Augustine’s Confessions: A Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books)
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
In this brief and incisive book, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills tells the story of the Confessions—what motivated Augustine to dictate it, how it asks to be read, and the many ways it has been misread in the one-and-a-half millennia since it was composed. Following Wills’s biography of Augustine and his translation of the Confessions, this is an unparalleled introduction to one of the most important books in the Christian and Western traditions.
Understandably fascinated by the story of Augustine’s life, modern readers have largely succumbed to the temptation to read the Confessions as autobiography. But, Wills argues, this is a mistake. The book is not autobiography but rather a long prayer, suffused with the language of Scripture and addressed to God, not man. Augustine tells the story of his life not for its own significance but in order to discern how, as a drama of sin and salvation leading to God, it fits into sacred history. “We have to read Augustine as we do Dante,” Wills writes, “alert to rich layer upon layer of Scriptural and theological symbolism.” Wills also addresses the long afterlife of the book, from controversy in its own time and relative neglect during the Middle Ages to a renewed prominence beginning in the fourteenth century and persisting to today, when the Confessions has become an object of interest not just for Christians but also historians, philosophers, psychiatrists, and literary critics.
With unmatched clarity and skill, Wills strips away the centuries of misunderstanding that have accumulated around Augustine’s spiritual classic.
- Explores what motivated Augustine to dictate it, how it asks to be read, and the many ways it has been misread
- Provides an unparalleled introduction to one of the most important books in the Christian and Western traditions
- Strips away the centuries of misunderstanding that have accumulated around Augustine’s spiritual classic
This is a sensitive, informed, and just appreciation of and introduction to the Confessions. It does justice both to the appealing narrative of sin and fall that preoccupies most readers and to the more complicated structure and ending of the whole work. Few books on the Confessions rival the excellence or concision of this one.
—James J. O'Donnell, Georgetown University, author of Augustine: A New Biography
Garry Wills rescues Augustine's Confessions from its posterity, peeling away layer after layer of anachronistic reactions to the text and providing an invaluable aid to readers. A master restorer, Wills gives us a picture carefully cleaned of a millennium-and-a-half of varnish. More than that: he helps us appreciate what the original colors actually meant to those who first made contact with Augustine's strange book. This is vintage Wills—punchy, clear, well-argued, and beautifully translated, both linguistically and culturally.
—Peter Brown, Princeton University, author of Augustine of Hippo: A Biography
Another gem of a little book by Garry Wills. . . . Wills describes brilliantly the manner in which this strange work seeped slowly through literary circles. . . . His book is a passionate plea that we should read Augustine's strange book as it was first heard, and in the light of the purposes for which it was first written.
—Peter Brown, New York Review of Books
- Title: Augustine’s Confessions: A Biography
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Resource ID: LLS:GSTNSCNFSBGRPHY
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-04-30T18:59:59Z