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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2025
Among the less considered ‘conversions’ of the Confessions is the conversion of grief. The Confessions traces how Augustine learns to grieve justly and with hope. Augustine’s grief in book four is presented in stark contrast to his grief in book nine. In many ways, these two books serve as a counter image of each other. The striking narrative similarities that Augustine presents between the death of his boyhood friend in book four and that of his mother in book nine serve, however, to highlight the significant differences that Augustine wants to accent between these two experiences of death and grief. Holding these two scenes next to each other allows us to witness another profound conversion of the Confessions, namely, how Augustine learns to grieve profound loss in hope.
This article is dedicated to a fellow student of Augustine, James Wasmuth, whose friendship I deeply cherish and in whose company I have long enjoyed Augustine’s description of friendship: ‘To make conversation, to share a joke, to perform mutual acts of kindness, to read together well-written books, to share in trifling and in serious matters, to disagree though without animosity—just as a person debates with himself—and in the very rarity of disagreement to find the salt of normal harmony, to teach each other something or to learn from one another, to long with impatience for those absent, to welcome them with gladness on their arrival. (conf. 4.8.13).
1 Helpful scholarly literature on grief in the Confessions includes Michael Cholbi, ‘Finding the good in grief: What Augustine knew that Meursault could not’, Journal of the American Philosophical Association 3 (2017): 91–105. Catherine Conybeare, ‘Feeling for Augustine’, Classical Antiquity 43 (2024): 1–18. Joseph Grabau, ‘The Limits of Grief in Augustine of Hippo’s Sermones 172-173 and Sermo 396’, Vox Patrum 78 (2021): 293–310. Kim Paffenroth, ‘The young Augustine: Lover of sorrow’, The Downside Review 118 (2000): 221–230. William Werpehowski, ‘Weeping at The Death of Dido: Sorrow, Virtue, and Augustine’s Confessions’, The Journal of Religious Ethics 19 (1991): 175–191. James Wetzel, ‘Book Four: The Trappings of Woe and Confession of God’, in A Reader’s Companion to Augustine’s Confessions, ed. Kim Paffenroth and Robert P. Kennedy (Louisville, KY.: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 53–69.
2 conf. 4.4.7. I have followed the translation by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
3 conf. 4.4.8.
4 conf. 4.4.8.
5 conf. 4.4.8.
6 conf. 4.4.9.
7 conf. 4.6.11.
8 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and melancholia’ (1917) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth, 1953), 237–258.
9 Freud, ‘Mourning and melancholia’, 251.
10 conf. 4.6.11.
11 ST II-II q. 35 a. 1.
12 conf. 4.7.12.
13 conf. 9.11.27.
14 conf. 9.12.29.
15 Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘Suffering Love’, 228 in Philosophy and the Christian Faith, ed. T.V. Morris (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1988).
16 Wolterstorff continues, ‘The mentality expressed in this attitude to grief not only shapes Augustine’s view of the proper place of sorrow and suffering in human life; it also contributes to his conviction that in God there is no sorrow or suffering. God’s life is a life free of sorrow—indeed, life free of upsetting emotions in general, a life free of passions, a life of apathy, untouched by suffering, characterized only by steady bliss’. Wolterstorff, ‘Suffering Love’, 197–198.
17 Admittedly there is a historical liability in retrospectively applying to the Confessions the strenuous criticism against Stoic apathia that Augustine levies in the City of God (written more than a decade after the completion of Confessions). Nevertheless, it seems a sufficiently acceptable scholarly hazard as Augustine’s censure of Stoicism remains fairly constant from the time of his baptism. See Sarah Byers, Perception, Sensibility, and Moral Motivation in Augustine: A Stoic-Platonic Synthesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 55–99.
18 civ. 14.9. I have followed the translation by R.W. Dyson (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
19 civ. 14.9.
20 civ. 14.9.
21 conf. 9.12.32.
22 conf. 9.12.31.
23 conf. 9.12.29.
24 conf. 9.12.29.
25 conf. 9.12.30.
26 conf. 4.6.11.
27 Augustine uses similar language of rending and tearing to describe the pain of being separated from his concubine (conf. 6.15.25): ‘The woman with whom I habitually slept was torn away from my side because she was a hindrance to my marriage. My heart which was deeply attached was cut and wounded, and left a trail of blood…. My wound, inflicted by the earlier parting, was not healed. After inflammation and sharp pain, it festered. The pain made me as it were frigid but desperate’.
28 Strikingly Augustine maintains that when another person is ‘used’ well—that is, loved in God—we can even be said to ‘enjoy’ them: ‘But when you enjoy a human being in God, you are really enjoying God rather than the human being…. It is in this sense that Paul writes to Philemon. In this way, brother, he says, let me enjoy you in the Lord (Phlm 20). But if he had not added in the Lord, and had merely said let me enjoy you, he would have been placing his hopes of bliss in Philemon’. DDC I.33.37. I have followed the translation by Edmund Hill in The Works of Saint Augustine Series (New York: New City Press, 1996).
29 conf. 4.6.11.
30 conf. 4.8.13.
31 conf. 4.10.15.
32 conf. 4.9.14.
33 James Wetzel articulates this well: ‘It is generally easy, when reading Augustine, to turn God and the created world into competing objects of desire… which is in fact a disastrous misreading of Augustine. [Augustine] failed to love his friend in God, and this left his friend to be the creature of Augustine’s fears and desires…. The terrifying prospect of Augustine’s confessional logic is that love is an all-or-nothing affair. Either we love something well and therefore in God, or we love a fiction of our interior poverty, a desperate projection of sin. Apart from God, in other words, we never get outside the fiction we take to be the self’. Wetzel, ‘Book Four: The Trappings of Woe’, 68–69.
34 conf. 9.11.28.
35 conf. 4.6.11.
36 conf. 9.12.33.
37 conf. 9.11.27.