A book newly acquired by the Thammsat University Library offers much of interest to students of history, literature, and comparative religion, among other subjects. The Confessions of Saint Augustine were translated into Thai language by Wikit Suksamran and published last year. The TU Library also owns translations into English of the Confessions of Saint Augustine. One copy is shelved in the General Stacks of the Puey Ungphakorn Library, Rangsit Campus, where another translation into English may also be found. Other books about Saint Augustine, including a biography, are in the General Stacks of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus. The TU Library also owns other books by and about Saint Augustine.

Saint Augustine of Hippo lived about 1800 years ago in Roman Africa. He wrote in Latin as an early Christian philosopher. He was the bishop of a place known as Hippo Regius in north Africa. Hippo Regius is today the city of Annaba, Algeria. The name Hippo is from the ancient Punic language, also called Carthaginian, once spoken in the Carthaginian empire in Northwest Africa. It has nothing to do with the noun hippo, short for hippopotamus, the familiar African mammal whose name is derived from an ancient Greek term for river horse.

From childhood on, Augustine Aurelius was aware of himself as an African, although at home his family spoke Latin, as the influence of ancient Rome was strong at the time. Augustine was recognized as highly important and influential for his writings about Christianity and he was named a saint many centuries ago. Even today, the day on which he died, August 28, is commemorated. The Confessions were written by Augustine before he was a saint, when he was in his forties. He was looking back on his early years, when he did not always behave very well. He regretted this misbehavior, and although he writes from a Christian perspective, readers of other religious backgrounds have found enough material of interest to make the Confessions a classic internationally.

As Thais know, in Buddhism, at monasteries, regular confession to other monks about bad actions is required.  In the Pali Canon, the standard collection of scriptures in the Theravada Buddhist tradition, as preserved in the Pāli language, Buddhist monks in the past even confessed their bad deeds to the Buddha himself. This tradition continues to the present day. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the need for confession is often mentioned in the Bible. In the Jewish religion, people spoke of things they may have done wrong on a Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur in the Hebrew language. This practice dates back around two thousand years. According to the Christian Bible, when people are baptized, they confess their sins. Augustine would have been familiar with this tradition and the ritual of going to church to tell a priests about past bad actions on certain days of the year.

Today’s readers will note that Saint Augustine describes his childhood with much regret. He suggests that children are naturally violent unless they are given leadership by adults and shown how to behave. He mentions that as a young person, he would sometimes pray:

Please Lord, make me good, but not just yet.

This means that he knew enough about moral and ethical teaching to know that what he was doing might be bad, but he did not want to stop doing it right away because he was enjoying himself too much. This somewhat lazy approach to being a good person meant that goodness was postponed until the person was ready to take full responsibility for all actions, and then the possibility of change arrived. The Confessions of Saint Augustine are considered the first autobiography in the Western sense of the term, so their focus is naturally on himself. This is not because the author was too self-absorbed to think of anyone else, but by concentrating on his own life and thoughts, he hoped to arrive at an inner truth. He wrote:

People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.

The idea is that tourists and other travelers go to see distant sights rather than stay home and think of their own actions and motivations. What happens outside of us can be a distraction from what may reveal a basic truth about life.

Augustine writes with regret that when he was a teenager, he stole pears from a tree belonging to one of his neighbors. Although this may seem like a minor episode, it is remembered today and cited in the West by social scientists, philosophers, and neurologists as an example of the sense of guilt that may result from disobedience. The poet Wystan Hugh Auden, whose works are owned by the TU Library, analyzed the pear tree episode as proof that

St. Augustine was the first real psychologist.

This was because he realized that when he was a teenager, Augustine went around with a gang that was badly behaved. One day, after they had played some sports, they noticed that a pear tree next door to where Augustine lived was full of ripe fruit. The boys were not hungry, and had no plans to eat the pears or sell them, but decided anyway to would steal them. They shook the tree until all the fruit fell to the ground. Augustine admits:

We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden.

Augustine realized that the motivation for this theft was just the thrill of doing something that was forbidden. Sometimes bad behavior, especially in childhood, does not appear to make sense, since it does not benefit the person who behaved badly, Instead, the motivation for such actions may be found in this description by Saint Augustine. Doing something forbidden was in itself an attraction. The boys did not feed the hogs because they were worried that the hogs were hungry and needed food. Instead, they just used the hogs as a way of getting rid of the evidence of their bad deed.

One distinguished reader of the Confessions, the United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., noted that it was strange

to see a man making a mountain out of robbing a pear tree in his teens.

However, Augustine drew some general conclusions about why people sometimes do bad things even when it is not to their own advantage.

TU students from the Faculty of Philosophy may find it useful to read Augustine, since most important philosophers in the Western tradition refer to him. These include such influential philosophers as Hannah Arendt, René Descartes, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. All of these authors are represented in the collection of the TU Library. TU Students who are fans of the Lord of the Rings films and books may be interested to know that their author, J.R.R. Tolkien, was also an attentive reader of Saint Augustine. Among the many ideas shared in the books of Tolkien and Augustine is that people are travelers living in exile until they find inner tranquility from moral and ethical beliefs.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)