I'm reading this for our Catholic women's book club ... it's the November selection so if I begin now I should finish on time.

I have tried reading this book twice before and always gotten bogged down in Augustine's complaints about being beaten by his tutor. This time I am going to just skim or skip those complaints in the interest of seeing what I DO like about the book rather than letting road bumps throw me off track.

It's kind of ironic that Augustine is one of my earliest saint "friends" who I became attracted to after reading Restless Til We Rest in You, a wonderful daily meditation book focusing on his writing in digestible chunks. Now, I will go for the whole enchilada!

UPDATE 1
I'm actually benefiting quite a bit from having read Restless Flame, Louis De Wohl's bio of St. Augustine. Augustine intersperses his life story with asides to God, expressions of his innermost feelings and spiritual understanding as it were. This helps me pick out the source material for his life, as seen in the context of his Christian understanding.

UPDATE 2
Picked it back up because it is time for our book club to discuss Books V - IX. I am enjoying the middle of the book much more than the first part, which is a relief. I have to say that I can see why people who aren't Catholic, or even Christian, are drawn to this book. Augustine works his formidable brain to a nubbin examining what God must be like and how evil can exist if God is all good.

This is a book that any thoughtful searcher can relate to. It is also the book that makes me realize just how lazy those people are who toss out, "Can't believe in God because evil exists" and leave it at that after a cursory examination of the subject. It is clear that Augustine wanted the truth and nothing but the Truth, as it were.

Restless seekers of complete truth find a kindred soul here. People who want the truth dropped in their laps are shown up as slackers, whether back in Augustine's day or right here and now.

UPDATE 3
Picked it up again since we'll be discussing the final third of the book next week. I was not crazy about the first third and LOVED the second third ... now this last third seems completely different so far. And I'm not loving it. But I'm leaving the door open for Augustine to wow me since there is about 80 pages left to go.

FINAL
Thank the Lord (literally) that I am finally done. I enjoyed the middle third of the book but the first third was not that interesting to me and the final third was like trying to read metaphysics ... which, to be fair, was an interesting insight into how Augustine would puzzle his way through scripture and matters of God, but which I did not connect with that much.

Am I glad I read it? Not that much. But now I suppose I can say that I have.

Second reading was great. It only gets better. What a great heart he had for God, and what a great God who had his heart!

After reading the full 1100 pages of City of God, I picked up Confessions. Admittedly, this was a breath of fresh air, after reading a long winded, and at times arcane, tome on theology... Still, I decided to put down Confessions after reaching chapter 11. The book simply fails to impress me in any significant way. But before I explain why, let me briefly give a sketch of the book itself.

The word 'confession' can be interpreted in either of two ways: a confession of sins and a confession of faith. And actually, Augustine's Confessions is both at the same time. In the first 9 chapters of the book he explains how he lived his earlier life. The main aim is twofold: to explain how much he sinned and how he gradually steered towards becoming a true Christian. Basically, Augustine was too greedy for milk at his mother's teat; he stole apples because his friends would like him because of it; he believed in the Manichean doctrine of Good and Evil being the two guiding principles of the world; and he was obsessed with sexual intercourse.

Luckily, Augustine's mother Monica was a devout Christian who prayed to God almost continuously to show her son the true path of Good. When he went from Carthage - where he studied rhetoric and became a professional teacher (others would say sophist, or rather, a swindler) - to Rome his world gradually started to shift. He became more frustrated by his obsession with sex and he started to doubt the truth of the Manichean worldview (everthing is composed of Good and Evil) more and more. Now, when he started reading books on Neo-platonism, he became convinced, for the first time in his life, that God is not material but immaterial. This opened him up to the notion of the Christian God - who is, supposedly, a transcendent, immaterial, perfect Being - and finally convinced him of the falsity of Manichaeism.

After he went from Rome to Milan, and met the Milanise priest and saint to-be Ambrose, he started to delve ever deeper into Christianity. Augustine read the epistles of Paul and felt he became a true Christian. Yet, he also became more and more frustrated because now he had two 'wills' inside him. He really wanted to become a true Christian, if only he could stop thinking about/desiring sex. This cognitive dissonance leads to such a nervous breakdown that at some point he runs into a garden, falls to the ground and starts to weep. One can almost hear some modern-day movie music when reading this supposedly dramatic scene. After this epiphany, Augustine decides forever to leave sex alone, instantly doesn't desire it anymore and becomes a Christian.

