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Book Cover for: Confessions, Augustine

Confessions

Augustine

Augustine's Confessions is one of the most influential and most innovative works of Latin literature. Written in the author's early forties in the last years of the fourth century A.D. and during his first years as a bishop, they reflect on his life and on the activity of remembering and interpreting a life. Books I-IV are concerned with infancy and learning to talk, schooldays, sexual desire and adolescent rebellion, intense friendships and intellectual exploration. Augustine evolves and analyses his past with all the resources of the reading which shaped his mind: Virgil and Cicero, Neoplatonism and the Bible. This volume, which aims to be usable by students who are new to Augustine, alerts readers to the verbal echoes and allusions of Augustine's brilliant and varied Latin, and explains his theological and philosophical questioning of what God is and what it is to be human. The edition is intended for use by students and scholars of Latin literature, theology and Church history.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Penguin Classics
  • Publish Date: Nov 30th, 1961
  • Pages: 352
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.77in - 5.07in - 0.86in - 0.57lb
  • EAN: 9780140441147
  • Categories: ReligiousChristianity - HistoryMemoirs

About the Author

St Augustine of Hippo, the great Doctor of the Latin Church, was born at Thagaste in North Africa, in A.D. 354. He was brought up as a Christian but he was soon converted to the Manichean religion. He also came under the influence of Neoplatonism. However, in 387 he renounced all his unorthodox beliefs and was baptised. His surviving works had a great influence on Christian theology and the psychology and political theology of the West.

R.S. Pine-Coffin is a Roman Catholic and was born in 1917.

Praise for this book

"[Wills] renders Augustine's famous and influential text in direct language with all the spirited wordplay and poetic strength intact." --Los Angeles Times

"[Wills's] translations . . . are meant to bring Augustine straight into our own minds; and they succeed. Well-known passages, over which my eyes have often gazed, spring to life again from Wills's pages." --Peter Brown, The New York Review of Books

"Augustine flourishes in Wills's hand." --James Wood

"A masterful synthesis of classical philosophy and scriptural erudition." --Chicago Tribune