Notes on Confessions Book V

Confessions
St. Augustine

Book V

Ch. 1

The Lord sees into all hearts, even the hard and closed ones. He will soften and heal those hearts according to His will.

Ch. 2

The wicked flee God's gentleness to collide with His justice.

"Thou art near even to those who go farthest from thee"

"Thou art the Lord, who canst remake what thou didst make and can comfort them"

Ch. 3

Religious men ask, "what is the source of the intelligence by which they investigate?" The prideful discover many true things about creation without learning the Truth of the Creator.

Ch. 4

God isn't pleased by the man who knows a lot but doesn't know Him.

Ch. 5

Augustine attacks Mani for presuming to teach what he does not know. He condemns Mani for impersonating the Holy Spirit falsely.

Ch. 6

An eloquence, when unfettered from truth, is like a gaudy chalice with a drink that doesn't quench the thirst.

Ch. 7

Augustine's interaction with the Manichean Bishop, Faustus, and Faustus' inability to help Augustine understand why Manicheism was preferable to other belief systems served as the final breaking point between Augustine and Manicheism.

Ch. 8

Augustine leaves Carthage and heads for Rome.

Augustine points out that his mother's prayers were not answered in the way she hoped for (he still left Carthage for Rome). God did not let her temporary request undermine His work and end goal for Augustine.

Ch. 9

The fetter of original sin is that we all die in Adam. But we can be forgiven in Christ.

Ch. 10

Sin was all the more uncurable because Augustine would not confess it.

Augustine even rejected the true faith because of his dualistic leanings. That dualism caused him many numerous problems.

Ch. 11
The dualism and belief in a great evil that makes God finite allowed him to twist and to fall prey to twisted theology.

Ch. 12

Rome did not turn out to be the paradise that Augustine had hoped for.

Ch. 13

Augustine goes to Milan and meets Ambrose. He is attracted to Ambrose because of his nature, even if Augustine was unwilling as of yet to hear Ambrose's message.

Ch. 14

Ambrose's teachings slowly changed Augustine.

Augustine joined the Catholic faith because the philosophers, in all their wisdom, could not offer the cure, they had not the salvation of Christ.