At this moment in the autobiography - just when Augustine, his mother and his friends are on their way back to Africa (after years of living in Italy) - his devout mother Monica dies and the internal struggles are allowed one last piece in the stage play of Augustine's life. He wants to weep for his mother but he doesn't want to allow it - in the end he still weeps. End of story.

After this, the 9 chapters of the book are over. 4 chapters still remain: chapter 10 is an introspective evaluation of sins and confessions - something like the theological and psychological principles of the first 9 chapters (his life). After this strange chapter, chapters 11-13 are analyses of Genesis. I haven't read these chapters, since I have had enough theology after recently struggling through his immense City of God. I read some summaries on internet and it seems to be the exact same method: reading the Bible (Genesis in this case) and then allegorically interpreting the words to explain theological propositions. Thanks, but no thanks.

So what to think of Confessions? As a historical document it is interesting. Even though Augustine's goal is to describe his life, one learns a lot about the contemporary world he lived in. The importance of stage plays in peoples lives; the workings of the Roman state; the means of travel; the relationships between different classes and sexes; etc. In this regard, Confessions has satisfied me. But the story itself I find rather pitiful and empty. We witness a person grovelling before some sky-daddy, and resenting himself because of his desires. It cannot really become more pitiful than this. Yet I do recognize some strange quirks in Augustine - a fact that rather makes me uncomfortable. Especially his need for intellectual closure and the high importance he places on the mind, as opposed to the body (meant in a metaphorical way - there's such a thing as dualism); at the same time feeling intense bodily desires for all things material; and the cognitive dissonance (i.e. stress) that results from this inner struggle. All this sounds too familiar for my taste - but then again, don't most humans feel this way?

Anyway, I did like the book but I didn't find it really that interesting. At least it's much shorter, and easier to digest, than his 'magnum opus' City of God.

Read this one for class and I can’t stand this guy. He’s so lame and overly hard on himself. I promise you bruh no one cares that you stole some pears. The only cool people in the book are the Wreckers, “a title of ferocious devilry which the fashionable set chose for themselves”. He doesn’t really say anything else except that he enjoyed spending time but they were a secret snare of the devil. Honestly I’d much rather read their book.

Note, Oct. 20, 2024: I've just edited one sentence below to incorporate a point made by another reader who commented.

As a first-semester college freshman needing an elective, I signed up for a speed-reading class. I never adopted any of the techniques the course touted, although I got an A in it; but the classroom had a paperback rack with various donated books we could practice on, and this was one I read. It turned out to be the most lasting educational benefit of the class, and did make a genuine intellectual impression on me. (Other than Lightfoot's translation of the Apostolic Fathers, which I read a few years later, this is the only reading in Patristics that I've ever done.)

Augustine (354-430 A.D.) was, of course, one of the major theologians in Christian history, and probably the most influential of the Latin Fathers, at least on the development of the church in the West. This is far from his only writing, and not his most important one; most scholars would give that accolade to The City Of God (which is on my to-read shelf). These two, though, are probably the two most widely read of his works. This one is not extremely long (a bit over 300 pages), and is divided into 13 “books,” each divided in turn into short, numbered chapters with numbered paragraphs. (The chapter numbers were added to the early printed editions of the 1400s and 1500s, and the paragraph numbers in the 17th century.) As the title implies, it's partially autobiographical; the first nine books telling the story of his early life, leading up to his Christian conversion at the age of 31, and continuing through his mother Monica's death a couple of years later, in 388. (By the time he wrote, he had already entered the priesthood and become a bishop, but this book doesn't continue his story that far.) Rather than being autobiographical, the last four books are mostly theological reflections, and so seem somewhat disconnected from the preceding nine.

Of course, I read this in English translation, but I no longer remember anything about the edition or the translator. (The copy I'm referring to now is of the 1991 translation by British scholar Henry Chadwick, a well-recognized authority on Augustine, published by Oxford Univ. Press. Besides a short bibliographical note, brief list of important dates in Augustine's life, and a bit over four-page index, it has a 16-page introduction, which would have been very helpful to me if the copy I read had included it.) It should be admitted that at the time of my life that I read this, I wasn't at the optimum place for appreciating it, either intellectually or spiritually (I'd become a Christian in high school, but still had no serious conception of discipleship and wasn't very familiar with the Bible). Also, as an intellectual who both studied and subsequently taught in the schools of that day, where teens and young men learned rhetoric and philosophy, Augustine was well versed in the classical Latin literary style, which can often come across as dry and ponderous, especially in the later “books.” (Then too, a particularly odd stylistic feature here is that the whole book is ostensibly addressed to God, not the reader, as though it were a 300+-page prayer. Though his attitude no doubt was prayerful in places, the fact that he's obviously writing this to be read by others makes the strictly God-ward address seem somewhat dishonest and gimmicky.) Although I did engage with the text, there's a good deal that didn't brand itself on my memory. And the reactions to various parts of the book that I do remember were both positive and negative.

