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Readings from the Church Fathers
St. Augustine's "Confessions"
A 13 WEEK READING
WEEK ONE: BOOK ONE
Confessions of the greatness and unsearchableness of God,
of God's mercies in infancy and boyhood, and human wilfulness;
of his own sins of idleness, abuse of his duties, and of God's
gifts up to his fifteenth year.
WEEK TWO: BOOK TWO
Object of these Confessions. Further ills of idleness developed
in his sixteenth year. Evils of ill society, which betrayed him
into theft.
WEEK THREE: BOOK THREE
His residence at Carthage from his seventeenth to his nineteenth
year. Source of his disorders. Love of shows. Advance in studies,
and love of wisdom. Distaste for Scripture. Led astray to the
Manicheans. Refutation of some of their tenets. Grief of his
mother Monnica at his heresy, and prayers for his conversion.
Her vision from God, and answer through a Bishop.
WEEK FOUR: BOOK FOUR
Augustine's life from nineteen to eight and twenty; himself
a Manichean, and seducing others to the same heresy; partial
obedience amidst vanity and sin; consulting astrologers, only
partially shaken herein: loss of an early friend, who is converted
by being baptised when in a swoon; reflections on grief, on real
and unreal friendship, and love of fame; writes on "the
fair and fit," yet cannot rightly, since he entertained
wrong notions of God.
WEEK FIVE: BOOK FIVE
St. Augustine's twenty-ninth year. Faustus, a snare of Satan
to many, made an instrument of deliverance to St. Augustine,
by showing the ignorance of the Manichees on those things, wherein
they professed to have divine knowledge. Augustine gives up all
thought of going further among the Manichees: is guided to Rome
and Milan, where he hears St. Ambrose, leaves the Manichees,
and becomes again a Catechumen in the Church Catholic.
WEEK SIX: BOOK SIX
Arrival of Monnica at Milan; her obedience to St. Ambrose,
and his value for her; St. Ambrose's habits; Augustine's gradual
abandonment of error; finds that he has blamed the Church Catholic
wrongly; desire of absolute certainty; how shaken in his worldly
pursuits; God's guidance of his friend Alypius; Augustine debates
with himself and his friends about their mode of life; his inveterate
sins, and dread of judgment.
WEEK SEVEN: BOOK SEVEN
Augustine's thirty-first year, gradually extricated from his
errors, but still with material conceptions of God; much aided
by an argument of Nebridius; sees that the cause of sin lies
in free-will, rejects the Manichean heresy; recovered from the
belief in Astrology, but perplexed about the origin of evil;
is led to find in the Platonists the seeds of the doctrine of
the divinity of the WORD, but not of His humiliation; but, not
knowing Christ to be the Mediator, remains estranged from Him;
all his doubts removed by the study of Holy Scripture, especially
St. Paul.
WEEK EIGHT: BOOK EIGHT
Augustine's thirty-second year. He consults Simplicianus;
from him hears the history of the conversion of Victorinus, and
longs to devote himself entirely to God, but is mastered by his
old habits; is still further roused by the history of St. Antony,
and of the conversion of two courtiers; during a severe struggle,
hears a voice from heaven, opens Scripture, and is converted.
WEEK NINE: BOOK NINE
Augustine determines to devote his life to God, and to abandon
his profession of Rhetoric, quietly however; retires to the country
to prepare himself to receive the grace of Baptism, and is baptised
with Alypius, and his son Adeodatus. At Ostia, in his way to
Africa, his mother Monnica dies. Her life and character.
WEEK TEN: BOOK TEN
Having in the former books spoken of himself before his receiving
the grace of Baptism, in this Augustine confesses what he then
was. But first, he enquires by what faculty we can know God at
all; whence he enlarges on the mysterious character of the memory.
Then he examines his own trials under the triple division of
temptation; what Christian continency prescribes as to each.
On Christ the Only Mediator, who heals all infirmities.
WEEK ELEVEN: BOOK ELEVEN
Augustine breaks off the history of the mode whereby God led
him to holy Orders, in order to "confess" God's mercies
in opening to him the Scripture. Moses is not to be understood,
but in Christ, not even the first words In the beginning God
created the heaven and the earth. Answer to cavillers who asked,
"what did God before He created the heaven and the earth?"
Inquiry into the nature of Time.
WEEK TWELVE: BOOK TWELVE
Augustine proceeds to comment on Genesis 1, i, and explains
the "heaven" to mean that spiritual and incorporeal
creation, which cleaves to God unintermittingly; "earth,"
the formless matter whereof the corporeal creation was afterwards
formed. He does not reject, however, other interpretations, but
rather confesses that manifold senses may and ought to be extracted
from it.
WEEK THIRTEEN: BOOK THIRTEEN
Continuation of the exposition of Genesis 1; it contains the
mystery of the Trinity, and a type of the formation, extension,
and support of the Church.
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