From Pulitzer Prize-winner Garry Wills, the story of Augustine's
Confessions
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.
