As the structure of the Confessions shows, Augustine came to see God’s providence operating behind the scenes in his encounters with Neo-Platonists, his delight in earthly beauty, and even his tragedies, which lured him forward with more provocative and tantalizing glimpses of God’s attractiveness. Kierkegaard’s view of a new kind of pathos elicited by the incarnate Christ, without whom the new pathos would be impossible, would be the functional equivalent of this dynamic in Augustine’s writings.
