Made up of three books that are the earliest extant works of St. Augustine, these works claim to give a reliable picture of the mind and way of life of one of the greatest figures of the West, precisely at the moment that was for him most critical and vital. Augustine's Confessions and his earliest philosophical writings, represented here, are his most accessible extant works. Although his pieces are against pagan Platonism they represent the thought world which he and many other educated persons, pagan and Christian, inhabited at the time.