The Confessions of St. Augustine: What is the Genre of this Work?

This is an article commentary and reflection I made when I was still a postulant, way back 2009)

The Confessions of St. Augustine: What is the Genre of this Work? (author:Frances Young )

The uniqueness of Augustine’s The Confessions is undeniably a note worthy autobiography. He did not only attempt to tell a story of his colloquial personal experience but he also went deeper into his personal character, as one of God’s creation. This is not just a confession of his misspent youth, together with testimony to God’s providential rescue and celebration of conversion to a new life but, if ancient language would tell us, it is about confessing to God and meant of praising or extolling divine nature. 

However, despite of this verbose appraisal to Augustine’s work it faced actually a lot of controversies regarding the manner that he used in writing it. Scholars question its truth value and the factuality of the events that he wrote since it is just an account taken from his memoirs. No one is certain about this. Another is regarding the influence of patristic literature into its work. Did Augustine follow a trend of writing his autobiographical book? 

Young’s article on “The Confessions of St. Augustine: What is the Genre of this Work?” wanted to offer to its reader the understanding of the Confessions’ character by setting the background of patristic literature. 

The principal strength of the article is manifested on the author’s emphasis on making a parallelism between Augustine’s work and contemporary theologians and philosophers who wrote also their own autobiography. As much as the author can possibly include in his examples he made it clear that there is the precedents of the type of literature apparent during the period. These are the Apologetic writing and the Meditative literature. The former produced to explain and defend from the criticisms of a person’s past while the latter emerges from the philosophic tradition having the Neoplatonic spirituality. It is true that there is an apologetic flavor in Augustine’s work – e.g. in book 10 there’s an account against the Contra Academicos. However, as Young said this does not suffice the character of Augustine’s work as simply apologetic and meditative since this was not all about individual self-expression, nor about the search for the inner core of one’s particular subjectivity rather there is something deeper than this. 

Young introduced ‘typology’ as the emerging type of writing precedent also during the patristic period. Typology is loaded with attempts to define non-allegorical ways of recognizing deeper meanings. Typology is similar to parables telling narratives of moral behavior since it does only teaches the life of a person but it also gives information or rather we call this the didactic character which is common to this period. Young also cited typological parallels from Augustine’s Confessions, likewise the description of Monica in terms of the widow at Nain. Generally, typology spoke of types and parables, metaphors and allegories all pointing to the deeper meaning of the text. According to Young, consciously or unconsciously, alongside with the apologetic interest, Augustine’s purpose in The Confessions is typological. It is so clear that Augustine constructed his autobiography according to the biblically-shaped pattern – e.g. generally, Augustine’s life is similar to Jesus’ parable on the prodigal son which could be found in the Gospel of Luke. Furthermore, The Confessions is not only a narration of individual experience but also the arousing of religious emotions and thoughts. 

I suppose Young made enough discussion that will suffice his claim regarding the real genre of Augustine’s The Confessions apparent during the patristic period. He based his claim by making some parallelism between the work of Gregory of Nazianzus on De Vita Sua as his main example and of Augustine’s The Confessions. He had well enough implicitly helped me understand the reason of Augustine in writing this opus. As an observation, I think, Young’s article is limited only to his discussion of exemplifying other persons like Gregory of Nazianzus, Marcus Aurelius and others and not to the special role played by the Church into Augustine’s major works. He somehow did not explicitly discuss the general role of the Church, even also in citing the work of Gregory of Naziannzus. I think not without the church and eventually God’s intervention they will not be able to write these wonderful works. The author I think clarified only the technicalities as objective and not subjective in a way or another. 

In terms of the influence of the article on my present thinking, I think it gave me a hint on how difficult it is to write a biography. In order to write a worthy to be published biography, it needs wit and enlightenment from the Holy Spirit especially writing a religious catholic biography. All of them were inspired by the Holy Spirit when they wrote those books. And somehow it gave me information regarding the manner of writing a biography will it be meditative or apologetic in character. 

Lastly, the article remained me puzzled and dubious as to how shall I know validity of the events that happened in Augustine’s life since Young showed to me the influence and pattern that Augustine had somehow used. The Confessions is just an account from his memories. Is it then possible that we could consider the use of memory also as a type of literature?