Introduction

There are books we read, and there are books that read us. The work you are about to enter belongs unmistakably to the second kind. Written more than sixteen centuries ago by a North African bishop who could not have imagined that his private words to God would one day be translated, printed, downloaded, and quoted across cultures he never knew existed, this is one of the strangest and most intimate documents in all of human literature. It is a prayer that became a book. It is an autobiography that became a mirror. And it is, perhaps above all, a record of one restless human heart trying, with terrifying honesty, to understand itself.

Most introductions to a classic feel obliged to convince you that the old thing in front of you is still relevant. That task is unnecessary here. You will find, often with a small shock, that the man speaking on these pages is not a dusty relic but someone uncomfortably like you. He is ambitious. He is anxious. He is addicted to approval and pleasure and the good opinion of others. He chases success and finds it hollow. He falls in love and confuses love with possession. He is brilliant and proud of being brilliant, and he slowly learns that being clever is not the same as being wise. He wastes years. He hurts people. He lies to himself with the casual fluency of someone who has had a great deal of practice. And then, gradually and painfully, he begins to change.

That, in the simplest terms, is what this book is about: a man changing. But because the man in question possessed one of the most penetrating minds the world has produced, the story of his change opens out into questions that have never stopped mattering. What is memory, and how does it make us who we are? Why do we want the things we want, even when they harm us? Can a person truly start over, or are we forever the sum of everything we have done? What is time, and why does it slip through our hands? Is there something we are made for, something that would finally quiet the constant hum of our wanting? These are not the questions of a forgotten age. They are the questions you carried into the room where you are sitting right now.

To read this book well, it helps to know a little about who was writing it, though you will discover most of this from his own lips as you go. He was born in the year 354 in a small town in what is now Algeria, then a province of a Roman Empire that was vast, sophisticated, and beginning, almost imperceptibly, to crack. His mother was a devout Christian of fierce and persistent faith. His father was a man of more worldly ambitions, determined that his gifted son should rise in the world. The boy was indeed gifted — gifted to a degree that set him apart from the very beginning — and the family poured what resources they could into his education, betting everything on his future.

He became a teacher of rhetoric, which in his world was a glamorous and powerful profession. Rhetoric was the art of persuasion, the engine of careers in law and politics, and a young man who could master it might rise to dazzling heights. He moved from his provincial town to the great city of Carthage, and later still to Rome and to Milan, then one of the centers of imperial power. Along the way he tasted everything the ancient world had to offer an ambitious, talented young man: intellectual fame, fashionable philosophies, the company of clever friends, the pleasures of the body, and a long-term relationship with a woman whom he loved and with whom he had a son. By every external measure, he was succeeding.

And yet — and this is the engine of the entire book — he was not happy. Beneath the polished surface of his accomplishments lay a deep and persistent unease, a sense that something was missing that he could not name. He searched for it everywhere. He searched in philosophy, moving through the various schools of thought available in his day, each of which promised answers and each of which, in the end, left him hungry. He searched in a popular religious movement of the time that offered tidy explanations for the problem of evil and the structure of the cosmos, and for nine years he believed he had found his answer there, until the explanations crumbled under his own scrutiny. He searched in worldly success, climbing the ladder of his profession. He searched in pleasure. None of it worked. The hunger remained.

What makes him so compelling as a guide through all of this is that he refuses to flatter himself. Many people who write the story of their lives quietly cast themselves as the hero, the wronged party, the misunderstood genius. He does the opposite. He examines his own motives with a surgeon’s coldness and a penitent’s grief. When he confesses his sins, he does not reach for the dramatic crimes that might make him seem interesting. Instead he lingers, famously and at length, over a trivial childhood theft — the stealing of some pears from a neighbor’s tree, fruit he did not even want and threw away — because he is fascinated and appalled by the fact that he did it purely for the thrill of doing something forbidden. He does wrong for the sake of doing wrong. And in probing that small, almost laughable episode, he uncovers something genuinely disturbing about the human will, something most of us prefer not to look at: that we are sometimes drawn to harm and chaos not for any benefit they bring us, but for their own sake. Few writers before or since have stared so unblinkingly into that darkness.

It is worth knowing, too, that this was not written by a young man in the heat of his struggles, but by a mature one looking back. By the time he composed these pages he had already passed through his great transformation and become a bishop, a leader of his community, a public figure. He is writing about his younger self from a place of relative peace, which gives the book its remarkable double vision. We hear the voice of the man who lived through these things and the voice of the man who now understands them, and the two voices weave together into something richer than ordinary memoir. He is not just telling you what happened. He is telling you what it meant, and admitting, often, that he still does not fully understand it himself.

