Vyznání I-IX

AURELIUS AUGUSTINUS (354-430) One of the most important Latin Church Fathers and bishop of the North African city of Hippo Regius, who greatly influenced the direction of Western Christian thought. Initially a teacher of rhetoric and a Manichaean auditor, he was inspired by the Milanese bishop Ambrosius to embrace Neo-Platonic Christian spiritualism and underwent a mystical experience in a Milanese garden, after which he gave up a promising secular career and converted to Catholic Christianity. After the death of his mother Monica and his return to Africa, he was elected bishop in the city of Hippo Regius, where he served his congregation until his death in 430. Augustine's Confessions is not only one of the most widely read works of European literature, but also one of the works most subject to misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Indeed, the reader who gets carried away by the autobiographical passages often forgets that this is a complex philosophical and theological work that cannot be understood without a deeper knowledge of the intellectual milieu in which it was written. Is it an autobiographical text with a philosophical-theological appendix, or is it a philosophical-theological treatise with an unexpectedly long autobiographical preface? Of Augustine's literary legacy, which comprises several hundred writings, the Confessiones is undoubtedly one of the best known and most translated. In this work, the author confesses the errors of his youth and his intellectual groping as to the true nature of God. The first autobiography in European literature still fascinates today with the unprecedented emotionality of its language and the degree of self-revelation of a man seeking his own identity in the face of God, and it loses none of its urgency.

Czech edition