History Literature / ConfessionsSaintAugustine

* ChildrenAreInnocent: Children can't cause evil, not for a lack of trying. By Augustine's observations, infants are just as prone to selfishness and malice as adults, its just that their struggles to injure those who do not please them are innocent since their bodies lack the ability to cause harm. So, Children's Bodies Are Innocent, but their wills, not so much.

* BetrayalByOffspring: Monica spends her every waking moment trying to help Augustine get away from his cycle of miseries and evil, a love that her son repays by lying to his fearful mother and stowing away on a ship to Rome without saying goodbye to that widowed saint who prayed for him without ceasing (he eventually gets better).

* CatharsisFactor: InUniverse, Augustine talks about how seeing his own guilty passions and miseries acted out by others acted like scratching an itch. Problem is, the scratches left "spots, pus, and repulsive pores," making him even more likely to fall into those passions and miseries despite brief respite.

* BrokenPedestal: The Manichee teacher Faustus is well-renowned throughout the Roman Empire, and during the weeks preceding his visit to Carthage, all anyone could talk about was how wise and affecting Faustus is. When the great teacher arrives and Augustine gets to ask him about Manichee doctrine, it quickly becomes Faustus is blessed with rhetorical skill and nothing else. He's read very little and openly admits to being too ignorant to answer any of the philosophical (especially theological) issues Augustine has noticed in Manichee texts.

** Augustine wasted his youth indulging every horrible whim he had, lying, fornicating, and stealing whatever he wished, all while getting no happier than the hobos he'd walk by as they lie half-dead on the street. He refers to this period of this life as "an abyss of death" and compares his joy in doing evil to a prisoner claiming omnipotence in his cell by breaking the rules without punishment, desperately trying to ignore his own confinement.

-->--'''St. Augustine of Hippo''', The Confessions (John K. Ryan translation)

Ever learn about evil from pears? Avoid baptism for the sake of your sex life? Join a {{Cult}} that vomits gods from fruit? Have a hole in your heart only [[{{God}} Love Himself]] can fill? If you answered "yes" at least once, then Saint Augustine's ''Confessions'' might be the book for you.

* BrokenPedestal: The Manichee teacher Faustus is well-renowned throughout the Roman Empire and during the weeks preceding his visit to Carthage, all anyone could talk about was how wise and affecting Faustus is. When the great teacher arrives and Augustine gets to ask him about Manichee doctrine, it quickly becomes Faustus is blessed with rhetorical skill and nothing else. He's read very little and openly admits to being too ignorant to answer any of the philosophical (especially theological) issues Augustine has noticed in Manichee texts.

* MadeOfEvil: The Manichees believed that all physical matter was made from the "evil body" that caused all suffering. As such, if a Manichee were to lie or sleep around, they couldn't be blamed for it, it was just their evil matter taking over from their squeaky clean soul. The way this idea diminishes moral responsibility attracts the young and selfish Augustine to the Manichees, at least until he concludes they're fools.

* ToxicFriendInfluence: During his twenties, Augustine reunited with a childhood friend and brought him into the horrid, false {{cult}} of the Manichees. The friend only comes to his senses when he is baptized on his deathbed, at which point he rejects Augustine and refuses to see him before his early death.

* BetrayalByOffspring: Monica spends her every waking moment trying to help Augustine get away from his cycle of miseries and evil, a love that her son repays by lying to his fearful mother and stowing away on a ship to Rome without saying goodbye to that widowed saint who prayed for him without ceasing.

* TurnToReligion: The first nine books of the Confessions chronicle St Augustine's youth of excess and debauchery, before he eventually takes up the Christian faith and reforms himself.

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The work is usually published with the name ''The Confessions of Saint Augustine'' to distinguish it from another autobiographical work of the same name, written by Creator/JeanJacquesRousseau.

* {{Allegory}}: Book XIII rereads the Literature/BookOfGenesis as a figurative telling[[note]]not that Augustine denies Genesis's claim that God created the universe and man[[/note]] of how God saves souls from formless darkness by bringing them into the Church.

* SchoolStudyMedia: InUniverse, Augustine had to read the works of Creator/{{Homer}} and Creator/{{Virgil}} to learn Greek and Latin. He goes on quite a bit about how stupid it is to teach children about horrible lies that support adultery and violence when you only want to teach them the alphabet, which can be done without sanctioning divine rape.

* RaisedCatholic: Augustine was enrolled as a catechumen, and at one point was stricken with a stomach illness, so he asked for baptism. When he recovered, the baptism was deferred (at the time, one of the first steps of baptism was that the catechumen must come of age to make a profession of faith). He then spent much of his youth giving himself up to sin, indulging in lust and the company of delinquents. This gets eventually subverted when, after years of philosophical inquiry and struggling with lust, he has a conversion of the heart and realises that the Christian faith is true; he eventually went to Cassisiacum with his mother and his friends to be baptised.

