Of all the autobiographies ever written by mere mortals, Confessions by Saint Augustine of Hippo is the greatest. In this masterpiece, you will find a doctor of the Church longing for the true Doctor of the soul, Christ. Taking us from Augustine’s roots in Africa to his encounters with his spiritual father Saint Ambrose in Milan, from his battle against his concupiscence to his famed conversion, Confessions is itself a veritable pilgrimage to the threshold of the new Jerusalem. Indeed, its end is not biography but a breathtaking meditation on time and memory, on the human soul and the material world, and on the creative and redemptive power of God himself.
In Dr. Anthony Esolen’s new translation, the esteemed translator and author seeks to retain and reveal the figurative by hewing as closely as possible to the literal, both in the significance of individual words and in the manner of the author’s expression. Confessions is a work of literary art, “one of the most stupendous ever wrought,” he says, immensely rich in insights, and intricate in its returning, again and again, to the questions of a soul in search of truth and of answers ready to be found, if we will only seek, and ask, and knock.
Confessions is like no other book you will ever read. According to Dr. Esolen, “The Confessions is one continued and coherent prayer, a profound profession of faith, and a plea for more, ever more wisdom, ever more love. It is artistic in its whole conception, in its parts and their arrangement down to the merest sentence. It is closer to the Gothic cathedrals that would grace Europe eight hundred years later than to anything that you or I might write about ourselves and our lives.”
