and another thing at another.' It is knowledge 'without any temporal successiveness,' a kind of instantaneous, universal knowledge not subject to the affects of time.

With these descriptions Augustine elaborates on the two aspects of creation that 'precede' the visible creation. Though in essence these spheres are virtual opposites, both are, by nature, atemporal. Augustine claims that freedom from time accounts for the fact that the days of in Genesis are not numbered until after God creates 'heaven and earth.' Again, Augustine reads this description of the initial creation as covering only 'heaven of heaven and formless matter.'

Lines 17-31

The remainder of Book 12 is primarily a response not to Manichee critics—a position which Augustine spent considerable time denouncing--but rather to Catholic critics of Augustine's very figurative reading of Genesis. Augustine is most concerned with the charge that Moses, in writing Genesis, didn't anticipate or invite such lofty interpretation. Some Catholic critics would argue that Moses simply meant exactly what he said, and that we must read phrases like 'beginning' and 'heaven and earth' literally. In rebuttal, Augustine defends the validity and even the necessity of certain fundamental aspects of his spiritual reading before asserting that no one can really know what Moses was thinking.

Augustine then extends a reinforced argument for God's immutability and atemporality: God's nature 'will never vary at different times,' and 'his will is not external to his nature.' Augustine claims this interchangeability as an inherent truth, spoken in 'the inner ear' by God. The literal sense of Genesis cannot be its deepest and truest, since it shows God making decisions at different points in time. Rather, writes Augustine, 'once and for all and simultaneously, [God] wills everything that he wills.'

Continuing to defend his reading of Genesis, Augustine turns to a statement from scripture--'wisdom was created before everything.' Since he has previously linked 'wisdom' (that in which everything was made) to the 'Word' referred to at the beginning of Genesis, Augustine must now address the implication in this phrase—that 'wisdom' is itself a created thing. He does so by arguing that 'wisdom' in this particular case refers to the heaven of heaven, the order of being that rests in pure contemplation of God but which is nonetheless part of his creation. The heaven of heaven is 'an intellectual nature which is light from contemplation of the light,' 'not Being itself' but the closest thing to it. Based on these assumptions, 'wisdom' can be both a created thing, and the eternal divine in which creation takes place, as expressed in the first lines of Genesis.

Following this retracing of the heaven of heaven, Augustine embarks on a painfully intricate exegesis of all the possible alternate readings of 'heaven and earth.' He ventures an interpretation that includes 'heaven of heaven [which has form] and formless matter [which has none],' but it could also be read as anything from 'formless spiritual creation and formless physical creation' to simply 'formless matter and its products [one product being 'heaven,' the starry firmament].' This enumeration of other readings acts as an expedient, a proof for Augustine's conclusion that there is no single true interpretation, provided the interpreter is honestly pursuing truth.

Nevertheless, after arguing against the possibility of the one true reading, Augustine quickly lists ten 'axioms' that seem to be required of all readings. Though covered previously, the interpretive principles provide a decent summary of Augustine's main assumptions about Genesis: 1) God made heaven and earth; 2) The 'beginning' refers to God's wisdom; 3) 'heaven and earth' is a label for 'all natures made and created' (for Augustine, this means the heaven of heaven and formless matter); 4) mutability implies 'a kind of formlessness' in that everything mutable is in a state of flux; 5) what is so totally mutable as to be without form and therefore changeless (as in the case of formless matter) has no experience of time; 6) what is totally formless cannot suffer temporal successiveness (essentially the same point as 5); 7) a source sometimes takes the name of its product (as in Augustine's reading of 'heaven and earth' as 'heaven of heaven and formless matter'); 8) 'earth and the abyss' in Genesis refers to formed objects that possess almost total formlessness; 9) God made everything that has form as well as everything capable of receiving form; and 10) anything that 'acquires form' is first formless. Augustine does not number these points--they are presented in list form.

