Now he felt a compelling need to retrace the
crucial turnings of the way by which he had come. And since he
was sure that it was God's grace that had been his prime mover on
that way, it was a spontaneous expression of his heart that cast
his self-recollection into the form of a sustained prayer to God.
The Confessions are not Augustine's autobiography. They are,
instead, a deliberate effort, in the permissive atmosphere of
God's felt presence, to recall those crucial episodes and events
in which he can now see and celebrate the mysterious actions of
God's prevenient and provident grace. Thus he follows the
windings of his memory as it re-presents the upheavals of his
youth and the stages of his disorderly quest for wisdom. He omits
very much indeed. Yet he builds his successive climaxes so
skillfully that the denouement in Book VIII is a vivid and
believable convergence of influences, reconstructed and "placed"
with consummate dramatic skill. We see how Cicero's Hortensius
first awakened his thirst for wisdom, how the Manicheans deluded
him with their promise of true wisdom, and how the Academics upset
his confidence in certain knowledge -- how they loosed him from
the dogmatism of the Manicheans only to confront him with the
opposite threat that all knowledge is uncertain.
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