The eminent historian Peter Brown notes that in the fourth century there were many elite men writing “another kind of letter” about their lives. Men who might become Manichaeans, or Skeptics, or Stoics, or Platonists were called “men of the spirit,” elite Roman men who would have otherwise enjoyed stable imperial careers were now traversing a cultural period of great upheaval and change.
Christianity had only been a licit religio for 84 years when Augustine started writing his Confessions in 397 A.D. It had only been three decades since Emperor Julian the Apostate had restored animal sacrifices in the pagan temples, and revoked all the privileges that Constantine had bestowed upon the Catholic Church. It is a century like our own, caught between Christian and pagan worlds, and there are many men who documented their own search for higher ground. Yet none of these letters written in pursuit of happiness and perfection of life in a tumultuous world match St Augustine’s Confessions.
