Were Augustine's Confessions truly without precedent? Everything I read has a boner for how original and unusual this 'autobiography' was, as if he was the first to write one.
But pagans like Libanius had written autobiographies before, often about spiritual conversion. I just don't understand what is meant to make them a watershed. Do you need to be a Christian?
Yes.
Roman classical education + early Christian thought are the perfect combo.
>>1180746
But does that mean you can call the Confessions 'unprecedented'? It seems to me that in combining Neoplatonist thought (very candidly) with Christian scripture, Augustine is merely mashing two precedents together, rather than inventing something new.
Everything good about Christianity is not new; and what is new is not good. Alain de Benoist
>>1180864
Sorry, just so I am clear (not trying to say you're wrong) but you think that in being autobiographical, the Confessions are unprecedented? Despite the existence, near in time, of the 'Autobiography' of Libanius?
>>1180869
There is an intropsection method that is new. Augustine uses a language of another era than his own.
>Were Augustine's Confessions truly without precedent?
Not really, he was just heavily influenced by the Persian prophet Mani and by Plato. From Mani he got the idea that evil is a permanent feature of the world, which defused the eschatology of early Christianity, in which an End Times scenario would defeat evil. From Plato, he got the idea that the spiritual belongs in an eternal realm, and that therefore the events of the Bible must be understood within spiritual terms, not as actual events but as inner transformations of the believer himself. This is where the idea that Genesis as a metaphor comes from, it owes much more to Plato than to Jesus
