ABSTRACT
The Confessions by St Augustine of Hippo is one of the great books of Western culture. Written in a North African province of a fading Roman Empire at the end of the fourth century, it still is easily found in bookshops of the twenty-first century. Its status as a classic is ensured by the massive influence of its author on the history of philosophy and theology, and by the veneration it commands as a devotional work within the Western Christian tradition. Perhaps of greatest importance to twenty-first-century readers, however, is its reputation as the first autobiography.1
