LINGUISTIC AND FUNCTIONAL-SEMANTIC FEATURES OF AUGUSTINE’S CONFESSIONS AS A LANDMARK OF CHRISTIAN LITERATURE

Abstract

The article offers a comprehensive study of Augustine’s Confessiones from functional, semantic, and linguistic perspectives, allowing the text to be interpreted as a literary, theological, and linguistic phenomenon simultaneously. Central to the analysis is the specificity of early Christian confessional discourse, which establishes a new communicative model distinct from the classical autobiographical tradition. Confessiones emerges as an intentional form of communication in which God is the primary addressee, while the mode of expression takes on the features of prayer and internal dialogue. The semantic analysis demonstrates that the key conceptual categories of the work form an integrated system in which theological and anthropological concepts are mediated through linguistic mechanisms of interiorization. Lexical fields lose their purely descriptive function and acquire anthropological depth: attention shifts from external action to the internal state of the human personality, which reflects the fundamental orientation of Christian thought. Semantic inversions characteristic of the text reveal the emergence of a new paradigm of understanding human nature, shaped by the concepts of spiritual disorder and internal conflict. The linguistic analysis identifies the complex structural organization of the text, where syntax and stylistic choices serve as tools for representing its intellectual and emotional intensity. The combination of complex syntactic periods with concise, high-tension statements, along with rhetorical figures, repetition, and anaphora, creates a distinctive rhythm oriented toward introspection. The pervasive use of the first-person singular establishes a self-observant mode of expression in which the author is both subject and object of discourse. Thus, Confessiones is interpreted as a coherent linguistic-semantic construct in which the language itself becomes a means of spiritual self-knowledge. The analysis elucidates the mechanisms underlying the formation of Christian discourse and emphasizes the role of linguistic structure in shaping the emerging cultural paradigm of late antiquity.