What makes the Confessions unlike any book before it is its address. Augustine does not write about God for readers; he writes to God, with readers permitted to overhear. The Latin word confessio carries three senses at once, and he uses all of them: confession of sin, confession of praise, and confession of faith. Within that prayer he examines his own life with a scrutiny previously unknown in ancient literature. The famous episodes are small on purpose.
The theft of pears from a neighbour's tree matters not for its harm but because he stole what he did not want, and so found in himself a will turned toward wrongdoing for its own sake. His grief at a friend's death, his years teaching rhetoric, his ambition for advancement in Milan, his long entanglement with a concubine he loved and dismissed, all are weighed as movements of a heart seeking rest in the wrong places. The turning point in book eight has him weeping under a fig tree when he hears a child's voice chanting words he took as a command, tolle lege, take up and read; opening Paul's epistles at random, he read, and the struggle ended. The narrative closes not with triumph but with the quiet scene at Ostia, where he and Monica, shortly before her death, together touch for a moment the eternal wisdom they had been discussing.