ABSTRACT
Augustine was cecumenical bishop of Hippo, in North Africa, from 396 to his death in 430. When, in his forties (he was born in 354), he launched his Confessiones into the world, nearly fifteen years had passed since the summer of 386 in which he had taken the crucial turn in his life that made his autobiography of lasting interest. Whatever may have peen the actual circumstances in which his " conversion" took place, that Augustine then passed through an hour in which he felt himself carried beyond all natural conditions, and endowed with the strength and faith to carry out his highest aspiration-this, however problematic the nature of the spiritual change, remains as the unquestionable reality of a moral and religious experience that might give a man a metaphysical consciousness of his true sel£ The heightened awareness of the self from which his" Confessions" proceeded grew out of that experience.
