On holiday in Tunisia recently, I took St Augustine’s Confessions as my spiritual companion. After all, Tunisia is the site of ancient Carthage and it was at the renowned university of Carthage that Augustine studied and practised the art of rhetoric before his ambitions took him north to Rome. The Confessions is well worth re-reading; recounted in dramatic and mesmerising prose, it is a classic story of sin, grace and conversion that manages to be both timeless and contemporary at the same time.

Augustine has all the restless, introverted, self-consciousness of a modern writer – but without the self-absorption. His Confessions differ from the usual autobiographical writing in that they are designed to record a spiritual rather than a sentimental journey; thus he discards much that the idle and curious reader would like to know, selecting and meditating on certain crucial episodes only as they serve to shed light on his wayward search for the divine. For Augustine, these incidents are not of interest in themselves, but as milestones in the supernatural destiny of a soul. He sees himself as simply the chief actor in a play written by God.

Yet what a play! Such is his intensity, his constant self-reproach, his frequent and fervent thanksgiving for the grace of conversion that a reader would have to be starkly insensible not to be drawn into what is, after all, the drama of every human soul. “Give what thou commandest, and command what thou wilt”, is Augustine’s imploring prayer, repeated on page after page, for he knew with the unflinching honesty which is a feature of his book that his struggles with incontinence could never be won without grace.

Again, he knew that only grace could free him from the intellectual chains of Manichaeism or from the love of literature for its own sake: “There is more than one way in which men sacrifice to the fallen angels” he hints darkly. No wonder TS Eliot found fellow-feeling with him: “And I became to myself a wasteland”, laments the saint. The moment of truth, in the garden in Milan, prefaced by a storm of tears and self-disgust, does not lose its power to grip the imagination: here, in AD 386, is a man of 33, surrounded by friends and fame, who for 15 years has hungered for the truth and, perversely, used all his considerable gifts to reject it whenever it has presented itself to him. The child sings; he picks up the Bible; and there, opened at random, are the words of St Paul, now understood for the first time with the fierce clarity of the convert.

Augustine began his Confessions soon after becoming Bishop of Hippo in AD 391. Hippo is in modern-day Algeria, a lively centre of Catholic Christianity all those centuries ago, before the rise of Islam. The man – later doctor of the Church - who wrote in paragraph 1, chapter 1, the words for which he is most famous, “Thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee”, would hardly view with equanimity the current decline of Christianity along the North African shoreline.

This edition, handsomely bound in blue, gold and white, with summaries at the start of each chapter, an introduction and bibliography, is part of a series of Christian classics that also includes The Imitation of Christ; a good addition to a spiritual library and, if you are heading for the sun and sand of Tunisia, far better value than the current crop of airport novels.

© 2005 Francis Phillips

Theotokos Catholic Books - Book Reviews Section - www.theotokos.org.uk