Confessions

Augustine wrote the Confessions in the first years after he became bishop of Hippo in North Africa. Books 1–9 follow his life from his birth in 354 through his schooling, his years as a Manichaean and as a teacher of rhetoric, to his conversion in a garden at Milan (8.12), his baptism and the death of his mother Monica at Ostia. Book 10 examines his state at the time of writing, and books 11–13 are a meditation on the opening of Genesis.

The work is a first-hand account, and it is also a prayer and an argument. Augustine tells his past as a bishop looking back, selecting and interpreting it to show how God led him, and he says little about matters that do not serve that end. Where it can be checked against the dialogues he wrote in the months after his conversion, the emphasis differs, and scholars have long discussed how far the later telling reshapes the earlier experience. For what Augustine believed and taught about 400 it is direct evidence.