Ever learn about evil from pears? Avoid baptism for the sake of your sex life? Join a {{Cult}} that vomits gods from fruit? Have a hole in your heart only [[{{God}} Love Himself]] can fill? If you answered "yes" at least once, then Saint Augustine's The Confessions might be the book for you.

* ChildrenAreInnocent: Children can't cause evil, not for a lack of trying. By Augustine's observations, infants are just as prone to selfishness and malice as adults, its just that their struggles to injure those who do not please them are innocent, since their bodies lack the ability to cause harm. So, Children's Bodies Are Innocent, but their wills, not so much.

* {{Doorstopper}}: InUniverse; ''Confessions'' itself '''[[AvertedTrope averts]]''' this, being less than 300 pages, but Augustine spares little ink on mocking the Manichees for covering up the flaws of their false philosophies inside their many, many massive tomes.

* AmoralAttorney: The author's study in rhetoric and increasing moral decline leads him to take a career in law, where (as he says) people excel according to how well they can lie and deceive. His only motive for working in court is to fund his vain sexual escapades.

* TheBarnum: The author takes great delight in describing how Creator/{{Cicero}} exposed all the vanities, lies, and hypocrisies of those who call themselves "philosophers" to swindle others out of their time and money.

* DumbIsGood: The end of Chapter IV is a lament that all the knowledge, receptivity, and skill in the world is useless if one does not rest in God, making Augustine's ill-learned students far superior to their effortlessly genius, but cruel teacher.

** According to the ''Confessions'', Manichees would be willing to put one of their own to death if they fed a starving man an apple since the apple was considered to a hold a piece of God.

* RaisedCatholic: Augustine was never baptized and never devoutly practiced Catholicism, but his mother imparted on him a sincere affection and love for UsefulNotes/{{Jesus}} that makes it difficult to fully give himself to Greek philosophies where Jesus has no place.

* SnakesAreSinister: BAD Augustine's act of snaring his student into the slavery of sin is accompanied by what the narrator calls a "serpent's persuasion," comparing Augustine at the Literature/BookOfGenesis's greatest antagonist, the serpentine Devil.

* WeAllDieSomeday: Looking beyond humanity, the author argues that worshiping or loving anything in the place of God is futile, since all things in life are finite and passing parts of the larger whole. To center life around any finite thing would be like stopping someone from finishing their sentence just to hear one random syllable spoken: the part loses its meaning if it isn't part of the whole.

* MoralMyopia: When playing games with his friends, our saintly narrator would denounce any slight breach of the rules with all his ferocity; whenever anyone caught him cheating, he would react with equal ferocity in order to defend himself, with no moral qualm except whether his defense would help him win the game.

-->--'''St. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions (John K. Ryan translation)

-->--'''St. Augustine of Hippo''', The Confessions (John K. Ryan translation)

''Confessions'' is an autobiographical work written around 397-400 A.D. by St. Creator/AugustineOfHippo himself. It outlines his sinful youth and eventual conversion to the Christian faith. Here, he examines the nature of evil, sin, lust, goodness, faith, and happiness, and can be seen as a guide for people struggling with such issues.

* TheAntiGod: Augustine references the Manichee belief in a "body of darkness," a sentient force of physical evil that stands opposed to the mildly stronger, spiritual force of good called "God." Ultimately, this doctrine causes Augustine to reject Manicheeism as a whole since it assumes God can be killed by this evil God and thus isn't actually immortal or omniscient, i.e. really not God.

* ConsummateLiar: Late into his boyhood, Augustine began to regularly lie to his family and friends in order to avoid his responsibilities and play games with his friends. In adulthood, this habitual fraud led Augustine to become a rhetorician and say whatever he needed to to advance his political stance.

* DrillSergeantNasty: Augustine's teachers would beat him and the other boys for the slightest bit of play, all in the hopes their students would achieve fame and success. Of course, they only wanted this so their students would reward them handsomely, and in the end their methods only succeeded in making Augustine hate them.

** According to the ''Confessions'', Manichees would be willing to put one of their own to death if they fed a starving man an apple, since the apple was considered to a hold a piece of God.

* ForTheEvulz: As boys, Augustine and his friends stole pears from a stranger's property and threw the pears away. They didn't need or use the pears, they had nothing against the pear, nor did they have any ideological reason to do so. The only reason they did it was for the sake of doing what was not allowed. Of course, since evil is just absence of a good in his view, Augustine gained no real joy from his sin.

* ForbiddenFruit: Augustine and his friends steal from a pear tree is purely for the sake of taking what they aren't allowed to take. The connotations of taking fruit from a tree is an intentional parallel with the Literature/BookOfGenesis, which informs Augustine's opinion of his own evil.

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* PeerPressureMakesYouEvil: Augustine doubts he would have been brave enough to steal or lust as much as he did in his adolescence if he hadn't associated himself with a group of idiots and brutes who never expressed any moral qualms about their robberies and vandalisms.

-->--'''St. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions (John K. Ryan translation)