Livro XI das Confissões de Santo Agostinho (Book XI of the Confessions of Saint Augustine) is one of the most iconic books of what is commonly referred to as the second part of the Confessions (Books X-XIII). In this book, the author’s perspective is neither memoirist nor autobiographical, but rather pertaining to literary history, regarding the act of narrating the past in the first person and the compromise between the possible truth and that narrative or confession. It considers the complex workings of the memory, courage and foolishness involved in speaking about ourselves to those who know more about us and about everything, as well as essayistic, centred in the internal debate of theological and philosophical questions. The difficulty inherent to formulating these questions, whose recipients are “the Lord” or the “soul”, can be roughly located in the problem between human commensurability and finitude and, therefore, their intelligibility, understanding and communication, and divine incommensurability, before which the human conceptual apparatus cannot but falter and hesitate. This is, therefore, a speculative debate, set out to fail ab initio, but which, once one has decided to conduct it, becomes, for that very reason, all the more pertinent, indispensable and rigorous, anchored in the mastery of a language and argumentation whose eloquence is directly proportional to revealing more clearly the man who struggles with his role as thinking man in the here and now.
In the case of Book XI, Augustine struggles with two questions which are interrelated: what is that moment which combines and contains all times and all things, and which is condensed in the act of creation, and what is time. Regardless of the answers to these interrogations, what emerges from the author’s text is the progression of a narrative whose coherence and beauty stem not so much from their systematic character, but from a methodology of hesitation which does not abstain from posing itself new questions, when it seems to have obtained the consolation of a truth. After all, it could not be any other way, and Augustine is well aware that the idea that we are Prometheus is our greatest illusion and fault.
