St. Augustine’s famous Confessions is a book directed to the very heart of each young person. No other book is quite like it. In it, Augustine excitedly tells us about his reading of Cicero’s now lost dialogue, the Hortensius. At about the age of nineteen, Augustine’s reading of this dialogue in a provincial town in Africa changed his life in the direction of philosophy. Many readers of these words will be themselves nineteen and wonder why they have not had a similarly mind-wrenching experience? At least one reason may be that they have never yet read Augustine or Cicero. By the time we are nineteen, it is indeed time to wake up, as Augustine’s example teaches us. Augustine also recalls his reading by chance a passage of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. This passage told him that it was time for him to stop his carousing and dickering with life and to change his ways, to direct them toward God in sorrow for all the errors and abuses he had already embraced and committed in his own life. Augustine is an excellent guide for today’s students and searchers. He tells them that living their lives in personal moral disorder—often the principal cause of intellectual disorder—will prevent them from seeing the truth. He tells each of us to be honest with ourselves, not to lie to ourselves in our own souls about ourselves, to describe accurately the real results of our choices and deeds, not to be blind to the results of our errors, sins, and defects.
–James V. Schall, SJ, A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning, 19-20
