Confessions

Introduction

'You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.' The whole of the Confessions is one long prayer to God. Augustine looks back over his life: the jealousy of the infant, the boyhood theft of pears, the lust and vanity of youth, his attachment to Manichaeism, his conversion in the garden at Milan, the death of his mother Monica at Ostia. The last books turn to philosophical meditation on memory, time and creation, and his question about time, 'What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not', is still a classic problem of philosophy. It is the first true autobiography in the West.