When my son Evan took a course at Wheaton called “Classics of Western Literature” he asked me what I thought of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I said I had met Beatrice, actually, and it turns out that her name is Victoria. The way he and his roommate kept their room, I added, would remind his mother of Dante’s description of hell. He smiled and changed the subject, saying he had also read again Augustine’s Confessions — he’d read it in high school — a book which he knows to bring up is to get me started.

We live in confessional times. Secrets once deliberated behind closed doors, sins once examined between priest and penitent, crimes once addressed by blind justice — all have become fodder for newspaper features, radio shows and TV news and programming. Victim and offender alike think nothing of appearing together on Dr. Phil or Oprah or 60 Minutes.

The guiding premise seems to be that if people tell their story — with enough anger, passion and candid details — they forget the past; they will have justified themselves before and/or absolved themselves of whatever burden they’ve laid at the public’s feet. Even a Christian is encouraged, above everything else, to tell his or her own story, as if its very uniqueness commands priority over the story of the faith.

By its very title, St. Augustine’s Confessions ought to attract a wide audience, promising as it does to be a tell-all book of the same genre as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Many of us who opened it first as adolescents scanned through it quickly in hopes of discovering salacious revelations and lurid stories of low life in pagan antiquity. Little did we realize how much we mirrored the young Augustine by these very expectations!

The Confessions ought to be a handbook for the would-be storyteller, but it isn’t. Not that there isn’t a story contained therein: Precocious army brat from a small town, gifted student with a penchant for public speaking, academic forever exploring different life-styles. But given the stories that now assault us, Augustine’s is pretty mild stuff regarded simply as story. The stolen pears pitched at pigs, his fondness for Latin literature, even his mistress (more like a common-law wife) from whom he parts — these hardly seem to us the black-as-night sins which Augustine depicts them to be. Comparatively, the outlines of Augustine’s story differ not all that much from those of many a clever graduate student pursuing a tenured-track job at a small college.

But Augustine’s purpose in sitting down in 397 A. D. to pen his Confessions was not primarily to confess his story — at least not to start, not at the beginning of the Confessions Book One wherein our hero is introduced. We need to flip ahead to Book 10, the point past which most bookmarks never venture. Read quickly, Book 10 offers us a dry, philosophical tract on human memory. Studied closely, it provides us with the wondrous key by which to comprehend Augustine’s overall purpose.

For Augustine, memory is much more than the simple ability to recount past events. Memory is best pictured by several different metaphors: the abyss of human consciousness, a vast warehouse from which we can call up a variety of past impressions, even the stomach of the mind. Augustine tells us, “I find in memory what I have to say and produce it from that source.” Memory is a land to be entered, explored and inhabited.

But, most important, memory provides Augustine with a ladder and road to God. In exploring the mystery of what we remember, Augustine exclaims, “As I raise above memory, where am I to find you? My true good and gentle source of reassurance, where shall I find you? If I find you outside my memory, I am not mindful of you. And how shall I find you if I am not mindful of you?”

As Augustine recounts his story, what is most significant are not his individual, sinful deeds, as important as these may be. What is most significant is that these deeds come to assume a shape in the telling. And this very shape comes to witness to God’s gracious existence. God may not be contained in his memory but, by reviewing his memory and rehearsing his life, Augustine discovers himself moving toward the mystery of God.

What is radical, then, about Augustine’s Confessions is not the story he confesses. Augustine did not write to catalogue his sins; that is, to tell all. Others in Late Antiquity wrote “confessions” — life stories about their moral progress from Point A to B to C. They were often more graphic in their depictions of sin than Augustine. What gives the Confessions its radical power is that Augustine is concerned not to move neatly from Point A to Point B, from tempestuous sin to placid redemption; instead he rejoices to remember everything, to remember correctly before God’s eye. Light and darkness, sin and redemption, immortality and corruption become wondrously juxtaposed before God’s gaze. Thus, Augustine can immediately follow a vivid account of his mother’s almost beatific vision at Ostia with a dark account of her stroke and death. The woman whose mind was lifted to the very frontiers of heaven is the very same woman who “explained her thoughts in such words as she could speak, then fell silent as the pain of her sickness became worse.” His writing that recounts her dying and death give us some of the most heartbreaking sentences in any literature.

The Confessions is not a seamy exposé addressed to a prurient audience; from beginning to end, it is a prayer addressed to God — a prayer for the Holy Spirit. And in being found by the Holy Spirit, Augustine discovers a truth at which every saint seems finally to arrive: Unlike the New Age pabulum which passes for spirituality, the Christian life is not a matter of forgetting, of moving smoothly onward and upward, of letting the inner child blurt out past mistakes in order to become the master of your own story. The Christian life is a matter of being able to discover and confess, confess to God, that in Christ we are enabled to remember all things; and that all things, good and bad, come to possess, through Christ, their glorious unity, even a sacrifice of praise offered to the Most High.

