Notes on Confessions Book II

Confessions
St. Augustine

Book II

Ch. 1

Dig into the past to face your corruptions, not for the love of those corruptions, but for the love of God.

Corruption can seem good in one's eyes, but it is not seen so by God.

Ch. 2

Both the good (pure affection) and the bad (unholy desire) boiled up in Augustine making it impossible to distinguish the good from the bad.

"For thy omnipotence is not far from us even when we are far from thee"

I should've sought pleasures free from God's discontent. Where to find such pleasures? Only in God.

Ch. 3

Augustine admits he took as much pleasure in being praised for his sin than in committing the sin itself.

Ch. 4

Augustine stole for the sake of stealing, sinned for sin's sake.

"It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error - not that for which I erred but the error itself".

Ch. 5

But sin for sin's sake still requires some motive.

Ch. 6

 The pears he stole weren't even that tasty. He enjoyed the sweetness of the theft more than the sweetness of the fruit. What made the theft so sweet?

All the vices of man are searching for ends outside of God. Lust replaces love as men seek satisfaction from love from something that cannot satisfy in the way God can. Vices are corrupt forms of going after a need in something other than God. Rightly done the need would have been satisfied in God.

"Thus the soul commits fornication when she is turned from thee and seeks apart from thee what she cannot find pure and untainted until she returns to thee"

Even in sin the sinner is imitating God - setting themselves up as the ultimate law unto themselves.

Augustine wrestles with why he stole the pears. Was he trying to set up a counterfeit liberty? Trying to become omnipotent himself?

Ch. 7

God melts sin away like it's ice. All the sins Augustine confesses are forgiven.

Ch. 8

Augustine loves the sin of theft because of the companionship he got in the act.

Ch. 9

The friendship that brings about sin is a corrupt version of friendship.

Ch. 10

"I fell away from thee, O my God, and in my youth I wandered too far from thee, my true support. And I became to myself a wasteland".