The Church Fathers · c. 397–400
Confessions
Confessiones
Augustine of Hippo · 354–430
What it is
A life told as prayer: a restless African rhetorician traces his own thefts, ambitions, and long detour through Manichaeism and Neoplatonism, then turns in the final books to memory, time, and the opening verses of Genesis.
Why it lasted
The first true autobiography in Western literature, and the book that taught Christianity to speak in the first person. Nothing in the tradition's interior life is untouched by it.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
This work is in the public domain and can be read in full, free, at the archives below. The Library catalogues it; it does not host the text.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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