The Confessions of St. Augustine is a portrait of the inner world of Augustine of Hippo. The author was the bishop of Hippo in Roman Africa for 35 years, during the time of the decline of Roman civilization on that continent. Augustine is considered one of the important Fathers of the Church in the West, and he helped form Christian theology in the early history of the church. In his Confessions, Augustine shows the depth of his religious belief and writes extensively about his own inner turmoil about such events in his life as the time when he was a child and stole pears from a neighbors tree, a crime that haunted him for the rest of his life. Augustine borrowed heavily from Plato. He agreed with Plato about the status of transcendent Ideas, but he did so in an altered form. Augustine agreed that the Ideas constituted the stable and unchangeable forms of all things and provided a solid basis for human knowledge, but he noted that Plato lacked an adequate doctrine of creation. He argued that Plato's metaphysical conception could be fulfilled by the Judaeo-Christian revelation of the supreme Creator. Augustine thus identified Plato's Ideas with the collective expression of God's Word, the Logos, and saw all archetypes as being contained within and expressing of the being of Christ.
His Confessions is an important work detailing the inner life and of the religious man. It is also a book that links the sinner with redemption, for Augustine presents himself as a great sinner until the age of 32 when he is convinced of the truth of Christian teachings and changes his life. The book is thus part biography and part statement of philosophy.
Peter Brown notes the biographical element and the fact that the work is not an autobiography in the modern sense. However, he also finds that the autobiographical element in a work from the Late Roman era is what sets the book apart from the intellectual tradition to which Augustine b...