SoliloquiesAugustine
About Soliloquies
One of Augustine's earliest Christian writings, composed in the winter of 386–387 at Cassiciacum, a country estate outside Milan, in the months between his conversion and his baptism. The book invents its own literary form. Augustine, wanting to examine the state of his own soul, stages a dialogue between himself and Reason, the faculty that speaks within him. The name soliloquia, "speakings-alone," is his own coinage.
The work begins with a long prayer for illumination and then sets out two questions: what does Augustine wish to know, and on what condition. The answers are: God and the soul, nothing else; and only by a life purified from attachment to the body. Reason then leads him through arguments for the soul's immortality, resting on the mathematical permanence of truth. Because truth does not perish, and because truth lives in the mind that knows it, the mind that knows truth cannot wholly perish either.
The are unfinished, breaking off during the second book, but they introduce themes Augustine will pursue for the rest of his life: the turn inward as the path to God, the knowledge of oneself bound up with the knowledge of truth, the dialogue of the soul with its own reason as the form of Christian reflection. The , fifteen years later, will take up this inward dialogue and give it its classical shape.