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 years. Book II, however, ends with the ad mission that he "became to myself a wasteland" while also de claring that giving oneself over to God means "enter[ing] into the joy of his Lord" (Augustine 51). Book III ends with the rev elation that Augustine's mother Monica, who had sought spiritual counseling to help her son, was advised to let matters run their course and allow him to see the error of hi ways in his own time. In other words she was told to turn her ...