“Thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee..”
St. Augustine's Confessions is one of the most influential and most innovative works of Latin literature.
Written in the form of a long prayer addressed directly to God, (for we have stumbled upon a human being at a primal moment: standing in prayer before God), Augustine's Confessions, the remarkable chronicle of his conversion to Christianity, endures as perhaps the greatest spiritual autobiography of all time.
Composed in the author's early forties in the last years of the fourth century AD and during his first years as a bishop, Augustine traces his “restless” life as a lost soul, how he was converted, and then moved to the corridors of high power of the imperial court in Milan.
He came to realize that far from being cleanly divided into light and dark, our vices are often misdirected virtues.
The combination of brilliant dramatic set pieces and close emotional self-scrutiny makes Augustine’s Confessions read like the work of a great novelist or poet.
Many scholars consider Saint Augustine to be among the greatest and most influential fathers of the early church. And as you read his Confessions, you will find the confident humility that is common among those whom Jesus calls "great in the kingdom of heaven." Augustine writes as a common man, and so his words span time and tradition.
SAINT AUGUSTINE, the celebrated theologian who served as Bishop of Hippo from AD 396 until his death in AD 430, is widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers in the Western world.
"Augustine lived the theology he wrote: he experienced the reality of Christ living in his own soul."
-Thomas Merton
"There has, quite literally, been no century of the sixteen centuries since the conversion of Augustine in which he has not been a major intellectual, spiritual, and cultural force."
-Edward Gibbon
