Augustine's ‘Confessions'
A Critical Guide

Represents the best of contemporary scholarship on Augustine's Confessions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and offers new insights into the text.

Thomas Williams (Edited by)

9781316511107, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 January 2026

258 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.9 cm, 0.52 kg

Augustine's Confessions, written between AD 394 and 400, is an autobiographical work which outlines his youth and his conversion to Christianity. It is one of the great texts of Late Antiquity, the first Western Christian autobiography ever written, and it retains its fascination for philosophers, theologians, historians, and scholars of religious studies today. This Critical Guide engages with Augustine's creative appropriation of the work of his predecessors in theology generally, in metaphysics, and in philosophy as therapy for the soul, and reframes a much discussed - but still poorly understood - passage from the Confessions with respect to recent philosophy. The volume represents the best of contemporary scholarship on Augustine's Confessions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and builds on existing scholarship to develop new insights, explore underappreciated themes, and situate Augustine in the thought of his own day as well as ours.

Introduction Thomas Williams
1. Theological predecessors to the confessions of Augustine Mark Edwards
2. Trinitarian metaphysics in the Confessions: Marius Victorinus and the Neoplatonic triad 'being, life, mind' Sarah Byers
3. Augustine's therapy of emotions: the Confessions as a Christian guide to care for one's soul Charlotte Köckert
4. Augustine's Confessions and earlier exegesis Bronwen Neil
5. Reading Augustine reading Scripture in the Confessions Michael Cameron
6. Augustine on the tasks of reading Scripture Blake D. Dutton
7. The sacramental structure and imagination of Augustine's Confessions Elizabeth Klein
8. How great a debtor: grace and providence in Augustine's Confessions Thomas Williams
9. Augustine's second-personal account of the virtues Andrew Pinsent
10. The nobility of sight in the Confessions Gerald Boersma
11. First words: Confessions 1.8.13 and the inner life of language James Wetzel
12. Augustine on time, eternity, and temporal experience Tamer Nawar
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy: Ancient, to c 500 [HPCA]