The Confessions of Saint Augustine

I tried, I really did. We're going to be discussing excerpts of this at my church book club, and I already had it on my TBR, so I figured why not try to do the whole thing. I got through page 57 (somewhere in the middle of Book 4). There were lines throughout that were lovely, expressing Augustine's love for God and His goodness. But the language was so difficult to read as a modern reader, that even with close attention I don't know that I was really getting a lot out of it.

I could keep trying, I suppose, but I went to the Sparknotes website to look up summaries for the next few Books (chapters), and after clicking through a couple of them, I couldn't muster up any desire to keep reading summaries, let alone the rest of this tome. I think that's a good indication I should set this aside.

This is more a rating of my reading of the book than the book's quality itself. Besides the bad timing of choosing to read this book during our busiest season and having low mental energy while trying to read it, I had a few legitimate issues with it.

1) The translation - if you're already translating something from Latin to English, it's a bold choice to choose to translate it into Old English. I'm sure there's a modern English translation out there, I just didn't even think to look for it. It made it unnecessarily hard to truly understand and process what the book was saying. Take my advice, it's worth researching the specific translation.

2) The context - in the book, Augustine is referencing heresies, controversies, schools of thought, and sects that I had never heard of or even considered. Even though this book is described as an autobiography, there are long sections of his philosophical pondering of the Kingdom of God and the nature of people/the world. Having a study guide to read alongside the book would have made it much more useful and applicable. As it was, I never felt confident that I was actually understanding his arguments.

3) The age - while it's incredible to have the ability to read the words written by such an important church father and thinker, the fact remains that we live in a very different time right now. I am in no way saying that there is no value in understanding and thinking through the questions he presents, and being encouraged and inspired by his story and perspective. However, in my mind the practical value of this book in the average contemporary believer's daily life is low without an understandable translation and helpful commentary to show how it connects to today's issues or important theological truths that are necessary in every century.

So, basically, I know that there is a much deeper wealth of truth in this book than my casual reading was able to fish out, but I think it would take a lot of help for me to be able to understand what this book means.