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At its most basic, an autobiography is the story of a person's life, written by that

person. It is sometimes said that Augustine invented the modern autobiography.

Augustine did not simply establish a pattern; he produced a work whose influence

was so pervasive that all later autobiographers were affected by it, either positively

or negatively. (The most famous example of a reaction against Augustine's

Confessions appears in the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the FrenchRomantic writer and philosopher.) However, Augustine's Confessions was certainly

not the first work of autobiography in Western literature. Numerous Classical

authors had produced stories of their own lives, and Augustine also had specifically

Christian examples to draw on, such as the passion narratives of martyred saints

like Perpetua.

However, Augustine's autobiography is unique in several ways. The Confessions is

not a straightforward account of the events of Augustine's life. In fact, Augustine

frequently leaves out events that readers may consider important. The death of his

father, for example, is mentioned only in passing, and large portions of his life aresimply glossed over. On the other hand, Augustine gives special emphasis to

seemingly small events, such as the theft of pears. In telling the story of his life,

Augustine selects only those events that illustrate his spiritual development;

everything else is pushed into the background. In focusing so tightly on his spiritual

life, Augustine also trains his acute powers of observation on his own psychology.

The intensely personal nature of Augustine's self-portrait is one of the aspects that

have made it so appealing over the centuries. In the Confessions, Augustine is a fully

rounded person: candid, acerbic, passionate, ambitious, restlessly intellectual,

devoted to his friends, subject to flaws of pride and excess. Augustine's voice is

uniquely identifiable, and it gives readers a genuine feel for his personality and

character. Readers see Augustine not only from the outside, but from the inside.

By its nature, autobiography is a tricky genre. Because autobiography has an

element of history, readers expect some measure of historical accuracy from the

author. But because autobiography is also a form of literature, it shares some of the

elements of fiction: a story arc, specific events that move the story, and details of

style and narrative that affect your interpretation. Readers, therefore, may wonder

how much of an autobiography is true. This question does not necessarily imply

deliberate deception on the part of the author; human memory is naturally selective,

and your perceptions of your own life are shaped by your experiences. Throughout

the Confessions, readers are constantly confronted with two Augustines: the young

Augustine struggling along his spiritual path, and the older Augustine, the narrator,who looks back over this path and finds that it had a direction he was unable to

recognize at the time.

By being selective about the events he chooses in order to illustrate his life,

Augustine is giving a deliberate shape to his narrative, a shape that the messy events

of life generally do not possess. As an author, he is aware of the tricks that memory

can play; he devotes much attention to examining how memory works.

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Furthermore, Augustine gives his story a distinct arc, as event builds upon event in

Augustine's spiritual struggle. Augustine also uses clear literary echoes to lend

meaning to his story. He repeatedly compares himself to the Prodigal Son, the

wandering sinner returning home, and when he abandons Monica at Carthage, his

story parallels that of another famous wanderer, Aeneas. The scholar Pierre

Courcelle, examining the Confessions, identified literary parallels for almost everypart of Augustine's story. But does that mean the story is fictional?

In one sense, to ask whether the Confessions are empirically true is to ask the wrong

question. You have only the story as Augustine tells it, and ultimately, you must

judge it on its own merits. The game of "hunt the author" can quickly become an

exercise in absurdity. Scholars have spent considerable time and energy, for

example, debating what exactly happened to Augustine in his garden at Milan: What

could a child from that period of history have said, in the course of a game or a

conversation, that Augustine would have misheard or interpreted as "Take and

read"? Such questions may be entertaining, but they do not shed much light on themeaning of the Confessions, either for Augustine as writer or for his readers. As

Augustine's own interpretations of Christian scripture demonstrate, he was always

looking for the meanings hidden under the surface of a text, and he believed that

even seemingly simple texts could support multiple interpretations. For Augustine,

historical truth and symbolic significance were not mutually exclusive. If you view

the Confessions as both autobiography and literary artwork, you can open up your

understanding of it in ways that the Confessions itself invites.