6 ideas
As a teenager Augustine and friends stripped a neighbor's pear tree at night, not from hunger — they had better pears at home — but threw most of the fruit to pigs. What he loved was the forbidden act itself and the complicity of companions; alone, he insists, he would never have done it.
Every sin imitates some real good — pride mimics loftiness, theft mimics freedom and power — so wrongdoing is not the pursuit of something evil but the preference of a lower good over a higher one. Evil has no substance of its own; it is a turning away, a privation of right order in desire.
Memory is a boundless interior space holding images of sensed things, learned skills, emotions stored without being felt again, and even the memory of forgetting. Augustine is astonished that the mind cannot fully contain itself, making the self a greater mystery than the external world.
Seeking God, Augustine moves past the senses and through the chambers of memory, finding that God was within him while he searched outside. He notes that people could not seek happiness unless some trace of it lay in memory, but he distinguishes this from knowing God, whom he says was not in his memory before he learned to know him.
Past no longer exists and future does not yet exist, so time can only be measured within the soul as memory, attention, and expectation — a present of past things, present things, and future things. Time is thus a stretching of consciousness rather than an external quantity, and a recited psalm shows attention passing from expectation into memory.
Augustine narrates his life as a prayer to a God who already knows everything, so confession serves not to inform but to reorder the speaker and to praise. Readers overhear this address, and the honest exposure of past failure becomes a means of turning oneself and others toward change.