Publisher's Synopsis
The two books of the Soliloquia were, by the statement of the author himself (Lib. I. 17), written in his thirty-third year. They were therefore written immediately after his baptism, evidently in the rural retreat of Cassiacum, in Upper Italy, belonging to his friend Verecundus, to which we know that he retreated for awhile after he had been received into the Church. It is therefore his earliest Christian work. And as it is early, so it is raw. His new-found faith struggles to justify itself through an intricate course of reasoning, in which he confuses helplessly the forms of logic with the substance of truth. However, though crude, his essential characteristics appear distinctly in it; his power of reasoning, his wide observation of fundamental facts, and of mental processes and experiences, his love of his friends, and above all of Alypius, his ardent aspirations after supernal light, his deep devotion, which, however, has not availed to subdue the artificialities of rhetoric into childlike simplicity.
