The Confessions of St. Augustine

About the book

Augustine looks back on childhood, education, ambition, friendship, bereavement, and religious searching in an account addressed to God. Particular memories become occasions for asking why he wanted what he wanted and how he came to understand those desires differently. His mother's faith and his encounters with competing intellectual traditions belong to the narrative of conversion, but the work reaches beyond a chronological life story. Later books turn explicitly towards memory, time, and the interpretation of creation in Genesis. This movement joins personal confession to philosophical and scriptural inquiry. Augustine treats the act of remembering as a present task, shaped by questions that the earlier self could not yet formulate. Readers encounter both a history of change and an attempt to understand what makes truthful self-knowledge possible.

• Conversion
• Memory and time
• Desire and self-knowledge

Why read it

For an influential union of intimate recollection, prayer, and philosophical inquiry that remains interested in the difficulty of knowing oneself.

English translation by E. B. Pusey