Augustine of Hippo

Augustine grew up in Roman North Africa, devoured rhetoric and philosophy, lived for years with a concubine, joined the Manichaean sect, and at thirty-two converted to Christianity in a Milanese garden — an episode he describes in the Confessions, the first autobiography in Western literature and the first sustained portrait of an inner life.

He went on to become bishop of Hippo and the most influential Christian thinker between Paul and Aquinas. His fusion of Platonism and Christian doctrine — the City of God against the City of Man, time as a creature of the eternal, evil as the absence of good, the soul's restless turning toward God — defined Western theology for a thousand years.

The Confessions in particular invented an entire way of speaking about the self: as a being divided against itself, opaque to its own desires, in search of an authority it both flees and yearns for. Every later confessional writer — Rousseau, Tolstoy, Knausgaard — is in his shadow.