Dear Confessors:

Both Augustine of Hippo (354-430) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Geneva (1712-1778) wrote autobiographic books containing their confessions. Both contain some pretty racy stuff, but neither is a particularly exciting read. (Although we do learn that Rousseau liked a good spanking—perhaps why the book was published posthumously. Now that I think about it, Rousseau’s work is a bit of a page-turner. But I digress.)

What brings me to my musing today is the tension between what Augustine and Rousseau thought they were accomplishing through their tell-all, self-disclosive diaries.