Talk:Confessions (Augustine)

Untitled
would you call those themes or plot points? Polymathematics 02:54, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

The text
why don't we have the full text on wikisource? it should be public domain. --Witchinghour 17:06, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

The Language
Has anyone else noticed that this article reads like a five year old wrote it? There are numerous sentences that begin: "He talks about..." and, even worse, ones that begin, "And he talks about..." I hope to clean this up and add some of the more important theological concepts of the book shortly. SJCstudent 09:22, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

revert anons additions
Reverted anons additions, inappropriate for Wikipedia, full of POV and OR. -- Stbalbach 16:08, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Inaccuracies
About twenty years ago Courcelle wrote a french article about Confessions and about how it was not an autobiography but an exegesis of Genesis. Since then a lot of research (check any article database like JSTOR) has been done on Confessions which has shown what parts are cribbed from Deuterotomy, the Aeneid, and other such sources. None of that work is shown on this page, which is severely outdated. Anyone want to do some work on it? Sandarmoir (talk) 01:40, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Agreed, but it would be better to begin again and from the point of view that Saint Augustine intended, not just outlining pagagraph headings.

It is not so much outdated as just headings.

Saint Augustine intended his Confessions to be a declaration of how he progressed from a self-indelgant life to conquering his addictions and reaching an angelic peaceful life. This article page should depict this, heavely leaning on his own words in his Confessions and later writings. It would be a mistake to just fill the page with modern writers, when Saint Augustine wrote so well about it, himself.

For accuracy, and to avoid copyright infringement, I suggest we keep to the original Latin.

MacOfJesus (talk) 14:54, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Although including the words of Augustine himself is an important consideration, we should also remember Wiki's "no original research" policy. As a way to avoid adding personal analysis with excerpts of Confessions, we should include modern scholars' interpretations, as long as we are careful not to mischaracterize them. Since the "Purpose" section lacks detail about Augustine's motivations, over the next few days I am going to add scholarly interpretation that regards this issue. (Rpconner (talk) 22:07, 19 February 2016 (UTC))

Over the next day I'm going to add more summary based on an English translation of the work. (Rpconner (talk) 15:42, 18 February 2016 (UTC)).

I want to add an online, uncopyrighted text source from a database, yet I do not think the Wikipedia citation format best includes all this information. Therefore, I want to use MLA because it includes all necessary information to distinguish the source. (Rpconner (talk) 21:14, 18 February 2016 (UTC))

Article structure & redundancy
Presently, there are 3 different sections in the article that link to the various English translations:
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_(Augustine)#Editions
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_(Augustine)#Sources
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_(Augustine)#English_translations

Is there supposed to be a certain kind of distinction between these?

Also, the following discussion contains good information regarding the various translations. I think this redundancy and unclear structuring needs to be consolidated and cleaned up.
 * Which translation of Augustine's Confessions is the easiest to read in English? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Echu888 (talk • contribs) 04:59, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

Relationship to Existentialist Philosophy
Some aspects of Augustine's Confessions have been seen as being proto-Existentialist or being important precursors to Existentialist philosophy. Should the article discuss this? CessnaMan1989 (talk) 20:37, 18 October 2021 (UTC)