Practice question · Match the pairs
Match each analytical book of the Confessions to the problem it takes up.
- Book 10
- Book 11
- Book 12
- Book 13
- What memory is, and how it can contain God
- The days of creation read allegorically
- What we measure when we measure time
- How scripture can bear several true readings
Hints
- All four come from the analytical half, not the narrative one.
- The four problems run memory, time, interpretation, creation.
Show the answer
- Book 10 → What memory is, and how it can contain God
- Book 11 → What we measure when we measure time
- Book 12 → How scripture can bear several true readings
- Book 13 → The days of creation read allegorically
Why
The analytical books are not an appendix to the narrative: memory has to be examined because the preceding nine books were made of it, and time because a life recounted from its end raises the question of what the recounting measures. The last two turn on scripture itself, which is where the argument was always heading.
Practise Augustine’s Confessions: the Invention of Interiority
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