ABSTRACT
The concept of God’s love for humanity is one of the text’s most important secondary ideas. In Confessions Augustine demonstrates how he comes to know God. His book is a narrative that relies on the concepts of conversion, ascent, Jesus Christ’s work, and pilgrimage; the movement from sin to righteousness, sickness to health, and ignorance to knowledge, requires humility and grace, both of which should be understood as divine interventions into human life. Two ideas about human action, love and admonition, were particularly important to Augustine. Augustine’s understanding of Christ, or Christology, has often been overlooked in studies of Confessions. The person of Christ plays a crucial role in Augustine’s account of the relationship between God and humanity. Scholarship over Augustine’s Christology has been heavily influenced by the leading German philosopher Martin Heidegger* and in particular his 1921 lectures on Confessions.
