Confessions Weakness Quotes

Easy come, easy go, right? That's the problem of loving earthly things. It's also, Augustine seems to suggest, the root of all human suffering. You can only really safely love God, because unlike everything else, God doesn't change.

Here, it seems like weakness is a good thing. Ever heard the Bible quotes, "blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth" (Matt. 5:5) or "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God" (Matt. 19:24)? Augustine might not be directly alluding to those verses here, but the point is that Christianity has a tradition of advocating humility and eschewing wealth and power, kind of like Christ. This is a very different kind of weakness than the weakness Augustine is talking about when he can't seem to give up earthly delights.

When we love someone or something, isn't it always with the conceit that we won't lose them, even when we know we might? It's interesting that Augustine specifically says, "as though he would never die;" he's implying that to love anything is to believe that you'll always have it. Yes, Augustine sees loving his friend as a futile act, like pouring water onto sand. But the other big personal loss that Augustine endures in the Confessions is the loss of his mother. The loss of Augustine's good friend is almost like practice for Monica's death. Does Augustine handle that death any differently?

We think that clinging to something sounds kind of desperate, right? Also, beauty sounds so flimsy in this quote; is there anything beautiful that stays beautiful? It's like sorrow is the very loss of beauty, or the knowledge that beauty isn't permanent. Not only is the person who clings to beauty weak, but beauty itself is weak, too. Diamonds might disagree with our man Augustine on this point.

At this point in the book, we've really gotten a sense that weakness lies in the proclivity to change. Here, Augustine talks about how he accounted for the existence of evil in the world, and reasoned that evil had to have come from God, because God made everything. But he leaves his own weakness out of the equation. Way to avoid taking responsibility, Augustine.

Old habits die hard. Augustine is the type of person who likes to be right about everything, and he argues as though he knows the truth. But after meeting Ambrose, he starts to question whether the Manichean beliefs that he subscribed to for the better part of a decade hold any water at all. Talk about a paradigm shift. Augustine may be humble as the writer of his Confessions, but the old Augustine wasn't exactly eager to admit being very, very wrong. We assume that the "headlong fall" refers to his spiritual failures. So, naturally, he's reluctant to accept the Christian doctrine that he derided for so long, even if his soul might be hanging in the balance.

The "they" here refers to "lower things," which is delightfully ambiguous. But we can guess from context that he's referring to pride and other personality vices. Augustine even compares them to insects that swarm. Gross. But he's also putting himself in an awfully passive position here. "I wanted to change, but vices prevented me from doing it. They literally blocked my path." Um, hey Augustine: don't go blaming imaginary bugs for your weaknesses. But seriously, the point he's actually trying to make is that sometimes it feels as though there are things inside of us that prevent us from changing. Yep, we've been there, Augustine.

Augustine is talking about his darn irrational soul. Augustine can't understand why, even after he has accepted the belief that his soul will die if he doesn't give up his sinful habits and follow God, he still doesn't want to. Apparently, Augustine's soul is actually more afraid of the immediate consequences of giving up the sin it loves so much than it is of the hypothetical of "wasting away to death." The challenge is to think in the long-term, even if it means that the short-term might suck—though Augustine, the hedonist he is, isn't ready to take the long view yet.

Augustine is using a really neat rhetorical technique here. Look at how each of his questions build on the previous one. To get an answer to the very basic "Who am I?" he specifies the answer to "What kind of man am I?" And then, to define what kind of man he is, he asks, "What evil have I not done?" So, it would seem that the kind of people we are is determined by our sins. But wait: Augustine doesn't ask "What evil have I done?" but "What evil have I not done?" This implies that Augustine has done more evil than he has good. Yikes.

This quote is not talking about moral weakness, but intellectual weakness. See, Augustine is trying to understand memory and forgetfulness, but he keeps running into the barrier of his own physical limits. So it's like Augustine is stuck with this fallow tract of land that he's trying to farm, and it's just not producing anything. But all of the difficulty that he's encountering lies within himself; he's both the farmer and the field in this metaphor. Guess we've gotta spend some time cultivating our own gardens and whatnot.