A typical Great Books curriculum features the Confessions of Augustine of Hippo (354–430 A.D.) at the end of the Greco–Roman portion of the syllabus, in part to suggest the transition between the pagan and Christian eras. I hope nobody says Augustine “marks” the transition, which was too slow and complicated for any marker. In fact, the contrasts and tensions in the author’s own life—parts of it narrated in this first true autobiography—look almost bizarrely deep and persistent.

Augustine’s mother, Monica, was a pious Christian, but his father was a pagan, only converting at the end of his life at the urging of his wife. Monica’s widowhood was devoted to bringing her son into mainstream Christian belief and practice, already called “catholic,” from the Greek for “universal.” Her own life ended not long after her success in this campaign, in the thronging Italian port city of Ostia, as she was about to accompany her son back to their homeland in North Africa, his worldly career as a rhetor—an important sort of literary civil servant—being over.

Despite their Christianity, at the window of their lodgings, looking onto a garden, they conducted the sort of discourse that, in outline, might have been conducted by the pagan Roman orator Cicero—whose philosophical Hortensius had long before started Augustine on excited inquiries into the meaning of things. But Hortensius’s purported source was a discussion among elite men,