Augustine's "confessions" - (Lives of Great Religious Books) by Garry Wills (Hardcover)

Garry Wills' "The Book's Birth: From Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills, a story of Augustine's Confessions - unparalleled introduction to one of the most important books in the Christian and Western traditions.

Understandably fascinated by the story of Augustine's life, modern readers have largely succumbed to the temptation to read the Confessions as autobiography.

But Wills argues, this is a mistake.

The book is not autobiography but rather a long prayer, suffused with the language of Scripture and addressed to God, not man.

Augustine tells the story of his life not for its own significance but in order to discern how, as a drama of sin and salvation leading to God, it fits into sacred history.

We have to read Augustine as we do Dante, alert to rich layer upon layer of Scriptural and theological symbolism."