Following these axioms, Augustine briefly presents seven possible readings of the creation story. Most are quite similar to his own, differing only in what God made first; some readings assert that the initial creation includes only the formless matter that would become the physical world, others broach the possibility of two distinct realms, and still others postulate one realm with two implicit sub-realms. The reading that Augustine singles out for criticism holds that God made heaven and earth out of a pre-existing formless matter. For Augustine, this view is untenable because it suggests that there is something that God did not make. Augustine, speaking for those who maintain this perspective on Genesis, offers a reply on their behalf—God did indeed make this formless matter, but the act is not mentioned in Genesis.

Lines 32-37

After considering the possible and potentially proper readings of the creation story, Augustine separates the most common disagreements over the meaning of the text into two fundamental areas of debate. The first is reserved for issues regarding the 'truth of the matter in question.' The second category centers upon the 'intention of the writer.' In the former case, there is no leeway: the essential and basic truth of Genesis is, undeniably, God's unchanging truth, and all parties must appeal to this single truth for justification. The latter case, in which readers argue about Moses' intended meaning and the words he used to express it, leaves room for multiple interpretations and therefore, disagreement, since no one can know Moses' motivation when he wrote Genesis. For this very reason, however, it is somewhat futile to speculate on Moses' authorial intention—to do so is to ignore the deeper truths for which his 'articulation is appropriate.' Moses, whatever he desired to write, created the best possible version of God's truth.

Augustine derides all who claim to know Moses' original intentions as overly-proud and arrogant—such people love their own opinion rather than the truth in the text. No one can own the truth expressed in Genesis, since it is open to all practitioners of devotion and reason. When people see truths in any number of interpretations, they are really seeing truth in God.

Augustine reasons that scripture, with its basic and easily understood language, allows for so many different 'true' readings (that is, many different apprehensions of its truth) precisely because it aims to reach the widest possible audience. Even if people are inspired by the literal narrative—a story about a large deity who made things over time—this remains a 'true' reading in that it is a step toward faith in God as creator of the universe. Augustine justifies this view with a reminder of the Neoplatonic idea that all of creation, no matter how lowly, wants to return to God: 'it returns to you, the One, according to the capacity granted to each entity.'

Lines 38-43

Continuing to vacillate between this admission of interpretability and an insistence on tenets of interpretation, Augustine eventually moves against what he sees as a common mistake regarding priority in the creation. He emphasizes again that God's self (his nature) is interchangeable with his will, so God did not have to 'decide' to create—there was no 'before,' before creation. It makes no sense to say that God made everything 'first' in a literal sense, since there would be nothing that remained for him to create 'before' or 'after.' In order to explicitly denote the proper sense of 'first,' Augustine repeats three of the five types of priority set out in Aristotle's Categories: priority in time, priority in preference, and priority in origin. To these he adds his own fourth type, priority in eternity.

Priority in eternity is the sense in which God is prior to everything else: namely, everything else is more closely bound in time than he is, since he is altogether distinct from it. Priority in time and in preference are self-explanatory. Priority in origin is more difficult to understand, and is the type of priority Augustine wants to apply to Genesis. Sound is prior in origin to a song, for example, not because the song is made from it in time, as a carpenter makes a bench from wood, but because the song is made from sound at every moment—it subsists in sound, and sound must always be present in order for there to be a song, but not vice-versa. The sound is quintessential, the most basic element from which the song comes into being.

Augustine contends that the relationship between formless matter and the visible heaven and earth is based on priority in origin—analogous to that of sound and its corresponding, co-existent song. Formless matter did not precede the physical in time, but rather in origin. The visible creation is not made from formless matter, but rather is of it—an entirely more dynamic and interactive dependency.

After concluding this discussion, Augustine closes Book 12 with a reminder that we need not offer much consideration to Moses' authorial intention. If we insist on developing a definitive understanding of the specific thought process by which Moses produced the scripture, we should appease such curiosity with the assumption that he had all possible 'true' interpretations in mind.

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    성 아우구스티누스(Augustine of Hippo, 354~ 430): 로마 제국 누미디아 주 출신의 기독교 신학자겸 철학자. 히포 레기우스(현 알제리아 Annaba 시)주교. 서구 역사상 가장 영향력 있는 철학자로  교부 시대 라틴 교회의 가장 중요한 교부 중 한 사람이었음.