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About Me About Me
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The Story of Us The Story of Us
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I’m Still Here I’m Still Here
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Conclusion Conclusion
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Further Reading Further Reading
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21 Augustine’s Confessions as Autobiography
Get accessMichael Stuart Williams is Lecturer in Ancient Classics at Maynooth University, Ireland. He is the author of Authorised Lives in Early Christian Biography: Between Eusebius and Augustine (Cambridge, 2008), along with a number of articles on the intellectual history of Late Antiquity. His most recent publications are Peace and Reconciliation in the Classical World (edited with E.P. Moloney, Routledge, 2017), and The Politics of Heresy in Ambrose of Milan (Cambridge, 2017).
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Published:13 January 2021
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Abstract
This chapter explores the Confessions of Augustine of Hippo. Almost every author who writes on Augustine’s Confessions feels an obligation to insist that this difficult and complex work is not an autobiography. If the purpose of the Confessions as a whole is to turn the reader towards God, as it would appear from Augustine’s account, it seems no less clear that the means is through narrating Augustine’s own life in all its aspects, both good and bad. With this in mind, it has always been difficult to deny that the Confessions possesses, at the very least, a profoundly autobiographical character. Augustine offers an extended meditation of his life in more-or-less chronological order. If this is not the whole story of the Confessions, it is enough all the same to suggest that there may be value in approaching it as autobiography. Such an approach must begin by acknowledging that ‘autobiography’ is an elusive category, no less than is its parent ‘biography’.
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