Practice question · Put in order
Arrange the episodes of Augustine’s narrative in the order the Confessions gives them.
- The theft of the pears
- Meeting Ambrose at Milan
- Years as a Manichaean
- Monica’s death at Ostia
- Rhetoric studies at Carthage
- The garden conversion
- Infancy and learning to speak
Hints
- The narrative runs from infancy to a death.
- The conversion in the garden comes near the end of the narrative books, followed by his mother’s death.
Show the answer
- Infancy and learning to speak
- The theft of the pears
- Rhetoric studies at Carthage
- Years as a Manichaean
- Meeting Ambrose at Milan
- The garden conversion
- Monica’s death at Ostia
Why
The narrative arc is deliberately shaped: each stage is a further account of misdirected desire, and the garden scene resolves it. Monica’s death at Ostia closes the narrative because the conversion has already happened, the life story has done its work.
Practise Augustine’s Confessions: the Invention of Interiority
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More questions on Augustine’s Confessions: the Invention of Interiority
- The Confessions is addressed to its readers, who are asked to judge Augustine’s account of his life.
- Which are true of the pear theft in book two?
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