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Aug 23, 1960 | ISBN 9780385029551 Buy
Jan 26, 2011 | ISBN 9780307785909 Buy
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Available from:
Aug 23, 1960 | ISBN 9780385029551
Jan 26, 2011 | ISBN 9780307785909
Heartfelt, incisive, and timeless, The Confessions of Saint Augustine has captivated readers for more than fifteen hundred years. Retelling the story of his long struggle with faith and ultimate conversion — the first such spiritual memoir ever recorded — Saint Augustine traces a story of sin, regret, and redemption that is both deeply personal and, at the same time, universal.Starting with his early life, education, and youthful indiscretions, and following his ascent to influence as a teacher of rhetoric in Hippo, Rome, and Milan, Augustine is brutally honest about his proud and amibitious youth. In time, his early loves grow cold and the luster of wordly success fades, leaving him filled with a sense of inner absence, until a movement toward Christian faith takes hold, eventually leading to conversion and the flourishing of a new life. Philosophically and theologically brilliant, sincere in its feeling, and both grounded in history and strikingly contemporary in its resonance, The Confessions of Saint Augustine is a timeless classic that will persist as long as humanity continues to long for meaning in life and peace of soul.
"The reader who has never met Augus-tine before ought to go first of all to the Confessions," reflected the Trappist monk and scholar Thomas Merton. "Augustine lived the theology that he wrote. . . . He experienced the reality of Christ living in his own soul." Saint Augustine, the celebrated theologian who served as Bishop of Hippo from a.d. 396 until his death in a.d. 430, is widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers in the Western world. Written in the form of a long prayer addressed directly to God, Augustine’s Confessions, the remarkable chronicle of his conversion to Christianity, endures as the greatest spiritual autobiography of all time. "Augustine possessed a strong, capacious, argumentative mind," wrote Edward Gibbon. "He boldly sounded the dark abyss of grace, predestination, free-will, and original sin." And the eminent historian Jaroslav Pelikan remarked: "There has, quite literally, been no century of the sixteen centuries since the conversion of Augustine in which he has not been a major intellectual, spiri-tual, and cultural force."
Saint Augustine was one of those towering figures who so dominated his age that the age itself bears his name. The Age of Augustine was a time of transition, and Augustine was a genius of such stature that, according to… More about St. Augustine
"In plain words–if you can accept them as plain–Christianity is the life and death and resurrection of Christ going on day after day in the souls of individual men and in the heart of society. It is this Christ-life, this incorporation into the Body of Christ, this union with His death and resurrection as a matter of conscious experience, that St. Augustine wrote of in his Confessions."–Thomas Merton
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