AUGUSTINE'S CONFESSIONS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The Confessions of St. Augustine still raises doubts about its generic classification. Some scholars, ignoring the last three books, consider the whole text as an autobiography with an additional philosophical appendix. Others take this work for a philosophical treatise with a disproportionately expanded autobiographical introduction. And there are also scholars who think that the Confessions represents an autonomous genre which they label "confessions" or "confessional literature". This article does not pretend to solve this long-standing issue; its aim is only to show that it is not necessary to challenge the classification of the Confessions as an autobiography on the basis of its particular use of facts from the author's life, combined with the prominence of philosophical reflection in it. Augustine uses autobiographical passages and philosophical reflections in the Confessions to construct his inner self, and by trying to understand himself he also tries to understand God. The resulting construction of Augustine's own personality thus represents a new way of understanding God and the redemptive effect of divine grace in human life. Autobiography and theology in the Confessions therefore go hand by hand, and to separate one from the other comes at the cost of misinterpreting the work as a whole.