Between St. Augustine’s Dialogical Soliloquies and Monological Confessions

Abstract

The article presents the formal and thematic continuity between the Soliloquies and Confessions of St. Augustine. The former, left unfinished, dates from the time immediately after Augustine’s conversion (386), while the latter was composed approximately fifteen years later (400). Both works are dialogical, but each in its own way: in one, the dialogue takes place within one single person; in the other, the narrator’s interlocutor seems silent but actually speaks in his own way. Both present the central theme of Augustine’s theology, the knowledge of God and of oneself, which is developed in the twofold meaning of confessio (peccatorum, laudis). The study concludes with the hypothesis that an aim of the Confessionsmight have been to continue answering the questions from the Soliloquies which had remained unanswered.