In an earlier study entitled Augustine the Reader (1996) I attempted to trace the stages of development of Augustine's outlook as a reader and to situate this skill within his approach to meditation, interpretation, and the search for self-knowledge. My attention was chiefly devoted to the narrative books of the Confessions (books one to nine) in an effort to describe how Augustine's story of himself as a reader harmonized with what can be learned about his understanding of texts from his philosophical and theological writings in the period before and after the writing of his autobiography.

This book was initially conceived as a companion volume in which I intended to make a more detailed analysis of these problems within the writings known as “the dialogues” than was possible in Augustine the Reader. However, as the study progressed, this plan was gradually modified and eventually abandoned altogether. The topic of reading, with which my earlier book was concerned, is not absent from Augustine's early writings, as Catherine Conybeare has recently reminded us, but only emerges with clarity in De Doctrina Christiana (396) and the Confessiones (397–400). In the decade before these works were composed Augustine had other interests as well, and one of these is taken up in the pages that follow. I am referring to the use of inner dialogue as a “spiritual exercise” and to the rôle which such exercises play in the formation of a narrative philosophy and theology.