worries for her son over to God's care, just as addicts are meant to do for themselves in the twelve-step program. It is toward the end of Book IV, when Augustine is saddened by the sudden death of a friend who in his last days had been converted too Christianity and thus had re fused to see the heretic Augustine, that a hollowness of secular intellectualism began to emerge. There is an inkling of acknow ledgment that such strength as human beings have comes from God, not man (Augustine 89).
In Book V, Augustine formally articulates the mission of the Confessions as a whole, much in the manner of the twelve-step demand for "a searching and fearless moral inventory" (Lemanski 19). Here, too, Augustine gives an account of his growing disaffection with Manicheanism and his "drawing gradually nearer" to Catholicism (Augustine 108), through the good offices of Bishop Ambrose. Book VI describes the misgivings with which Augustine reapproached the faith, "not yet groaning in prayer for [God] to help me" (Augustine 114) and still engaged by the good life, including preparations for marriage on one hand and the preference for mistresses, one of whom bore him a child. In Book VII, Augustine is still troubled, though less by world and the flesh than by spiritual matters. While abandoning heresy and superstition and embracing Catholicism, he nevertheless agonizes over the problem of evil (145-8), until he has what can only be described as an experience of grace that has the effect of resolving his difficulties through the mediation of Christ. This growing attachment allows him to admit not only the perfection of God but his own imperfections.
In Book VIII, Augustine confesses the "winding paths of my error" (162) to Ambrose's protTgT Simplicianus, which seems the equivalent of the addict's admitting the exact nature of his wrongs (Lemanski 20). Augustine's articul
...