Product Description

The premier line of Classic literature from the greatest Christian authors. The finest in quality and value.

Never underestimate the power of prayer. As Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, watched as her son and grandson were being baptized on that bright easter morning in A.D.387, she knew her lifelong prayers had been answered. Even though in his Confessions, Augustine wrote about his early life as an example of how sin grows and works within a person, he was looking back over those early years with the vision of a bishop of the church. Monica could not have known that those prayers would have presented to the church a man who would impact Christianity with the strength that Augustine did.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1618545 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Language Notes
Text: English
Original Language: Latin

About the Author

About the Translator:
An expert on the early Church, Henry Chadwick is Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He is the author of such books as Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition and Augustine in the Past Masters series.

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Customer Reviews

Excellent Translation
I won't recount all the excellent reasons for reading this remarkable book. It's not a part of the Western Canon for nothing! It's a seminal work (autobiography) in a seminal field (Patristics)worth reading regardless of religious orientation, including none. What makes THIS particular version so exciting is that it is eminently readable and still quite stylized. Chadwick's eloquent translation caputes not only Augustine's ideas and thoughts, but equally important, his rhetorical skills. This alone justifies the purchase of this work. The philosophical nuances that, ironically, have entered twentieth-century thought again are very clearly articulated in Chadwick's translation. Other translations are likely to obfusicate what Chadwick elucidates. Read this great work by a great translator. I am confident you'll return to it again and again (even if you disagree with the Doctor).

Written for Forever
There are three classes of support for Christian belief: the metaphysical, the historical, and the experiential. The metaphysical argues from logic and the existence and nature of reality, the historical from the past - both human and pre-human, and the experiential from personal, and private, experience.

While I don't want to diminish the metaphysical or historical components of Christian belief and apologetics, I think that the most important source of living belief is the experiential, but it is also by far the hardest to communicate, since it is by nature, private and personal. While my experiences may convince me of the truth of the Christian faith, how can they convince you? They are part of my experience, not yours. It might seem to be an impossibility, yet this is the challenge that Augustine took on in "Confessions", and it is by the degree of difficulty that the extent of his success and the greatness of the work can be measured.

"Confessions" is a work of great beauty. Written in the form of a confessional prayer, Augustine bares himself utterly, and in so doing, makes the reader want to lower his defenses as well, making it possible to experience another's life more deeply than he might have thought possible, and in so doing, to translate his experience of Christianity across the divide that separates us from each other.

Because of the nature of "Confessions", I think that analysis of it is to be avoided. Analysis is distancing - it encourages the reader not to dive it in, but to stand back. You cannot experience "Confessions" and critique it at the same time, and all of the value is in the experience.

Has ever any other writer reached this clarity of thought?
The only reason I dare to review Augustine's classic is to focus on the high level of clarity he attained writing on the most abstract themes, like "time" and "thinking about thought". Though the highest points of his book, to my taste, are those of philosophical character, the author is also a charming narrator. Consider, for instance, the episode where he marvels at the sight of Ambrosius reading alone "without moving his lips"! Would I perhaps be allowed to give seven stars to this book?