This book is not a novel, and it does not move in a straight line the way a modern story might. To enjoy it fully, it helps to know something of its unusual shape, so that you do not expect one thing and receive another. Broadly speaking, it divides into two great movements.

The first and longer movement is the story of his life, told from infancy up to the great turning point of his adulthood and a little beyond. This is the part most readers find immediately gripping. He begins, astonishingly, with reflections on his own babyhood — what can be known of it, what it reveals about human nature even in its first helpless days — and moves forward through his schooling, his adolescence, his rebellions, his friendships, his intellectual wanderings, and his slow, circling approach toward the change that would define everything. This portion of the book contains some of the most vivid scenes in ancient literature: the death of a beloved friend that nearly destroys him with grief, the agonizing pull between his old life and a new one he could see but could not yet reach, and the famous moment in a garden in Milan when everything finally breaks open. Even those who know nothing else about this work often know that garden scene, and when you arrive at it, you will understand why. It is one of the most precisely observed accounts of a human being on the edge of decisive change ever set down.

Woven all through this first movement is the towering presence of his mother. Her devotion to him, her tears, her prayers, her stubborn refusal to give up on him even when he had given up on himself, form one of the most moving relationships in the book. She follows him across the sea. She worries. She hopes. She believes, against all the evidence, that her wayward son will find his way. And the portrait he paints of her — loving but not sentimental, honest about her flaws as well as her virtues — is one of the great depictions of a parent in all of literature. The scene of their final conversation together, near the end of his account of his early life, is so tender and so charged that readers have wept over it for centuries.

The second movement is different in character, and this is where some readers feel the ground shift beneath them. Having told the story of his life, he turns to a series of profound meditations — on memory, on time, on the act of creation itself. Here the book stops being a story and becomes something closer to philosophy and prayer combined. He asks what memory actually is, how it is possible that we carry within us a vast inner world of images and ideas and feelings, where this enormous storehouse is kept, and what it tells us about the soul. He asks what time is — a question that sounds simple until you try to answer it, at which point it dissolves into paradox. His reflections on time are still discussed by philosophers today, because he saw with stunning clarity how strange it is that the past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist, and the present has no duration, and yet we live entirely in time and could not think a single thought without it.

I want to be honest with you about this second movement, because knowing what to expect will greatly improve your experience. Some readers, having been swept along by the drama of the life story, are surprised when the narrative gives way to abstract reflection. They wonder whether the book has wandered off course. It has not. Understand that for the author, the story of his life and these deep questions are not two separate subjects. They are the same subject. His whole point is that you cannot understand a human life — your own included — without understanding memory, because we are made of memory; without understanding time, because we are creatures of time, always slipping from what we were toward what we will be; and without understanding where everything came from, because the question of our origin is bound up with the question of our purpose. The life story raises the questions. The meditations pursue them. If the early chapters show you a man searching, the later ones show you what he found when he finally turned his attention to the deepest things.

So I would offer this practical advice: do not rush, and do not feel you must grasp every sentence on first reading. This is a book to live with rather than to consume. Some passages will strike you immediately, with the force of recognition — you will think, that is exactly how it feels, and I never knew anyone else had noticed it. Other passages will pass you by on first encounter and reveal themselves only later, perhaps on a second reading years from now, when life has prepared you to understand them. That is the nature of a great book. It grows with you.

You should also know that the entire work is addressed not to the reader but to God. This is one of its most distinctive and, at first, most disorienting features. The author is not narrating his life to us; he is speaking to the divine, and we are permitted to overhear. This is why the book carries the title it does — for the word at its heart means not only the admission of wrongdoing, as we usually understand confession today, but also the act of giving praise and bearing witness to the truth. He is confessing his sins, yes, but he is equally confessing his faith, confessing his wonder, confessing his gratitude. The whole book is an extended conversation with a presence he addresses directly and intimately, sometimes pleading, sometimes questioning, sometimes overcome with awe. Once you settle into this unusual mode of address, you will find it does something remarkable: it strips away the performance that usually creeps into autobiography. A man writing for an audience tends to manage his image. A man speaking to the One he believes already knows everything about him has no reason to pretend. That is the source of the book’s almost unbearable honesty.