Augustine's Confessions

Augustine's Confessions is a book written in the first and second persons - both a self-exploration and a dialog with the one who has always spoken, acted, and given even before we are on the scene. Dr. Craig asks what we might learn from this narrative grammar about the mind itself. He helpfully suggests that we should read Augustine in the light of Plato's celebrated image of the 'cave' in which finite minds are trapped, and allow our reading of the work to be itself an opening to conversion, an exit from the cave. Here is an innovative and generative reading of the Confessions, sensitive to both history and metaphysics. It's an original and persuasive piece of work and to my mind makes a real contribution to Augustine studies.

-- Rowan Williams, University of Cambridge

It's a rich interpretation, compelling in its comprehensiveness, deeply informed by the relevant primary and secondary literature, and highly original, distinctly different from all previous interpretations... It's an interpretation that I find compelling.

-- Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale University

The reading of Augustine's Confessions never ends. That is the way it should be. Few books have the style and substance of this extraordinary book. So we now have Robert Craig's extraordinary proposal for reading The Confessions. I confess when I first read his proposal I was doubtful but he has done his homework and he rightly loves this book. Craig's book will be rejected by many but that makes it the kind of book you need to live with. Plato's cave is itself a great piece of literature and if Craig is right it helps us understand Augustine. We should not be surprised.

-- Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University Divinity School

Robert Craig's book provides a much more rounded approach to Augustine's Confessions. It is to be seen at once as a work of 'scriptural philosophy' and yet as still in the pagan philosophical tradition precisely *because* it approaches Christianity as the 'true life' and seeks to allegorize, personify and exemplify its new theoretical teachings. Thereby the book encourages us today further to think about the Bible and philosophy in tandem.

-- John Milbank, University of Nottingham