ABSTRACT
A work of art with the religious and universal human appeal of Augustine's autobiography exists for all time. Each new century looks upon it with different eyes and discovers new aspects of it; it is able to distribute energy and yet retain its energy in its unique nature; thus it has a share in the existence of something eternal in human life. This sort, however, of eternal existence is in no way supratemporal; but it has a dynamic character. A man's unique creative work, through its acceptance in various epochs and its influence over the outlook then prevailing, may become the determining element in the development of a definite type of intellectual creation. Thus Augustine's Confessions passed into their age-long influence. They are one of the few books that have been widely read in every period in which there was intellectual life in the Western world; the phraseology of the inner life has been influenced down to our own day by Augustine. 1 He himself bore witness at the end of his life to the effect his autobiography had had on his contemporaries, and ascribed to all his other writings, extraordinary as their influence had been, less impressiveness than to that one work. “Not one of my works has been read more widely or with more pleasure than the books of my Confessions.” * And in the decades that immediately followed that work it already found literary imitations; their production continued among the new nations, ultimately extending beyond the religious field and influencing the development of records of the inner life in profane literature. The continuity of the production of autobiographies was largely due to the effect of that one work.
