Hello and welcome to Literature and History, Episode 100. Late have I loved you.

In this program we will make our way through the second half of Augustine's Confessions,

a milestone of Christian theology written between 397 and 400 CE. Over the next 90 or so minutes,

as we move through books 8 through 13 of one of late antiquities most famous works,

we'll watch Augustine move away from the more famous autobiographical sections of the confessions,

and into pure theology. The final five books of the confessions, having wrapped up the story of

Augustine's checkered youth and his conversion, set out to answer some of the great questions of

theology and philosophy. What Augustine wonders is the nature of time and our experience within it.

How does memory work? If God created the world, what was God up to beforehand?

In the portions of the confessions that we're about to read, many of Augustine's theological

speculations are timeless like these. Other sections of Augustine's theological writings in the

confessions are much more rooted in the religious climate of the late fourth century. The version

of Christianity that had been ratified as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the year

380 had a Trinitarian deity, a father, son, and Holy Spirit. But the Old Testament at least

didn't say a peep about a God with three aspects, and so in some of the closing portions of

the confessions, Augustine sets himself up to do nothing less than to retroject a late antique

theological doctrine into scriptures written a thousand years earlier, pinpointing the Holy

Trinity in the opening chapter of Genesis. The early chapters of the confessions, those which

we covered last time, are the ones that most people remember. Augustine tells us of his infancy and

childhood, his tumultuous adolescent years, his inclinations toward sex and unrestrained self-indulgence,

and finally his journey up into the Italian peninsula to the cities of Rome and Milan.

The first half of the book involves a fair amount of sermonizing and references to the intellectual

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