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Augustine's Confessions

In Our Time: Philosophy

CHAPTER

How Did Augustine Decide to Write the Confessions?

Some have suggested it might have been an exercise in self-justification. But the way I see it is that that doesn't really explain how he writes the confessions. He was writing it as a text which was intended to have the same effect on his audience as the books that he was reading when he converted. So he wants to transform his readers' lives in the way in which his own life was converted. And we have to ask, why does he spend so much time on giving us all that detail?

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