Confessions Weakness Quotes

The "they" here refers to "lower things," which is delightfully ambiguous. But we can guess from context that he's referring to pride and other personality vices. Augustine even compares them to insects that swarm. Gross. But he's also putting himself in an awfully passive position here. "I wanted to change, but vices prevented me from doing it. They literally blocked my path." Um, hey Augustine: don't go blaming imaginary bugs for your weaknesses. But seriously, the point he's actually trying to make is that sometimes it feels as though there are things inside of us that prevent us from changing. Yep, we've been there, Augustine.

Augustine is talking about his darn irrational soul. Augustine can't understand why, even after he has accepted the belief that his soul will die if he doesn't give up his sinful habits and follow God, he still doesn't want to. Apparently, Augustine's soul is actually more afraid of the immediate consequences of giving up the sin it loves so much than it is of the hypothetical of "wasting away to death." The challenge is to think in the long-term, even if it means that the short-term might suck—though Augustine, the hedonist he is, isn't ready to take the long view yet.

Augustine is using a really neat rhetorical technique here. Look at how each of his questions build on the previous one. To get an answer to the very basic "Who am I?" he specifies the answer to "What kind of man am I?" And then, to define what kind of man he is, he asks, "What evil have I not done?" So, it would seem that the kind of people we are is determined by our sins. But wait: Augustine doesn't ask "What evil have I done?" but "What evil have I not done?" This implies that Augustine has done more evil than he has good. Yikes.