Carthage—Rome—Milan

In the autobiographical narrative of Confessions 3 to 9, Augustine stages his early years in the urban spaces of Carthage, Rome, and Milan, which are among the most important cities of the late antique world. Each of these cities is assigned the role of a transit point on the way to moral and theological purification, associated with events and experiences that are subsequently assigned a particular significance which is transferred onto the place. Augustine’s Bildungsroman is thus also a kind of travel novel in a landscape defined by emotions and intellectual achievements; that is, in a psychogeography that leads ever further into the ‘inner person’, and reveals what is often interpreted in the history of philosophy as the discovery of subjectivity and interiority. Augustine’s narrative thus produces a series of imaginary or—according to Henri Lefebvre—‘abstract spaces’ which overlay, but do not erase, the ‘absolute’ or ‘real space’.