Confessions
Augustine, Confessions
Augustine, bishop of Hippo
"You have made us for yourself…" The professor kept it safe.
- Catch rate
- Not found in the wild
- Base research
- 140
- Stat total
- 292
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.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
The Confessions has been read continuously for sixteen hundred years and not a page of it is lost — near-maximum Stamina.
Augustine has been a Doctor of the Church since 1298, and no church father shaped later theology — or Calvin — more. The Confessions argues with all of that weight behind it.
Copies of the Confessions survive in enormous numbers and agree with one another — one of the most secure texts of the ancient church.
The Confessions has never stopped being read. Almost anyone can recall it instantly, so it takes the debate floor first nearly everywhere.
Cited for this book
Doctor of the Church since 1298. The manuscript tradition is among the richest of any patristic work, and Augustine is the most-cited church father in Calvin’s Institutes.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Give What You Command | Soteriology | Argument | 75 | 100% | 10 |
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 1 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 15 |
Read it: Late Have I Loved You
The passages the Scriptorium holds on screen, word for word from a public-domain translation. Written in Latin.
“You awaken us to delight in Your praise; for 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).
“I heard the voice as of a boy or girl, I know not which, coming from a neighbouring house, chanting, and oft repeating, ‘Take up and read; Take up and read.’”
Augustine, Confessions 8.12.29 (trans. Pusey, 1838, public domain).
“I seized, opened, and in silence read that section on which my eyes first fell… No further would I read, nor did I need; for instantly, as the sentence ended — by a light, as it were, of security infused into my heart — all the gloom of doubt vanished away.”
Augustine, Confessions 8.12.29 (trans. Pusey, 1838, public domain).
“Belatedly I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new, belatedly I loved you. For see, you were within and I was without, and I sought you out there. Unlovely, I rushed heedlessly among the lovely things you have made. You were with me, but I was not with you.”
Augustine, Confessions 10.27.38 (trans. Pusey, 1838, public domain, lightly modernized).
“You called and cried aloud, and forced open my deafness. You gleamed and shone, and chased away my blindness. You breathed fragrant odors and I drew in my breath; and now I pant for you. I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.”
Augustine, Confessions 10.27.38 (trans. Pusey, 1838, public domain, lightly modernized).
“Give what You command, and command what You will.”
Augustine, Confessions 10.29.40 (trans. Pusey, 1838, public domain, lightly modernized).
Written c. A.D. 397–400, in thirteen books, and addressed to God on every page — it is a prayer that happens to be an autobiography. Books 1–9 are his life; Book 10 turns to memory; Books 11–13 are on time, creation, and Genesis 1.
The scene in the garden is the hinge. A child’s voice chanting a game over a wall, a codex of Paul lying where he had put it down, and one glance at Romans 13. He says the doubt did not argue with him. It simply left.
Now that last line, the short one. Eight words, and they carry his entire doctrine of grace: if God must GIVE what he commands, then the commandment is no proof that we could keep it.
And Augustine tells us himself what it cost. In the Retractions he recalls that when a fellow bishop read this very sentence aloud in Pelagius’ hearing at Rome, Pelagius "could not bear them and contradicted him so excitedly that they nearly came to a quarrel."
So the controversy did not begin with a treatise. It began with someone quoting a prayer at a gathering, and a man in the room who could not sit still through it.
Augustine was named a Doctor of the Church in 1298. He is the most-cited church father in Calvin’s Institutes, and the Confessions has never once gone out of use.