Confessions
Confessions documents an extremely impressionable man’s tenacious search for a consistent and comforting worldview. Augustine transitions from quantitative hedonism, to Manichaeism, to Aristotelianism, to Neoplatonism, and, as far as we know, ultimately to Catholicism, with the intermittent hiatus in Astrology, Aestheticism, and more hedonism. He is motivated successively by the vicissitudes of youth, by the promise of the rhetorician’s fame, by the need to justify the death of a beloved friend and to find an immortal replacement, and by a predilection for divine ontology (oh, and don’t forget Mom!). The journey culminates with a grand synthesis of cherry-pickings from these antecedent studies and Aquinas is born again. But why should we believe it all ends here? After all, he changes his entire belief system at least as often as he changes his address. Isn’t Confessions just another On Beauty and Decorum? Isn’t Christianity just another stop along the Way?
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