Confessions (1595)
Confessions is a 1595 religious aspects of truth book written by Augustine of Hippo.
Sixteen centuries ago Augustine of Hippo tried something new: he addressed a book-length prayer directly to God and let the reader listen in. He recounts a restless early life, his ambitions and appetites, his long detour through rival philosophies, and the slow turn that brought him to the faith he would go on to help shape. Part memoir, part theology, part meditation on memory and time itself, it reads as one man talking to God with unusual candor. This edition presents Garry Wills's complete modern translation of the whole work in plain, living English.
A few thoughts on Confessions
One of the founding documents of Western autobiography, and still startlingly personal. Come to it for the voice, a brilliant restless mind examining its own past out loud, rather than for doctrine alone. Wills's translation strips away churchly stiffness, which makes the searching, self-questioning Augustine much easier to meet on the page.
Stories of a life before and after belief changed
Confessions works because Augustine keeps the awkward parts: the ambition, the appetites, the years he spent elsewhere. Each of these follows one person through a change of mind and keeps the detours in. Some come from the person who lived them, one is a novelist's account of Augustine himself, and one traces the same pull across a family.
Films and series about arguing your way toward belief
Half of Confessions is Augustine talking himself through rival philosophies before he settles anywhere. These films and series stay in that unsettled stretch: a priest and a skeptic trading arguments, ten stories built around a single moral rule, a long spell of doubt in the desert. None of them hands you a conclusion in the first ten minutes.
Philosophy that talks to you instead of lecturing
Augustine addresses God for the length of a book and lets the reader listen in, so his thinking on memory and time arrives as speech rather than as a treatise. These take the same route into large questions: a Daoist writing in parables, essays on what happiness asks of a person, a survey of how several traditions answer.
Comics and films that take a complaint straight to God
Confessions is a book-length address to God, complaints included. These draw or film the same posture: Eisner's tenement landlord holding an old bargain to its terms, Tezuka's long account of one man's search, a manga retelling of scripture, a film built around a conversation. The reader listens in on someone talking upward.