Confessions by Augustine Book Review

The Manichees, St. Augustine says, think themselves to be “raised on high and shining, whereas they fall upon the earth and their foolish heart is darkened.” By which he means the Manichees are far from God: “for to be darkened in heart is to be far from Thy face” (19). In his Confessions, Augustine proposes that it is only by acknowledging the darkness of our human souls that we can encounter God, the true and eternal light. 

What interior light presents itself to our soul’s eye is God’s. Because of their pride, Augustine accuses the Manichees of “attributing to themselves what is Yours” (78). As mere creatures, our souls are not ‘shining.’ Rather, Augustine writes, within the depths of his own soul:

I saw Your unchangeable light shining over the same eye of my soul, over my mind. It was not the light of everyday that the eye of the flesh can see, nor some greater light of the same order, such as might be if the brightness of our daily light should be seen shining with a more intense brightness and filling all things with its greatness. Your light was not that, but other, altogether other, than all such lights. (128–29).

That is, not only is the light that shines within our souls not our own—it is also entirely different than any created, worldly light—Augustine is careful to make that difference clear in this passage. God’s light is of a separate order; it is altogether other.

The ‘otherness’ of God’s light is essential to Augustine’s broader argument in that the human soul is not self-illuminated. Returning to the Manichees, Augustine faults them for “imagining the nature of the soul to be the same as God. Thus they become not light but deeper darkness, since in their abominable ignorance they have gone further from You” (156). Our souls’ darkness requires that they be “illumined by another light,” illuminated by God (69). 

The Manichean arrogation of divine light to themselves deepened their souls’ darkness. By contrast, Augustine recounted that, being admonished to “return to myself, I entered into my own depths, with You as my guide; and I was able to do it because You were my helper” (128). Precisely by doing this, entering his depths, he is able to see God’s unchangeable Light. This seems to be a contradiction: that by entering into the darkness of his soul, Augustine sees God’s light. However, Augustine wrote earlier in the same book that his desire for God was unable to be satisfied because “that light was within, I was looking outward” (125). God’s light, as established, is ‘other’ than the human soul—but is nonetheless interior.

Augustine learns of this interior ‘otherness’ of God’s light though the Platonists, in whose writings he found that “the soul of man, though it gives testimony of the light, yet is not itself the light; but the Word, God Himself, is the true light which enlightens every man that comes into the world” (126). There is something of the human soul that is able to bear witness to God, able to be enlightened. Moreover, Augustine praises God as “brighter than all light, yet deeper within than any secret” (163). Despite God’s brilliance, he is hidden inside us as a secret.

Paradoxically, we find God’s light through our own darkness. At least, Augustine did. Prior his conversion, Augustine ascribed to the Manichean belief that it “was some other nature of the race of darkness that had sinned in me” (169). This prevented his conversion; because Augustine did not admit that the darkness of his soul was his own, he could not repent. He says that, because God entirely knows a man’s conscience, if he were to fail to confess to God: “I should only be hiding You from myself, not myself from You” (189). The sick man should not hide his wounds from the physician.

That is not to say our inner darkness is fully knowable to us—Augustine required God as his guide, and as his helper, when he entered into his own depths. People are created such that they can “descend from themselves to Him, and by Him ascend to Him” (78). In effect, the darkness of our souls acts as a sort of negative, by which we God’s light. It’s a darkness we must  acknowledge and take responsibility for, but it’s through God as the True light that we arrive at any truth, we are able to see  “That Which Is” (even about our own darkness).