The liberation of questioning in Augustine's Confessions

Abstract

Concluding his Confessions, Augustine chose as the work's final word aperietur, 'will be' or 'shall be opened'. The oddity of ending and closing a book on a conjugation of to open provokes reflections into the nature of questioning, reflections that open into a larger investigation concerning how Augustine understood the nature of religious belief and faithful life. For him, faithful life is a project of resisting our always premature attempts at conclusion, in order better to see the project of 'inquiry into God' as an infinite undertaking, in community with others, organized centrally around reading and inhabiting the thought world of the Scriptures. The Confessions turns out to be a story of Augustine learning to ask questions in the right way and to accept the dynamic of questioning as an energy moving him toward God. Appreciating the Confessions as a story of 'learning to ask questions' illuminates not only the work's content but also its structure, most notably the odd change of tone and topic from books 1-9 to books 10-13.