One important aspect of the book that struck me is that this is very much a window into the mindset of ancient Platonic philosophy in the Hellenistic world, and its influence in shaping post-apostolic Gentile Christianity in its early centuries. (As I was learning in my early college years, this is a strand of philosophy which has pre-Platonic roots in the thought of Pythagoras, and ultimately in the Hindu worldview of the sages of India, with whom Pythagoras studied as a young man.) This was basically a worldview that glorified the non-corporeal (“spiritual”) and disparaged the physical world and the body. It reached its most extreme form in the Gnostic and Manichean heresies of Augustine's time (though these had precursors already in New Testament times, which Paul and other NT writers warn against), with the idea that the physical world is evil and not of Divine origin at all, and that salvation consists of the soul ridding itself of the evil body. As Augustine frankly discusses here, he was a committed Manichean as a young man; and he explains the reasoning and influences that led him eventually to reject that system, and to embrace Christianity with its belief in God as creator of the world and of Christ as truly incarnate in a human body. But despite his conversion, he didn't wholly jettison all of his Manichean attitudes. In one revealing passage here (chapter 31, paragraph 44 in Book 10), which had me rolling my eyes big-time, he speaks of God teaching him that food should only be taken like medicine, in the quantity just necessary for the sustenance of the body, which is always less than the quantity which would actually give “dangerous” pleasure in eating, which he seriously speaks of as “an insidious trap of uncontrolled desire,”and which he speaks of as a daily struggle against temptation. The contrast of this attitude with Scripture texts like Ecclesiastes 9:7 (“Go, eat your food with gladness....”) couldn't be more marked; we see here a glorification of asceticism that would express itself in things like monasticism, and the whole tradition of the “if you enjoy it, it's a sin!” school of pseudo-spirituality. (Augustine himself would become the founder of a monastic order, the Augustinians.) We can also see Platonic and Manichean roots for the penchant he displays here in a number of places for adopting allegorical interpretations of the Bible rather than straightforward readings of the text.

Despite his theoretical deploring of bodily impulses, Augustine is also frank (though never titillating) in his admission that, in his teens, he indulged in quite a bit of promiscuous sex. At the age of 17, he settled down to faithful cohabitation with a lower-class “concubine” (whom he never names, which struck me at the time I read this as sort of dehumanizing; but it's been credibly, and more charitably, suggested that suppressing her name was actually simply a way of protecting her reputation from disrespect), with whom he lived for about 13 years. (She bore him a son, Adeodatus, though sadly the boy died in his teens.) The year before his conversion, he dumped her in order to get engaged to an upper-class woman who could provide a dowry –though that marriage never took place, since he subsequently broke the engagement when he decided to enter the priesthood. (He kept custody of his son, though it's not explicit in the book whether or not that arrangement was what the boy's mother wanted.) Even granting that the long illicit union wasn't based on love (at least on his part), and that he was not yet at that time a Christian, his treatment of his partner impressed me then, and still does, as shabby. He deplores his own behavior in indulging in unmarried sex, but he never evinces much feeling of guilt about unkindness to a fellow human; and I'm inclined to see that blind spot as also related to his Manichean attitudes.

On a more positive note, a major take-away from this book was the insight into the nature of eternity: that God, as the eternal creator, created time itself along with the universe, but Himself exists outside of time, and experiences all time as something like an infinite, omniconscious present, rather than sequentially, the way that we do. As I've recently learned, this idea wasn't original with Augustine; he derived it from Plato (a more constructive contribution than some of the latter's other ideas!). But nonetheless, it makes considerable sense to me and explains some Biblical concepts in a way that I've found immensely helpful. I'm glad to have read the book on that account, even if it hadn't been illuminating in other ways. (There are some other deep philosophical concepts dealt with here as well.)

