Augustine characterizes human knowledge as _ when compared to god

Augustine wrote these words in one of his earliest works, but they retained their force throughout his lifetime. The irrefutable solipsism of self confronted with the absolute reality of God, the wholly other: all of Augustine's thought moves between those two poles.

All three confessions occur in the Confessions. If God and the soul are all Augustine wants to know, and if they are to be known best in relation to each other, then acknowledgement of the weakness of the individual and of the power and greatness of God are two sides of the same coin. but it was just those friends to whom Augustine regrets having given a disingenuous explanation for his retirement:. Having converted to a religion of humility and self-effacement, Augustine would not have trumpeted his inmost feelings so soon and in so self-serving a way. Neoplatonic influences were at work in the years after 386, but these influences were constantly on the wane, for Augustine had taken Christianity as the new norm according to which all other religious and philosophical notions were to be judged.[8] In the central books of the Confessions (Books 6-9), Augustine contemplates the events that led him to his new life.

The patron of Augustine's turn to Christianity would seem to have been Ambrose, whose sermons demolished intellectual barriers Augustine had not been able to surmount for himself and whose hands administered the baptism that made Augustine a member of Christ's church. In his sermons, he showed Augustine for the first time Christian scriptural interpretation as Augustine would later describe it in Christian Doctrine. Simplicianus heard Augustine tell of his encounter with the books of the Platonists in Victorinus' translation and saw a chance to tell Augustine a story about a man very like Augustine himself (Victorinus was a distinguished student and practitioner of rhetoric and philosophy who had earned the honor of a statue erected in his honor in the Roman forum.