Augustine's Confession of Being Known

In 397 AD, a bishop in North Africa sat down to write something no one had ever attempted — a full autobiography addressed not to readers, but to God. Augustine of Hippo opened his Confessions with words that echo Psalm 139: "You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You."

What makes Confessions remarkable is Augustine's slow realization that during every reckless year — the stolen pears in Thagaste, the mistress in Carthage, the hollow ambitions in Milan — the Almighty had never once looked away. He had not been wandering unobserved. He had been pursued. "You were within me," Augustine wrote, "and I was outside myself."

He described his conversion beneath a fig tree in a Milan garden, weeping, when a child's voice sang, "Take up and read." He opened Paul's letter to the Romans and the restlessness stopped. But what shattered Augustine most was not that he had finally found God. It was that God had always found him — had known his sitting down and his rising up, had understood his thoughts from afar, even the ones Augustine himself could not untangle.

The psalmist marveled, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me." Augustine spent the rest of his life agreeing. The God who knit him together in his mother Monica's womb had numbered every wayward step and never once lost count.