ABSTRACT
The Confessions is a work that constantly intertwines the first and second persons. Its first words are ‘Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise’: we are immediately in the middle of a dialogue. I, Augustine, am calling upon you, God. Here, moreover, I, Augustine, speak as part of ‘we’, all humans: ‘we humans, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you – we who carry our mortality about with us’. There are very few passages in which the ‘I’ does not defer to ‘your’ presence; in which the ‘you’ is not the measure, the arbiter, the continual point of reference. The effect is intense, and intensely conversational. The conversation is not one-sided: God is so vividly imagined that he is constantly present in the text. Moreover, he is present in the words of his scriptures. One of the expository arcs of the Confessions is that of Augustine learning how to hear God in scripture.