I do not well remember what reply I made to her about this. However, it was scarcely five days later — certainly not much more — that she was prostrated by fever. While she was sick, she fainted one day and was for a short time quite unconscious. We hurried to her, and when she soon regained her senses, she looked at me and my brother as we stood by her, and said, in inquiry, “Where was I?” Then looking intently at us, dumb in our grief, she said, “Here in this place shall you bury your mother.” I was silent and held back my tears; but my brother said something, wishing her the happier lot of dying in her own country and not abroad. When she heard this, she fixed him with her eye and an anxious countenance, because he savored of such earthly concerns, and then gazing at me she said, “See how he speaks.” Soon after, she said to us both: “Lay this body anywhere, and do not let the care of it be a trouble to you at all. Only this I ask: that you will remember me at the Lord’s altar, wherever you are.” And when she had expressed her wish in such words as she could, she fell silent, in heavy pain with her increasing sickness.

But as I thought about thy gifts, O invisible God, which thou plantest in the heart of thy faithful ones, from which such marvelous fruits spring up, I rejoiced and gave thanks to thee, remembering what I had known of how she had always been much concerned about her burial place, which she had provided and prepared for herself by the body of her husband. For as they had lived very peacefully together, her desire had always been — so little is the human mind capable of grasping things divine — that this last should be added to all that happiness, and commented on by others: that, after her pilgrimage beyond the sea, it would be granted her that the two of them, so united on earth, should lie in the same grave.

When this vanity, through the bounty of thy goodness, had begun to be no longer in her heart, I do not know; but I joyfully marveled at what she had thus disclosed to me — though indeed in our conversation in the window, when she said, “What is there here for me to do any more?” she appeared not to desire to die in her own country. I heard later on that, during our stay in Ostia, she had been talking in maternal confidence to some of my friends about her contempt of this life and the blessing of death. When they were amazed at the courage which was given her, a woman, and had asked her whether she did not dread having her body buried so far from her own city, she replied: “Nothing is far from God. I do not fear that, at the end of time, he should not know the place whence he is to resurrect me.” And so on the ninth day of her sickness, in the fifty-sixth year of her life and the thirty-third of mine, that religious and devout soul was set loose from the body.

I closed her eyes; and there flowed in a great sadness on my heart and it was passing into tears, when at the strong behest of my mind my eyes sucked back the fountain dry, and sorrow was in me like a convulsion.

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Augustine, Confessions, Book IX, chapter xii. These are some of the best lines in any literature. Saint Monica is commemorated May 4th on the Church kalendar. The thought of dying away from home is unwelcome in any age, but this was especially the case in the cultures of the Ancient Near East. Monica reminds me of my father. When I asked him some years ago where he wanted to be buried, he said, “Son, you can tell the mortician when he lays me out to point my toes. You can get a maul and pound me in the ground wherever you want. The Lord will know where to find me.”

I do not well remember what reply I made to her about this. However, it was scarcely five days later—certainly not much more—that she was prostrated by fever. While she was sick, she fainted one day and was for a short time quite unconscious. We hurried to her, and when she soon regained her senses, she looked at me and my brother as we stood by her, and said, in inquiry, “Where was I?” Then looking intently at us, dumb in our grief, she said, “Here in this place shall you bury your mother.” I was silent and held back my tears; but my brother said something, wishing her the happier lot of dying in her own country and not abroad. When she heard this, she fixed him with her eye and an anxious countenance, because he savored of such earthly concerns, and then gazing at me she said, “See how he speaks.” Soon after, she said to us both: “Lay this body anywhere, and do not let the care of it be a trouble to you at all. Only this I ask: that you will remember me at the Lord’s altar, wherever you are.” And when she had expressed her wish in such words as she could, she fell silent, in heavy pain with her increasing sickness.

28. But as I thought about thy gifts, O invisible God, which thou plantest in the heart of thy faithful ones, from which such marvelous fruits spring up, I rejoiced and gave thanks to thee, remembering what I had known of how she had always been much concerned about her burial place, which she had provided and prepared for herself by the body of her husband. For as they had lived very peacefully together, her desire had always been—so little is the human mind capable of grasping things divine—that this last should be added to all that happiness, and commented on by others: that, after her pilgrimage beyond the sea, it would be granted her that the two of them, so united on earth, should lie in the same grave.

When this vanity, through the bounty of thy goodness, had begun to be no longer in her heart, I do not know; but I joyfully marveled at what she had thus disclosed to me—though indeed in our conversation in the window, when she said, “What is there here for me to do any more?” she appeared not to desire to die in her own country. I heard later on that, during our stay in Ostia, she had been talking in maternal confidence to some of my friends about her contempt of this life and the blessing of death. When they were amazed at the courage which was given her, a woman, and had asked her whether she did not dread having her body buried so far from her own city, she replied: “Nothing is far from God. I do not fear that, at the end of time, he should not know the place whence he is to resurrect me.” And so on the ninth day of her sickness, in the fifty-sixth year of her life and the thirty-third of mine, A.D. 387 that religious and devout soul was set loose from the body.

Augustine, Book IX, Confessions