Although Augustine is perhaps best known as the first Christian theologian to explicitly advocate the doctrine (with which I personally disagree vehemently) of unconditional double predestination of humans to either salvation or damnation, with no volition on their part, a view which later greatly influenced John Calvin, he doesn't go into that at all here (at least, not that I can recall). He describes his own conversion and the lead-up to it in considerable detail (and his was a fairly dramatic conversion experience); but as he tells it here, there's no indication that its climax was anything other than a voluntary turning to God through Christ.

In the undertaking of reading The Confessions of St. Augustine, I discovered quickly that it was an auspicious text. St. Augustine’s reflection on his battle rejecting the flashy attractions of the world and embrace the Catholic faith provides a paradigm to many of us in the POVID microcosm who struggle with this dilemma on a quotidian basis.

Utilizing numerous scriptural references and detailed recollections, Saint Augustine recants the story of his struggle to accept the Catholic faith and reject his desires (bordering on hedonism). Generally the writing is without frivolous accentation---and to my delight---St. Augustine’s humor peeps through at times. Confessions encourages the government of life via the mind of a Saint.

"The decayed parts of you will receive a new flowering, and all your sicknesses will be healed."
(Matt. 4: 23; Ps. 102: 3).

His classic prayer of Grant me chastity and continence, but please not yet illustrates a struggle familiar to us who desires such that does not enhance the intellect. When it was presented as a question---what God was doing before He made heaven and earth – “He was preparing hell for people who ask questions too deep for them” caused laughter.

Conclusively, this book is the journey of a man searching for inner peace that is given by God. After tasting many earthly pleasures, he finally accepts the Lord into his life and ultimately achieves the goal of becoming an ordained bishop. Exceptional read---penned by a Saint. I recommend this for all fans of Thomas Aquinas.
---
In susceptione legendi Confessionum S. Augustini, cito detexi textum illum auspicatum fuisse. S. Augustinus in meditatione de proelio suo ad amoenitates mundi respuendas et catholicam fidem amplectendam paradigma praebet multis nobis in Microcosmo POVID, qui cum hac dilemma cottidiano fundamento luctantur.

Multis scriptorum testimoniis et recordationibus accuratis adhibitis, sanctus Augustinus narrat de suo personali certamine suscipiendae fidei catholicae eiusque desideria quae hedonismo finitima sunt repudiant. Plerumque scriptura sine frivola accentu est, et in oblectatione mea S. Augustini humor interdum percurrit.

" Debiles partes vestrum novum florem recipietis, et omnes languores vestros sanabuntur."
(Matth. 4, 23; Ps. 102, 3).

Eius classica oratio: Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed nondum placet certamen nobis familiare illustratum, qui intellectum non auget. Cum praesentatus est tamquam quaestio - quid Deus faceret antequam caelum et terram faceret - Infernum parabat hominibus qui profundius interrogationes pro eis interrogabant. Risum effecit.

Prorsus hic liber est iter hominis pacem interiorem quaerentis, ut soli Deo detur. Cum multas voluptates terrenas gustasset, Dominum tandem in suam vitam accipit ac finem tandem consequitur ut in Episcopum ordinatum fiat. Eximia lectione exara- tione S. . Hoc commendo omnibus fans Thomae Aquinatis.

Memory, experience and expectations filtered through our now shade our reckoning for how we think we think about our past, present and future when all we really have is our grasp of the now through our being, actions and our will as he analogously states in reference to the mystery of the Trinity. Augustine tells his life as it unfolds in time and his beliefs on time, creation, memory and ‘on the nature of things’ while professing his faith through confessing as an individual who is in awe of the infinite as it has been revealed to him by living right and with right character inspired by the writings of Cicero while incorporating St. Paul into his belief system as a whole.

