A friend of mine has, over the last year, taken quite an interest in theology but was very intimidated by St Augustine. So I recommended Confessions to him. He is rather taken by it all - and I think slightly stunned that the same chap who write City of God and who casts such a long shadow could be the same guy who thieved and got drunk and generally behaved like teenagers all over.
I view it as an amazingly subversive little work in some ways - some of which I am sure were intentional by the saint himself.
I don't need to digress on why the lack of philosophical literacy has led to us regressing into Plato's Cave, where all the self-proclaimed "smart people," in real life and in the OT of this forum
have become the dwellers who proclaim "truth" in seeing their shadows -- but Augustine is quite the trip, especially for those who have read him in canon and development from
Confessions to
Retractations which English-speaking Protestants have erroneously dubbed "Rectractions" as if he recanted his earlier views which he did no such thing but elaborated further on his earlier work which is what it should be titled to give better context or if you read it after having read his earlier works you realize certain Calvinists have spun nothing but lies about him and his so-called "retractions." He is remarkable, dense, and his influence on just about everything after him cannot be understated (all of Continental philosophy is, in some way, rooted in Augustine). Of course, perhaps I'm biased, as someone who works heavily in the classical world of philosophy and who is doing a thesis on his political thoughts here at Yale in dialogue with Cicero and has multiples essays published discussing the content of Augustine's thought, but I would approvingly say that you did your friend well in recommending him to
Confessions. Though I dock you a half letter grade if you recommended the English translation instead of the Latin to your friend.
Augustine is so wonderful, especially in Books I-IV where he just tells all. Gazing at women in church. Sex in during Eucharistic consecration. Crying for Dido when he read
The Aeneid (who can't help themselves but feel sorry for Aeneid), feeling bad for stealing a pear and throwing it to pigs (in which he elaborates a very dense and important doctrine of the metaphysics of aesthetical ethics), saying that he found Biblical prose to be wanting in comparison to Cicero and Virgil (which is true, of course), and other random asides scattered throughout are just super delightful especially if you know what he's referencing. I think you're right that some of it was deliberately intentional.
Oh look, I just referenced three of the people you're not allowed to speak ill of in my presence: Cicero, Virgil, and Augustine -- but especially Virgil. Dante was one lucky man to have Virgil scoop him up and slide down the mountain with him.