Книга: The Confessions of Saint Augustine (Classic Reprint)

INTRODUCTION . THE Confessions of St. Augustine are the first autobiography, and they have this to distinguish them from all other autobiographiesJ-hat they are-addressed directly God. Rousseau's unburdening of himself is the last, most effectual manifestation of that nervous, defiant consciousness of other people which haunted him all his life. He felt that all the men and women whom he passed on his way through the world were at watch upon him, and mostly with no very favourable intentions. The exasperation of all those eyes fixed upon him, the absorbing, the protesting self-consciousness which they called forth in him, drove him, in spite of himself, to set about explaining himself to other people, to the world in general. His anxiety to explain, not to justify, hitnself was after all a kind of cowardice before his own conscience. He felt the silent voices within him too acutely to keep silence. Cellini wrote his autobiography because heTable of Contents CONTENTS Introduction ? BOOK I Confessions of the greatness and unsearchableness of God, of God's mercies in infancy and boyhood, and human wilfulness of his own sins of idleness, abuse of his studies, and of God's gifts up to his fifteenth year BOOK II Object of these Confessions Further ills of idleness developed in his sixteenth year Evils of ill society, PAGE IX which betrayed him into theft 28 BOOK Ill His residence at Carthage fro111 his seventeenth to his nineteenth year Source of his disorders Love of shows Advance in studies, and love of wisdom Distaste for Scripture Led astray to the Manichreans Refutation of some of their tenets Grief of his mother Monnica at his heresy, and prayers for his conversion Her VISIon from God, and answer through a Bishop 43 · Vi CONTENTS BOOK IV Augustine's life from nineteen to eight-and-tw