Augustine gave one of the most cognizant lessons I have ever seen on how women can stop being beaten by their husbands while not having to show up the next day with bruises that can’t be easily hidden. As St. Monica (Augustine’s mother) demonstrated by her words a wife should not engage their husband as the husband is going off and they should at the best do everything in their power to minimize the situation and wait till calmer times come before engaging verbally with their spouse. When one ignores the absurdity of a society or a religion that accepts beating spouses in any sense of the word, the advice is actually not bad because most disagreements between people aren’t really worth losing emotional capital over and one can profit from realizing that the person is just speaking emotional truths for themselves and there really is not room for disagreement. Even if a simpleton says something like ‘the dark web within the government purposely has spread Covid-19 in order to make Trump look bad and to propagate child molestation because nobody loves a quarantine more than a predator’ (that is actually a real Qanon argument), there is really nothing to say except ‘uh huh’, because irrefutable premises are nothing but pseudo-science and there is no data or experiment that I could design to show them wrong. Similarly, a spouse or acquaintance who is vulnerable to losing their temper and heading towards anger the best strategy is just to say ‘uh, huh’, because in the end they are speaking emotionally and it is part of their emotional truth and to everybody except that person emotions are not things so just let them spout their emotional truths because to them they are things and it is the truth. St. Monica gave good advice even for those who aren’t afraid of being beaten.

I would rank this book on the list of the greatest 100 books ever written. It reminds me of Proust’s ‘In search of Lost Time’ especially volume 6, The Fugitive. Augustine is way ahead of the curve with this book. Augustine overall gets something, that we are in a paradox that keeps us from understanding since our memories come from our previous experiences which were tainted by our expectations and that our now is all that we ever have. (Proust did exactly that with his oeuvre). Now, Augustine resolves his paradox by promising us an infinite existence after this life and makes God's love the thing in itself that provides our meaning, value and truth and believes Adam and Eve are real as well as a talking snake acting as a tempter and that a mediator is necessary between Man and God and that the 'Son of Man’ can suffer vicariously for your sin and that the Devil is real and will never have eternal life since the wages of sin is death and a lot of other such things.

I think all modern day Evangelicals who write their convoluted books would be well served to limit their arguments to what Augustine presented here in this book because Augustine has a consistency, coherence and a foundation that they seemed to have forgotten if one were only to look past some of the absurdities.

Take up and read, has there ever been a more apt affirmation? Regretfully, Augustine took the affirmation to be only in defense of one narrow system of beliefs, because he brought a depth to questions we still wrestle with such as what is my purpose, what should I do, how should I act and what should I believe in as well as what is time, memory, or why is there something rather than nothing and how does form come out of the formless and what was God doing before his will started to act through his thought and created a universe out of nothing, Augustine had an answer for that, ‘God was making hell for those who asked such questions’, at least he quoted an anonymous friend who jokingly said that.

Augustine's Confessions beckons us to venture into the depths of his life, witnessing the transformative path that led to his conversion. Within the initial nine books, he intertwines the tale of his existence with a philosophical exploration. Amidst his contemplations on time, Augustine unravels its paradoxical nature—a realm where the past dissolves, becoming nonexistent, and the future lingers, elusively waiting to be grasped. Time, like Aristotle's notion of motion, gravitates toward a state of non-being. Yet, in contrast, God transcends this temporality, dwelling in eternal realms where the past and future blend into an ever-present "now."
The dichotomy between the temporal and the eternal finds its most striking manifestation in the present moment, which, were it not for its inevitable transition into the past, would transcend the confines of time, attaining a state of timeless eternity. God, the timeless source of all existence, embodies the very essence of perpetual being. In the midst of this paradoxical division of time—past, present, and future—language itself assumes an enigmatic character. Augustine delves into the measurement of time, unraveling its elusive essence. Slippery and evasive, time eludes our grasp as the past retreats into the depths of memory, and the future hovers unfulfilled. We are left to grapple solely with the present, which, in its fleeting nature, defies notions of durability. Centuries dissolve into millennia, months into mere moments. Memory safeguards the past, while anticipation breathes life into the unrealized possibilities of the future.
Augustine draws a connection between time and motion, recognizing the pitfalls of measuring time with time itself—a path that would only entangle us in an endless loop of circularity. Aurelius, in his philosophical ruminations, contemplates the paradoxical expansion of the nonexistent future and the gradual fading of the vanished past. It is through the spirit that we measure time, preserving the past, attentively observing the fleeting present, and anticipating the mysteries yet to unfold. In his departure from the notion of time solely derived from celestial motion, Augustine acknowledges the divine creation of time, woven into the very fabric of all existence, birthed alongside creation itself.

This was a newer translation that completely spoke to me.

What I especially enjoyed was that all the scripture that he referenced in his work was noted down. It took me a while to read this one because I read all of the Bible passages noted in the work.

I can see way this book has been such an inspiration for people over the years.

