Autobiography and Perspective in the Confessions of St. Augustine

Abstract

A FTER sixteen hundred years, the literary power of St. Augustine's Confessions remains undisputed, despite the fact that few readers today can assent to the Christian doctrine which Augustine himself considered to be at the heart of his autobiography. As in the case of that other great practitioner of Christian autobiography, Dante, modern critics who deal with St. Augustine have been confronted with an author for whom literary and theological structures seem inextricably intertwined. Until relatively recently, theology tended to dominate interpretation of Augustine's text. The development of literary criticism as a profession (perhaps theological in its own way) has been accompanied by a shift in emphasis. As with Dante, the predominant impulse among modern critics has been to divide and conquer, to set aside the problem of Christian content in favor of a formal analysis on historical or philological grounds. In Georg Misch's expansive History of Autobiography, for example, Augustine is placed within a literary tradition which, as Misch's title indicates, is exclusively autobiographical. By choosing his sources on the basis of their membership within a literary genre rather than on their qualifications as specifically Christian texts, Misch appears to have freed himself from theological constraints. But Misch's putatively nondogmatic work remains very much bound to a philosophical, though not overtly religious, set of assumptions. The words history and autobiography are freighted with meaning, and Misch's assessment of