In The Confessions by Saint Augustine, Augustine throughout his many conversions always has a relationship to God and is always reaching to his higher goal in his life. Augustine has many conversions throughout his life, but there were four main conversions that he went through, his intellectual conversion, conversion of the heart, the ecclesial conversion and his ongoing conversion through life. Through the many conversions that Augustine did make he always was looking up to God to guide him through the many obstacles in life, and with that he gradually got closer to God without really knowing that he was. The path of Augustine to find his intellectual acceptance of Christianity took most of the first thirty-three years of his life. In …show more content…
He didn’t really know the importance of knowing oneself. He was aware of the nearness of his goal, but he was unable to reach it. But also Augustine finds that God can only convert his heart and from that it gives him the strength to make the decision. “Yet even as my heart roared its anguish my clamor found its way to your hearing, and all my longing lay before you, for the light of my eyes was not there at my command: it was within, but I was outside; it occupied no place, But I had fixed my gaze on spatially positioned things, and so I found on them nowhere to rest.” (7.7.11, pg. 124) Augustine’s heart was still looking for that approval from God that he needed to get before beginning his conversion to Christianity. He was not fully in his body at this time. It was almost like he was looking from the outside into his body to find what he was looking for. He was not yet converting himself from one to another he was finding the way on how he could convert his heart. The people with who he comes into contact with help Augustine put his trust in God alone. This takes time and at first he fully does not trust God in his heart but after Ambrose’s teachings and starting to believe in God his heart follows him and he is able to put his trust in God. After reading the scripture in the Bible, Romans chapter 13, verses 13 and 14, Augustine felt as if his heart was flooded with light, he turned from his life of total sin to the life of a saint. He thought that knowledge without love fails to delight in the goodness of what good has made, love involves the recognition and affirmation of a particular good. Love without knowledge fails to appropriately attend to the reality of what is loved. Knowledge needs faith which needs the heart to go with it. He needs a kind of self-love in which he needs the willingness to learn and to take the time to be changed. We need to be open