While reading this I was highlighting like crazy in my Bible app. Word of advice, if you read this edition and want to read all the passages, having a Bible app will make it easier. I was constantly switching between different translations because St. Augustine used the Latin Vulgate when he was writing this. And some of the books he referenced aren’t found in a common translation of the Bible.

Reading this book was a very joyful time.

Sometimes I provide lengthy reviews. It is impossible to really provide any type of review of the Confessions which will actually be helpful. This is one of the most important books of human history. Written by a North African Christian theologian who taught in Carthage, Rome, Milan, and finished his life as bishop of Hippo. This book is a book length prayer to God in which Augustine publicly confesses his life, his wanderings, his ups and downs, and so on. It is, at once, a work containing both deep theological and philosophical reflection (i.e. - the nature of evil, the nature and human experience of time, the nature and wonder of memory, how even pagan philosophers are able to know something of God through nature, and so on), and touching reminders that nobody is perfect (Augustine tells us both of his many evil actions before becoming a Christian and of his many struggles and moral failures as even a mature Christian.) or always right (Augustine, the most important theologian of Christian history, tells us of his many errors, of the lies and errors he accepted as true, and even of many things that he is just unsure about.).
If you haven't read this book yet, or recently, you need to read it again.

The first nine Books are brilliant, revolutionary, both as a confession and as theology. I wish Augustine had ended it there, and I wish someone could explain why he doesn’t end it there. But given I’m a slacker, I guess I don’t deserve an explanation. I’m sure it’s what I said before: “It probably all relates to the nature of humanity, the nature of God, the nature of His creation, and the nature of sin, all in the context of Augustine's early life and conversion. I just don't understand it...lol.” The last four books are way too philosophical for me, but I am assured that it ranks with the great philosophers.

I do like Kerstin’s final questions. Let me take a crack at them.

What did you think of the book overall?
Brilliant, difficult, insightful, revolutionary, honest, unlike anything in its day. Finally I think holy. His voice of continuous prayer just exudes holiness.

What surprised you?
How the entire book was one long, continuous prayer to God. An actual confession.

What touched you?
His relationship with his mother. We all know how much she loved him through her constant prayer for his conversion, but he apparently had the same love for her, and in his times I’m not sure how common that was. That moment after his conversion and just before she dies where they sit in the garden and contemplate heaven is very striking. And of course his prayer for her soul at the end of chapter nine was most touching.

What made you laugh?
I don’t know if this is funny (probably not) but a heck of a lot of his friends kept dying from fever. If I ever read Confessions again I’m going to have to count how many.

What inspired you?
The continuous prayer. His prayerful voice just entered my ear and has stayed there. It’s a wonderful way to speak to God, an almost constant confession, with praise and blessings thrown in.

4/2024: This very well may be my favorite book. Certainly it has impacted me more than any other besides the Bible. This time I finally got around to reading the whole thing, including the philosophical sections in the last quarter. Augustine has officially become my dearest "heart" writer, the one who most fundamentally informs the way I view myself and the world. Though I stuck with my beloved Chadwick this time around, I did some comparison with the newest translation by Thomas Williams (Hackett, 2019), which is in many ways more direct while investing some familiar phrases with a unique punch and sparkle, but it's just a bit too informal for my liking. I still like how Chadwick keeps the highly polished, rhetorical style without trying to make it too "raw", as Williams arguably does. Reading the Latin, it's clear that Augustine was really a prose-poet who aims to impress and delight with his language, and that quality needs to be wholly preserved in any worthwhile translation. Next time I read it, I'll probably try to do it all in the original language.

Original review: If you're looking for a conventional "autobiography" (that term is quite misleading when applied to this work) or theological treatise, Augustine’s style can be frustrating due to its willingness to jump around into random ruminations and seemingly irrelevant minutiae of his life. But if you have the patience and a taste for poetic wonder, you will uncover poignancy and relevance beyond all expectations. The Henry Chadwick translation is remarkable for its transformation of an achingly poetic and distinctly literary Latin (I think all Latin students have to translate the first section or two at some point in their studies; it's usually their first look at artistic Latin prose that abandons the tidy grammar of the formal exercises) into a gorgeous English with plenty of passages that perfectly distill Augustine’s rhetorical brilliance while remaining faithful to the text. This is much better than, say, the strange and borderline unreadable Garry Wills translation, which ironically approaches paraphrase while simultaneously using obscure and pretentious Latin derivatives in an attempt to sound "faithful".