ABSTRACT
Relatively innocent readers of The Confessions may be forgiven for assuming it is the first self-conscious autobiography ever written. It is plausible, after all, that this text generated "the introspective conscience of the Wes, and the title, "Confessions," would encourage us to think that Augustine set the trend in self-exposure. There is a serious issue about the genre of The Confessions at a time when the significance of genre for the evaluation of a literary work has become paramount. That The Confessions presents Augustine's life as a kind of paradigm of all human life is a thesis advanced in two forms in recent scholarship. More or less contemporary with Augustine we have the so-called autobiographical poems of Gregory Nazianzen. The Neoplatonic Augustine had defended free will and argued against moral determinism. Augustine's points away from himself to God, but to do that he has to demonstrate how God has led him to appreciate the fact that true knowledge is ignorance.
