Augustine’s Confessions as Autobiography

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’.