The Confessions of St. Augustine; Edited by the Rev. E.B. Pusey, D.D.
London: Blackie and Son Limited, circa 1904. Original green cloth (6 1/8 inches tall), gilt spine and front board, decorated endpapers, top edge gilt. Sporadic light foxing. A nearly-fine copy. Item #1452
"NARROW IS THE MANSION OF MY SOUL"
Handsome edition of Augustine's Confessions—translated from the Latin by E.B. Pusey. Issued as part of the publisher's Red Letter Library series, this edition is illustrated with decorated endpapers and a bordered frontispiece portrait of Augustine with a matching title page. With an Introduction by H.C. Beeching (Canon of Westminster) in praise of Pusey, "that learned theologian, had, through long study, become so imbued with the patristic spirit that, without adopting archaic phrases, he somehow managed to write in a style from which all modernism seemed excluded, a style that be called catholic."
This spiritual autobiography is the ideal introduction to the life and thought of Augustine of Hippo: "The reader who has never met Augustine before ought to go first of all to the Confessions" (Thomas Merton). Augustine's love song to God established a venerable literary form which has continued to animate Western thought in both the Catholic and Protestant traditions down through the centuries. Augustine was the critical link in the development of Christian philosophy: "St. Augustine's Confessions not only summarizes the Christian thought of the ancient or patristic period, but also points ahead to the medieval period, and indeed to the whole subsequent development of Christian thought" (Frank Magill).
First published in 1838, Edward Bouverie Pusey's translation of Augustine was a triumph of the Oxford Movement. This edition omits the last two books, keeping the focus on St. Monica. Augustine's devoted mother bore long witness to her son's spiritual journey and she is a constant presence until her death in Book IX. The relationship between Monica and Augustine was "deeply significant for Augustine's personality and life. The relations constitute a recurrent theme of the Confessions. It was she who persistently sought his conversion to Christianity...it was she who wept on the African shore as his ship departed for Europe, and who subsequently followed him there....it was she who...led him to break with his faithful mistress" (Magill). Frank Magill. Masterpieces of Christian Literature.
Price: $85.00