From Henry Chadwick's introduction to Augustine's Confessions:

This work is far from being a simple autobiography of a sensitive man, in youth captivated by aesthetic beauty and enthralled by the quest for sexual fulfillment, but then dramatically converted to Christian faith through a grim period of distress and frustration, finally becoming a bishop known for holding pessimistic opinions about human nature and society. The Confessions is more than a narrative of conversion. It is a work of rare sophistication and intricacy, in which even the apparently simple autobiographical narrative often carries harmonics of deeper meaning. To understand the work one needs to comprehend a little about the author's mind, his loves and hates, his intellectual debts and principal targets for criticism. The Confessions is a polemical work, at least as much as a self-vindication as an admission of mistakes. The very title carries a conscious double meaning, of confession as praise as well as of confession as acknowledgement of faults. And its form is extraordinary--a prose-poem addressed to God, intended to be overheard by anxious and critical fellow Christians.