Confessions

First written around 397–400 AD, Confessions by Saint Augustine is one of the most intimate and searching works to emerge from the ancient world. Addressed to God, it traces Augustine’s early life in Roman North Africa, his restless years of intellectual ambition and sensual pleasure, and his gradual conversion to Christianity, culminating in the celebrated account of his experience in Milan. His mother, Monica, stands at the heart of this spiritual journey, while questions of memory, desire, grief and the nature of truth give the narrative its enduring psychological depth.

Neither autobiography in the modern sense nor theology alone, Confessions transforms the examination of a single life into a profound inquiry into what it means to be human. Augustine’s lyrical, searching prose moves between recollection and prayer, personal confession and philosophical reflection, establishing a model of spiritual autobiography that would shape writers and thinkers for centuries. More than sixteen hundred years after its composition, the work remains striking in its candour about inner conflict and its insistence that self-knowledge is inseparable from the search for meaning.

From the book

"I became a great question to myself."

— Saint Augustine, Confessions

On Confessions

“Augustine’s Confessions is a masterpiece of world literature.”

— William E. Mann, editor, Augustine’s Confessions: Philosophy in Autobiography, Oxford University Press