The title Confessions may lead the modern reader somewhat astray. Augustine's work is not a National Enquirer-style admission of a lurid past, detailing sexual misconduct and told for the sake of entertainment. A lurid past there is, but Augustine is modest as well as honest in filling in the sexual details, and entertainment is far from his mind. He wants to edify us, and so the account of his sinful days is always accompanied by the reflections of the theologian he matured into after his conversion to Christianity. By exposing the struggles which once tormented his soul, he hopes to rouse us toward the peace of God.

In this world, such peace is fragile and transient. We have a vivid reminder of this fact at the beginning of the Confessions. Augustine wants to discover a way to address God, but several paragraphs of urgent questions and earnest answers apparently lead nowhere. Words cannot adequately express the mysteries of the infinite God -- and yet, paradoxically, it is only through words that finite creatures formulate and communicate their thoughts. The wordiness of Augustine's opening chapters ends in an acknowledgement of wordlessness, and is followed by a portrait of Augustine as an infant (Latin for "wordless") whose inarticulate sounds are misunderstood by adults. The problem of words and wordlessness recurs throughout the Confessions, as Augustine lets us see him acquiring Latin as a native tongue, learning Greek with great difficulty, embarking on a career as a teacher of public speaking, discussing philosophical issues with friends. But at the height of his reputation as a rhetorician, and after philosophical debate had cleared up his intellectual doubts, he was still in "speechless dread" of accepting the Christian faith (8.7). Then, in a garden, he heard a child's voice saying "take up and read," and, when he had read aloud one sentence of Paul's Letter to the Romans, he was calm. Human words are inadequate, but Scripture gives humans God's own words to use. Augustine certainly uses them; quotations from the Bible abound in the Confessions.

Augustine was born in 354 CE, in North Africa. This part of the world had been part of the Roman Empire for nearly five centuries. Few would have guessed that this child, before his death (430 CE), would see it overrun by barbarians as the Empire collapsed. His father was Patricius, a moderately wealthy landowner, and a pagan; Monica, his mother, was a Christian. There must have been many mixed-faith families at the time, for 354 CE is almost precisely the chronological midpoint between the end of the persecution of the Christians and the beginning of the persecution of the pagans.

Although Monica saw to it that Augustine was raised as a "catechumen" (a learner in the Christian faith), she shared with Patricius a natural parental desire to see their son a worldly success. Augustine was therefore sent to school. There, the study of literature inevitably entailed exposure to the immoral world of classical mythology. Peer pressure from his schoolmates led to boasting of imaginary sexual exploits, and to the commission of a very deliberate sin: the theft of the pears (2.4). Augustine speaks of this sin as "fornication"; he is applying the language of the Old Testament prophet Hosea, for whom all sin is fornication in that it betrays the love which God has for humans.

Literal fornication, however, was to be Augustine's habitual sin, which he first indulged while far from home as a 17-year old college student in Carthage (3.1). Within a year, he had a permanent concubine; a child, the boy Adeodatus, soon followed (4.2). In the meantime, however, a less literal fornication occurred: Augustine was "seduced" (3.6) by the Manichees.

The Manichees were a heretical Christian sect. They were troubled by an apparent inconsistency in orthodox Christian belief. How, the Manichees asked, could evil, from which we need to be saved, exist in the world at all, if God is both good and omnipotent? The Manichean answer was that God was not omnipotent; evil was a powerful force which God resisted, but could not eradicate. Since they believed that evil especially resided in flesh, Manichees were vegetarian. They also held that it was a great sin to produce a child, since that entailed imprisoning a soul within flesh. The most zealous of the Manichees abstained entirely from sex, but the less zealous were allowed it, provided that birth control prevented conception. Augustine's involvement with the Manichees may help explain why there were no more "accidents" after Adeodatus, although he kept his concubine for 15 years.

But school did not simply corrupt Augustine with bad friends and bad ideas. In Carthage, Augustine read Cicero's Hortensius; this work, which has not come down to us, celebrated the practice of philosophy (3.4). Inspired by it to lead a philosophical life, Augustine developed the critical thinking which led him to reject Manicheeism (7.2), and find in "Platonist books" the notion that evil was not a force in its own right; evil was the absence of good (7.9). Friends, too, played a powerful role in preparing Augustine for conversion. The death of a friend causes the young teacher to reexamine his life (4.4). Nebridius and Alypius move to Italy with him to form a "philosophical brotherhood"; Alypius is with Augustine in the fateful garden (8.8).

After his conversion, the friends remain together. And a new one is added: Monica. She, now widowed, had travelled to Italy with them, but only in the role of anxious mother. Now she and her son converse about the deepest mysteries of faith (after all, Augustine later insists, women are the intellectual equals of men -- 13.32), and then are transported together beyond them in a mystical vision (9.10). She dies shortly afterwards, but the "conversation" continues, with Augustine trying to work out, as much as is humanly possible, the relationship between Creator and creation in Books 10-13 of the Confessions.