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In book ten (specifically chapters twenty-seven through forty-three) of Confessions, Bishop Augustine reveals a connection to the first nine books. Although Augustine speaks frequently of hope, towards to the future, he also recollects the memory of sin and struggle between options. Thirteen years have now passed since the death of his mother, Monica, which he recorded in book nine. Now as Bishop of the Catholic Church in North Africa, Augustine shepherds and teaches the community whom he is writing. Book ten is a transition, but as Carl Vaught writes, “Augustine has still not reached the end of his journey.”[1] The Bishop recollects willfulness and the dissipation into many things. His remorse is that he not only missed out on being filled with God, and God filling him, but that he sought finite things that lead to nothingness. Augustine’s hope is turned to the one and only true mediator, who is both man and God, Jesus Christ. Though Augustine received Christ’s forgiveness in book eight, Augustine looks to the future in hope to be filled with him, healed by him, and continually praise him. Augustine begins chapter twenty-seven, “Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new, too late have I loved you! Behold, you were within me, while I was outside: it was there that I sought you, and a deformed creature, rushed headlong upon these things of beauty which you have made. They kept me far from you, those fair things which, if they were not in you, would not exist at all. ”[2]
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