Augustine’s Confessions

by Leland Ryken

Publisher:

Crossway

, 2015

Overview

In this short guidebook, popular professor, author, and literary expert Leland Ryken takes you through an example of the greatest literature in history while answering your questions along the way. This volume guides readers through Augustine’s classic spiritual autobiography, the Confessions, exploring the book’s historical context, key themes, and overarching message.

Contents

Top Highlights

“His own mother was a Christian and wanted Augustine to become a Christian. But the Catholic view of sex was not a biblical view and not what later became the Protestant view. The official Catholic position all through the Middle Ages was that sex itself served a necessary function in society (the procreation of the human race), but it was not regarded as an ennobling and fulfilling thing for a married couple. Marriage was the God-ordained outlet for the sexual urge, but nothing more. Yet another oddity, given our modern practices, is that Augustine lived in a society where parents arranged marriages for their children.” (Page 25)

“—his sexuality and his theft of pears from a neighbor’s orchard” (Page 23)

“The background chorus of the Confessions is how all of the bad experiences in Augustine’s life were orchestrated by God to bring Augustine to faith. Thus (for example) Augustine writes regarding his bad experience with disruptive students in Carthage that God was ‘at work in persuading me to go to Rome and to do my teaching there rather than at Carthage.’” (Pages 39–40)

“Confessions is Augustine’s claim that when he started reading the Bible seriously, he ‘found all the truth that I had read in the Platonists … together with [that is, ‘and in addition’] the commendation of your [God’s] grace’ (which by implication is lacking in the humanistic aspiration toward the divine in Platonic thought).” (Page 53)

“leading theme of the Confessions is that the proud in the world miss the greatest good, while the humble find God” (Page 36)

Product Details

• Title: Augustine’s Confessions
• Author: Leland Ryken
• Series: Christian Guides to the Classics
• Publisher: Crossway
• Print Publication Date: 2015
• Logos Release Date: 2018
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Subject: Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. Confessiones
• ISBNs: 9781433542480, 9781433542510, 9781433542497, 9781433542503, 143354248X, 143354251X, 1433542498, 1433542501
• Resource ID: LLS:GSTNSCNFSSNS
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T00:26:00Z

About Leland Ryken

Leland Ryken (PhD, University of Oregon) served as professor of English at Wheaton College for more than 43 years. He has authored or edited more than three dozen books, including The Word of God in English, The Complete Literary Guide to the Bible, The ESV Literary Study Bible, and A Complete Handbook of Literary Forms in the Bible. He is a frequent speaker at the Evangelical Theological Society and served as literary stylist for the English Standard Version.