More on Augustine: This for "PDempsey"

My head is full of Augustine right now. And there's so much I want to talk about, but I am not sure how to organize my thoughts. But here's some of it:

The Confessions is interesting in that it's more about Augustine's intellectual and spiritual growth and less about the external events and trappings of his life. In this way, it rather reminds me of C.S. Lewis's Surprised by Joy, a book that always fascinates me. But how can one really retrace and recount for us his spiritual development. I mean, there seems to be something artificial or constructed about it, you know? I can barely remember what I was thinking last night. How can someone so clearly remember what he was believing and mulling over at a particular period in his life, a period maybe years in the past. I don't think that Augustine is making it up or anything; it just strikes me that he can never really get at the texture and sense and "quidity," to use a Lewisism, of his own mind at any particular time. Yet, I applaud the attempt and generally think that Augustine is successful. (Forgive me for comparing him over and over to Lewis. I suppose that for a variety of reasons, Lewis controls how I tend to think about the world, the mind, and literature specifically. This is sometimes troubling.)

I'm struggling to "get" Augustine's ideas about sin. Before I started reading, I would have been able to give a simple definition, maybe even an explanation, of A's theory of sin; that is sin as a falling short, but also as a kind of nothingness, something that does not exist because God has created all that does exist, yet God could not have created sin. Ok, ok don't jump all over me because that wasn't perfect--I'm just trying to get out the working definition I'd assumed when I began the Confessions. Yet there's something about it that just isn't adding up for me. And I don't know whether the intellectual and maybe imaginative shortcoming is in me or A. or both. But I want to understand. I'd like to better know what sin is (or isn't.) But I am just not getting it. I suppose I just need to keep reading. I'd like to believe that if I keep reading everything will be ok somehow.

I realize that this post isn't very coherent. I'm rather tired (what else is new?), and I'm mostly trying to frame questions. I'm not quite ready to work at answers yet. Maybe the questions are just as important as the answers anyway.