Confessions of St. Augustine of Hippo
SKU: 3123
ISBN: 9781505126860
Of all the autobiographies ever written by mere mortals, Confessions by Saint Augustine of Hippo is the greatest. In this masterpiece, you will find a doctor of the Church longing for the true Doctor of the soul, Christ.
"What a gorgeous volume! The binding is excellent, the cover is beautiful and feels great in the hand, and the thick paper and clear typesetting make it a joy to read. Like St. Augustine himself, Dr. Esolen is intimately familiar with Sacred Scripture and the classical tradition, and he helps the reader enter into St. Augustine’s world through his meticulous translation and helpful explanatory notes. This book is worth it for the footnotes alone—they make all the difference in understanding many of St. Augustine’s images, references, and allusions!"
Peter Tapsak
Program Director, Institute of Catholic Culture
A Profound Journey into the Soul's Quest
A Profound Spiritual Odyssey
Meticulous Translation
Transformational Reading Experience
“For you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
—Saint Augustine of Hippo
Of all the autobiographies ever written by mere mortals, Confessions by Saint Augustine of Hippo is the greatest. In this masterpiece, you will find a doctor of the Church longing for the true Doctor of the soul, Christ. Taking us from Augustine’s roots in Africa to his encounters with his spiritual father Saint Ambrose in Milan, from his battle against his concupiscence to his famed conversion, Confessions is itself a veritable pilgrimage to the threshold of the new Jerusalem. Indeed, its end is not biography but a breathtaking meditation on time and memory, on the human soul and the material world, and on the creative and redemptive power of God himself.
In Dr. Anthony Esolen’s new translation, the esteemed translator and author seeks to retain and reveal the figurative by hewing as closely as possible to the literal, both in the significance of individual words and in the manner of the author’s expression. Confessions is a work of literary art, “one of the most stupendous ever wrought,” Esolen says, immensely rich in insights and intricate in its returning, again and again, to the questions of a soul in search of truth. The Lord is ready to answer if we will only seek, and ask, and knock.
Confessions is like no other book you will ever read. According to Dr. Esolen, “The Confessions is one continued and coherent prayer, a profound profession of faith, and a plea for more, ever more wisdom, ever more love. It is artistic in its whole conception, in its parts and their arrangement down to the merest sentence. It is closer to the Gothic cathedrals that would grace Europe eight hundred years later than to anything that you or I might write about ourselves and our lives.”
In Confessions, the reader does more than encounter Augustine, the boy, the promising youth, the sinner, the teacher, the intellectual wanderer, the hesitant catechumen, and the Christian man set free at last. Through this book, we enter into our own spiritual journeys, as we cry out to the living God in the depths of our hearts, “Let me know you, O Lord, who know me; let me know you even as I am known.”