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Comparing Confessions Of St. Augustine And The Love Letters Of

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Within the works Confessions of Saint Augustine and The Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise, many similarities exist in the forms of biblical and religious references and ideals as well as attitudes toward women. However, many differences appear in the inferred intentions for writing the works and subsequently within the values exhibited by each author. Augustine begins his work with a short prayer praising God. Augustine tells of his faith in God and his need to allow God to “live in” him. In his description of God, Augustine seems to describe Him as both everything and nothing, implementing such descriptions as “unchangeable…yet you change” and “ever active, yet always at rest”. Augustine reflects on his infancy, pondering his …show more content…

He asks “what does it profit me…to make known to men in [God’s] sight…not what I once was, but what I am now?” He acknowledges that these men (his readers) seek his truth and are “glad to hear of the past sins of others who are now free of them”. Augustine finds “joy in [his] heart when [he] confesses to [God]”. He again questions what it is precisely he loves when he loves God, deciding that God exists as “a light of a certain kind, a voice, a perfume, a food…”. Augustine acknowledges that God exists not only in the human senses, but also in memory and time. Augustine is astounded by the “vast, immeasurable sanctuary” that is memory. It is this vastness, according to Augustine, that allows humans to remember God without truly remembering this memory but rather remembering memories that attribute to the righteous worship of God. It is with this revelation that Augustine begins to ponder time and its relation to God. What is time but a memory of a fleeting present that has already become past? Augustine returns to his ideas of transience and finds that while time appears defined as past, present, and future it can only truly appear as an “eternal present”. He eventually decides that he does “not know what time is” and accepts that he will continue to praise God in this state of

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In Book I of Confessions, Augustine is torn how God could possibly transcend everything while also being within everything. Thus, it does not make sense for Augustine to ask God to be within him. Augustine then asks many questions about God in the form of metaphors, as in Scripture; therefore, I think Augustine may reveal his life to us via metaphors as well. One of these metaphors is infancy. Also as Fr.

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And if God is God, why is He letting us suffer?” (1) The lifelong quest for answers to these questions shaped his theology

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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).

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Throughout the book of Confessions, Augustine tells his story from how he remembers them, and it seems to be more personal because it is about true events that led to him to find

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“Never shall I forget those flame which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that Nocturnal Silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall i forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall i forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long God himself. Never.”

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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

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Throughout the Confessions, it is apparent that the writings of the apostle Paul and Cicero’s Hortensius play a heavy role in Augustine’s journey towards God. Through the study of these authors and books, Augustine learned to rejoice with reverence. Augustine gained the love for true wisdom through Hortensius and found grace though the works of St.Paul. Both St. Paul and Cicero, not only served as significant turning points in Augustine's life, but they led Augustine into a union with God, in order to accept at transform his life.

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Though grief is a common human emotion felt when one experiences loss, not everyone deals with grief in the same way. In fact, in Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Augustine himself handles the loss of two important people in his life in two different ways; though the feelings he experiences are similar, the duration of grief and perspective of death he has is markedly different once he converts to Catholicism, as well as the one he loses being closer to him due to a shared relationship with God. This difference in narrative and in perspective in each episode of grief highlight a way Saint Augustine believes a relationship with God can keep the deceased at the center of the grief and also make bittersweet a loss that would otherwise be pure

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The inner problem of all human problems of eternal salvation or immortality, which was so keenly felt by pagan antiquity, was solved by Christ when he came to earth to make mortal man immortal. Time, eternity, and Christ’s role as mediator are the basic lines of force by which we can interpret Augustine’s spirituality. This spirituality is a constant conversion lived out in two key areas: dialectic and agony, which find their synthesis in conversion. Of course the word dialectic, as we use it here, is absent from Augustine’s vocabulary, but its inner content inspires the best sermons and pages of his works. This is because the positive and negative elements, light and darkness, the repeated antitheses, not only give a special form to his style

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Something that Augustine misses here is that even though yes sometimes people can lead you astray if you really have a deep rooted faith that it shouldn’t be that easy to break. If I lived my life this way I don’t think I would have been able to get all my questions answered due to a lot of religious people and even non-religious people having very large bias in their thinking. That’s why I think it is important to look at not just one person’s point of view because we all have certain lapses in our knowledge and one person might have a different take that is able to open up your mind to understanding something you would have never figured out on your

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Moreover, Augustine argues, since it is “God who made human beings good, it is God, not human beings, who restores human beings so that they are good. He sets them free from the evil that they have brought upon themselves, if they will it, believe, and call upon him.” Since we have by our own will brought upon ourselves sin; we cannot be healed from our sin without the grace of

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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.

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For example, a commentary on the Song of Songs by Origen, portrays as a union of lover and beloved the affiliation between God and the person Eros can also be discerned in St. Teresa of Avila. The sixteenth Century mystic records in her autobiography entitled, The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, depicting therein the role of fervent desire in her relationship with God Teresa asserts that the desire for God can ultimately lead us to union with God Himself, this is what she call the ‘spiritual marriage’ in her interior castle. It is worthy to note that individuals who have had an intimate experience of God in their lives are found throughout the history of the Church.

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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.

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Milton’s thinking transforms to spiritual thoughts when he begins to reference passages of the Bible. The poet realizes and expresses at the ending of the poem that God does not need our works; he wants our heart’s devotion. Milton first alludes to

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