Himes mentioned in lecture, Augustine’s baptism was deferred until after infancy, which I think ties God more intimately into his life journey as he is actually aware of the most important sacrament of his life. In Book II, Augustine admits his sinful life with regret, displaying an increased conscience and awareness of God. He reasons that
Before meeting Lady Continence, Augustine feels torn “between [the lust] against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh”; he wants to harmonize his feelings so he can “become [Y] our soldier” (VIII.11), who is not “bound to the earth… afraid of being rid of all my burdens” (VIII.11). Augustine feels guilty for being between a righteous life with God and an imperfect life with his secular desires, because he has acknowledged that a better life exists than he is living. However, he has not been able to make the full jump to being right with God. As a result of his internal dissonance, Augustine’s guilt manifests in a physically as Lady Continence. She appears to Augustine as “serene and cheerful without coquetry”, and tells Augustine to join the others who have already relinquished their earthly desires: “Cast yourself upon him, do not be afraid… Make the leap without anxiety; he will catch you and heal you” (VIII.27).
The story of Robert Wringham Colwan is one of sadness and pity. It is the story of a young man who was living a stable life until pride and poor decision making got in the way. Robert was a good child and lived a fulfilling life. It was when he chose to do and meet the wrong people that he fell from his good state. In addition to his self-conceived sense of entitlement and power, his ability to judge right from wrong became blurred.
Augustine, the Pear Tree, and Original Sin In The Confessions, by Saint Augustine, Augustine discusses his life events and the journey he took to find his faith. In Book II, Augustine talks about an incident in his life where he and his friends stole pears from his neighbor’s tree. This experience was a huge moment in Augustine's adolescent life, it was sin that Augustine realizes he has committed. Comparatively, this could be considered Augustine’s original sin. Augustine did not steal the pears because he needed them for himself, he stole them for the sake of stealing which is what made the sin an egregious act.
Young Augustine and elderly Scrooge both have an imbalance between superficial success and internal happiness. In Augustine’s anecdote about his encounter with a drunk beggar he is miffed by the happiness of a seemingly hopeless beggar. Despite his success in his career, Augustine’s internal struggle to find meaning prevents him from achieving happiness. On the other hand, Scrooge requires three trips with ghosts to realize that there is a better path of existence.
The book VII of Confessions debates the fundamental topics of faith and philosophy like the presence of God, the root of evil, and the connection between the two. Prior to being influenced by Neoplatonism, Augustine believed that things needed to occupy space in order to exist, implying that God might not be as superior and omnipotent as thought by the Catholics. Similarly, he could not understand the problem of the evil, concluding that evil is just a deliberate choice which our free will allows us to make. Eventually, Neoplatonic ideas, which state that God is the only source of goodness from which all other things descend and evil is just the lack (privation) of this goodness, shaped his mindset and contributed to the rise of the famous Augustine theodicy. However,
In Book 2 of the Confessions, Augustine tells us the story of the pear tree. Even though his theft might seem like a youthful mistake to us, it continues to bother the adult Augustine as he looks back on his childhood. Augustine gets so worked up about those pears because now that he is older, and very religious he sees the wrong of the situation that he committed. Augustine had committed many sins in his life, but the pear theft story was one of the first ones that started it all. Yeah, Augustine does say that as an infant he would sin because of the tantrums he would make, but he did not sin because he wanted but because he did now know that he was sinning.
Augustine faces many decisions in his life which lead to him feeling grief or sorrow about the decisions he makes. This allows the reader to relate to Augustine because many people have felt the same way before about their own life. The emotions that Augustine feels and the struggle he has with his belief in God and the Christian belief are very relatable to many people. I mean in today society many people struggle with their own standing with the Christian
Augustine still hurt, and shook up, about what she had heard, continued to run as fast as she could outside across the fields. She knew exactly the direction she was going, there was a special place where she would always go to think, clear her mind, and just relax. It was about a quarter of a mile east of the plantation, under a huge oak tree that stood in the middle of a wide-open clearing. Augustine would immediately spot the tree, run with it, and as she hugged it, she slid down to the tree roots and continued to cry even harder. Why, why couldn't they just tell me the truth, said Augustine out loud.
Without even noticing, we all have support from people. The people who support us are trying to lead us on the right path so we are not led astray. We all have sinned in our life, and sinning only makes us as human as St. Augustine was. In the film Restless Heart we see how St. Augustine’s sins were one of the factors for his conversion. St. Augustine felt guilt for his sins when he realized what he had done in his lifetime.
Rhetoric If you stood up in front of 20,000 people, will you be able to overcome any problem and convince your listeners? Rhetoric, as the great Aristotle defined it, is “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion” (“The Art of Rhetoric”). Rhetoric has the power to change people´s mind about any subject in particular, ergo it has the ability to make significant changes. As it has been already said, this public speaking faculty has as a main purpose, the power of convincing an audience.
St. Augustine thrust into the Church many thoughts that, so to speak, fertilize the deposit of faith which has not yet come to full fruition. So great are the complexity, the richness, the amplitude of the literary and intellectual patrimony bestowed to us by Augustine, wherein nuances abound and even self-contradictions appear, that we cannot fully exhaust his incredible resourcefulness. He was paradoxically, a cumbersome inheritance to the Middle Ages. The task of this period of history was to put order into all that Augustine had bequeathed to the Church; this was both a difficult and problematic task during the first few centuries that followed the foreign invasions of Europe. Fortunately (for Divine Providence guarded jealousy this great
Suffering also goes along with the conflict of being free. If you are suffering you can’t be free. I believe that Augustine put this in his book because he saw what people had to go through going back and forth to different religions. Augustine’s writings were from the development of Western Christianity. Which is something that Augustine believed in the beginning.
He is beginning to realize that he has to change his ways in order to reach absolution. In the ninth book, Augustine shows how he was able to finally connect with God through his books and teachings. “I read on: Tremble and sin no more, and this moved me deeply, my God, because now I had learned to tremble from my past, so that in the future I might sin no more.” (Book IX, Section 4, Page 187) This shows that Augustine was finally able to find God through the readings of the Bible.
The Problem of Evil “Evil has no positive nature but the loss of good has received the name of evil” said St. Augustine. The problem comes from the fact that if there is a deity that is all good, all knowing and all powerful, how can evil exist? The problem of evil (or argument from evil) is the problem of reconciling the existence of the evil in the world with the existence of an omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful) and perfectly good God. The argument from evil is the atheistic argument that the existence of such evil cannot be reconciled with, and so disproves, the existence of such a God. Therefore, the “problem of evil” presents a significant issue.
