Where Was I?

“When, in 401, Augustine of Hippo—bishop, celebrated theologian and controversialist, preacher, ascetic, spiritual director—published his Confessions, he was not indulging in a taste for literary self-congratulation or self-advertisement. As Peter Brown has emphasized . . . this was a new kind of book. It was a work in which the writer’s struggles were worked out on the written page, in which a meaningful life had to be created in words. Augustine is never merely remembering; he is searching for significant patterns, making a biography. Again and again, the questions recur. Why was this so? Where is the hand of God in this or that experience? And yet the question repeatedly modulates into a different key; not, Where was God? but, Where was I?”

—Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge