§ 01 · Introduction
Augustine wrote the Confessions in his early forties, a few years after becoming bishop of Hippo in North Africa. It is not a memoir in the modern sense. Every sentence is addressed to God, so the reader overhears a man giving an account of himself — his boyhood in Thagaste, his ambitions in Carthage and Rome, nine years inside the Manichaean sect, his mother Monica's persistence, and the afternoon in a Milan garden when a child's voice singing "take up and read" sent him to Romans 13 and ended the argument he had been having with himself.
The first nine books tell that story. Book Ten turns inward to ask what memory is and how God can be found in it. Books Eleven through Thirteen leave biography behind entirely and read the opening of Genesis, with the famous puzzle about time ("What then is time? If no one asks me, I know") along the way. Readers who stop at Book Nine miss the point Augustine was making: the story of a life only makes sense once you understand the One it was addressed to.
Pusey's nineteenth-century English keeps the cadence of the Latin — long, breathing sentences full of scripture. Read it slowly and aloud where you can.