The Confessions of St. Augustine

A little about the book

Augustine addresses God as he revisits the experiences through which he came to understand his own restless desires. Childhood misbehavior, education, professional ambition, friendship, and competing intellectual commitments are examined with an intensity that turns recollection into argument. The voice is personal, but the purpose reaches beyond recording a sequence of events: Augustine wants to understand why he pursued some forms of happiness and failed to recognize others.

The later books move outward from the remembered life into questions about memory, time, and the interpretation of creation. This changing scale can surprise readers who expect a conventional autobiography. Prayer, philosophical inquiry, and scriptural commentary remain closely connected, so that the account of an individual mind becomes a way of asking what any mind can know about itself. The work rewards patient reading for the movement of its thought as well as the candor of its self-examination, and its unresolved questions often feel as important as the convictions Augustine reaches.

Things You May Not Know About The Confessions of St. Augustine

• Thirteen books, not one memoir. The work’s thirteen divisions begin with recollection and eventually turn toward philosophical reflection and commentary on the opening of Genesis.
• God is the direct addressee. The sustained second-person address gives the book the form of a prayer as well as a record of Augustine’s life.
• A famous childhood incident. The account of stealing pears becomes an extended investigation of motive, rather than a passing anecdote about youthful wrongdoing.
• Memory becomes a subject. Book Ten examines memory in its own right, changing the work’s focus from remembered events to the mind that remembers them.
• Time receives a whole inquiry. Book Eleven considers how past, present, and future can be understood, joining a personal question to a lasting philosophical problem.