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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2024
I Suppose the thing that strikes one most forcibly about St Augustine's Confessions is the astonishing power of introspection which they reveal. Rarely can there have been a man aware of himself and his experience with such ruthless clarity. The result is that all Augustine's theological thought is an experience-theology. it is never abstract, uncommitted, or impersonal. But this is not to say that his mind remained enclosed in his own personal world. He was not only a person of unusual self-awareness, he was also, if we can so put it, an unusually public person, Because he could look at himself so shrewdly and objectively, he was able to develop his experience into ideas of universal validity. It is with such a development of his experience of conversion that we are here concerned; not with the personal voyage of discovery described in the Confessions’, but with the geographical charts which came of that voyage, and which he unfolds in his De Tnnitate.