Augustine, Confessions — an early fragmentary witness (Book I; Book IX)
Augustine, bishop of Hippo
Not a real historical work. A fragment of Augustine’s Confessions the dream invented. The Confessions are real; this copy is not.
A witness the dream invented: no such fragment is known outside it. Imagined as 5th century — among the oldest witnesses of the Confessions. Unfortunately it survives only in fragments: the opening book, and then Book IX. The restless heart, and then the retreat at Cassiciacum, with everything between them lost. It grew from a psalter — as the Confessions itself did.
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Only the opening book and Book IX survive in this witness — the restless heart, and then a garden, a psalter and a baptism, with everything between them lost. Partial survival, partial Stamina.
A copy made this close to Augustine’s own lifetime would be extraordinarily trustworthy. (Whether this one exists outside the dream is another question.)
(Strange. Every other fragment you have carried, some professor once mentioned in a lecture or a footnote. This one — you cannot recall anyone ever naming it. Perhaps it exists only in the dream.)
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | Great Art Thou | Spirituality | Argument | 48 | 100% | 15 |
| 21 | Restless Heart | Experience | Argument | 79 | 100% | 10 |
| 22 | Thou Hast Broken My Bonds | Soteriology | Argument | 56 | 100% | 10 |
| 24 | The Hush at Ostia | Spirituality | Argument | 60 | 100% | 10 |
| 28 | Argument from Desire | Natural Theology | Argument | 86 | 100% | 10 |
| 50 | Speak Latin | History | Status | — | 100% | 5 |
How to read these. In Scholar’s Dream, books argue with each other. Each thing a book can do in a debate is a move, and most moves carry a real quotation — the words the book puts on the table when it uses that move.
Strong against lists the opposing books and arguments a move was written to answer. Used against one of them, it hits much harder than usual: ×2 means twice the normal force, ×4 four times. It is the game’s way of saying: this is the sentence that answers that argument. Open an entry to read why.
“Great art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is Thy power, and Thy wisdom infinite.”
Augustine, Confessions 1.1 (trans. E. B. Pusey, 1838, public domain).public domain
In the gameThe first sentence of the Confessions is a verse of a psalm. Augustine begins by praising, before he asks anything.
“You made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it reposes in You.”
Augustine, Confessions 1.1 (trans. Pusey, 1838, public domain, lightly modernized).public domain
In the gameExperience, directed toward God at last — what the Coach felt in his gut, Augustine prayed onto papyrus.
Augustine’s line is that the heart is restless until it rests in God. It is the collision Camus describes, said fifteen centuries earlier by the man he studied for his degree, and with an answer.
The cheerful, occupied man is restless and does not know it. The heart is restless until it rests in God.
Every people he names as older than Adam is a people with the same ache in it. One fall reaches all of them.
Pascal said that his account of man, wretched and great together, came from Augustine.
The Romantic looks in and expects to find home. Augustine looked in and found the ache — and said nothing finite, the self included, has ever stilled it.
Freud traces the restlessness to a child wanting its father. Augustine agreed it starts there, and said it does not stop there, because nothing finite has ever quieted it.
A good thing, made restless — which is the distinction he says cannot be drawn.
“O Lord, I am Thy servant; I am Thy servant, and the son of Thy handmaid: Thou hast broken my bonds in sunder.”
Augustine, Confessions 9.1 (trans. E. B. Pusey, 1838, public domain).public domain
In the gameBook IX opens with Psalm 116, said by a man who has just been freed from a habit he could not break alone.
“hushed the images of earth, and waters, and air, hushed also the pole of heaven, yea the very soul be hushed to herself, and by not thinking on self surmount self”
Augustine, Confessions 9.10 (trans. E. B. Pusey, 1838, public domain).public domain
In the gameAugustine and his mother Monica, at a window in the port of Ostia, shortly before she died, talking about what eternal life would be like.
“…is not a happy life what all will, and no one altogether wills it not?… And this is the happy life, to rejoice to Thee, of Thee, for Thee; this is it, and there is no other.”
Augustine, Confessions 10.20–23 (trans. E. B. Pusey, 1838, public domain).public domain
“the desire of the true good is naturally implanted in the minds of men; only error leads them aside out of the way in pursuit of the false.”
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy III.2 (trans. H. R. James, 1897, public domain).public domain
In the gameNobody has to be taught to want to be happy, and nothing on offer finishes the wanting. Augustine and Boethius, a century apart, both take the permanent hunger as evidence of where the food is.
Camus grants the hunger and the silence, and calls their collision the absurd. Augustine and Lewis take the same hunger the other way. A hunger for something the world cannot supply is one of the ordinary signs that something else supplies it. Camus wrote his university thesis on Augustine.
Freud explains where the longing came from. He never asks the other question — whether a longing this specific, appearing in every culture, is evidence that it has an object.
Diotima’s ladder in the Symposium climbs from one beautiful body to all of them to beauty itself, because no particular thing ever finishes the wanting. Augustine makes that argument nearly eight centuries later and grants Plato every rung of it. What a Form cannot do is come looking for you.
Augustine found that nothing he chose could satisfy him until God changed what he loved. Grace did not only teach him. It changed his heart.
Pascal said that his account of man, wretched and great together, came from Augustine.
A duty to believe only on proof is itself believed without proof — the rule cannot pass its own test!
The passages the Scriptorium holds on screen, word for word from a public-domain translation. Written in Latin.
“Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”
Augustine, Confessions 1.1 (trans. Pusey, 1838, public domain).
“Give what thou commandest, and command what thou wilt.”
Augustine, Confessions 10.29.40 — the familiar English of “da quod iubes et iube quod vis”, not Pusey, who renders it “Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt”.
What survives here is the opening book and then Books X to XIII — the restless heart, and then memory and time, with everything between them lost.
Hold the two lines together, because they are the same argument at either end of the book. The heart is restless until it rests in God; and the strength to obey is itself a thing God must give. Augustine will not let you supply either one yourself.
The second line is the one that scandalised Pelagius. If God has to give what he commands, then the commandment is not proof that we can keep it.
This copy grew out of a psalter, which sounds impossible until you notice that the Confessions is prayed from its first page. A psalter, prayed long enough, turns into someone’s own words.
(Strange, though. Every other fragment you have carried, some professor once mentioned in a lecture or a footnote. This one — you cannot recall anyone ever naming it.)
