Confessions

Description

Addressing God directly, Augustine recounts a life shaped by appetite, ambition, intellectual restlessness, and the desire for certainty. He revisits childhood, education, professional success, friendships, religious experimentation, and the moral conflicts that preceded his conversion to Christianity. Yet Confessions is more than a sequence of remembered events: Augustine continually asks how memory works, why human beings will what harms them, and how a timeless creator relates to time and creation. The later books expand personal testimony into philosophical and scriptural inquiry without abandoning the intimate form of prayer. Garry Wills's complete translation seeks direct, contemporary English while retaining Augustine's wordplay and poetic force, presenting a work in which self-examination becomes inseparable from questions about language, responsibility, and divine grace.

Themes