The Confessions of Augustine
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The Confessions can be taken as classical model for twelve-step recovery inasmuch as Augustine's description of his journey from an addiction to sin to the experience of grace can be connected to the journey of an addict's recovery. In Book I, in which he shows how as a child he thoughtlessly squandered nat ural intellectual gifts for "a love of play" (37) and worldly in stead of spiritual treasures, Augustine is preoccupied with his lack of power over sin, confessing to God "what my soul wishes to confess and as I find rest in the condemnation of my evil ways in order that I may love those good ways of [God's]" (Augustine 31). This is like the twelve-step admission of power lessness over the thing to which one is addicted--in Augustine's case sin. His acknowledgment that his "very being" is God's gift (39) and his wish "that there had been someone . . . to put a measure on my disorder and to turn to good use the fleeting beau ties of these new temptations" (41) are like the addict's admis sion that only a greater power can restore good mental--in Augus tine's case spiritual--health.Books II, III, and IV are a recitation of various details of Augustine's powerlessness over temptation to theft, carousing, intellectual arrogance, and flirtation with assorted supersti tions and heresies, especially Manicheanism, living "a life in which I was seduced and seducing, deceived and deceiving, the prey of various desires" (Augustine 69), during his adolescent, student, and teaching y
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future:
Late it was that I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new, late I loved you! And look, you were within me and I was outside, and there I sought for you and in my ugliness I plunged into the beauties that you have made. You were with me, and I was not with you. . . . you touched me, and I burned for your peace (Augustine 235).
The strength of Augustine's approach to addictions is the poetic power of intense personal experience and insight. This comes through in the earnestness of the Confessions, and the depth of sincerity and honesty with which he attacks his shortcomings. The principal weakness is embedded in that very strength, for it amounts to a willful rejection of reason on the part of one whose rational faculties are so highly developed. The ability of less gifted others to express their own experience can hardly be presumed, which means that less articulate addicts--to sin or alcohol or drugs--seem destined to rely on feeling rather than reason, sensibility rather than sense. There is also the partialistic reliance on religion as such; those who lack specifically religious sensibility might be forgiven for being disturbed at the short shrift given to the rational capacity, surely a more fundamental human attribut
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Approximate Word count = 2125
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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