Confessions of Saint Augustine: Where the Restless Heart Finds Its Rest The Complete Confessions

Written in the last years of the fourth century, the Confessions of Saint Augustine stands alone in the literature of the ancient world. It is autobiography, prayer, philosophy, and Scripture commentary woven into a single unbroken address to God, the most intimate book to survive from the patristic age.

Augustine was born in 354 in North Africa. He was brilliant, restless, and for many years unable to give himself to the God his mother Monica prayed he would find. He passed through the Manichean sect, the schools of rhetoric, the city of Rome, and the court of Milan before a voice in a garden in 386 reached him where all argument had failed. He was baptised the following Easter by Ambrose, bishop of Milan.

The first nine of the thirteen books trace that journey in his own voice, addressed directly to God. The tenth turns inward to analyse memory, the hidden archive of the self. The eleventh meditates on time, and on the eternity that contains it. The final two read the opening verses of Genesis as the pattern of all creation and all renewal.

This Merrick Press edition presents the complete thirteen books in the translation of Edward Bouverie Pusey, first published in 1838. Pusey was a patristic scholar of the first rank; his version has shaped the English reception of the Confessions for nearly two centuries. No word has been abridged, paraphrased, or modernised. An editorial introduction and a translator's note accompany the text.