Augustine's ‘Confessions' : A Critical Guide

Represents the best of contemporary scholarship on Augustine's Confessions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: philosophy, historical and systematic theology, biblical studies, and the history of late antiquity. Readers will gain an overview of current work on the Confessions and new insights into this classic text.

Augustine''s Confessions, written between AD 394 and 400, is an autobiographical work which outlines his youth and his conversion to Christianity. It is one of the great texts of Late Antiquity, the first Western Christian autobiography ever written, and it retains its fascination for philosophers, theologians, historians, and scholars of religious studies today. This Critical Guide engages with Augustine''s creative appropriation of the work of his predecessors in theology generally, in metaphysics, and in philosophy as therapy for the soul, and reframes a much discussed - but still poorly understood - passage from the Confessions with respect to recent philosophy. The volume represents the best of contemporary scholarship on Augustine''s Confessions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and builds on existing scholarship to develop new insights, explore underappreciated themes, and situate Augustine in the thought of his own day as well as ours.