Confessions
1482
- religious aspects of truth
- christian saints
- christianity
- spiritual life
- religion & spirituality
- bishop of hippo
- hippo
- collected works
- christian life
- early church
The story
Garry Wills’s complete translation of Saint Augustine’s spiritual masterpiece—available now for the first time Garry Wills is an exceptionally gifted translator and one of our best writers on religion today. His bestselling translations of individual chapters of Saint Augustine’s Confessions have received widespread and glowing reviews. Now for the first time, Wills’s translation of the entire work is being published as a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition. Removed by time and place but not by spiritual relevance, Augustine’s Confessions continues to influence contemporary religion, language, and thought. Reading with fresh, keen eyes, Wills brings his superb gifts of analysis and insight to this ambitious translation of the entire book. “[Wills] renders Augustine’s famous and influential text in direct language with all the spirited wordplay and poetic strength intact.”—Los Angeles Times“[Wills’s] translations . . . are meant to bring Augustine straight into our own minds; and they succeed. Well-known passages, over which my eyes have often gazed, spring to life again from Wills’s pages.”—Peter Brown, The New York Review of Books“Augustine flourishes in Wills’s hand.”—James Wood“A masterful synthesis of classical philosophy and scriptural erudition.”—Chicago Tribune
What it’s like
Long, searching sentences that turn inward, a voice that alternates between raw candour and sudden lyrical lift, the whole book read best in slow, unhurried sittings. This is a late-night or early-morning book, the kind to pick up in a quiet room with one lamp on and a cup going cold beside you. Augustine's prose moves in a rhythm of confession and prayer, pausing over memory like a hand smoothing a worn page, with bursts of wordplay and rhetorical heat that keep the pages from ever feeling sleepy. Wills's translation keeps the Latin's balance and punch in plain English, so the sentences land with the directness of speech. Its emotional register is intimate and often anguished, moving from grief and restlessness toward a quiet, hard-won peace, with moments of startling tenderness toward ordinary human longing. The intensity is entirely interior: no violence, no sexual content, just the sharp, uncomfortable honesty of a man examining his own desires and failings. It suits readers who want contemplative, spiritually charged writing and are comfortable with devotional language, as well as anyone drawn to the long history of self-examination in Western thought.
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