Conf. Fragment

Augustine, Confessions — an early fragmentary witness (Book I; Book IX)

Augustine, bishop of Hippo

Probably 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.

Catch rate: Not found in the wild
Base research: 150
Stat total: 244

Base stats

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.

Stamina56

Contend74

Defend56

Popularity58

Total244

Why these numbers

The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.

Stamina 56

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.

Defend 56

A copy made this close to Augustine’s own lifetime would be extraordinarily trustworthy. (Whether this one exists outside the dream is another question.)

Cited for this book

(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.)

Development

A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.

P. Oxy 5101→
Lv 20

Conf. Fragment→
Lv 25

Confessions

Moves learned

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
25	Restless Heart	Experience	Argument	75	100%	10
28	Argument from Desire	Natural Theology	Argument	74	100%	10
50	Speak Latin	History	Status	—	100%	5

The quotes behind its moves

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.

“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

Restless Heart

ExperienceArgument · power 75 · 100% accurate

In the gameExperience, directed toward God at last — what the Coach felt in his gut, Augustine prayed onto papyrus.

Strong against

×3The Absurdan argument · why?

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.

×3The Man of the Worldan argument · why?

The cheerful, occupied man is restless and does not know it. The heart is restless until it rests in God.

×2Men Before Adaman argument · why?

Every people he names as older than Adam is a people with the same ache in it. One fall reaches all of them.

×2Penséesa book · why?

Pascal said that his account of man, wretched and great together, came from Augustine.

×2The Expressive Selfan argument · why?

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.

×2Totem and Tabooan argument · why?

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.

×2You Are Still a Manicheean argument · why?

A good thing, made restless — which is the distinction he says cannot be drawn.

“…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

Argument from Desire

Natural TheologyArgument · power 74 · 100% accurate

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.

Strong against

×4The Absurdan argument · why?

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.

×4Totem and Tabooan argument · why?

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.

×2.5Platoa book · why?

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.

×2Grace as Examplean argument · why?

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.

×2Penséesa book · why?

Pascal said that his account of man, wretched and great together, came from Augustine.

×2The Ethics of Beliefan argument · why?

A duty to believe only on proof is itself believed without proof — the rule cannot pass its own test!

Read it: The Restless Heart

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”.

Notes

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.)