Grief In St. Augustine's Confessions

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

Before his mother died, Augustine had a spiritual conversation with her, coming to the conclusion that “the pleasures of the bodily senses, however delightful in the radiant light of this physical world, is seen by comparison with the life of eternity to be not even worth considering” (IX.x.24). Therefore, he knew that his “mother’s dying meant neither that her state was miserable nor that she was suffering extinction” (IX.xii.30). In Augustine and his mother’s beliefs, she was simply passed onto an eternal life with God. After his private tears in the presence of his God, Augustine says, “My heart is healed of that wound; I could be reproached for yielding to that emotion of physical kinship. But now, on behalf of your maidservant, I pour out to you, our God, another kind of tears” (IX.xiii.34). In a way Augustine writes his mother’s confessions for her, and these tears are his prayers for forgiveness that he knows has already been given her, which has allowed his heart to be healed, because “Her answer will be that her debts have been forgiven by him to whom no one can repay the price which he, who owed nothing, paid on our behalf”